Читать книгу Entangled Objects - Susanne Paola Antonetta - Страница 7

Ef found she had to shove four cotton balls into the toe of each shoe to keep them in sync with her feet, rather than trying to flap off. She unwrapped the cotton balls from the little bags on her cart, slips of plastic labeled “Toiletries for the Lady,” each containing two cotton balls, a cotton swab, and a tiny emery board. She had put her own shoes, brown loafers, on the bottom rack of her cart where she kept her street clothing. For her job she had had to purchase a gray uniform with a white apron sewn onto the cloth under the double-breasted bodice, for $55. This felt maybe more absurd than anything, that for a job that was all handling dirt she had to dress so particularly. All day she had to wipe at the uniform with wet cloths, to keep stains from showing. The fabric dried right away, and soon some other stain appeared.

And she knew from what happened after a change of clothes that while she wore it, she melted into her uniform; no one saw her, just it. It absorbed her. She wore the scratchy uniform until the end of her workday.

With the new shoes on, Ef walked experimentally around the room. Even four cotton balls barely kept the taupe leather shoes under control. She was a petite woman, fine-boned, with size five-and-a-half feet, six if the shoes ran small. So she unwrapped more cotton and wedged in a few more wads, adding theft to theft; the woman in this room, whom she’d run into a few times, obviously had not meant to leave these shoes here—she found one under the bed and one on its side by the tub—and her job required her to turn them in. And she was not permitted to steal toiletries from her cleaning cart; in fact, her cleanser and her cloths were monitored. Her supervisor even counted the toothbrushes she gave Ef to use for scrubbing the faucets and the grout on the tile floor.

But the shoes gave her the long, slim, tapered feet she longed for: celebrity feet, she thought. She couldn’t wear heels, but even without heels, these shoes had the kind of slim elegance she associated with women like Angelina Jolie or Cate Crawley. The guest in this room hadn’t thought enough about them to remember them; how could she think to get them back? The woman had kept a bag of seeds on the dresser: sunflower and pumpkin. She had a wide mouth that always seemed ready to twitch into a smile and wore the standard outfit of professional women in this town, a shapeless suit with a sweater under it.

Ef always noticed jackets and sweaters. Her mother had moved here from Naples, Italy, her father from San Juan, Puerto Rico: they had moved here and gone on to be cold for the rest of their lives. They shivered. It seemed cruel to be given a life like that, having to feel the air around you always and in such a personal way, a sting.

Ef began to clean in her uniform and the new shoes, but the backs of the shoes arched far up from her heels when she knelt on her kneepads. And the light leather seemed as if it could draw a stain easily. She changed back into her loafers, dreaming of quitting time and reacquiring her new long feet, the kind of feet that stalked across the screen in the movies or on television, toward a lover maybe, each step planted like a challenge or a promise. She could imagine herself, dressed in these shoes, being watched: purposeful, noteworthy.

Ef brought nice clothing to work with her and changed for the day at 5:30 in the maid’s closet on the eighth floor, the last floor on her daily rounds, taking the elevator down as if she were a guest. Most maids went home in their uniforms, but this moment (unwinding in the chamber of the elevator and blending with guests, not one of whom ever showed a flicker of recognition that she was the woman who waited patiently at their doors while they finished Facebook posts and cell calls so she could clean) had become a ritual. It first happened when she rushed from work to get to a high school friend’s wedding, then became a passage she needed to end her day, going home to where she still lived with her parents, most of her low income gone to pay them rent, the rest saved for what, she didn’t know. In the moving square of the elevator, she felt the possibility of another life.

She had two dresses she’d bought from the Crawley line at Baums Department Store—a line of clothes advertised by—designed by if you believed their press—the Crawley sisters of the reality show Crawleys Coming On. Ef watched the show but not regularly, snapping it on while she cleaned, on various channels, so she might watch old shows, or new ones. What struck her after a while was the sense of the show as having just one timeline, one that cycled back, repeating and repeating: she would often assume episodes fit into the arc she’d just been watching, when in fact the events took place years apart: the same cheating accusations, tears, interspersed with trying on designer dresses that could look like ball gowns or science fiction battle gear. The sisters forking salads. Cell phone calls, photo shoots in which the women were filmed posing for the camera in the midst of already posing for cameras.

