The restaurant looked like a white boxcar. Crammed between two horizontal rows of small dingy white red-shuttered motel rooms with paint curling and cracking like a late autumn leaf, the restaurant claimed to be the best eating-place in the county. Jones Motel was the only lodging within a twenty-mile radius and people were always talking about how neat and clean the colored women kept the rooms.\u00a0 Of course, they couldn\u2019t eat or sleep there since the motel was white only, but it was one of the few places in the county where they could get a job \u201cworking for the public,\u201d which is what they called any job outside sharecropping. Lena heard from her mother and her aunt, who were the cleaning women, that Mr. Jones, the owner, had fired his last cook for what he termed, \u201ca minor indiscretion,\u201d and her mother thought that since she was a good cook, she might as well apply for the job.<\/p>\n
When Lena went to restaurant to fill out the application, the motel owner’s wife interviewed her. \u00a0\u201cMy husband he a busy man and he want me to do this,\u201d the woman said. Marge Jones, a tall stout ruddy-faced woman with graying yellow hair and liquor on her breath, said she was in charge of the restaurant and she was the one to do the hiring. Her husband had too much to handle with trying to keep his lodging business going and making sure the rooms were always \u201cup to code.\u201d Lena knew what \u201cup to code\u201d meant because she had heard her mother and aunt talking about how G. Carter (which is what they called him behind his back), spent most of his time following them, checking to see if they stole anything. \u00a0\u201cUp to code\u201d was just another way of saying his cleaning women weren\u2019t stealing any of the motel\u2019s old raggedy sheets and towels. The women liked calling him G. Carter because when his daddy was living, the Jones family lived in G. Carter trailer park. Lena\u2019s mother and aunt teased that G. Carter and Marge probably still lived there when they weren\u2019t shacked up in one of those old shitty motel rooms.<\/p>\n
“How come you ain’t up north somewhere doing something to make some real money? This 1959, girl. Tell me a women can git good jobs up north, specially colored girls.\u201d Marge Jones eyed Lena curiously. “Where you been?”<\/p>\n
“Well, me and my husband live up the road there on Saddler’s Place.” Lena wondered what the woman was talking about. What did she mean, where had she had been?<\/p>\n
\u201cYou married?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, Ma\u2019am.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe working?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, Ma\u2019am.<\/p>\n
“Doing what?” With a devilish smile, Marge Jones tilted her head and raised her brow.<\/p>\n
“We farm. Or at least we did before that storm came through. Now he trying to find work just like me.\u201d<\/p>\n
“Yeah,” the woman said, changing her expression and pulling out a cigarette. “That goddam storm took the roof off one of them there motel rooms out yonder.” Waving a flaming cigarette lighter, its blaze alternately shimmering red and yellow, she pointed to the outside and then lit her cigarette. “Well, anyway, you know we been mighty lucky to have Elnora and Aggie cleaning these rooms.\u00a0 They good hard working colored women, and I wouldn’t take nothing for neither one of them. Can\u2019t nobody clean them rooms like them two. And every colored woman I know can cook. Why just the other day, I said to Aggie that I didn\u2019t know why she didn\u2019t take the cooking job.\u00a0 Can\u2019t nobody cook like colored women.\u201d She pulled on her cigarette and blew circles of smoke in the air. \u201dThey both praise you. Aggie say you the best for the cook. She say she know you can cook, cause she taught you.” She laughed and looked at Lena. \u201cGot any chilren?\u201d<\/p>\n
“Yes Ma\u2019am. Three. Hugging her purse to her chest, Lena wasn\u2019t sure she wanted to work for a woman who believed that all colored women were good for was cooking and cleaning, and a man who thought they were all thieves. But what were her choices? When she tried to get a job at the tobacco factory, they told her to come back two days later when they would be hiring coloreds. When she returned, the line snaked so far ahead of her, with first white and then colored, she could hardly see the building. Before the line was half gone with still a few whites at the front, a white man came out raising a sign, NO MORE JOBS. The only other thing she had heard about was cleaning the restrooms in the courthouse and she didn\u2019t think she could bear that kind of job because she knew how nasty some white folks could be.\u00a0 So, here she was sitting in the kitchen of the Jones Motel, waiting to see if she would get a job.<\/p>\n
