When Mrs. March opened her door to let her in, Sheila beamed, locking eyes as she always did, prompting Mrs. March to look at the floor. Behind Sheila, in walked Jonathan. Jonathan—with his upturned nose and eyes shadowed by dark circles, giving the boy a melancholy appearance and leading George, in a pretentious fit of literary whimsy, to nickname him “Poe.” Jonathan was quiet, unusually so, for a boy his age, but he did manage to exhibit a base rowdiness in the company of a friend. With a partner in tow he tended to make sounds he never made otherwise—chortling and whooping and braying—noises that echoed through the apartment like the hauntings of rabid ghosts.
Mrs. March bent down to hug him, smiling so widely that her face felt like it would split apart, and began speaking to him in a singsongy voice, one she did not use with him in private. Jonathan’s hair smelled of the cold outside and slightly of smoke, like a bonfire. He remained quiet, nodding at her high-pitched questioning (“Did you have a good time? Was it lovely there? Was it all snowy?”), while fidgeting with a Rubik’s cube that, Sheila explained, her son had gifted to Jonathan. Meanwhile, said son, Alec, hovered in the hallway outside the door, shaking his head when Mrs. March offered him some chocolate milk.
“I think they’re still full from all the sweets and French fries they’ve been eating for the past few days,” Sheila said, her tone mock-chiding. She winked at Mrs. March, who wasn’t sure how she was expected to react.
“Well, thank you so very much for bringing him, Sheila,” said Mrs. March. “Would you care for anything? Tea? Water?”
“No, thank you. We’ll just get out of your hair so you can spend the rest of the day with your boy.”
“Very well,” said Mrs. March, relieved she wouldn’t have to make further conversation. “If you need anything at all, let me know.”
“Okay then, bye! Say bye-bye, Alec.”
But Alec was already walking toward the elevator. Sheila shrugged at Mrs. March—boys!—and walked after him. Mrs. March closed the door. When she turned around, Jonathan had disappeared. She assumed he had run off to his room, eager to greet his familiar surroundings and favorite toys, but when she made her way through the hallway she realized he was in the kitchen, talking to Martha in excited whispers. “I ate the worm,” he was saying. “They dared me and I ate it.”
Embarrassed to interrupt them, Mrs. March walked on.
Throughout her life, Mrs. March, née Kirby, had lived in a staffed home. The parade of maids, cooks, and nannies that had trudged through her childhood had been long and mostly unmemorable—except for one.
Alma was their last live-in maid. Specifically, she lived in a cramped, windowless room off the kitchen. Initially meant as the laundry, Mrs. Kirby had renovated it to fit a narrow shower and a wall-mounted sink.
Alma was pudgy and olive-skinned. She had long black hair, braided and thick as a ship rope, which she always kept tucked out of sight, because Mrs. March’s mother found splendorous loose manes a personal affront. She talked in a sweet, gushing voice, seemingly in singsong, her diction scattered with Mexican terms. Mrs. March, who was about ten at the time, had never met such a humble, nothing-to-look-at woman so willing to laugh, unabashed, at her own faults—nay, to embrace them. “You really eat a lot,” she had told Alma once, watching her gulp down samosas on the kitchen high table.
“Ay, I know! That’s why I’m so roly-poly!” Alma had replied, squeezing a roll of tummy fat between her fingers. The almost sensual, shameless way she would indulge in food—like it was a carnal part of her, of her body—had made an impression on young Mrs. March, who had grown up surrounded by women on permanent hunger strikes. Her older sister Lisa, who had always been a chubby child, came back from college having shed half her body, accustomed to a diet of boiled potatoes and obsessed with jogging. Mrs. March had witnessed all of her mother’s girlfriends waning throughout the years as they offered excuses for refusing a meal (“I had such a big breakfast”; “I’m just never hungry at this hour, but you should see me at dinner”; “I’ve eaten so much over the holidays!”). Their diets weighed heavily on them, like eternal penances. Her own mother merely pecked at her food, as if afraid it might fight back. She had been so malnourished when pregnant with Mrs. March that she had given birth prematurely. Loose among the pages of the family photo album, there was a photograph of Mrs. March inside the incubator: a tiny pink ball, the plastic hospital tag around her wrist comically huge. She did not recognize herself in that shriveled body, in those bulging, swollen eyes. She had often wondered whether that baby was her parents’ real daughter, who had died inside that incubator. Whether she herself had never been related to them at all, but was actually the substitute baby her parents had been compelled to acquire.
