Chapter Two

 

“You don’t need a cleanup crew. You need a demolition team,” Mo Thompson said as she stood, transfixed, just two feet inside the door. Without ceremony, she dropped the plastic bucket she carried. The bottle of glass cleaner tipped out among a handful of cleaning rags.

The rest of April’s softball buddies gathered around Mo, a woman who was their unofficial leader even when they weren’t on the field. They stared at the neglect and devastation around them, their faces reflecting the amazement Mo expressed so clearly. They stood crowded together in a huddle of women, brooms, buckets, and mops.

“Girlfriend, my granddaddy wouldn’t turn a mule into a place this bad,” Johnnie Johnson said, as she studied a crusted stain of questionable origin on a ragged square of carpet.

Sally “Billboard” Jones used a putty knife to brush a substantial pile of mouse turds from a counter. “That beer I said you had to buy me just turned into a six-pack.”

April faced her teammates and friends. “Come on, guys. Just have a little vision.”

Mo kicked a sheet-covered couch and watched the clouds of dust her action raised.

“Might look better if we was downright blind,” Mo said in disgust.

A freckled-faced boy of ten walked to the counter of what had once been a kitchen and stared into a stained and chipped sink. He turned on the tap and waited as the pipes rattled and banged until a fitful flow of brown water finally erupted from the spigot.

“If you want me to touch this, somebody’s gonna hafta raise my allowance,” Mo’s nephew demanded.

April strode to his side and laid her arm across his shoulder.

“How about a two-Superman-comic bonus, Bubba?”

“Maybe,” he said as the stream progressed, looking more like water. His sister wasn’t as easily convinced.

“I’m not thirsty anymore,” little Morrie said as she stood on tiptoe, looking cautiously into the sink. Without a word, April reached into the cooler she’d hauled up the stairs and handed the child a Pepsi. Morrie’s face brightened, and April felt she had her first convert.

“Tell me again why we’re doing this,” said Mo’s sister. Allison, the only heterosexual in the team’s core group of players, was frequently the voice of sanity. Nobody knew if it was because she was straight, or because of her years of practice keeping Mo on track and out of trouble. Still others thought motherhood served as her secret to wisdom.

“Listen, gang. Don’t look at this as a dirty dump…”

“Lordy, Lordy, now she’s leading us to fantasy,” Johnnie mumbled.

“…but see what it will be,” April continued, ignoring her friend. “Imagine what this place can do.” Excitement grew in her voice as she tried to instill the flash of a dream she shared with Tandy. It didn’t seem as clear in the light of day and surrounded by doubting friends, but the dream still lived.

Mo walked to April and stood so close April could smell the pizza odor that still hung to Mo’s clothes from lunch.

“April, hon, I’m just a simple woman. I’m a damn good track coach, and I can even teach a little math, but if Sis over there hadn’t ragged my ass to finish college, I wouldn’t even be qualified to do that.” She punched April lightly on the arm. “I don’t see what the hell you’re talking about.” A smile softened her words. “I don’t believe in your dream. Hell, I don’t even understand it, but I’ll tell you what I do believe in.”

“What?” April asked, fighting to hide her disappointment.

“I believe in you.” Mo walked briskly to the sink, her bucket of rags and cleaning solution in tow. “Come on, folks. Let’s get to work.”

They worked like it was the playoff finals of the year. April hadn’t seen that kind of concentration on Billboard Jones’s face since the team’s power hitter pushed in the two winning runs for the league championship. She’d led the team to victory by, once again, hitting her favorite target with her homerun swing. Billboard gained her nickname because she so loved to hear the thump of the ball on the fading billboard for Adams Brothers Funeral Home where it stood behind left field.

The same humor, the same camaraderie, that carried the Diamonds through game after game, season after season, transformed a nearly impossible cleaning mission into a productive and pleasant Saturday afternoon. Grime gradually disappeared from walls, floors, and countertops, but an inordinate amount of the filth reappeared on the worker’s faces.

Midafternoon Tandy appeared, along with her lover, Sharon. The two women struggled up the stairs, welcomed bearers of a Number 10 wash tub filled with beer, soft drinks, and ice. The newcomers admired the progress through tired eyes. Tandy’s face was still softened by sleep, having just awakened from a day’s rest, a fact of life for the owner of a nightclub. Sharon’s exhaustion resulted from a fourteen-hour shift at the hospital.

