by Minrose Gwin
So when the large, kind woman set that plate of food on the table, I wanted to take her meaty hand to my cheek and hold it there. I wanted to kiss her palm. Instead, I mumbled my thanks, then started in on the creamed corn, tears raining down onto the food, making puddles on the plastic tablecloth. I ate everything on my plate, then took the last roll and wiped the plate clean, something Frances had taught me never to do.
When I finished, I pushed my plate to one side and put my head on the table and went dead asleep. I woke to the woman’s hand on my shoulder. “Do you have a place to sleep?” she asked in a low voice, and when I looked down and didn’t say anything, she told me to lie down in the booth, she’d come get me when it was time to close the restaurant, she didn’t want to get in trouble with her boss.
My sweater had fallen open so that, as she leaned over to clear my plate, she saw the wet spots on the front of my sweat shirt. She took a step back. “Where’s the baby?” she whispered. Her tone was low but harsh. “What’d you do with it?”
I looked up at her, startled. “How’d you know?”
She pointed at my chest. “Look at yourself.”
I looked down, furious with my body, its tears and leaks, its ruptures of privacy. “She’s in New Orleans,” I said. “At Charity Hospital. My aunt’s going to take her.”
“When did you have it?”
By then, I was so worn out and turned around I wasn’t sure. Was it yesterday? The day before? I looked blankly at the woman.
“You wait right here,” she said, sternly. “You lay yourself down and rest. Don’t you move a muscle. I need to talk to Nancy the night clerk.”
When she turned away, I hopped up, gathering my things, worried they would call the police on me.
The woman hurried out into the lobby. Nancy was still on the phone. She looked like she’d just crawled out of the sack, her orange hair flat and matted. The large woman waved her hand in front of Nancy’s face.
Nancy frowned. “I’m talking to Tommy,” she said. “Leave me alone, Elsa. Can’t a girl talk to her own boyfriend?”
The woman named Elsa didn’t budge. Vertically and horizontally, she made two of Nancy.
Again Nancy waved Elsa away, but Elsa reached out and snatched the phone. “Nancy’s got to go. Emergency,” Elsa said into the receiver and hung up. Then she squeezed herself through the half doorway leading behind the counter and began to whisper in Nancy’s ear.
As Elsa whispered, Nancy’s eyes widened. She kept turning to Elsa and starting to speak but Elsa shushed her and kept on whispering. Then Nancy nodded. She turned and pulled out a key from one of the slots on the wall and handed it to Elsa. Elsa pocketed it, put her finger to her lips, squeezed back through the half doorway to the lobby, and then headed back into the kitchen. By this time it was 6:30.
Soon after, the elevator binged and a man in a suit strolled out, his hat and coat on, car keys dangling from his hand. “Okay, I’m happy to report that all the rooms have been properly cleaned,” he said to Nancy in a pompous sort of way.
She nodded and waved.
When he left, she too hurried back into the kitchen. I went back to my booth and shut my eyes.
When I woke up again, the two of them stood over me. For a minute I thought I’d died on the delivery table; the two of them, their expressions so benevolent, I pegged as angels who’d come to take me up to heaven. I smiled up at them.
“Curled up like a puppy,” Elsa said.
“Jail bait,” Nancy said.
Elsa pulled at my hands and Nancy took first one foot then the other and placed them on the floor.
“Come on, honey, we got a room ready for you,” Elsa said.
When I tried to rise, I banged my head on the underside of the table and started to cry.
Elsa pulled harder. “Come on, now, none of that. We got you a nice bed for the night and a shower for you to clean up.”
They walked me out into the lobby and got me on the elevator. “I’m bleeding,” I whimpered.
“Of course you are, honey,” said Elsa, hitting the button for the third floor. “You just had a baby. You need to clean yourself up and get yourself a good night’s sleep.”
When the elevator door opened, they positioned themselves on either side and half walked, half dragged me down the hall. Elsa unlocked the door of 312 and gave me a gentle push.
“Get in the shower and clean yourself up. Throw me your clothes,” she said.
