Cigarette Smoke

The liquid splashed around the cup as Georgia struggled to put her coffee back on the table without spilling it. Other people had already ruined the linoleum on her plastic dining-room table and it was covered in scratches and peeling around the edges. The table had been white at some point but was now yellowed from years of use. Two ashtrays on the table were overflowing with ash and cigarette butts. The entire room smelled musty, courtesy of a combination of Florida humidity and a busted air conditioning unit, plus years of stale cigarette smoke. It wasn’t any use to open the windows to let in fresh air. The window screens were all broken and Georgia didn’t feel like replacing them. She also didn’t feel like letting in a bunch of mosquitoes into her home.

Georgia scratched her pale leathery cheek with a yellow and nubby index finger. Flakes of dead skin scratched from an old scab floated down onto an ash tray. Georgia stared at the black girl sitting at the other side of the table. She could barely see her through her glasses foggy from never being cleaned and getting multiple scratches on the lenses. The girl was younger than Georgia had expected when her daughter told her she’d hired a house cleaner for her. She also hadn’t said the girl was black. The girl’s hair was a mess, curled into dirty dreadlocks. Georgia restrained herself from grabbing the kitchen scissors, rusty and lying on the table next to cut up bills, and cutting the girl’s hair off. Georgia knew their hair did different things from hers, but she also knew that dreadlocks came about because someone didn’t brush their hair. Georgia always took good care of her hair. Her arthritic fingers may hurt now with the effort but she still brushed her hair one-hundred times at night and put it in curlers before going to bed just like she’d done for the past seventy years. Arnold, her husband, had loved her hair. She missed Arnold. She didn’t understand why God had taken him away from her. Or why her daughter thought she needed a housemaid. It was funny that her daughter pretended their ancestors had never owned slaves, and now she was giving Georgia the gift of a black girl to clean up after her.

It pissed Georgia off when people whined about those who glorified the South. They seemed to forget that the South had helped America to get to where it was today. Georgia knew it wasn’t right to treat people like property, but they weren’t treated like that anymore. The South had learned from its mistakes. No one seemed to do that today. Georgia’s granddaughter, Lisa, loved telling her off and blaming her for everything bad that had happened in the past, but when it came to taking responsibility for her own life, what did she do? Lisa blamed Georgia’s generation for everything while she herself lived on her parents’ income and went to a college paid by her father’s parents. They paid for a useless art degree instead of forcing Lisa to get a job and take care of her own life. That was the problem of that generation. They complained and blamed the wrong people instead of taking responsibility for their own lives. Georgia couldn’t have afforded to do that when she was Lisa’s age. She started working at sixteen to help her mom raise the money needed to take care of five kids because her father had died for his country that now spit on her.

The black girl in front of Georgia didn’t look older than sixteen but apparently was twenty like Lisa and needed money to help pay for college. She didn’t have rich grandparents to spoil her. From what Georgia knew of black families, this girl had been raised by a single mother because the father ran off or was too lazy to find a decent job. Or maybe he was in jail. Georgia still remembered how terrified she had been after David was mugged in a parking lot. It didn’t surprise her that he never fully trusted black people afterwards if they were off mugging people. Georgia saw enough stuff on the news to know that more blacks were jailed for stealing than whites. That couldn’t just be bias as Lisa kept telling Georgia while eating the food her parents paid for. What about the time that poor woman had been attacked by a black man while running in the woods near the city’s country club? Lisa could be as righteous as she wanted to be, but Georgia knew that she stopped going for runs after that attack. And now her daughter, Lisa’s mother, wanted her to hire a black housekeeper.

The girl hadn’t said anything yet. She shifted in her seat occasionally but resolutely looked directly at Georgia or glanced over the house. Georgia wondered if she was looking for something to steal. She made a quick scan. They were in the kitchen. From there, Georgia could look into the living room that was just big enough for a couch and Arnold’s threadbare armchair. There was nothing valuable in the kitchen. The original gas stove was now covered in burn marks. The old white cupboards were covered in scratches and dirt. A plastic tiled floor with paintings of faded flower bouquets had missing tiles because the glue had worn off and Georgia didn’t feel like replacing them.

Georgia took a drag from her cigarette and stared at the girl. The girl stared straight back. Georgia didn’t like that.

“My daughter said you’ve cleaned houses before,” Georgia said. The girl blinked but kept looking straight at her as she spoke.

“Yes ma’am. I started cleaning houses last summer. I can show you my references if you’d like to see them.”

