Thrown-away Child

girl. Coffee’s in the kitchen, you go help yourself now. I’ll be cooking some eggs and Such right after my program here.” Mama said all this without looking up from the TV set, which was filled with the empty face of a blond-headed news anchorman mispronouncing foreign names and places, and several on the domestic side as well. “By the by, your handsome husband gone off for a walk someplace. Left a note on the Frigidaire.”
    “A walk? Did you see him before he left?”
    “He slip off too early, I never seen him go.” The television distracted Violet from the anxious sound in Ruby’s voice. “Coffee’s done up strong. Hope you can stand it. Neil like it strong?”
    “Yes, he does.”
    “Well, when he come back in you tell him I make coffee so strong he want to get up and go slap his grandma.”
    “I’ll tell him what’s what, all right.” Ruby stared at her mother’s uniform, and stockings that covered up overworked veins standing out on her legs. She hated seeing Mama dressed like that. She hated it even more that she was embarrassed seeing Mama dressed like that. After all, cleaning house was worthier than the work Ruby did in Madison Avenue. “Where are you going this morning, Mama?”
    “Oh, I still do some housekeeping, you know. Just two little days a week.”
    “For that Ava LaRue?”
    “I spell her regular maid, this hoo-doo lady by the name Ophelia Dabon.”
    “How are you getting along with Miss LaRue after all these years?”
    “Fine, so long’s I don’t run into her damn husband Hippo.” The anchorman flashed California teeth and said he would return after some important messages. “Go on, get your coffee while the commercials are jabbering.”
    “Hippo.” Ruby said the name as if she were horking up spoiled food. “That greasy tax collector!”
    “Well, he a big old alderman nowadays. Had him a life of politics since you been gone from town, including he used to be po-lice commissioner. Hippo got his big butt in a tub of trouble lately, though.“
    “Trouble?”
    “Hippo be getting too flirty down to City Hall. Ain’t that a kick? That white man think all he got to do is say How-do and all the sweet young ladies going to spread they legs. White mens got them some kind of arrogance.
    “As I seem to recall, Hippo Giradoux is so fat it takes him three days to reach around and scratch his butt.”
    Mama laughed. “Oh, Ruby girl, I see you remember the dozens.”
    Growing up, Ruby and all neighborhood kids would “do the dozens,” as it was called. Nobody ever thought about the name of the game, no more than anybody ever analyzed hopscotch. But then one day, Ruby’s fifth-grade history teacher taught the class the roots of the dozens: during the slave trading days of New Orleans, white plantation owners deemed some Africans so ugly and undesirable that traders had to sell them off by the dozens.
    Ruby ran home crying after this rude lesson. She told Mama what she had learned. And after that, Ruby and Mama reserved the dozens for the cold-hearted.
    “Hippo Giradoux’s so ugly his mama had to get drunk to breast-feed him...” Ruby’s eyes were closed. She tried remembering her best zingers. “Hippo’s so big his hips are in two different time zones.”
    “Hippo, he so ugly, when he was a little his boy family set him in the corner, feed him with a slingshot,” Mama said. She got to laughing so hard a piece of dental bridge fell out of her mouth. She wedged it back in with her fingers and snugged down porcelain with her tongue. “Go on, get your coffee. And hurry on back, girl. You don’t want to be missing what’s next after these commercials.”
    So Ruby went into the kitchen and found herself a mug, filled it halfway with grandma-slapping coffee, and stepped over to the Frigidaire. She read Hock’s pitiful note taped to the door: “Good morning, ladies. Woke up early, decided to walk. Back later' Smacks—Hock.”
    A big fat lie, Ruby told herself. He’s off somewhere with Claude—that sweet boy in the lime green tux. Whatever they’re up to, it’s got something godawful to do with Perry.
    Ruby sighed and cut her coffee with milk and took her first sip of the day. And then—slap!—she thought of Princess Pamela back home in New York, proprietor of Hock’s favorite Lower East Side chicken joint and jazz club. A sloppy, preachy old black lady with a red-blond bouffant wig and ready advice about the meaning of Neil Hockaday: He is a poor fool who