There were earlier photographs in the album of her pregnant mother, looking skinny and wan, cigarette to her thin lips, her baby bump barely discernible under her summer dress; and some of her afterwards, holding her newborn daughter, her elbow jutting out of her arm like a twig protruding from a tree.
All of Alma was round and fat, except for her spindly, brown-jointed fingers, which ended in slender, purple-hued nails. Mrs. March would follow her around the house, talking to her as Alma cleaned the apartment. She would often rush through her own dinner in the dining room so she could join Alma as she had hers in the kitchen. Alma would tell her stories: memories from her childhood and old Mexican folktales. She taught Mrs. March how to peel the rim off the mortadella before eating it, and how to place the knives blade-down in the dishwasher for safety.
Alma proved good company during breakfast, when Mrs. March would otherwise eat by herself at the massive dining room table, because her sister was away at college, her father had left for work, and her mother took her cottage cheese and grapefruit in bed. Alma would ask her questions (how was school, did she have many friends, who was her favorite teacher, were any of the other girls ever mean to her), and seemed genuinely interested in the answers.
Mrs. March was not at all interested in any part of Alma’s life that excluded her, like the children she had left behind in Mexico, who received the majority of her wages. Alma had a photograph of them pinned to the wall above her bed. Mrs. March had studied it many times, unable to discern the children’s genders because of their bowl-shaped haircuts and oversized T-shirts. Even though Alma always told her she was “my special chica,” Mrs. March could not bear the prospect of sharing her. One day she ripped up the photograph of the children, who grinned up at her, toothless, as she shredded them apart.
When Alma walked in on Mrs. March, the remains of the photograph at her feet, she had wept, passionately and with her face in her hands, rocking back and forth. Mrs. March tiptoed toward the door, embarrassed by such an extravagant display of emotion—unlike any behavior she had ever seen at home—and left the room without a word.
The following morning at breakfast, Alma was quiet and withdrawn. Mrs. March asked her several times why she wasn’t talking, softly at first, then almost violently, yelling at Alma over her cereal. Alma just smiled weakly.
Eventually, the weeks passed, and all seemed forgotten. Mrs. March went back to sitting on one of the high stools around the kitchen table, listening to Alma talk over the sounds of the radio and the sizzling frying pan. She’d run to Alma at night during thunderstorms and fall asleep in Alma’s damp, mung bean smell. The following morning she would awaken in her own bed, not remembering being carried there, and she would hate that Alma’s life had gone on without her as she slept.
It was more or less around this time that young Mrs. March started getting physical with Alma, pinching and scratching and eventually, at the height of it, biting her. Very softly at first, with her gums, then viciously, leaving wet, inflamed teeth marks on Alma’s skin. Alma barely ever complained; she would silently brush Mrs. March away or hold her by the shoulders until she settled down.
When Mrs. March’s mother saw one of the crescent-shaped dents on Alma’s neck, she moved to put an immediate end to it. Mr
s. March was taken to a child psychologist—under such secrecy, not even she knew where she was going—who revealed that she was suffering from “a lack of parental attention,” and also from “a shortage of emotional tools to constrain her excessive imagination.” Her mother listened grimly to these diagnoses. She never took her daughter back to therapy and instead decided to fire Alma. It was just much simpler that way.
Mrs. March had worked hard to forget it all. It was mortifying, to think of herself as such a needy child, so spoiled and malicious, that she now wondered whether she had imagined the whole thing. After all, she was such a docile adult.
