Precious awoke the next morning with a bone in her throat. Her-days at Shirley’s were numbered; she would have to find somewhere else to live. It was a terrible realization to wake up to, and she would have much preferred to have opened her eyes and found no crisis waiting at her bedside, but sneaky Henry was sure to come prowling in her bedroom again. She could no longer live with him under the same roof.
“Lawd, I beg you, don’t drop a tin can ’pon me head today!” she moaned her usual wakening prayer before shuffling out of bed and performing her morning wash with a dispirited air.
What would she do and where would she go? How would she explain to Shirley that she suddenly wanted to live on her own, abandoning warmth and family companionship for loneliness and empty evenings? Shirley would think her possessed.
She was brushing her hair, mulling over possibilities and feeling blue, when she was suddenly struck by her own downcast reflection. She stiffened her back and drew herself upright with dignity.
If Henry dared whisper anything romantic at breakfast, she would crack an egg over his head. She crimped her lip with determination, applied her makeup, and sallied into the kitchen.
He was waiting for her at the breakfast table.
He sneak-peeped at her over fuzzy newspaper rim. She said “Good morning” as she always did and he mumbled guiltily into the belly of the sports page. She sat down and peacefully sipped her morning tea and pretended that all was well, though tension and plots bubbled palpably between them.
Precious gazed idly at the newspaper while Henry read and her eyes fell by direction of the Holy Ghost on a want ad for a housekeeper that promised attractive salary, light work, and spacious accommodations with all found. She tried to read it by craning her neck, and as she did so Henry broke the strained silence.
“Precious,” he began, still skulking behind the opened newspaper, “I just want to say—”
“I had a funny dream last night,” she interrupted cheerfully. “I know it was a dream because what I dreamt couldn’t happen in a million years.”
“Precious, please. I know what I did was—”
“It was my bed I was in last night, my innocent bed, and I say dat what happened there was only a dream. A bad dream. Now, lend me dis piece of paper, please, to read on de toilet.”
She took the want ad section from him, after thus brutally reminding him that while she no doubt appeared heavenly and beguiling, she still possessed the schoolbook twenty-three feet of bowels along with anal opening and was compelled by nature to do unseemly number two every morning, which realization she hoped would cool his ardor and bring him down to earth.
Then she sauntered off to the bathroom with the grim matronly tread of a respectable middle-aged woman about to perform her morning movement.
She had the interview for the housekeeper’s job that very same day. She called the ad and spoke to a man with an accent, and after he had questioned her on the telephone, he suggested that she take a cab and be interviewed in person.
She spent an hour achieving impeccability of grooming before taking a cab to the address. The cab prowled tentatively through a neighborhood of towering mansions that peered down on the vulgar public road from behind a screen of lawns, hedges, trees, and spiked wrought-iron fences.
“This is the place,” the driver said, plainly impressed, as he turned off the meter.
Precious paid the fare and stepped out, checking her footing as though she suspected that the asphalted pavement was boobytrapped. The cab drove off and she was left standing alone before a scrolled iron gate and gawking uncertainly through a spiked fence into the yard, when, suddenly, a television camera mounted on the fencepost swivelled with a watchful hum and peered down at her.
“Can I help you?” the camera asked metallically.
Precious stared up at it and stated her business in a quavering voice, feeling like an embezzler in a cathedral. Her heart began to pound with fright. The voice instructed her to stand back and the gate slid quietly open on rollers while the television camera stared morbidly after her as she entered the gravel driveway.
Precious crunched down the driveway in tottery heels, her heart beating fast, conscious that she was badly out of place, gaping at the landscaped gardens like one who had blundered into the enchanted woods of a fairy tale. From her shaky step, she might have been walking to the gallows, and the trip of her heart as she drove deeper and deeper toward the palatial house made her so breathless that she scowled and reminded herself that underfoot burrowed the same nasty freeloading worm of any tenement. She was a Christian woman destined for heaven and would not be made to feel inferior by worldly wealth, and she muttered as much to an immaculately trellised rosebush that struck an uppity and overarching pose as she hobbled past.
She was nearing the massive flanks of the mansion when she suddenly glimpsed a steamship smokestack, complete with intricate rigging and whistle, enmeshed in the web of trees that towered over the eaves behind the main house. She stopped dead in her tracks, wondering how they had managed to build a pond big enough to hold a ship, when she realized that the back of the yard bordered on water and that the ship was not cemented on the lawn but sailing past on a canal in the Atlantic.
Only one thing struck her as odd about the grounds. Scattered over the lawns and between the ornamental shrubs she thought she glimpsed some eight or nine stumps of fire hydrants. At first she thought her eyes were deceiving her and that she must be looking at plants bred by ne’er-do-well American botanists to resemble hydrants, but when she stopped and took a careful look she saw that she had made no mistake. Fire hydrants were definitely planted among the lawns and gardens; fire hydrants, without question, down even to the fluted dwarf torso and the lurid municipal red.
Well, at least if she got the job here and lived in this house she would never have to worry about fire, she smugly thought, continuing down the driveway until she found herself standing before an ornate and self-assertive front door whose knobs, embossed decorations, and leaded stained-glass exulted boastfully to the world, “I am Almighty Door.”
“Lawd have mercy!” she muttered with a greater tripping of-her heart as she gave Almighty Door a solid thump with her knuckles to demonstrate that man-made door could never be mightier than God-made woman.
