She looked at me, and I got a chill because it didn’t feel like the same person I saw flitting around the office. She gave me a silent and friendly smile, even though her eyes were wondering what my question meant.
I put down the big brown envelope addressed to Landsend and left without saying anything else.
Down in the basement I asked Ernie what was wrong with Mona today.
“Nothing,” he said. “I think she busted up with some guy or something. No, no, I’m a liar. She went out with her boyfriend’s best friend without telling him. Now she doesn’t get why he’s mad. That’s what she said. Bitch. What she think?”
Ernie didn’t suffer fools, as my mother would say. He was an older black man who had moved to New York from Georgia thirty-three years before and had come to work for Carter’s Home three days after he’d arrived. “I would have been here on day one,” he often said, “but my bus only got in on Friday afternoon.”
I’d been at Carter’s Home for only two months. After graduating from Hunter College I didn’t know what to do. Even though I had a BA in poli-sci, I really didn’t have any skills. Couldn’t type or work a computer. I wrote all my papers in longhand and used a typing service. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I had to pay the rent. When I applied to Carter’s Home for a professional trainee position they’d advertised at Hunter, the personnel officer, Reena Worth, said that there was nothing available, but maybe if I took the mail-room position something might open up.
“They hired two white PTs the day after you came,” Ernie told me at the end of the first week. I decided to ignore that though. Maybe they had applied beforehand, or maybe they had skills with computers or something.
I didn’t mind the job. It was easy and I was always on my feet. Junior Rodriguez, Big Linda Washington, and Little Linda Brown worked with me. The Lindas had earphones and listened to music while they wheeled around their canvas mail carts. Big Linda liked rap and Little Linda liked R & B. Junior was cool. He never talked much, but he’d give me a welcoming nod every morning when he came in. He dressed in gray and brown silk shirts that were unbuttoned to his chest. He had a gold chain around his neck and one gold canine. The Lindas didn’t like me, and Junior was in his own world. Everyone working in the interoffice mailroom was one shade or other of brown.
My only friend at work was Ernie. He and I would sit down in the basement and talk for hours sometimes. He told me all about Georgia, where he went on vacation every summer. “Atlanta’s cool,” he’d say. “But you better watch it in the sticks.”
Ernie was proud of his years at Carter’s Home. He liked the job and the company but had no patience for most of the bosses.
“Workin’ for white people is always the same thing,” Ernie would say.
“But Mr. Drew’s black,” I said the first time I heard his perennial complaint. Drew was the supervisor for all postal and interoffice communication.
“Used to be,” Ernie said. “Used to be. But ever since he got promoted he forgot all about that. Now he’s so scared I’m gonna pull him down that he won’t even sit for a minute. Used to be he’d come down here and we’d talk like you ’n’ me doin’. But now he just stands at the door and grin and nod.”
“I don’t get it. How can you like the job and the company if you don’t like the people you work for?” I once asked Ernie.
“It’s a talent,” he replied.
“Why ’ont you tuck in your shirt?” Big Linda Washington said to me on the afternoon that I’d unknowingly met Lana Donelli. The sneer on the young woman’s face spoke of a hatred that I couldn’t understand. “You look like some kinda fool hangin’ all out all over the place.”
Big Linda was taller than I, broader too—and I’m pretty big. Her hair was straightened and frosted with gold at the tips. She wore one-piece dresses of primary colors as a rule. Her skin was mahogany. Her face, unless it was contorted, appraising me, was pretty.
We were in the service elevator going up to the fifth floor. I tucked the white shirt tails into my black jeans.
“At least you could make it even, so the buttons go straight down,” she remarked.
I would have had to open up my pants to do it right, and I didn’t want to get Linda any more upset than she already was.
“Hm!” she grunted and then sucked a tooth.
The elevator came open then, and she rolled her cart out. We had parallel routes, but I went in the opposite direction, deciding to take mail from the bottom of the stack rather than listen to her criticisms of me.
The first person I ran into was Mona. She was wearing a deep red one-piece dress held up by spaghetti straps. Her breasts were free under the thin fabric, and her legs were bare. Mona (Lana too, of course) was short, with thick black hair and green eyes. Her skin had a hint of olive in it but not so deep as Sicilian skin.
“I can see why you were wearing that sweater at your desk,” I said.
“What?” she replied, in an unfriendly tone.
“That white sweater you were wearing,” I said.
“What’s wrong with you? I don’t even own a white sweater.”
She turned abruptly and clicked away on her red high heels. I wondered what had happened. Somehow I kept thinking that it was because of my twisted-up shirt. Maybe that’s what made people treat me badly, maybe it was my appearance.
I continued my route, pulling jackets from the bottom and placing them in the right in-boxes. Everyone had a different in-box system. Some had their in- and out-boxes stacked, while others had them side by side. Rose McMormant had no box at all, just white and black labels set at opposite ends of her desk. White for in and black for out.
“If the boxes ain’t side by side, just drop it anywhere and pick up whatever you want to,” Ernie told me on my first day. “That’s what I do. Mr. Averill put down the rules thirteen years ago, just before they kicked him upstairs.”
Ernie was the interoffice mail-room director. He didn’t make deliveries anymore, so it was easy for him to make pronouncements.
When I’d finished the route I went through the exit door at the far end of the hall to get a drink of water from the refrigerated fountain. I planned to wait in the exit chamber long enough for Big Linda to have gone back down. While I waited, a fly buzzed by my head. It caught my attention because there weren’t many flies that made it into the air-conditioned buildings around the Wall Street area, even in summer.
The fly landed on my hand, then on the cold aluminum bowl of the water fountain. He didn’t have enough time to drink before zooming up to the ceiling. From there he went to a white spot on the door, to the baby fingernail of my left hand, and then to a crumb in the corner. He landed and settled again and again but took no more than a second to enjoy each perch.