One of her two Crawley dresses was a tight red dress advertised as “body contouring,” meaning it squeezed her body in as a girdle would. It was meant, the label said, to nudge out her curves, and it did squeeze her slim body into rolling hills where just plains had been before, out front and along the sides. The other dress was a black one with a plastic belt tooled to look like leather, a belt that tended to pierce her skin. Ef brought both with her to work and chose one to put on at the end of day, unfolding her black hair from the messy cleaning ponytail. She found that when she wore these dresses with the new shoes, though, they changed: the feel of the fabric in her hand, thin and slithery, became cheap; she noticed what she could only think of as the over-simplicity of the red color, the one-note-ness of it, and it began to dawn on her that when people found something like a dress classy, it was due to the dress being complicated, in color and in fabric, in a way she hadn’t understood before.

She also realized that while the dresses did look a little like dresses the sisters and mother wore on Crawleys Coming On, they were simplified, dumbed down, as if the sisters tried to caricature their own style for someone they felt would never get the joke.

The camera followed the many couples on the show, from Cassie the mother and her latest squeeze, to Cate and J-lord, to the other sisters Candy and Carlotta with their boyfriends, up to the first moments of sex. It might be a scene of kissing and foreplay in bed, or maybe argument and giving in—as when Carlotta got pregnant by a boyfriend and refused sex for a while because she thought it would hurt the baby. The cameras would even stay long enough to blur the women’s nude parts, though the men’s never appeared. So all the Crawleys lived in a home in which each family member learned, not long after, when all of the others had had sex: the daughters had this knowledge of their mother, the mother, of her daughters. They knew whether the person wanted to or didn’t really, and even whether it had been good (the cameras often swooped back in as one person rolled off the top of the other).

Did the women want to have sex, or want to have it with the men in the show rather than someone else? When Ef saw them in bed she couldn’t stop wondering about this. Whose desires were expressed in those heaving bodies? Their own, or their director’s? Ef imagined the family having meetings with their director about their ratings and being told which of them should have more sex, and which less. They would accept these directions with a nod of understanding and go to work.

“You, Cate,” he might say. “Let’s see how close we can get to a boob shot without a nipple slip.” And Cate might tell J later to bend his thumb just over her nipple.

“From you, Cassie, not so much,” she imagined the director adding. Or, “we’ll just take the cameras out of your bedroom, thanks.”

And would that ever feel like rejection? Or just like television?

It seemed odd to Ef that people valued things like clothes more because they couldn’t quite pin them down; Ef felt more drawn to what she could name straight off. Though looking at these shoes—what would you call them? Was taupe right, or sand?—she felt an appreciation of such not-this-or-that-ness.

Ef no longer liked what she had. It made her nervous to steal all those cotton balls and the shoes. She kept imagining the woman who’d left them, chewing her seeds and calling the main desk to ask why her shoes hadn’t been returned. The woman had stayed at the hotel in the past, she knew, and was a guest of the Trin Group, one of their big corporate clients. If anyone found out she had taken the shoes, she might be fired. And her job at the Mariposa was a huge step up from her last job, cleaning at the Sheraton, all she could find to do after a year in community college that cost too much and bored her.

On the other hand, her unhappiness with her clothing—and her desire to keep up with her feet—became overwhelming. A few days after she took the shoes, she cleaned a filthy room: used tampons dropped on the bathroom floor, bloody and rank. As she grew angry over the mess Ef noticed a blouse hanging from the towel rack. It caught her eye, the sheen of the fabric that looked soft as human skin, the complexity of the color shading from cream to camel in the folds. The buttons, little fabric-wrapped pearls. Having touched the blouse’s animal softness, it became impossible that it not be hers. It matched her shoes.

You would think—Ef would have thought—that the threat of the loss of her job would, if not keep her from stealing altogether, at least keep her from wearing what she stole at work. But in fact, when she changed at the end of the day now, she wore the blouse, the shoes, and then the skirt and scarf that inevitably followed the blouse and shoes, from another guest’s room, a reasonably neat one at that. Then she waited for the elevator with other guests, most heading down to dinner.