After Alma was let go, Mrs. March never once asked after her. She knew better. Her parents’ quiet, unsentimental acceptance of her behavior filled her with shame, and she pointedly ignored the rest of the maids from then on. None of them ever lived with the family in the apartment again, and over the years the sad, strange little bedroom off the kitchen turned into a pantry. Over time, Mrs. March learned to appreciate the quiet solitude of her breakfasts.
When Mr. and Mrs. March moved into their Upper East Side apartment, Mrs. March had called Martha at the behest of her sister Lisa, who had employed Martha for many years, and was sorry to part with her upon moving to Maryland to take care of her dying mother-in-law. Lisa now lived on a quaint street in Bethesda, in a red-brick house with dark green shutters. The kind of place where residents found drowned wildlife under their pool tarps, where children stunned ants on the sidewalks until they were called in to dinner at dusk.
Not long after Lisa’s mother-in-law died, their own mother, Mrs. Kirby, had started displaying symptoms of senility. She lived alone in their old Manhattan apartment, as their father had died some years earlier. A concerned maid began finding religious cards in the fridge, and a vast collection of subway tokens and loose Russian dolls stockpiled in Mrs. Kirby’s underwear drawer. Mrs. Kirby then began refusing the help entry to the apartment, claiming not to know them. Lisa, evidently finding a calling in caring for the elderly, decided to fly her out to Bethesda. Mrs. Kirby was now living out the rest of her days in a residence that boasted a topiary garden and a patio. All expenses were shared by her two daughters. It was a relief for Mrs. March that her sister had taken charge of the situation. Her mother’s disease made her uncomfortable. She had been out to see her at the home a few times, and hated the visits. She detested the smell of lemon air freshener, the underlying smell of decay, and the way the old residents clung to her whenever they saw her. Lisa marched through the corridors as if she felt right at home, seemingly oblivious to the attempts at interaction from dementia-riddled strangers who would pull at her cardigan. Mrs. March had resolved, then, not to feel bad about her sister bearing the brunt of their mother’s caretaking. She seemed content enough with the situation, and plus, she and her husband traveled a lot (excessively, in Mrs. March’s opinion), and so it wasn’t like she was seeing their mother all that often either.
Lisa had tried to get Martha to move to Maryland with them; after all, she had reasoned, Martha was unmarried and childless, so what could possibly be rooting her down? But that arrangement was apparently no good for Martha, who wished to stay in New York, for whatever reason they weren’t terribly concerned to understand.
When Mrs. March first interviewed Martha, she had been immediately intimidated by her but had concluded that this was the appropriate feeling to have about one’s housekeeper; it must mean she was strict and in control and, overall, ferociously good at her job. And Martha entered their home and their lives just like that: firm, straightforward Martha, with her ample shoulders and her gray-streaked bun and her thick, uncut fingernails. Mrs. March was thankful for her; thankful for all the ways in which she was different from Alma, and thankful for everything that had brought Martha here, to her apartment, to her kitchen, where she was now whispering to Jonathan, whispering all sorts of things Mrs. March wasn’t privy to.
After waking up to another cockroach contemplating her from the bedroom wall, Mrs. March at last committed to calling the exterminator. She had inquired about the possibility of vermin throughout the building in whispers to the doorman, but he had dismissed the idea, suggesting to Mrs. March a more thorough attempt at regular cleaning. She had responded with a nervous laugh, mortified that he regarded her as unclean, as unworthy of residence in the high-end apartment building. She did not bring up the subject again.
However, upon finding the voyeuristic specimen on her bedroom wall, its shoe-polish black carapace taut over the ridges of its thorax, like an old man’s veined, leathery hands, she resolved to put a stop to the problem once and for all. She could not risk anyone catching wind of the infestation—an invasion so foul it was portrayed in films and books as a sure sign of poverty and sloth. Cockroaches thrived in the grimy, decrepit lodgings of junkies, not in tastefully decorated apartments or in the understated but spotless quarters of a working professional. She had never encountered roaches in her parents’ apartment, or in George’s old place—the one he’d been renting near campus when they first met. Afraid to be judged by her, Mrs. March had avoided telling Martha about the insects—but she shook every time she pictured Martha chancing upon one in the bathroom.