“You folks sure made a difference in here,” Tandy said.

Sharon slowly turned, taking in every corner of the room. “Tandy, honey, this looks better than it did ten years ago.” She turned to face her lover. “Wish I could say the same for you,” she said with a teasing smile.

Surprised laughter tittered through the room. Everybody looked wide-eyed at the tall, quiet blonde. Sharon rarely spoke, and this circle of friends was amazed at her effort to tease her gregarious lover. April, who knew the couple best, had glimpsed Sharon’s playful side. She knew it as a sign of deep happiness. April also suspected exhaustion had cracked Sharon’s studied reserve. Besides, Sharon may share more of Tandy’s dream for the Ladies’ Room than April realized.

Tandy laughed as she drew a cigarette from the crumpled packet in her shirt pocket.

“A few wrinkles just adds to my character.”

Sharon put an arm around her lover’s shoulders and planted a soft kiss in Tandy’s red-gray hair. “I agree,” the exhausted nurse-practioner said. She leaned heavily against her lover, and Tandy wrapped her arms protectively around the taller woman’s waist.

“Sorry to desert you ladies, but we’d best go home. My honey hasn’t slept in nearly nineteen hours,” Tandy said.

“Put her to bed,” Mo instructed.

“You got a good woman to take care of…you don’t need to be messing with this lot,” Johnnie added.

“Thanks for the drinks,” April called.

Billboard waved goodbye with the tip of the longneck Bud Dry she’d just downed and burped a merry farewell. Allison and her two children called goodbye from their seats around a table, where she explained to her kids why the women looked like they had plastic hair in every photo of the 1965 Time magazine they’d found inside a cabinet. Seven-year-old Morrie stared wide-eyed at the photos, certain she’d discovered a tidbit of ancient history.

April plopped, filthy and tired, to a seat on the couch, just inches from where Johnnie rested. Johnnie had declared that her career as a domestic was over.

“If you folks want to scrub until there’s no tile on the floor or skin on your fingers, you go right ahead.” I’ll just sit here and enjoy watching white folks work, and I’ll just sip on this here Dr Pepper.”

As usual, Johnnie was a woman of her word. She enjoyed her soft drink without a hint of guilt, as the other women worked around her. She stretched comfortably on the couch and read the Saturday paper she’d brought along with her share of cleaning supplies.

“If you’d plopped your butt on this couch like that two hours ago, we’d both be drowning in dust,” Johnnie said, as she leaned close to April.

“Thank God for vacuum cleaners,” April answered.

With the ease of long acquaintance, Johnnie placed her hand over April’s. The gesture was friendly rather than sexual. In the years they’d known each other, April and Johnnie had tap danced around a relationship, had even slept together a time or two, but they both knew in their heart of hearts that they were meant to be friends.

“So, you think we done good?” Johnnie asked.

“Done good? I think we’ve got a spot on the USA Olympic Cleaning Team,” April answered.

“I’ll volunteer as coach,” Mo said from where she rested on another couch. “That way I can sit on the bench and tell you all what to do.”

“And I’ll be the power scrubber,” Billboard said, as she sipped at her second beer.

Johnnie looked at her hand intertwined with April’s and let out a high-pitched squeal that made them all sit upright.

“Look at that!” she said.

April did as instructed and stared at their hands. “What? What?” She drew her hand to her face and looked closely, first at the palms and then the upper sides of each hand. “You see a tick or something?”

“No, look at them together,” Johnnie said, placing her hand beside April’s.

April focused and began to chuckle deeply. Every person in the room gathered around the two women, staring at their hands.

Patiently, April and Johnnie held their hands extended, letting everyone see the contrast. The same grime that left patches of dark on April’s hand appeared on the skin of her black friend as a light film. It was as though they stared at a positive and a negative, side by side.

“There’s got to be some deep, symbolic meaning to this, but I’m too tired to think what it might be,” April said.

“The only meaning I see is that you both need to wash your hands,” Allison the Practical said.

Morrie wiggled to a seat between April and Johnnie and held a hand from each woman in her lap, studying the difference. April felt a sense of rightness as she saw a child’s trusting touch of friends from two races. Morrie dropped April’s hand, and picked up Johnnie’s to study it more closely.

“Your fingernails look white,” the child said.

“That’s ‘cause there’s darker skin all around,” Johnnie answered.