Her interviewer was a short dapper East Indian man with the melancholy air of a clerk who’d just emerged from a gloomy matinee. He had a thick head of inky hair surgically parted in the middle and smooth cheeks inlaid with the grainy shadow of a beard. He was deferential and polite in the manner of educated East Indians and practically bowed and scraped with apology as he led her into the kitchen for the interview.
He said his name was Mannish Chaudhuri and that he was the chauffeur and general factotum for the mistress of the house, and while she was away it had fallen upon him to screen applicants for the housekeeping position and make a recommendation about their suitability. To this end, he continued, he was obliged to ask her some pertinent questions, and trusted she would not be offended by them.
Precious remarked that as a Christian woman with a vigilant soul, she was ready at this instant to appear before the Throne of Judgment, let alone before some ordinary facto—
“What you say you are again?”
“Factotum,” Mannish replied primly, adding, “It is a Latin word for someone who does all.”
So she said that she was ready and willing to endure any worldly interview, and to indicate as much, she interlaced her kerchief between her fingers, settled them in her lap, and put on her church-going face.
The interview went badly at first, for as Mannish brewed her a cup of tea, Precious suddenly remembered what his name reminded her of—mannish water, a clear soup boiled from goat testicles and thought to restore flagging sexual vigor in men—and struggled vainly against the impulse to smirk.
“I said something amusing?” Mannish asked, missing nothing as he returned with the steeped tea to begin the serious questioning.
Precious sternly swallowed her grin.
“We have a soup name mannish water in Jamaica,” she finally said offhandedly, trying to wriggle out of it and move briskly along.
“Oh, you do. What kind of soup, if I may ask?”
“A broth.”
“Oh. And how is this broth made?”
“With goat.”
“With what part of goat, if I may ask?”
“The bottom part.”
“Oh. Is that the part the world knows as the tail?”
Precious looked up sharply at him, determined to repel all Indian irony.
“No,” she corrected boldly. “It is made of the part dat hang down underneath the male goat.”
Mannish blinked as if he had suddenly been stung by a gnat in an unscratchable place. He was obviously not a man given to extreme reaction, and his blinking looked to Precious as much of a flinch as the poor soul could muster.
She pressed on with the full truth, harsh though it might be. “Men say it invigorates their nature. Personally, I don’t believe it. But certain men say-so.”
“And it has my name. I must try this soup someday and see if it has the desired effect.”
He smiled unctuously and resumed the polite questioning.
She had not been in this splendid house three minutes and already she had insulted her interviewer by telling him that he was named after goat-balls soup, Precious reflected gloomily as she fielded his questions. The opportunity for employment was obviously lost, since Mannish would certainly not want a woman around him who every time she heard or spoke his name would immediately think of ramgoat testicles bobbing in a broth. And it was perhaps this stupid blunder that led her to throw caution to the winds and open up during the interview.
She had felt bullied and put upon by the palatial driveway and grounds, and now as she sat in a kitchen so vast and ornate that its ceramic tiling flowed and silted between at least two corners—she had never before been in a kitchen to turn even one corner, much less two—she consciously decided to abandon sham and be her God-given self.
So not even halfway in the interview, Precious seemed to visibly expand and swell, and before she knew it, she was even laughing in her inimitable way at some little witticism slyly offered by Mannish. And when she laughed as she did, virtually splattering her good humor throughout the lavish kitchen, Mannish was so startled that he suspended the questioning for a moment and peeped up at her with renewed interest.
At one point, she even familiarly reached over and gave Mannish a sporting cuff on the ear, in the playful manner that Jamaicans who feel affection will genially swat an acquaintance in a bank lobby, and chuckled. For a brief instant Mannish thought he was getting his ears boxed by a Calcutta nun in primary school, but Precious was so obviously revelling in his humor that he broke down and managed at first a grin, then an outright smile, then a hearty treble laugh.
The two of them laughed without inhibition in the ornate kitchen.
Mannish regained control first, sniffed, and said, “My mother used to say that I was the least funny of all her seven children.”
Precious scoffed and gave him another play-box on the ear.
“Mothers are the last to know de truth about their children, you didn’t know that?”
Mannish gingerly withdrew out of cuffing range lest she shatter his eardrum with a mistimed blow.
An hour later he walked her to the front door and stood briefly with her surveying the grounds as they said goodbye.
“This place is so wonderful,” Precious exclaimed, waving her hand at the landscaping splendor, “that even a dog would feel afraid to wee-wee on the grass.”
Mannish chuckled. “The mistress has a beloved lapdog. And he wee-wees on this grass always. Those are his urination posts you see over there.” He pointed at the stumpy fire hydrants.
Precious gaped and beamed at him with a mischievous air. “You joking again, right?”
“I am very serious,” Mannish intoned grimly. “The mistress loves her dog, and when she thought he had no place suitable for alfresco urinating, she had workmen install those fake fire hydrants. She is very attached to her dog. Whoever takes this job will have to accompany Riccardo during his daily urinating promenades. It is part of the duties.”
Precious shook her head emphatically. “Any dog I ever see trying to sneak a wee-wee on this lovely lawn, I’d kick all the way to Timbuktu.”
Shaking hands with Mannish, she started her labored crunching down the driveway, leaving him standing before his mistress’s temple, chewing pensively on his lower lip.