The morning after calling the service, she welcomed the exterminator into her home. He was a kind man of ruddy complexion, dressed in a dark green jumpsuit and heavy boots. He headed straightaway to the Marches’ master bath, taking care not to topple anything with his canister of insecticide. He knelt on the floor by the toilet, checked every corner, drain, and crack, and assured her that the roaches did not live in her apartment. “I don’t see any … and I see no sign of any droppings. Maybe a couple found their way into your bathroom through the pipes?” he said as he examined a tiny crack in the baseboard, “maybe from outside, maybe from another neighbor”—Mrs. March’s heart leapt at this particular possibility—“but we’re not dealing with a plague here,” the exterminator continued, “so here’s what we’ll do. I’m gonna apply the poison in the bathroom, just a little bit in every corner, and over the next couple of days you might see some dead ones—don’t worry about it—and after a few weeks they’ll stop appearing altogether.” He explained all this while on one knee, gesticulating like a commander explaining a war stratagem to his troops.
The man smeared the poison, a brown, syrupy gel, into every nook, while Mrs. March sipped tea from a mug that said Today could be a wonderful day! The mug, old and chipped, was part of a surprise breakfast basket her sister had sent over for her birthday. She would not have bought the mug herself; it seemed too menacingly sanguine for her taste. The basket was a beautiful rattan picnic hamper, filled with juicy, swollen red raspberries and purple grapes, a stoppered glass bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice, sugar-crusted scones, and a small bouquet of daisies. Her sister enjoyed a reputation for her meticulousness with presents. She always managed to gift the most lovely things. It was annoying, really. It almost felt like a competition. Mrs. March probably still had the basket somewhere—probably buried in the linen closet. She could find it, fill it with flowers, maybe put it on a shelf, or on top of the fridge in the kitchen. Why, she could even renovate the entire kitchen accordingly, transforming it into a rustic dream of wicker-backed chairs, red gingham tablecloths, and dried flowers in old tin watering cans or hanging upside down from wooden ceiling beams.
The exterminator looked up from the bathroom floor. “That should kill ’em dead. Mind if I wash this stuff off my hands?”
When Mrs. March saw him off, she strolled, in as casual a manner as she could manage, into the kitchen to toss the tainted hand towel into the trash and ask Martha to bread the chicken cutlets for lunch. She had resolved to tell Martha, only if prodded, that the exterminator’s visit was merely preventative as she’d caught wind of an infestation in the building next door, but Martha only nodded her head at the petition for chicken cutlets, and went right on peeling potatoes.
AFTER LUNCH, Mrs. March sat filing her nails in t
he living room, the television on in the background to keep her company in an otherwise indifferent household—Jonathan was home from school in his bedroom and George was showering. Martha, meanwhile, puttered about George’s study, taking advantage of his rare absence to swoop in and tidy up.
“The body of Sylvia Gibbler, missing since November eighteenth, has been found. The cause of death remains unknown, pending an official autopsy.”
Mrs. March looked up from her mottled nails to the television screen, which displayed the familiar black-and-white photograph of Sylvia, smiling at her just as brightly as she had done from the news clipping in George’s notebook.
“Authorities are questioning friends, neighbors, and the patrons of this quaint gift shop, where Gibbler worked until her disappearance.” The camera panned, rather dramatically, Mrs. March thought, across the purple storefront, showcasing a haphazard window display with no apparent color palette, a hodgepodge of old teapots and cookie canisters, gaudy tinsel hanging from the ceiling. Over the purple doorway gold-painted script read The Hope Chest. “This tight-knit community is in mourning, having lost all hope of ever seeing Sylvia alive again,” said the news reporter. “Back to you in the studio, Linda.”
Mrs. March turned off the television, unease wriggling through her belly like a handful of maggots. She headed toward George’s study, with the intention of sneaking another look at the newspaper clipping hidden in his notebook while he was in the shower. Instead, she found him pacing from the study to the bedroom as he packed a small leather suitcase laid open on the bed.
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