Lena had wanted to be a teacher. Ever since she was a child in the first grade, she had imagined herself in front of a class telling the children all about the fun of learning, just as her teacher had told her. But when she was in the tenth grade, her father had a heart attack and died after three days in the hospital. She dropped out of school to help her mother finish out the year\u2019s crops because the Mr. Warner, the landowner, said there was no other way. So she postponed her dream. The next thing she knew she was married with three children and asking herself, \u201cHow in the world did I get to this place?\u201d<\/p>\n
“You sure you want this job? A woman with your looks could do a whole lot of things,” \u00a0Marge Jones said, half smiling. “You know what I mean?\u201d She reached over and shook Lena’s shoulder. \u201cWish I looked good as you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now she thinks I\u2019m a streetwalker, Lena thought, propping her elbow on the small table and gazing at the woman’s arm. It was pale pink, fleshy, with a loose top layer of skin that draped over her arm. She wondered if the top layer were pulled back, would there be another less meaty layer. What was there underneath that thin flab that shook every time the woman moved?<\/p>\n
“You listening to me?” The woman tapped Lena’s shoulder again.<\/p>\n
Lena jumped slightly and smiled. “Oh, yes Ma\u2019am.” She hoped the woman had not asked her anything important.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou bout how old? I bet you ain\u2019t no more than twenty.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTwenty-four,\u201d Lena said.<\/p>\n
Marge Jones leaned back in her chair and pulled on the cigarette. \u201cTwenty-four, huh?\u201d She folded her arms across her chest and leaned back, smiling to herself.\u00a0 \u201cAh! To be twenty-something. What I\u2019d give to be twenty-something again.\u201d \u00a0Then, straightening up as if she were coming out of a dream she didn\u2019t want to talk about, she looked at Lena out of the corner of her eyes. \u201cI don\u2019t want to hire you today and you quit next week, just soon as something better come along.\u201d<\/p>\n
Something better, Lena thought. She couldn\u2019t believe this woman expected loyalty and she hadn\u2019t even begun working yet. She wouldn\u2019t even be here if she thought there was something better for her now.<\/p>\n
“What about crop time? You going to quit on us then?”<\/p>\n
“Oh no, Ma\u2019am,” she said. “We\u2019re not planning to farm after this year.<\/p>\n
“Well, we pay $15 a week, and that’s pretty goddam good, if you ask me.” \u201cBesides your tips, and you\u2019ll git good tips, you can eat two meals a day in the kitchen, but I don\u2019t want to catch you taking nothing home.\u00a0 Me and Mr. Jones don\u2019t allow that. And there\u2019s a toilet out back behind the kitchen for the help.\u201d She pointed towards the back of the restaurant.<\/p>\n
“Yes Ma\u2019am,” Lena said with no particular expression. She had expected at least twenty dollars, but what could she do? Fifteen dollars would not go very far, but at least it was more than she could see at one time working in Saddler\u2019s fields.<\/p>\n
“Git paid every Thursday.\u00a0 Got Wednesdays off. Closed on Sundays. Got any questions, just ask me. \u00a0on’t worry Mr. Jones bout it.\u00a0 Mind your business, and stay out of the motel rooms.” The woman scooted her chair from the table with a loud scrape and stood up.\u00a0 “That’s what got the last one fired. Out there fucking in one of the motel rooms and I caught her in the act.”\u00a0 She shook her head laughing. “You start tomorrow.”<\/p>\n
Calmly, Lena stood up. She had shown no curiosity with the woman’s comment about the last cook, but she was dying to know if she were colored or white. Didn’t sound like no colored woman, at least she didn\u2019t think so. The last thing she needed was to come in behind that kind of thing, especially when white folks were always ready to think the worse anyway. She’d ask her aunt, Elnora.\u00a0 If anybody knew, she did.<\/p>\n
