Free Tar Baby by Toni Morrison Page B

cleaners, some disappeared altogether. There was nothing in that line for her to do but amuse herself in solitude and, awful as that was, the dinners with Valerian’s friends were worse. There men talked about music and money and the Marshall Plan. She knew nothing about any of it, but she was never stupid enough to pretend she did or try to enter the conversation. The wives talked around the edge of such matters or dropped amusing bits into the conversations like the green specks in cannoli filling. Once a wife whom she showed to the downstairs powder room asked her where she had gone to school and she said South Suzanne. What’s there? asked the woman. South Suzanne High School, said Margaret. The woman gave her a wide generous grin for a long time, then patted Margaret’s stomach. “Get to work, fast, sweetheart.”
    Margaret lived for the concerts Valerian took her to, and the dinners for two at restaurants and even alone at home. Otherwise it was solitude with the colored couple floating mysteriously through the house. In the fourth month of her marriage she sat on the screened porch listening to “Search for Tomorrow” when Ondine passed by with a can of linseed oil and said, “Excuse me. Did they arrest Joan Barron yet?” Margaret said No, but they must be about to. “Oo,” said Ondine, and began to fill her in on the cast of characters. Margaret was not a regular listener but she became one with Ondine and a maiden friendship flowered. Margaret was not afraid anymore (although it was some time before Sydney did not inspire her with awe). She looked forward to the chats with Ondine whose hair was black then and “dressed” as she called it, once a month. They talked about Valerian’s family and South Suzanne and Baltimore, where Ondine was from. Ondine was just about to show her how to make crust (and Margaret by then knew the honor of the offer, since Ondine didn’t like sharing recipes or kitchen space) when Valerian put a stop to it saying she should guide the servants, not consort with them. The next thing you know they’d be going to movies together, which hurt Margaret a lot because taking in a movie with Ondine was definitely on her mind. They quarreled about it. Not because Margaret thought Valerian was wrong: she had never known him to be and doubted if he could be in error about anything. Not him, not with those calm eyes or that crisp quiet voice that reassured and poked fun at you at the same time. And although the theme of her defense in the argument was that Ondine (if not all colored people) was just as good as they were, she didn’t believe it, and besides that wasn’t the point of the disagreement anyway. Valerian was never rude to Ondine or Sydney, in fact he pampered them. No. The point was not consorting with Negroes, the point was her ignorance and her origins. It was a nasty quarrel and their first in which they said regrettable things to each other that resulted in not touching toes in the night. It frightened Margaret—the possibility of losing him. And though she abandoned the movie idea, and still sneaked into Ondine’s kitchen of an afternoon, she took the advice of the lady in the powder room and “got to work, fast.” When the baby was born everything changed except the afterboom which got louder and louder and even when she carried her baby through the rooms it was there as soon as she turned her back. It had been a horror and a pleasure to teach little Michael how to count by walking him up those wide stairs flashing white like piano keys. One, two, three…his little hand in hers repeating the numbers as they mounted each tread. No one would believe that she loved him. That she was not one of those women in the
National Enquirer.
That she was never an overprotective or designing parent with unfulfilled dreams. Now that Michael was an adult, of all the people she knew in the world, he seemed to her the best. The smartest and the nicest. She liked his company, to talk