It was heaven to be taken care of. I didn’t question anything the two of them told me to do. I passed them my clothes and got in the shower, made it hot because the room heater was off when we came in and I was shaking with cold. In the shower my feet unthawed, bloomed red, and began to throb.
“Wash your hair,” Nancy shouted through the door. “That always makes me feel better.”
Elsa hollered, “Do you need some Kotex?”
“No,” I said, “but I could use a toothbrush.”
“We got that behind the counter,” Nancy said.
I heard the door to the hall open, then close, then a few minutes later open again. By then I’d gotten out of the shower.
“What’s she doing now? This is the most exciting thing that’s happened since that man died of diabetic shock in 229,” I heard Nancy say to Elsa.
“She’s out of the shower,” Elsa answered. Then the door to the bathroom opened a crack and Nancy handed me a toothbrush and paste, some deodorant, a T-shirt that said “Go Boilermakers” on the front, and a pair of men’s boxers. “Got these out of the Lost and Found,” she said, grinning. “I hope they’re clean.”
I looked in the mirror. I looked like a drowned girl, washing up by the waves. I came out of the bathroom, my hair still wet. The two of them were sitting on one of the beds in the room waiting. The other they’d turned down neatly. I went straight for it and crawled in. Elsa walked over to the bed and pulled the covers up around me.
“Pitiful,” Nancy whispered.
Elsa had my clothes in her hands. “Honey, we’re going to run these through the wash, and tomorrow morning Nancy here will bring them up to you. You got to be out of the room by seven o’clock. That’ll give us time to get the place cleaned up before the manager comes to work. You can come on downstairs and I’ll give you some breakfast and we’ll have a talk.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Nancy.
I tried to smile, but the sheets were too soft, the room too warm and my eyes were closing. I took one fluttery breath, a little bird—for a second I pictured Mama’s caught sparrow—set loose inside my chest, and my eyes closed.
THE NEXT MORNING when Nancy knocked, I awoke in the same position I’d fallen asleep in, on my left side, my right hand under my cheek, my left stretched out, touching the bedside table. My fingertips twitched when Nancy knocked the first time, then clinched at the second, louder knock. Where was I? Plastered against my chest a wetness, my breasts again, now hard as rocks and feverish. I thought of my baby girl, maybe at that very moment sucking on a bottle given her by an indifferent nurse, curling her body toward her chest, her little fingers opening and closing, reaching for something more, something she didn’t yet have a name for.
A key turned in the lock and Nancy came bustling in, saying she’d stayed on after her shift to get me up. Did I remember her? Nancy? And Elsa from last night? Elsa had given the morning cook the day off and was back in the kitchen, handling the breakfast crowd. She’d told Nancy in no uncertain terms to get me out of the bed, put Dee Ann on the room, she was the fastest of the maids and could keep her trap shut—tell her Elsa will chop her into a million little pieces and serve her for lunch if she tells—and get me down to breakfast.
Nancy passed me my clothes, smelling of bleach and still warm from the dryer. “Get dressed now and get down to the kitchen, or the shit will hit the fan. It’s already 7:30. Doug’ll be walking through that door any minute now. Take the stairs. What’s your name, by the way?”
“Grace.”
Or N
ot Grace? I could hardly remember how I got into the room in the first place, but Nancy’s face looked familiar and I had a memory of the big woman with kind eyes who smelled like celery. I threw on the clothes and gathered the knapsack and staggered down the stairs, the sleep still in my eyes, my hair a rat’s nest.
When I appeared in the kitchen doorway, Elsa frowned and pulled a comb out of her pocket. “Get into that lobby bathroom and comb your hair and wash your face. You need to look regular. I can’t be seen feeding people off the street. Doug’ll have my hide.”
Again I did what I was told, and such relief it was to give over responsibility for what to do next to someone so wise and downright practical that my eyes filled up again. When I returned to the kitchen, Elsa told me to sit down at the counter. She set a plate of biscuits and eggs in front of me, along with a glass of orange juice. I gobbled down the food and asked for a cup of coffee. Along with the coffee Elsa brought me an apron, a paring knife, and a bucket of potatoes and told me to start peeling and, if the manager came in, to keep my mouth shut.