Ef realized how risky this was, the stealing, and then wearing stolen goods at work. But the person she became in these clothes of hers could only exist at the hotel, a woman who came to be in transit, riding between one fixed point and another. As guests in the elevator looked at her, she transformed, became the person she was before only in her imagination. There she could tell her fine-boned body read to others as a body well-exercised, her dark skin as tan and leisured, like Cate Crawley, a short woman who darkened her dark skin even more with spray tans. Without makeup, in a maid’s uniform and a ponytail, even the Cate Crawley who existed now—the post-plastic surgery Cate—would come across much as Ef herself did at work. To be alive in the right way required others, and their looking, which handed back to you the story you wanted to tell.

Ef thought of a phrase she ran across in a book left behind by a guest, folded open on the night table: a fleeting-improvised man. A memoir by a man named Paul Schreber. Well, she was a fleeting-improvised woman.

Ef began to feel the shoes send out a certain energy towards her, from her cart, as she cleaned. Once in a rush—she had spent far too much time in a room, absorbed in television—she knocked them over with her bucket. Nothing happened to the shoes, but the thought of them upended made her dizzy, till she could stoop down and straighten them.

The shoes reminded her of something she’d believed as a child—that her things had feelings only she could understand. At night her mother brushed Ef’s long hair, then tossed the brush into a drawer in the bathroom. As her mother drew the covers around her Ef would feel with intensity the brush’s feelings—cast sideways, coughing, choking on Ef’s hair. Ef would have to climb out of bed, remove the hair from the brush and place it carefully back, straight, with bristles pointing upward. Ef’s mother watched her do this—Ef would tell her mother what she was doing, if her mother asked—then she went into the living room and whispered to Ef’s father.

Ef did not believe as a child that there could be things that had no feelings. Nor was she certain of that now.

At the end of each workday Ef put her outfit on, feeling the inevitable end of this game of playing dress-up, yet smoothing her blouse down into the skirt with a sense of reprieve and release.

One day she stood at the eighth-floor elevator at the end of the day, slightly behind a guest, a man with short hair the color of a pat of butter. The elevators were old and ceremonious in this hotel, announcing their coming with a sound like a rushing of wings.

The doors opened and a waiter half-fell out. Another waiter stood behind him and both were laughing, clowning around. The man with the butter-colored hair stepped back, hard, to avoid colliding with the waiter, and his foot hit the toe of her right shoe with an audible crunch of leather, a sound like a hard crust breaking. He only crushed the cotton balls, but it knocked her off balance and she fell forward, pitching over as he grabbed and held her.

“Oh my God,” he said, “Oh my God.” He looked at her shoe, noticeably dented, at her body wobbling in his arms. “You’ve broken something. I broke your toe.” She said nothing, enjoying the fabric of his suit, soft and complex with a sheen to it, the cologne he wore, a smell almost like cucumber, but nice.

“You must be in agony.” His eyes swept from her eyes to her feet. “Can I call 911?” Then he bit his lip, as if he realized calling an ambulance for a broken toe would be ridiculous. But she could see from his slipping eyes that he had no idea what to do; he felt responsible and like he should drive her to get medical care, and probably pay, but he didn’t know how to say all this to the woman he saw in front of him at this moment—a smartly dressed young woman, one who could afford a room in a pricey hotel.

“I’m ok,” she said, not rushing to straighten up and out of his arms. “I’m alright.” She rubbed her fingers along the end of the shoe with a bit of ceremony, pressing down on the cotton balls, as if testing her feet.

“I don’t think anything’s broken. Not broken exactly.” She looked up into his eyes, holding her stepped-on foot in one hand, and leaning into him still. She brought her other hand up to the scarf at her neck, a beautiful silk rectangle of red, yellow, and orange leaves.

“It hurts,” the man said sympathetically. “It’s painful.”

She planted the foot on the floor, wobbling her leg back and forth as if uncertain it could hold her weight. Slowly she pulled out of his arms, favoring her left foot, hoping she was shifting her body in a believable way. She had felt nothing when he squashed the cotton balls, though her eyes and hand had instantly seized on the shoe; she thought it might have been blemished. A thought formed in her head, I am performing, and she had been, though she’d done it without thinking, in the way someone on a show like Crawleys Coming On must do.

“Are you right-handed,” the man said, then, “Oh God that’s idiotic. It’s not like you’d be right-footed,” and then, “I think I should stay with you until I’m sure you’re fine. I’m Tom.”

