8
On Saturday, I helped my mother in the garden. She talked about the neighbors: who she’d seen, who was away at the Eastern Shore or Rehoboth Beach, and who had played in her tennis foursome. This reporting was interrupted periodically by instructions on how to properly deadhead flowers and pull weeds. I listened to all of it, the stories and the directives, but my mind was on the Cones, Jimmy, and Sheba. I felt like the outline of a fourteen-year-old girl pulling weeds and nodding at her mother.
At four o’clock my mother and I changed into dresses. We were due at the Elkridge Club at four thirty. She was meeting friends on the porch for tea and lemonade before our six o’clock dinner reservation with my dad, who had been at the club all day playing golf.
As we were about to walk out the door, my mother looked me up and down. “Mary Jane, is there something you can do with your hair?”
I pushed my hair behind my ears. “Should I put on a headband?”
“Headband, ponytail, braids. Just don’t walk around as if you’re a child with no mother looking after you.”
I ran upstairs, went into my bathroom, and opened the drawer that held my brush, comb, and hair bands. I put on a blue floral headband that matched my light blue dress, and examined myself in the mirror. With my hair pushed back like that, my forehead looked broader, and my dark eyebrows stood out. Just then, I could see that maybe someone might notice me someday: my smooth skin, my wide mouth, my orangey eyes.
“Mary Jane!” my mother called from downstairs. “Do not dillydally!”
My mother and I were silent in the car on the way to Elkridge. Just as we pulled into the lot, she asked, “Have you figured out which club the Cones belong to?”
“Well, Mrs. Cone isn’t Jewish. And Dr. Cone is Jewish, but he’s really a—” I stopped myself before I said Buddhist. My mother might think a Buddhist was worse than a Jew.
“Really a what?”
“Well, he prays but he doesn’t seem so Jewish. And she’s Presbyterian, like us.”
“How do you like that! I wonder how their families deal with that.”
“I’m not sure. Their parents both live in other towns. No one’s around to help.”
“Maybe they don’t want to because it’s a mixed marriage.”
“Yeah, maybe.” I didn’t want to betray Mrs. Cone’s trust and tell my mother that Mrs. Cone’s parents didn’t talk to her specifically because Dr. Cone was Jewish.
“So what is Izzy? Presbyterian or Jewish?”
“I guess she’s both.”
“Does Mrs. Cone take her to church?”
“Mrs. Cone is sick, remember?” The lies came out so smoothly now, I barely thought about them.
“Before. Did she take her to church before?”
“I don’t know, Mom. Right now no one is going to church.”
“Hmm. You’d think with her sick, now would be the time to go to church.”
“I guess.”
“We’ll pray for her tomorrow.”
Lately all my prayers had been for Jimmy to get better and for me to not be a sex addict. “Okay. That would be nice. I’ll tell her on Monday.”
While my mother and her friends drank iced tea and lemonade on the porch, I stared out at the vast green lawn and watched the men play golf. I’d been coming to the club my entire life and had never seen it the way I did that day. What in the past had seemed normal suddenly felt abnormally hushed, quiet, and contained. It was like we were in a play that went on forever and ever without any dramatic tension. The waiters and waitresses, bartenders and busboys at Elkridge were Black men and women. I’d seen and known many of them since I’d first started walking. But it wasn’t until this day with my mother that I could see myself, my mother, and her friends the way the employees might. What did they think of all these quiet white people? What did they think of the pastel-colored dresses and pants and the hairdos that were frozen in place with Aqua Net and hair bands? What did they think about working in a place that wouldn’t accept them as members?
We’d learned about the civil rights movement in school. It made me feel hopeful, like change was happening all around us. But sitting at Elkridge that day, I felt stuck in a time-warp atrium of segregated politeness.
At dinner that night, my mother told my father about the Cones’ mixed marriage.
“Hm.” My dad sawed off a thumb-size bite of steak. “How can he play golf?”
“How can he play golf?” I repeated. I didn’t understand what golf had to do with it.