Two Mrs Williamses

[31 August 2023: I originally posted this on 10 February 2006. I’m making it public now as it’s relevant to a piece I’m writing about the Voice Referendum.]

In E. J. Levy’s essay, ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ in The Best American essays 2005 (edited by Susan Orleans), I was astonished to read this, about Mrs Williams, the ‘cleaning lady’ who came to her childhood home once a week:

I felt ashamed when I saw my mother and Mrs Williams chatting over coffee at our kitchen table. I saw their silhouettes against history, and they made an ugly broken line. I read in it patronage, condescension, exploitation, thwarted rage.

I thought at the time that it was misapplied gentility that prompted my mother to sit with Mrs Williams while she ate lunch. Their conversations seemed to me a matter of polite routine. They spoke generally. Of the latest space launch, Watergate, the price of oil. When Mrs Williams was dying of breast cancer, she told my mother that my mother had been her best friend. Her best friend. My mother told me this with wonder, as if she were amazed that anyone had ever considered her a friend. Now I wonder if the declaration moved her too because she understood its corollary, that Mrs Williams had been her best, perhaps her only, friend.

I was astonished because there are so many points of contact with my own experience. When I was a child on a sugar farm in Innisfail, North Queensland, in the 1950s, a long way from E. J. Levy’s Watergate-era Minnesota, an Aboriginal woman, also named Mrs Williams, would come to our home at least once a week to clean. She and my white, blue-rinse-genteel mother would sit at the breakfast-room table – right next to the kitchen – drink coffee and chat about generalities, of which the only one I remember is the One People of Australia League. The spectres of ‘patronage, condescension, exploitation and thwarted rage’ may have belonged in that room too, though I can’t claim to have been aware of them on my days home from school with asthma – I was more drawn to the mystique of the coffee they drank (Bushell’s non-instant coffee boiled in a saucepan of milk), and the Milk Arrowroot biscuits they had with it.

I have often reflected, though, on the friendship that grew from such (you would think) unpromising soil. When my parents left the farm and moved to a smaller house, Mrs Williams would still come once a week to clean, even though Mum didn’t need the help any more. After my father died and Mum moved into a tiny house close to town it became impossible to keep up any pretence of needing a cleaning lady: Mrs Williams kept coming once a week, to drink coffee and chat. I think it was about then that they stopped calling each other Mrs Shaw and Mrs Williams and became Esme and Pearl.

In her seventies my mother lost confidence as a driver – she would drive a very long way anti-clockwise to avoid having to make a right hand turn – but she she still drove regularly to the Williamses house to take Mrs Williams to the shops, or her husband (Mr Williams) to a hospital appointment.

I doubt if anyone would say that they were each other’s best friends, but they were real friends.

Postscript: The internets tell me I am mistaken to think Mrs Shaw and Mrs Williams talked about OPAL in the 1950s: it wasn’t founded until 1961, and I had already left for boarding school by then. My mother must have told me about Mrs Williams’s involvement in it when I cam home for holidays.