She extended her scarf hand, smiling weakly.

Tom said, “I was going to grab some dinner. Can I treat you to dinner here?”

In this way Ef ended up eating dinner at a table lit by a votive candle with a white napkin folded like a goose bending its neck toward her, at the hotel where she worked as a chambermaid (they used this word here, chambermaid), wearing clothing stolen from women who might well be in this room, all of them sipping from wine glasses that looked crystalline-ly lovely in the low light, but that she knew were cheap—about half a buck a glass, just well washed. She had a moment of panic entering the room but it went away as soon as she sat down; the low light and the man who held her by the arm, with his suit and tie happening to pick up colors in her scarf and blouse, were both a disguise and an armor. No woman who matched her man so carefully could be a thief.

She had tasted many of the restaurant’s offerings picking up room service trays, a habit all the maids had. She ordered the dry-aged steak with a swiftness that she realized made her seem like a seasoned guest. Ef was impressed with how well she handled this situation; she hadn’t had a boyfriend since high school and had little sense of what a date should feel like—those high school boys had seemed dropped into her world by nature, from some sort of restless social sky.

Tom told her he worked with people but didn’t elaborate. Ef told him she ran a cleaning business, thinking back to her first maid’s job, for a large chain company that had franchises all over. You bought one, the woman who led her group of four maids told her, giving you the right to use their name and advertising. It seemed believable.

“We both have to work with people,” Tom said, buttering bread. “People don’t always know what they want.”

She smiled and nodded her agreement.

Tom ordered a bottle of wine, some type that he ran past her before ordering it, though the words had gone by like music, sound without content. The waiter poured her a generous glass, and Tom kept refilling it. She grew up drinking wine with dinner, her parents’ habit, but she had had little to eat today and she felt very relaxed after finishing her first glass, then a little more than relaxed: swimmy. Her steak tasted delicious, very different from her mother’s made with lemon and oil, and the difference between the two steaks resembled the difference between her old and her new clothing: the old dresses had a kind of beauty, but it was simple and you couldn’t have said a lot about it, while she could have talked and talked about this steak, which she’d only tried before when it was cool and congealed: its tenderness, the way the coating of peppercorns had a charged flavor but little heat, the notes of sweet and cream and mustard in the sauce. The way, like good clothing, the flavors kept subtly changing.

“I like the pepper,” she told Tom, but didn’t want to say too much.

Tom proved to be the kind of person who always had a question he could ask, though he didn’t seem to listen too much to the answers—a good thing, because Ef couldn’t invent much about running a cleaning company, and stuck to responses she had heard from her team leader’s supervisor: You had to clean well—I mean, remind your employees to clean well—under the bed and under the mattress (but never, she left out, mention what you found there to the wives: tissues stuck together with body fluids you didn’t want to think about, used condoms—look, her supervisor said, married couples don’t use condoms, the woman in a marriage gets the birth control). For whatever reason, most of their clients were straight married couples, a man and a woman. You had to clean in such a way that people might believe the woman who lived there had done it, so another girl on the crew got in trouble for folding the toilet paper into points, the way she’d been taught at a hotel.

“So I had to tell the girl, cut it out with the toilet paper!” she told Tom. “The wives are complaining. A lot of them don’t even tell their husbands they hire us,” Ef added. “Sometimes they say a clean house makes their husbands romantic.”

Tom smiled appreciatively, though his eyes kept flicking around the room. He had a habit of not really meeting her glance but looking at her until she looked at him, then letting his eyes slip away, though not in a shifty or nervous way. It felt confident, as if he felt certain he knew enough about her, and she liked him for it.

He was a good-looking man, though in a bland way that made him hard to describe. His eyelashes were his most striking feature, long and fair as his hair, palely framing his eyes like brushy halos. “Which room at the hotel is your favorite?” Tom asked. “I love the tub in the window one.” He topped off her glass. Had he bought a second bottle of wine? He might have.

“Me too,” Ef answered, thinking of the shoes.

Ef, even when she wasn’t lying her head off as she was now, often found people hard to talk to. They looked at her in ways she couldn’t interpret, and she felt the things she was saying were making some entirely different impression than the one that formed in her mind as she pulled the words out of their separate places and squashed them together. She rehearsed what she was about to say and anticipated the reaction, but, like a bad actor or unfunny comic, rarely got the response she imagined.