****<\/p>\n
Lena\u2019s orientation into the restaurant business lasted about two days, and it was less than a week before she realized it was criminal to pay her $15 a week for the amount of work she did. Arriving every morning between six and six-thirty, she had to wash any dishes the Joneses might have left in the sink from the night before. Rarely was there a morning when Mrs. Jones had not left a lipstick-stained cup or glass on the worktable in the kitchen, and an ashtray spilling over with twisted cigarettes butts and ashes on one of the oilcloth-covered tables. By the time she cleaned up their mess and started the business for the morning, the crew from the rock quarry farther south on 29 was coming through the screen door.<\/p>\n
The rock quarry crew was her daily dread. Covered with red dust when the weather was dry and mud up to their knees when it rained, they stomped into the restaurant, barking out their orders like drunken soldiers. All the while she prepared their typical morning meal of eggs, fatback, bread and coffee, G. Carter followed on her heels reminding her, \u201cone egg to a order, a pan of bread to a table.\u201d Through the crew\u2019s joking with each other and calling for two and three orders, they ran Lena back and forth from the kitchen to the dining area until the soles of her feet burned, and never did they leave more than a twenty-five or thirty cents tip.<\/p>\n
The crew, though, was just the beginning of the day. There were always those few people from the county who came in every other day or so just to have somewhere to go and because they enjoyed the cooking. They gobbled their food in a few minutes, but they lingered over the coffee for hours, constantly requesting a warm-up and then finally getting up and leaving nothing but the empty cups and dirty plates.<\/p>\n
The restaurant was grueling work. Not only did Lena do all the cooking, but also she waited the tables, washed the dishes, ordered most of the food, signed for the orders, and cleaned both the kitchen and the dining room. In the evening, usually after eight, she dragged herself to the back door to wait for her mother or Elnora to take her home, only to begin the routine again the next morning.<\/p>\n
Contrary to what Marge Jones had told her, the woman took no real interest in the restaurant. G. Carter spent more time in the kitchen than Lena had been led to believe. Both Elnora and Aggie had told Lena not to expect much from old lady Jones because she was lazy.\u00a0 Not that she wasn\u2019t an okay white woman; she was just lazy and spent over half the time wallowing around smoking and watching television. Most of the time, Lena found out, she was back in the room off from the kitchen asleep on the cot while the T. V. played. \u00a0G. Carter, on the other hand, was always somewhere around, under foot, in the way, keeping an eye on how much money came in and how much food went out. With piercing green eyes and dark hair, he was a tall man that wasn\u2019t too bad to look at, but Lena didn\u2019t trust him because she sensed he was sneaky. Then she was sure of it when Elnora and her mother pulled Lena aside and told her that the woman caught in the motel room was white, but the man was G. Carter and he couldn\u2019t be trusted any further than she could see him.\u00a0 Mrs. Jones had kicked the woman off the place, but she had simply thrown up her hands at G. Carter. \u201cPoor Marge Jones,\u201d her mother and aunt said to her. \u201cShe lets that man treat her just like a dog.\u201d His feelings about colored women, Elnora and her mother couldn’t be certain. \u201cBut one thing for sure,\u201d Elnora told Lena, \u201cme and your Mama got our eyes on him cause we don\u2019t want to have to kill him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lena wasn\u2019t afraid of G. Carter Jones. He was just a terrible inconvenience to her. Always in the way, like a stray cat or a whining dog.\u00a0 With all her other responsibilities, she had to keep an eye on him. At times he would be in the kitchen checking behind her after she filled out the stock orders, and he always made some comment about what she had on, how she smelled and he frequently asked questions about her husband, the children and whether or not she planned to have others.<\/p>\n
One day after the restaurant had closed and Lena was putting away the mop and bucket, he tipped into the kitchen like a cat.\u00a0 Closing the door to the room where Marge lay sleeping, he grabbed the mop from Lena, and smiled kindly. \u201cWhy don\u2019t you set down for a spell.\u00a0 I know you got to be tired with that crew that just left.\u201d<\/p>\n