After the breakfast rush, Doug came into the kitchen to talk to Elsa about her water usage. When he came in, Elsa wiped her hands on her apron and shot me a warning look.
He had been going over the utility bills and was not in a good mood. One of his best maids had just told him she was quitting to go work at Huddle House, where she could make more in tips. Being in Darcy, the motel didn’t draw many visitors unless the John Deere or corn syrup people brought in a group. Traveling salesmen and relatives of Darcy residents were the primary clientele. The motel was usually not even half full.
“I got to worry about staying in business,” Doug whined. “I got to make a living.”
“I think you do all right,” Elsa said. “Better than most.”
As Elsa would tell me later that day, she could talk that way to Doug because he appreciated her. He needed her. She worked hard and her food was to die for. Customers raved about it. Locals ate in her restaurant all the time; it kept the Best Western in business. Elsa had worked there since before Doug ever took over the franchise. He knew nothing about her, where she came from, the fact that she had two grown children, that her husband had died twenty years before, buried alive from walking down the corn in a silo over at the Farrington place. Buried alive in corn, if you can believe that.
“I’d like to ask you a favor,” Elsa said to Doug.
Doug stopped in the doorway. “Elsa, I can’t give out any raises right now. I’ve got to hire a new maid.”
“This is my niece,” said Elsa, pointing at me. “She’s a good girl, a hard worker. She needs a job.”
Doug brightened. “Does she clean?”
Elsa grinned at him. “I’ll say! She’s a real good cleaner. Dee Ann says she’ll be glad to train her. She knows she’ll just get minimum at first.”
“When can she start?”
Elsa hadn’t realized this was going to be so easy. She glanced at me, considering my condition. I looked up from my peeling and tried unsuccessfully to manage a smile. “How about next week? She’s just getting settled in at my place.”
THE NEXT EIGHT months passed in the blink of an eye. I quickly graduated from cleaning rooms to cleaning the lobby and the elevators and the restaurant bathroom. I thought about my baby girl, now turning over in the crib, following Frances with her eyes as my aunt moved around the room taking care of her. I thought of her restless little head bobbing on Frances’s shoulder as Frances rocked her to sleep. I’m coming back for you, I’d say to her. Don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten.
But I wondered if I meant it. I was an accidental in Darcy, but I’d begun to settle in. Elsa clucked over me, and Nancy made me laugh. I’d settled into thinking of myself as Not Grace, a simple girl with a simple job and a simple life. And by simple, I don’t mean dumb; I mean a job to do that had a beginning and end each day, good food, a joke or two, maybe a picture show or a good TV show at the end of the day. Dreamless sleep. No dead mother, no lost boys, no baby out of wedlock. No questions asked.
So I hummed hit parade songs—my favorite “Big Girls Don’t Cry”—and did my daily chores. The only one I dreaded was the mirror on the left side of the elevator. Every morning it was nothing but smears and smudges. When people’s fingers got to tinkering with the floor buttons, they couldn’t seem to stop. They pressed, they puttered, they made twirlies on the glass. Some touched and touched again, as if their reflection were a sweetheart they were about to take leave of. The squeegee didn’t make a dent on the oil and dirt from their hands. I had to use the rag and that spray stuff without a label that makes me lightheaded when the elevator doors shut. If that didn’t work, I’d scrape off stubborn smudges with my fingernails, which over time chipped and cracked.
The mirror was warped on that bad left side. When I polished it, I leapt out at myself, strangely altered, disfigured even, with lumps and bumps in untoward places, manatee-like; I once saw a picture of one on TV, bobbing in a swampy lake in the Everglades. If I moved to the left a step, the manatee’s blunt nose would lengthen into a horse’s head, and I’d snort softly, flip my ponytail, squinting against the fluorescent glare. Then there’d be a bing and the elevator doors would begin to shut and I’d put my foot between the doors, gather my cleaning supplies, and get off, manatee-horse-girl.