Morrie looked again, her small forehead creasing in deep thought. “What’s it like to be black?” she asked.

“Morrie!” Allison called, horrified at her daughter’s boldness.

Johnnie laughed. “It’s just fine. Sounds like an honest question to me.” The woman used her free hand, the one not currently scrutinized by a small child, to brush a curl of hair from Morrie’s eyes. “Child, I don’t know that I can answer that question. Being black is with you from the time you’re born until the time you die. I don’t think about it much. Don’t guess you think much about what it’s like to be white.”

The child dropped Johnnie’s hand and chewed at her lower lip as she thought. “No. I never have. I’m just Morrie, I guess.”

“And I’m just Johnnie.”

“Jeez, you ask some of the dumbest questions,” Bubba said to his little sister.”

“Do not,” she challenged.

“Do too.”

“Not.”

“Do.”

“Enough!” Mo yelled. Halting the childish argument before it shredded all their tired nerves.

Johnnie raised the newspaper and waved it at her friends. “I wish everybody could accept different folks as easy as Morrie.”

“What’s up?” Mo asked.

“Wait until you see the editorial page. There’s a doozy of a letter to the editor, talking about all us dykes and faggots,” Johnnie answered.

“Spare us the views of the ignorant and the opinionated,” Allison added.

April groaned. “Great! That means Slider will razz me big time on Monday morning. He loves showing me all the homophobes’ letters. Likes to use them to prove how lucky I am to have such an open-minded friend and co-worker.”

“Read it,” Mo said. “I want to know what we’re up against.”

Johnnie folded back the paper until the letter rested before her. She read in a clear voice, only slightly tinged with the country accent of her central Texas farm folks.

 

“As a man of God, I remind the people of Amber that we must guard against the works of the devil. I am horrified to learn that our safe, God-fearing community is home to a growing number of the worst of Satan’s helpers: homosexuals. I hate the dirty feel it gives me to even write the word.

“The Bible tells us clearly in Romans 1:24-27 that homosexuals are an abomination. As Christians we must not allow them to live among us. They do the work of the Devil and will bring nothing but grief to our community.

“I call on you all to root out this evil. They must be converted to the true life or told to take their ungodly ways elsewhere.”

In God’s truth,

Reverend Ralph Thomas

 

As Johnnie’s words came to a halt, there was a silence that grew into an uncomfortable weight.

“Don’t that chill your insides?” Mo finally said, breaking the silence.

“Does it say what church this guy is from?” April asked.

Johnnie glanced at the paper. “No. Some hard-liner, born-again bunch, I reckon.”

Morrie went to her aunt and curled into Mo’s lap, her arms tight around the woman’s neck.

“Is he talking about lesbians?” the little girl asked. With a loving aunt so far out of the closet she had a hard time finding a place to hang her clothes, Morrie learned at a young age the rudiments of truth about homosexuality.

“Yeah, Morrie. He’s talking about lesbians and gay men.”

“Why’s he hate you, Aunt Mo?”

“Don’t know, sweetie. Wish I did.”

Johnnie sat forward and looked at the child. “Your aunt’s kind of lucky, Morrie.”

“Why?” the little girl asked.

“You asked me what it was like to be black. I guess one of the biggest things to live with is knowing that you’re different from the white world everybody thinks is normal.”

“Yeah?” Morrie didn’t understand.

“It’s not bad being different. In some ways it’s better. Life being a little tougher makes us work harder and makes us prouder when we manage to get something done. It also makes us pull together. If I walk into a room full of people and there’s one other black person, we’re family right from the start, no matter what our other differences.”

“So?” the child asked.

“Most white folks don’t know about that, but gay people do.” Johnnie leaned back and took April’s hand once again. “Sometimes, that helps bridge the gap between white and black.”

April squeezed the hand that held her own. “I hope so.”

Billboard walked to the Number 10 and retrieved another longneck from the ice. “I bet that old toad doesn’t drink beer either.”

“He probably just looks at it as one more cross to bear,” Mo answered.

“How many have you had, anyway?” Allison asked.

Billboard grinned and raised the bottle to her lips. “Don’t worry. I ain’t driving.” She looked around the room. “I got friends to get me home.”

April felt a haze of warmth around her heart. She hoped that the afternoon was a hint of the magic still to grow in the Ladies’ Room.