There had been several men who had begun a job on the highway and they ate their mid-day and evening meal at the restaurant.\u00a0 They had been particularly ornery this evening, snapping their fingers and yelling out the orders, complaining about the food, and all the while eating like hogs. For a fleeting moment, she had thought about quitting.<\/p>\n
Lena wiped her hands on her apron and reached for her purse on top of the storage freezer. The smell of cooked onions from the afternoon meal still hung in the air.\u00a0 “I’ll be going now.\u00a0 Elnora picking me up today.”<\/p>\n
Sweat beaded on his forehead and wiping it with the back of his hand, he took a long breath. He stood as if he were trying to figure out what task to take on next. “I could’ve took you home this evening,” he said. “I ain’t got nothing else to do.”<\/p>\n
“Well, thank you just the same, Mr. Jones, but Elnora waiting for me.” She suddenly sensed his inching closer and she felt caged..\u00a0 He smelled like a dusty room and Lena turned towards the back door.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou ain\u2019t got nothing to be scared of,\u201d he said as if he had been misunderstood.<\/p>\n
\u201cI ain\u2019t scared,\u201d Lena said and walked past him. “It\u2019s just time for me to go.”<\/p>\n
“I just want you to know how much I, I mean we, preciate what you do here.” Folding his arms across his chest, he glanced quickly towards the closed door. “I know Mrs. Jones ain’t been much help, but she feel the same way I do.” His eyes followed her to the door. “Why, she always speaking highly of you.”<\/p>\n
“If yall think so much of me, how come I still make $15 a week, Mr. Jones?” Lena reached for the outside door. She was tired, drained from the afternoon crew, and she didn\u2019t feel like any of G. Carter\u2019s deceitful conversation.<\/p>\n
G. Carter reached towards her shoulder, but then dropped his hand. \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t take much for me to give you a little raise,\u201d he said, almost pleadingly. “I could give you twice the money you making if . . .”<\/p>\n
“If I what?” She shot back.<\/p>\n
He lowered his eyes towards the floor and clasped his hands in front of him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . I didn’t mean no harm.”<\/p>\n
Memories of every raggedy-behind white man she had ever worked for rose before Lena as she shoved her way past G. Carter and out the door. The ones she had challenged for cheating her mother, those she had argued with for following behind her brothers to make sure they were working, the ones she subconsciously killed for humiliating her husband whenever he went out looking for a job\u2014G. Carter, even in his uncertain behavior, was every one of these men. She wasn’t slaving on the farm, but she was slaving just the same. She had fought hard to keep pessimism out of her mind and heart, but it was almost impossible not to wonder if colored folks were just doomed to be forever at the mercy of white folks. Well, she said to herself, she\u2019d be damned if she was going to put up with any of G. Carter\u2019s foolishness, on top of all the other things she had come to hate about the job.<\/p>\n
And the thing she hated most, even more than the way G. Carter always seemed to be sneaking around like some old hungry hound dog, was the way she had to hand colored folks their food orders through a tiny window to the outside of the cafe, when whites came in and sat down to be served. Whites, even those who wandered up and down Highway 29 picking up trash, sat down at the table as if they owned the place, and colored came up to the window, pecked on it like an escaped slave and mumbled their order.\u00a0 They had done this for so long, they did it as naturally as washing their hands or brushing their teeth. Each time Lena packed a bag and handed it through the tiny window, she felt as if she were a co-conspirator in this ugly thing she couldn\u2019t define.<\/p>\n
One day, after she had been working at the restaurant for almost six months, a car with New Jersey license plates pulled up into the lot of the motel. Through the window, Lena watched three men, two women and a small child get out of the car and start toward the dining room door. Mrs. Jones was in the back watching television and G. Carter had gone into town. Lena heard the door spring back, and figured the people must have been in the restaurant. She knew there were only two customers in the dining room, regulars from the neighboring rock quarry, and she felt nervous, almost scared. Glancing quickly back towards Mrs. Jones, Lena reached up for the ordering pad. Her palms were sweaty and suddenly she felt a rush, but this was going to be one time colored were going to get the same treatment as whites.<\/p>\n
