Martha also looks blue, but because she is so black. I love her. She smells like clean ironed cotton, mostly because, when she comes to our house one day a week, or every other week, she spends the day ironing. My mother hates to iron, she says; on her ironing days, this ritual: she stands over the unfolded metal board with a big basket of clean laundry on the floor beside her: sheets, shirts, my father’s patterned boxer shorts. On the edge of the board is her spray starch, a big ashtray, her flip-top box of Salems a deep mint green. Iron, smoke, spray the little atomized droplets, smoke, walk around, and smoke a little more. The gradual emptying of the basket seems endless, Sisyphean. One day when she’s gone out I take one of the Salems for myself, light it, go out to the front porch and inhale the mentholed cloud, and am quickly dizzy and sick, swirling in my head like the girl who got hit by the train. Martha’s ironing days are long and steady, no cigarettes; lovely scent of the hot iron and the smoothed clothes. A fine day for me, when Martha comes; I bring books or drawing paper and crayons and sprawl on the floor close to the ironing board, or pursue my favorite project of the moment, which is to cut magazine pages into very tiny triangles until I have filled a saucepan from the kitchen with them, and then I stir the paper with a spoon. Martha talks some about this and that: the weather, the work I am doing, her children. One day I meet them, when she brings them to Carla’s house for a visit, because there’s some problem and Martha doesn’t have anyplace else for them to go that afternoon, which they must spend playing outside while she works; three small girls in clean, worn dresses, their faces scrubbed to shining, hair combed and tightly rubber banded. I like them, their sweet alienness. If I mention Miss Carla while Martha’s pushing the iron back and forth along the metal-colored cloth of the board, Martha will sigh and say nothing, and then get into the spirit of her version of gossip, a good-natured mixture of resignation and complaint.

I like her word for Miss Carla: a “tribulation.” Miss Carla is a tribulation to her. Martha’s assigned task is to respect her (as rich girl and employer’s daughter) and control her at once, which both Martha and Carla know is impossible. Carla resists and ignores, and yet she must always be Miss Carla regardless. Therefore Miss Carla has won, particularly since she has long ago conquered the prime arena of her struggle for power, her mother. Her mother is Carla’s chief accomplishment.