Tom, however, was easy to talk to. It didn’t seem as if he were that interested, just that he could absorb the words bouncing at him and lob them back easily, pleasant, neutral, like someone playing a sport so familiar he probably wasn’t more than a little conscious about it. He didn’t care what rooms she liked, he just wanted to keep the word-ball moving. He had no wedding ring. He was at least a dozen years older than she was, mid-thirties, an age difference that seemed proper as long as the man was the older. Why shouldn’t he want to be with her again?

Tom didn’t blink at spending thirty-two bucks on her steak, and he had the suit and a watch of shiny metal, some real metal that came out of the earth like that, just needing to be polished up, with many smaller wheels telling various things within the larger wheel-face of the watch. They were easy together in a way that promised they could always be easy together, sit together at a table and do this every night.

Ef thought: this is how people develop lives that work. They have good clothes and stand at elevators at nice hotels where someone might step on their shoes and then see them for the first time, see them as a person equally worthy.

She had another thought that caused her to jolt slightly in her seat. It wasn’t just okay in the moment that she had stolen, but it was right in a larger sense: of course, stealing must be the only course of action, and people who did well in life—even those who stayed solidly in place—did it by stealing what they wanted from others, who would steal it too if they got a chance. If nothing else, successful people, like the Crawleys, decided what they wanted to be and changed into it, stealing who they became from God or the fates or whatever you happened to believe created the world as it is, and kept an eye on it.

Ef thought of all her parents’ stories, their sisters and brothers and friends and even a parent who died young of typhoid and cholera and pneumonia. Or the girl known as “my cousin Maria that killed herself, God bless her,” in the words of her mother, who invoked Maria and then crossed herself. Life itself was theft.

Ef noticed, by dessert, which was a custard flavored with roses and topped with a crust of sugar, that Tom’s inattention and looking around the room seemed purposeful in a way she hadn’t realized at first. Being nervous, she hadn’t noticed, but he kept glancing, trying not to let her see, at the entrance to the restaurant, as if looking out for some particular person coming in. As she absorbed this fact, another one hit her: he had mentioned, in the stream of conversation, that he lived in town. So why was he here at all, and how did he know the rooms?

Ef thought it was likely Tom had come to the hotel for an affair, and that the affair had been going on a while. He didn’t want his lover to see him in the restaurant with her; he didn’t want to try to explain the toe and the waiter and his feeling bad towards her. It might have been an affair with someone married, and he might even have taken his own wedding ring off for his lover’s sake. He had his own used condoms stuffed in dark places where they didn’t belong. It was the other thing about life and about stealing, which had just seemed so simple and clear: sometimes what you wanted to steal had been stolen already. And your own desire, though it pierced you as you looked, say, at a blouse on a rack, maybe was not enough.

Ef got up at the end of dinner and did not think about her foot, putting weight on it as usual. Tom walked her to the outside of the hotel, a well-lit circular entrance, and said goodbye.

“I’m so glad you’re alright,” he told her, smiling, which scrunched up his eyes and made his pale lashes that much more visible. They reminded her of the silks from an ear of corn. Shucking ears was one of her jobs around the house—her father loved fresh corn—and she thought of the cling of the silks, which she’d be wiping off her fingers and her clothes for the rest of the day. She imagined his lashes hanging onto him as they fell, fine curls caught in the watch, on the suit. “Please call me if you need anything else.”

Tom ducked down, and in the process looked at Ef’s shoes, and she saw them through his eyes: on her petite body, far too large for her feet.

“I’m fine,” she said, hearing the stiffness in her voice. “Thank you.”

The next day Ef came to work hauling, as always, her new shoes and stolen clothes, in a Shop Rite Grocery Store bag. She put her hand into the bag without thinking about it, fingering the soft fabric of the blouse, the cotton-balled fullness of the shoes, but without a faith she had had the day before. Maybe these things, with all their ties to a certain way of living, still could not bring you to that way of living, the nightly careless conversation at the dinner table. Maybe they could only get you so far and then, like a streak of dye in the hair, they’d fade. She could not remake herself: she was no Crawley.