“What will yall have this morning?” Trying to calm herself, she looked up at the clock on the wall. “Oh, it’s ten after twelve. Dinner time.”<\/p>\n
“Dinner?\u00a0 You eat dinner this early?\u00a0 We eat lunch this time of the day.” One of the women smiled warmly. Tall, thin and dark, she reminded Lena of a young Elnora.<\/p>\n
“Well,” one of the men said. “Down here, they call it `dinner,’ and they call `dinner’ `supper.” He reared back in his chair authoritatively and looked at Lena out of the corners of his eyes.<\/p>\n
“How you know?” The other woman asked. “Just cause you lived here a thousand years ago, don’t mean nothing.”<\/p>\n
The man winked. “They ain’t changed,” he said and snickered. “Well, I take that back. They made one big change.”<\/p>\n
The others looked at him with questioning eyes.<\/p>\n
“We setting here, ain’t we? \u00a0It\u2019s 19 and 59 and we setting right here in this here restaurant in Rockingham County, North Ca-ro-li-na.\u201d\u00a0 He leaned his face towards the little boy, who made faces in his glass.<\/p>\n
They all laughed.<\/p>\n
One of the other men raised his eyes at them and said, “Come on yall, we taking up the woman’s time.”<\/p>\n
Lena’s eyes shifted towards the two white men as though they shared some common knowledge. They were looking from her table to her, and Lena looked back at her guests. “I can come back if you want me to.” She thought if she went back into the kitchen, she might calm herself and pray that the white men would leave without causing any trouble.<\/p>\n
“Naw,” one of the women said. “We ready.”<\/p>\n
As they started to order, Lena could feel the sweat forming between her fingers. \u00a0Her hands were trembling so she could barely write.\u00a0 Just as the little boy began to order, Lena saw one of the white men come towards the table.<\/p>\n
“And I want . . . I want a big . . .” He raised his hands and made a circle with his thumbs and index fingers.<\/p>\n
“Lena, what you think you doing?” The white man interrupted.<\/p>\n
Lena looked squarely in the grey eyes of the lanky white man. “What do it look like?\u00a0 I’m taking a order.” Her voice was firm, but she squeezed the pad to steady her hands. “Something I can get for you?”<\/p>\n
The white man took off his cap and smoothed the thin brown hair from his forehead. “I bet Mr. Jones don\u2019t know nothing bout\u00a0 this?”<\/p>\n
The people looked anxiously from the white man to Lena. “Is something the matter?” One of the women asked.<\/p>\n
“No,” Lena said and then looked at the white man. “If there’s nothing you want, then I’ll take your money soon as I get through here.”\u00a0 She turned back to the little boy.\u00a0 “Now, what was that, sugar?\u00a0 I’m sorry.”<\/p>\n
“Come on, Henry,” the white man yelled.\u00a0 “I done lost my appetite eating in the same room with these here niggers.\u00a0 Mr. Jones going to hear bout this, and your black ass going to be out of a job.” He pointed his finger back at Lena as he started towards the door.\u00a0 “We ain’t paying neither, and you<\/span> tell them why.”<\/p>\n The three men from New Jersey had stood up while the white man yelled at Lena. Their eyes following the white men as they moved towards the door, they stood together forming a shield between the white men and Lena. “We didn’t mean to cause you no trouble and we don\u2019t intend to let nothing happen to you,” one of them said. \u201cLeast not while we<\/span> in here.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe just took a chance coming in here,\u201d the other one said as they each moved back to the chair. \u201cI was just hoping<\/span> things had changed.\u201d<\/p>\n Lena frowned. “That’s alright.\u00a0 You ain’t caused a bit of trouble.\u00a0 Just enjoy your dinner . . . I mean lunch.” She laughed, relaxing the lines in her forehead.<\/p>\n “We can go if this cause trouble,” the woman said, looking more like Elnora.<\/p>\n “No, Ma\u2019am.\u00a0 You’ll do no sucha thing. It\u2019ll be alright.\u201d<\/p>\n While the people ate their dinner, Lena paced the kitchen floor. Every now and then she peeked in the dining room to see if anyone else had come in, but she kept one eye on the door to Mrs. Jones’ room just in case the woman came stumbling into the kitchen.