Except for that one stubborn panel, I liked cleaning the elevator. Everybody saw those mirrors; they fixed their hair in them, adjusted their clothes, measured the width of their behinds. They thought the sparkle they saw reflected back was their own sparkle, but it was my clean mirrors they were appreciating, even if they didn’t know it. Plus, while I rode the elevators, I got to hear traveling people’s stories, which were wild things, things I’d never dreamed of. In Darcy, it was always the weather, how the corn and soybeans were doing in the drought, how much snow was expected in the coming winter. The ladies who passed through came from faraway places with their suitcases and pink plastic makeup cases. They came from somewhere else and were on the way to somewhere else; they were there to see a relative or bury one, or do a quick piece of business, seldom staying more than one night. They talked about the latest hemline, death, divorce, and Marlon Brando. They’d seen things and those things clung to them. The funeral was terribly sad or their lives had been wrecked, totally wrecked, by this one or that one. Back then, that was all I wanted, something, anything that had an edge, like the growing crack in the mirror of the right side, a crack that wandered up the whole wall, splitting me in half from top to bottom. It was all I could do to prevent myself from reaching out and testing the fabric of their pressed skirts and jackets, touching the toes of their shiny high heels.
SO TIME WENT on, each month melting into the next, like a spring snow on warm pavement. On my way into work one morning, the fog swished and bloomed its way across the cornfields and sky, making them indistinguishable. The sight of all that baffling gray reminded me of the day I had walked into town. I clutched the steering wheel so hard my peeling fingertips began to throb and burn. A wreck was all I needed right now after last month’s cavities in not one but two teeth, probably from all the Tootsie Pops I sucked as I did my chores at the hotel, so many that one side of my mouth had become permanently discolored.
After a mile or so, the fog thickened and the right line of the road disappeared. When I heard the sound of gravel under the tires, I tried to correct, but the tires spun and I found myself in some kind of hole. I knew what to do. Elsa had taught me to drive. I put on the hazards and opened the car door onto several withered stalks that crackled under my feet as though something wicked was animating them. For the next half hour I stood shivering on the side of the road, my uniform plastered to my skin. I shook from the cold, thinking about how the earth’s body spun on a tilt (this is something Frances had taught me), how green and bright it all was from far out, how lovely. How this patch of fog was less than a pinprick on its surface. Then the fog partly lifted and two nice Mormon boys stopped and pushed the
car out, getting slung with mud for their trouble. I waved as I drove away, afraid to stop and properly thank them, afraid of sinking down again.
After the mishap, my heart skittered and pitched; it’d been a while since I’d been so scared, so taken by surprise. I’d almost forgotten how anything can happen, anything at all. The thing I liked about cleaning the elevator, the drudgery and boredom of the day-to-day grind—the one thing that made it all okay—was the absence of fear, an absence that continually delighted and astonished me.
As I edged the Ford into the motel parking lot and spotted the blessedly familiar plaid couch and love seat in the lobby, June’s coconut cake leapt into my mind, shining in the window as I’d come in from school the afternoon of my sixteenth birthday, the way she’d put the cake on Mama’s pedestal cake plate made of crystal, the way my sister (my sister!) had tipped the lamp shade up so the light would make the crystal sparkle.
I hurried through the automatic doors. I’d parked in a far corner of the parking lot to give the customers the good spaces; the one time I was late and parked close, Doug had read me the riot act. “How many times do I have to tell you? Those spaces are for customers, not maids!” he’d thundered. After that, I made it a point to park as far away as possible on principle alone.
I waved at Nancy, and she grinned. What a relief to shake off that dismal fog and see again, not only lines and shapes but also color, the blessed orange of Nancy’s hair, the blue of her sweater. One of the few things I’d come to pride myself on was having learned to take pleasure in things nobody else would think twice about. I had no expectations so I was constantly surprised by small pleasures. A thick peanut butter and jelly sandwich, flocks of blackbirds flashing their red-tipped wings as they swooped down on the corn, Elsa’s celery smell at the end of a day in the kitchen. The first snow of winter, which had fallen just the past week and melted the next day.
I grabbed my cleaning supplies out of the laundry room, headed straight for the elevator, and began the day’s work by wiping down the mirror.