Georgia barely listened as the girl talked. She was distracted by the girl’s nose ring. Her daughter had told her they were a new trend and she called them septic rings or something like that. She couldn’t see any, but Georgia was sure the girl had tattoos. Georgia took a deep drag from her cigarette. It was disgusting what people did to their bodies now. When she was twenty, Georgia ironed her clothes and kept her hair in neat curls. This girl was wearing a tank top with a marijuana leaf on it. It looked it had been dug up from the bottom of a pile of dirty laundry. She didn’t have a handbag, just a faded wallet and a cell phone that she had put on the table, far away from the ashtray.

Georgia looked away from the girl who was staring at her and took another drag from her cigarette. Nothing happened. She stuffed the new nub into an ash tray and took a new cigarette out of the can she bought from Sam’s Club when her daughter had taken her there for some shopping. It was convenient that she didn’t have to rely on those puny packs that barely got her through a day. Georgia lit the cigarette with the last lighter Arnold had bought for her. He had smoked cigars. She still had the last one he had smoked on when he had had his heart attack. It was stored in an old cigar humidor along with the letters he had written to her from Vietnam and the picture of him in his uniform.

“Excuse me, ma’am, do you have any other questions for me? I’m getting picked up by someone in ten minutes.” The girl spoke suddenly and it startled Georgia. She dropped her cigarette on the table. It made a new burn mark on the linoleum before going out. She had forgotten about the girl who had just interrupted a memory of Arnold and made her waste a cigarette.

“Yes, I do have more questions for you,” Georgia told the girl. “If you’ve been cleaning for other people, why’s my daughter telling me we need to hire you because you need the money? I’d think that if you’ve been working you don’t need to be asking anyone any favors.” Georgia didn’t like how the girl was now looking at her, with hate in those eyes framed by dirty dreadlocks.

“I did not ask for anyone’s charity, ma’am. I was offered the job because Mrs. Lars told me she was looking for a housekeeper to help you out.” Georgia didn’t like this backtalk, especially by someone asking to work for her.

“Listen up, Miss.” She couldn’t remember what her daughter had told her this girl’s name was. “I don’t want a housekeeper. I can clean my own house. When I was your age, I didn’t ask for handouts. That’s because I’d already been working since I was sixteen and helped my mother raise four children. What’d you do?” Georgia was so aggravated she rasped the table with her knuckles, sending ash from the trays to sprinkle over the table. The girl kept looking at her with an insolent gaze and then had the nerve to stand up.

“I apologize for wasting your time, ma’am. I’ll let Mrs. Lars know my services aren’t required by you.”

Georgia sat in shock as the girl left her kitchen without waiting for her to say something back. She lit another cigarette and went to the kitchen window to see the girl hurriedly walk to a car parked in front of her house.

Georgia watched the girl from the kitchen window, but made sure to stand to the side far away enough so she wouldn’t be seen by her nosy neighbors who were outside mowing their lawns. She recognized the car. It was her daughter’s hybrid. She saw Lisa, her granddaughter, stepping out of the car. Georgia took a quick drag from her cigarette. The nicotine warmed her and she relaxed. Lisa was finally visiting her. She knew her ultimatum at Thanksgiving of never seeing Georgia again, after she made made a random remark about the two women who lived next door to her, had been a bluff. Maybe Lisa was here to help her clean. Georgia watched with surprise as the girl walked towards Lisa. They talked but she couldn’t tell what they were saying. Lisa glanced at the kitchen window and Georgia took two quick drags from her cigarette. Lisa was frowning. Then she smiled and said something to the girl who laughed. Her dreadlocks shook while she laughed. Georgia took another drag on the cigarette but her heart was beating fast. With a quick second glance at the window, Lisa grabbed the girls’ face in her hands and kissed her.

Georgia dropped the cigarette. Ash was knocked off onto the floor but the cigarette stayed lit. It dropped close to the lace curtains at the kitchen window. If Georgia nudged her foot slightly, the curtains would go up in flames. She didn’t notice the danger. Her attention was fixed to watching pale skin on black. Georgia watched helplessly as her granddaughter and the black girl kissed on her front lawn. She kept watching as they walked, laughing and kissing each other, to her daughter’s car. Georgia stepped numbly back from the window as they drove off, and with her step, kicked the lit cigarette towards the lace curtains. Georgia watched numbly as flames slowly licked their way up the curtains. She couldn’t feel the heat from the fire, not even as the flames wafted higher and higher up the curtains.