esperanza

Harper

"Guh-ross!" She frowned at the cup as if it were its fault that she didn't like the taste.

I laughed.

"But I like coffee!" She frowned at me this time. "I know I do! And I want some." Her mouth worked, trying not to pout.

"Go get some milk and sugar, if you really want to have a cup. When I was your age I drank what my granny called 'uptown' coffee. Half milk and three sugars."

"My age?" That broke up the incipient pout with another frown, this one puzzled. "I remember, my Granny called it 'Boston' coffee. Didn't you say milk and sugar will make you fat?"

Her mood had flipped again, back to teasing.

"You could stand a little more padding here and there."

She set the cup down carefully, and stood up. "You just wanna make me fat!" she accused playfully. "And I just wanted to use the line about liking my men the way I like my coffee."

Her hand flew to her mouth and her face turned very red.

I snorted. "In that case you had best put a little coffee in your milk instead of the other way around."

Her wiseass grin widened, as she moved a hand up to push the towel off her forehead. "Why? You think you're the man I'm talking about liking?"

"Are you trying to flirt with me or just get my goat?"

She fiddled with the towel, either loosening it or tightening it, and looked thoughtful. "I dunno, Just having fun, I guess."

"Better be careful, girl. Fun like that might get you in trouble."

"Me? Never. I'm a boy, remember?"

"Worse. The kind of trouble you could end up with is dead trouble."

She nodded as the towel came partly loose and fell across one eye. Another change of subject apparently occurred to her.

"You don't act black," she commented as she carefully undid the towel, pushing away the damp, dark strands that tried to fall around her face.

I didn't ask, "What's that supposed to mean?" I considered the comment in the light of what her attitudes might be, given her bizarre personal history. She didn't mean, you're not all over me just because I'm a white girl. She didn't mean you don't talk street jive. She didn't mean, you don't act like the fake-ass rappers on Mtv and the radio. I decided that she meant I didn't act as if I considered my blackness integral to my person.

"I guess I don't think of myself as black, mostly," I said. "I'm just an engineer with some African ancestors. I'm English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Choctaw and who knows what else, the black is mostly for flavor."

She had meant no offense and I decided to take none. She snickered then looked serious. I had known we would have to get around to this sometime.

"Have you ever been called Uncle Tom?"

A fair question and an incisive one, she did have an understanding of attitudes "out there" to people like me. Some people don't like the fact that I consider my ancestry as one of the least important things about me except where it influences the actions of other people toward me. But I didn't wince.

"Once or twice. Doesn't bother me as much as some things I've been called."

She shook her head.

"Too much for me, I guess."

Too much for me, too, I guess. In the context of how it is used by those who use the name. A shame too, cause if any of them had bothered to even read the story they'd learn he was actually the hero of the story, and a compliment. I don't think about my great-great-grandparents and the difficulty of their lives much more than most Americans, anyway.

I wanted to change the subject, so I said, "You don't act like a boy."

"I don't, do I? I wonder how come?"

She turned her head sideways in a very girlish, flirty manner.

I had to grin. "You don't think of yourself as a boy, maybe?"

She shrugged, turning the towel over in her hands as she started to re-wrap it. Now with the dryer side in, to soak up more damp, I supposed.

She said, "It's funny, the body knows how to move, kinda. If I don't think of it, I find myself doing the damndest swishiest shit."

"Am I going to have to paddle you to break you of that potty mouth stuff?" I asked. I tried to grin to show I was teasing but really, that kind of thing did bother me. In more ways than one. Children shouldn't be using such language, nor should females of any age. It's unbecoming, distasteful, and trashy.

She looked at me from under dark eyebrows, plucked, I noticed again to a thin and feminine arch. The grin got wider as she tried to bite it back. Then she threw the towel at me suddenly and ran from the room, laughing.

The robe flapped around her and the legs I had noted before flashed their length and creamy color at me. I started up from my chair, but stopped before I took even one step, I could pursue her, she seemed to want me to. But what the heck was I supposed to do when I caught her?

I found her on the back patio, hanging some things up on the little clothesline to finish drying.

"Need some help?"

No rain here in Burbank and none likely, the clothes would dry quickly enough though I had almost never done it this way.

"Sure. Those shirts are yours. If you want to hang them now, they'll be less likely to wrinkle than if I run them the rest of the way out in this dryer."

She was carefully doing up buttons on a satiny blouse after having hung it on a plastic hanger.

I pulled a few of the shirts out of my antique dryer and put them on hangers. I noticed that the dryer was still full of lacy underwear and frilly things that had no normal business being there.

Looking at them made me feel odd, I hadn't mixed my laundry with that of a woman since my marriage had failed almost ten years before.

"I didn't think you were supposed to mix all this kind of stuff in one dryer load."

She snorted delicately. "Like it's gonna matter in a dryer with only two settings. You got heat or no heat, that's all. I had a dryer like this one back in 1964, fer-gosh sake's." She grinned. "That's why I'm taking a lot of stuff out still damp and hanging it."

She reached into the still warm cylinder and pulled out a few of her unmentionables. I rapidly shook my head, trying to rid it of a blurry, naughty image that was trying to come into focus in my mind.

"Now these are dry." She informed me. She then reached back in and snagged something else out before restarting the dryer on the 'Air Only' setting. "I'll be right back, I'm gonna go put this on."

She giggled and bounced a little as she went inside.

I worked on hanging up the shirts I had taken out. Who would have thought she could be so domestic? I had noticed as I went through that she had apparently cleaned up the kitchen a bit, too, as there were no dishes in the sink and the counters looked neater somehow. I suspect she had put some things away that I perennially left our after using them.

I wasn't sure what I thought about her feeling okay with doing something so -- intimate? That was surely not the right word, but it did make me grin. I wasn't sure what I thought about her going to put on something more feminine either. I didn't want to think about her slipping on the pink panties with the ruffles I had glimpsed. And the bra, a color between mauve and rose, a style that would seem to require more development than I had seen she had, was it padded?

I missed a button on a shirt and had to undo everything and start over.