At work Ef saw Anna, a woman who came to the Mariposa from Portugal. She ran into Anna in the maid’s closet, loading up her cart with tiny bottles of soap and shampoo and skin lotion, as she loaded up hers. She had thought about the possibility of running into Tom at the hotel that day but didn’t really care. She could duck easily as if getting something out of her cart, and she doubted he’d look hard enough to notice her, just see her uniform and her hair.

One of her new shoes slipped out of the Shop Rite bag onto the floor. Anna picked it up and handed it back to her.

“Beautiful,” she said, adding, “a little big?”

“Oh actually,” Ef admitted, “it is big. It’s not really mine.” It occurred to Ef the other woman may have seen the shoes before; better to tell her. “I guess I kind of took it. That woman who stayed in the tub room? She left her shoes here, in her room. It feels like stealing, kind of.” She was a bit embarrassed.

“Ha, her,” said Anna. “She always leaves a pile of stuff behind. You didn’t steal it. She didn’t want it. This is stealing,” Anna laughed as she slipped tiny shampoo bottles into her purse. “She’s odd, that one, leaving piles of crap behind, all folded neat. I guess she doesn’t know what suits her.”

Ef had not stolen the shoes, then. And for all she knew, maybe she had not stolen the blouse, the skirt, and the leafed scarf either; the blouse had been jammed on a towel rod, for God’s sake. Maybe these women were just as glad to be rid of these things, or they had so little to do with them they never noticed their absence.

A flush crept up her neck. Maybe she had instinctively reached for the clothing these women knew, in the safety and security of their lives, was inferior; clothes lacking the magic that kept the wealthy women up above her where they floated; clothes that had deflated somehow.

When Anna wheeled out of the room with her cart, Ef poured the contents of the Shop Rite bag into the white plastic Lost and Found bin in the room. She straightened out the shoes, pulling the cotton balls out of the toes and tossing them in her open yellow garbage bag. They were all she felt truly sad about, dignified shoes, giving her feet reach and purpose. She had a little money in the bank she’d been hanging on to but as she couldn’t go back to her old clothes or keep these, she would go out this weekend and spend some, find herself more, at a store where all the clothes were good clothes.

She could call that high school friend who’d gotten married and restart their friendship. She had other high school friends still in town. It might even work to go out sometime, shopping or some such, with Anna. There were always things to do, weren’t there? No matter what happened to people, they did things.

And she found pleasure just in being with women. She smoked with the other chambermaids from time to time, bringing Kools she lit by pressing the unlit tip to the coin of flame on another woman’s cigarette, a gesture that felt so intimate it made her startle with the thought of having sex with that woman, with women. She imagined what she might do with her hands, her tongue and would touch herself, later. At these moments, laughing, smoking, she wanted to make a move, but she felt like she didn’t understand how to start or to give pleasure the right way, and would make a fool of herself, in bed.

Still, the thoughts that tumbled through her head as she wheeled toward her first rooms felt old and used, images from a self she thought she’d left behind. She had a lot of life in front of her—probably a good sixty years, all of it wheeling in front of her and heavy to push. Would she always do this, or something like it? That life to come felt like a weight in her body, something she was doomed to carry but never truly give birth to, her version of being forever cold.

At the same time, each turn of the wheel of her life was final, in a way the rooms she cleaned were not; the same rooms came back, but a day would never. It was just gone. And both thoughts—the weight of now and the finality of its ending—were sad.

Her mother watched a television show called Cosmos. In it Ef learned that the universe held endless strangenesses: warped time, or backward time, or no time, astronauts chugging along without getting any older, the vast erupting from the pinprick. There was a thing called Hilbert space and we exist within it and it has infinite dimensions, though we do not. She had felt a little of that Hilbertness, she thought, during her dinner with Tom, and then her body passed back into one dimension only, that one of rags, smears, Clorox.

Ef went into her first room. It seemed a man was staying there; she noticed undershirts draped over the back of a chair, a wide brown brush with coarse bristles, aftershave the color of blue detergent in the bathroom. She began the bathroom with Rust-Out in the toilet—the old hotel pipes sent rust-blushes onto all the enamel—a putty knife and Windex on the glass shower door.

She went back to her cart, parked in the doorway, for a rag when Anna appeared, holding the shoes in her hands, the long and elegant shoes, toes pointing towards her.

“In the Lost and Found?” Anna said, then, when Ef didn’t answer, “Filomena?”