\u00a0 Lord knows, she didn’t need Mrs. Jones coming out, dipping into the pots and licking spoons, then turning around and staring in the face of colored people.<\/p>\n When Lena had finally gotten tired of straining her ears to get some clue to what was happening in the dining room and the back room, she decided to go check on her customers. The little boy was finishing his water and wrapping his burger in his napkin, while the others were impatiently watching him.<\/p>\n “Can I get yall anything else?” she asked, clenching her pad in her hand. She didn’t want to rush them, but God, she wished they wouldn’t still be here when G. Carter returned.<\/p>\n “Naw, I don’t know bout everybody else, but I’m full as a tick, and I betcha I’ll be sleep fore we get to town,” the man said. “You a mighty good cook.\u00a0 Ain’t nothing like that good ole down home cooking.” He chuckled as he rubbed his stomach.<\/p>\n “Pay the woman,” one of the other men demanded. “How much we owe you, Miz?”<\/p>\n Quickly, Lena wrote out the bill, tore it off the pad and handed it to the man who had done most of the talking. He glanced at it, and commented on how much such a meal would have cost up north.\u00a0 Fingering in his back pocket for what Lena thought was his wallet, he pulled out a thick wad of bills and peeled off two twenty dollars bills. “These ole rebbish crackers ain’t changed a lick,” he said. “They act like them kids in Greensboro ain’t raising a stink bout this shit.”<\/p>\n They tipped Lena twelve dollars and thirty-two cents, more than half of the amount she had collected during the last two months she had been working at the restaurant. By the time she looked up from the crumpled bills, the people were outside the door.\u00a0 “Yall come back,” she yelled, raising her hands. “And thank you. I sure preciate this.\u201d With her voice trailing, she waved the bills in the air and smiled.\u00a0 \u201cThank you,\u201d she said to herself. \u201cThank you.\u201d She looked down at the money, thinking about what the man said about the people in Greensboro and remembered that she had seen something on Mrs. Jones\u2019 T. V. about a sit-in at Woolworth\u2019s.\u00a0 Oh well, she mumbled, as she watched the car out of sight, \u201cI don\u2019t have time for no daydreaming. G. Carter be back shortly.\u201d<\/p>\n When they had gone, Lena breathed a sigh of relief.\u00a0 She had done it and nothing had happened. At least, nothing important.\u00a0 What’s more, she felt good about it. All this foolishness about colored folks coming to the side of the window like some dog begging for scraps.\u00a0 It didn’t make a lick of sense. Who started this foolishness, anyway, she wondered as she swept the dining room. It ain’t nothing but slavery time stuff and I ain’t no slave.<\/p>\n Lena had finished cleaning the dining room and washing all the dishes when Mrs. Jones came out of her room. With puffy eyes and a sour breath, her face was red and swollen and her overly-teased hair was mashed to her head on one side. She left the door to her room opened, leaving the T. V. in full view.<\/p>\n “Whyn’t you go on in there and set down for a spell. I know you tired. Ain’t going to hurt nothing.\u00a0 Then you can look without stretching your neck out its socket.” The woman laughed.<\/p>\n Lena could hear Mrs. Jones laugh over the laughter from the T. V. as the woman walked heavily into the kitchen. She didn\u2019t know what was louder\u2014Mrs. Jones\u2019 bare feet slopping against the linoleum, the T. V., or her own pounding heart. The realization of what she had done was scary, but if she had to do it over, she\u2019d do the same thing.\u00a0 She took a deep breath. \u201cThank you, Jesus,\u201d she mumbled. \u201cThank you, Jesus.\u201d<\/p>\n “What you looking at?” Mrs. Jones yelled back at Lena.<\/p>\n Lena rested her chin on her hands. “`What\u2019s My Line’, I believe.”<\/p>\n Gnawing on a chicken leg, Mrs. Jones came back into the room, sat down on the cot and crossed her plump legs. “You want to watch that?”<\/p>\n “I guess it’s alright. I’ll be going home in a little while. Soon as Elnora gets here.” Lena cut her eyes at the woman and watched her pull on the chicken bone.<\/p>\n An empty bottle of Old Taylor lay on the floor next to the cot, and Mrs. Jones reached over and clutched the neck of the bottle.\u00a0 With her lips quivering, she leaned her head back and drained the bottle. “Git this little corner here. Can’t let none of this go to waste.”