Lauren, my ‘liberal’ white friend and neighbour, who has a black maid, will react to this. I am seeing this as a social experiment – and hoping it might assist Lauren to see her maid as a human being rather than one of ‘those people’ of which, apparently, Nosizwe and I are exceptions.
I pick up the phone and dial my husband’s number.
‘Babes? I am getting a maid.’
‘That’s good that you finally decided, hon. It will take a load off.’
‘A white girl,’ I whisper into the phone conspiratorially.
‘Is this one of your little crusades to show Lauren how biased she is?’ he laughs. The man knows me only too well.
‘Never. I just think unemployed whites deserve as much of an opportunity as unemployed blacks. Call it White Economic Empowerment, if you will. But don’t tell anyone, okay?’
‘Okay, babes, I won’t tell anyone. You do what you want about hiring your maid, but I have to go, there’s a patient waiting for me.’
Huh. Men always whine about not being involved in household decisions, but listen to that man saying ‘your’ and not ‘our’ maid, as though she will be serving me alone.
I send an SMS to my father: Thinking of getting a white maid. He texts me back immediately: Make sure she does the toilets.
Before I go maid-recruiting though, I can tell you are dying to hear about Nosizwe and Lauren . . .
1. Nosizwe the Clothes Horse
Chapter 1
Nosizwe the Clothes Horse
Nosizwe does not work out, and eats whatever she wants. Although she was not blessed with the prettiest Xhosa face, she is one of the few who does not possess the Xhosa passport – otherwise known to all as the humongous butt. She does, however, possess a physique that is perfect in every way – pert breasts, well-toned ass, a waist that would make a wasp jealous, cellulite-free thighs, killer legs . . . And as if that weren’t enough advantage, Siz, as I call her, is one of those few black South African pre-independence children who were born with beaded silver spoons in their mouths.
Her father was a businessman and her mother a pretty, twenty-years-younger nurse, who saw an opportunity and grabbed it. Her dad already had children aplenty from one marriage and several flings, and was lucky to have been born and gone at a time when Aids was unknown. Such was the power of her mother’s mojo that when Siz’s father died when she was five, he stipulated that everything in his will belonged to this pretty young nurse, and had even set up an exclusive trust fund for Siz and her younger sister Nomalizwe, known to all as Lizwe. Not only did Siz’s father leave a will at a time when few, if any, black people did so, but also in those days children born out of wedlock had no claim on the estate (to protect the many white children who had ‘coloured’ siblings?) so Siz, her mother, and her sister inherited the man’s vast business interests as well. The first wife didn’t contest the will because she was under-educated and therefore ignorant of the law and her children’s rights. Besides, she would have had the fight of her life on her hands had she tried. ‘Why?’ you ask. You have to know Siz’s mother to understand. She is one of those characters who, when she walks in and out of a room, leaves you feeling as though you have been through a powerful hurricane. Today, with her children out of the house and as a grandmother to Lizwe’s six-year-old son, her word is still law. Shit, her word is even law to Mandla, Lauren, Lauren’s husband Michael, and I, and we are not even related to her.
But Siz’s mother is not just a pretty face with hurricane mojo; she has brains and ambition to match and managed to turn a two-bit business in Langa into a chain of supermarkets in the Eastern and Western Cape, while still maintaining great contacts with the then-banned South African political parties, without seeming like a sellout for having money. As if all that were not enough, her second marriage was to one of the leaders of the United Democratic Front who did a stint on ‘the Isle’. With her business acumen and his political connections, Siz’s mother became a ‘must-know’ post-1991. When Black Economic Empowerment came into play, all the honkies wanted to partner up with her. She now co-owns a bunch of companies, sits on numerous boards of directors, and is a multi-millionaire in her own right.
Unfortunately, as most people know, rich parents are either very generous or very stingy, and Siz’s mother falls into the former category with her last born and the latter with her first born. Sure, she armed Siz with a preppie South African private girls’ school education to matric level, and a posh public school for A-Levels in the UK, and then an even more expensive private university in the States – specifically Hawaii, where Siz and I met. But she was strict on Siz, trust fund or not, and gave her a measly allowance every semester, allegedly to foster responsibility. ‘After all, you are the first born. You are supposed to learn responsibility,’ Siz would often mimic her mother after one of our drunken episodes on dollar-pitcher night at Moose’s. I smile, as one can only do with a full belly, when I remember the times that girl and I lunched on stale hot dogs from 7–Eleven.
For my part, I could not help her much financially. I hated calling home to ask for funds; my father would tell me about some distant cousin he had just assisted financially in one way or another, and I would end up telling him, ‘I was just calling to see how you are.’ There we were in what the rest of the world considers a paradise, Hawaii, without two pennies to rub together. Paradise lost? Indeed.
It was different with her baby sister, Lizwe, though. Lizwe is clearly the apple of her mother’s eye. She didn’t have to work for all the seven years she spent doing her undergraduate at NYU. Lizwe, you see, could never make up her mind what she wanted to study, and so touched on Information Systems, Pre-Med and, eventually, when even her mother was getting fed up, got her degree in Business Studies.
When Nosizwe graduated and returned home, she begged and scraped to find employment but did not ask for help from her mother, not wanting to deal with any more emotional guilt about ‘everything I’ve done for you’. Eventually she hooked an executive job with a French multinational company in Johannesburg. The way Siz tells it: ‘My blackness was imperative and my intelligence apparently just an added advantage, so I am forever having to prove myself to those white boys in suits.’ She now lives two blocks from me in Lombardy East because, I flatter myself, she needs me as an anchor in her dramatic life.
Although she is very judgmental (like her mother) with a strong sense of wrong and right, Siz has never been a very good judge of character when she likes someone. This may explain her marital union. I think homegirl watched too much Soul Food because, like Bird, she married an ex-con who her mother detests with a passion. I am sometimes a little unsure whether Siz has remained married to Vuyo because she is trying to ‘show’ her mother, or because he is one of the sweetest, funniest, most loving, most charming – and not to mention ‘prettiest’ – boys a woman could hope to catch.
He’s also the only person we know who can stand up to Siz’s mother. With his athletic physique, his zero-curse-word vocabulary and a teddy-bear personality, Vuyo can aptly be described as a Gentleman-Thug. He has a steady job – which is more than can be said for a lot of the black male population in South Africa. But there is a down side to Vuyo. Two of them, to be exact.
The first is that he came with the baggage of two ghetto-fabulous babymamas, who seem not to care that Vuyo is a married man now. The second is that Vuyo loves his two bastard sons and Siz is barren and so, unsurprisingly, she resents the brats.
Vuyo always had a way with ladies and prior to Siz coming into his life, had two simultaneous girlfriends from Zola in Soweto. They hated each other and, maybe each
