I was becoming more aware of my mother’s unhappiness, in part because it was more explicit. Before going to work one morning my father put in her hand two fifty-cent pieces. He left and she sat down at the kitchen table. “With this,” she said, indicating the coins, “I am expected to maintain a family, keep a house running, put food on the table.” She was a strong woman but she wept easily. I patted her. She washed clothes using a washboard angled into the laundry sink in the kitchen. Her arms went up and down in the suds. “I used to have the most wonderful maid,” she told me. “When you were an infant. A woman from Jamaica, Carrie was her name. She adored you, took you out in your new carriage and would shoo anyone away who got too close. Carrie guarded you as if you were the Prince of Wales.”Coming home from school, now I often smelled cigarette smoke, which told me my mother’s friend Mae was visiting. Mae worked as a bookkeeper part time, in the mornings. It was the best work she could find.
