Social Cleaving (Post-Script, Part III)

Elizabeth's car was on its last legs, so she had to take the bus. And then walk half a mile to her destination. These were the things these privileged white folk never understood, just how **** it could get, she thought. But now on the other side, the perspectives of those privileged were just as remote. She almost had a mental block to everything that had happened to her for those happy, vapid laden days as a beauty queen and wife. When everything was clean and easy and beautiful. When everything was unsatisfying and haughty and dumb.

She realized she recognized the neighborhood. It was her old neighborhood, all right. And as she walked by one stately manor to the next. Her stomach started to clench. Had she really forgotten ... was this the house?

It was. She gritted her teeth. She already paid the bus fare after all, and it was just coins jangling in her purse now. She walked up to the door and rang the bell, to what was once her home ... her sanctuary.

Moses answered the door, and seeing his ex, disheveled, her chicken store shirt stained, he smiled victoriously. He'd done this. He'd turned this pampered white woman into a baseborn ghetto slut who couldn't even remember where she used to live.

"Elizabeth," he said innocently. "So good of you to visit."

"I saw ..." she flushed petulantly, "I saw you're looking for a maid."

"That we are," he said. "Can't have my wife cleaning house, that is for sure!" He laughed, overly loud, slapping his knee. As if on cue, his wife came downstairs, willowy and blonde and pregnant. Elizabeth gawked seeing her former best friend ... Julia.

"Julia, you remember Elizabeth, don't you?" he said smoothly as she elegantly descended the stairways. She saw ... not angry or hatred from her former friend's eyes, but suspicion. Deep suspicion.

"I do," she said. "You've fallen on hard times, dear." There was pity in her eyes, inspecting how Elizabeth's pants stretched her work pants. She wrinkled her nose, and Elizabeth realized how superior Julia felt to her.

"Yeah," Elizabeth said in a small voice.

Could she fucking do this? Be a maid to her ex-husband and her ex-best friend?