<\/p>\n The laughter from the T. V. now sounded like a distant echo while Mrs. Jones continued to talk. Lena tried to watch the people guess what the little baldheaded man did, but not even Gary Moore had any ideas.<\/p>\n “You don’t drank none of this stuff, do you?”<\/p>\n “No Ma\u2019am.” Watching Mrs. Jones, Lena\u2019s mind wandered to the people from New Jersey and then all the colored people who had pecked on the window to the kitchen. It just wasn\u2019t fair.<\/p>\n “Well, good for you. And may you never have cause to take a little drank, cause chile, this stuff’ll git a hold of you and turn you every which way but loose.” She propped an unsteady head in her hands. “But this some good stuff, girl. Ain’t nothing like a little swig to git you up when things is down.” Resting a ham hand on Lena\u2019s shoulder, she tilted the bottle and looked into it. \u201cAll gone, look like.\u201d She cut her eye sharply at Lena. \u201cYou know why I do this, girl?\u201d<\/p>\n Lena cleared her throat to keep from answering. Yes, she wanted to say. I know. You lonesome. You lazy, you got a husband that treat you like trash and you don\u2019t have nothing better to do. She kept her eyes focused on the T. V.<\/p>\n \u201cYou think I got it made, don\u2019t you? Bet you wish you was me, hunh?\u201d Mrs. Jones clutched the empty bottle towards her chest.\u00a0 \u201cWell, girlie, I could tell you a thing or two.\u201d She became silent, her eyes distant. \u201cSometimes, I wake up in the morning and I just dread to see daylight. I say to myself, \u201cIf I pull the cover over my head, it\u2019ll still be dark, and I won\u2019t have to face the day. But then I hear G. Carter stumbling around out yonder,\u201d she pointed to the kitchen, \u201cand I know the day is here.\u201d She dropped her hand, letting it rest on Lena\u2019s arm.<\/p>\n Mrs. Jones\u2019s voice was no longer hard and scratchy like a radio with too much static. But now, Lena thought, it was weak and thin, almost like a lost child. Lena felt the pressure of Mrs. Jones\u2019s cushy hand on her arm and noticed the moisture settling in the deep fleshy craters under her eyes.<\/p>\n \u201cIt just ain\u2019t easy,\u201d she said, her voluminous chest rising and falling with each breath. It\u2019s like trying to run, ankle-deep in mud.\u201d<\/p>\n For a few minutes, the only sound was the laughter from the T. V. The panelists were still trying to guess the bald-headed man\u2019s profession.<\/p>\n Suddenly, Mrs. Jones jumped up. \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d she snapped, wiping her eyes with the back of her hands. “I got to make me a little run.” She snatched her purse from the top of the television and ran out the door. “Be back in a few minutes. If Mr. Jones git back fore I do,\u201d she yelled from the kitchen. \u00a0\u201cTell him I ain’t gone far.”<\/p>\n “I hope I’m gone,” she mumbled, feeling the tension easing from her body like an old habit. She turned back to the television. The panelists were looking around at each other and laughing like they had gone mad. The bald-headed man grinned unwittingly, his head turning from the host to the panelists like a dummy. Lena had missed the part of the show where Arlene Dahl guessed what the man did, but the host was still talking about it. The guest was a monkey trainer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Chapter from LENA AND MARY GLADYS The restaurant looked like a white boxcar. Crammed between two horizontal rows of small dingy white red-shuttered motel rooms with paint curling and cracking like a late autumn leaf, the restaurant claimed to be the best eating-place in the county. Jones Motel was the only lodging within a twenty-mile […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angelenejhall.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angelenejhall.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angelenejhall.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angelenejhall.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angelenejhall.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/angelenejhall.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":166,"href":"https:\/\/angelenejhall.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions\/166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angelenejhall.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angelenejhall.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angelenejhall.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}