It Is Wood, It Is Stone

by Gabriella Burnham

  The room was so starkly white, even the slightest glimmer of sunlight bounced from surface to surface. I curled up and massaged my eyelids with the tips of my fingers. An early memory of my mother began to percolate inside me. As a small child, when I didn’t want to be hugged, I begged not to be hugged, she would squeeze me until finally I gave in and hugged her back. I remembered that deep relief, the feeling that she hadn’t let go. I don’t know how long I had been lying naked, but I began to smell lunch cooking in the kitchen. I put on a dress and went to see if Marta needed help.

  “No,” she said. “It’s okay. It will be ready soon.”

  I watched her cut up carrots and celery and put them in a small glass bowl. She was preparing ground beef lasagna, which I’d learn was her specialty dish. She also made ground beef kibi, or ground beef patties with lime juice, or beef stew with potatoes, or ground beef pasta and tomato sauce sprinkled with dried basil. Every afternoon she would wipe the table from breakfast and put a plastic tablecloth down, a white one with red flowers, and set a meal for me—a can of Guaraná, some variation of a beef dish, vegetables, sometimes bonbons she brought from home—then go to the closet in our laundry room to watch novelas on her small television.

  “Are you sure? I like to cook.”

  “No,” she said. The knife hit the cutting board with metered thuds. “Don’t worry.”

  There were two bottles of tomato sauce and dried pasta on the counter. Oil smoked in a skillet on the stove. She scraped the raw meat off the wooden cutting board and into the pan. I could see that a watery pool of blood had filled in the divots on the cutting board.

  “I don’t want to impose.” I spoke gently. “But maybe you should use the plastic cutting board for raw meat.”

  She rested her chin on her left shoulder and formed a peculiar gesture with her hand, pressed her index finger and thumb into a circle, and scratched her nose. She dropped another piece of beef into the pan.

  “Wood is fine for meat.”

  “Sure. It’s not a big deal.” I pointed to the cutting board. “But you see. The juices seep into the wood.” The mixture of raw beef and humidity made my stomach turn.

  She ripped a paper towel in half and sopped up the bloody juice from the board. “I have always used wood. Wood has been around much longer than plastic.”

  My mind inched forward and crawled through the blood-soaked paper towel, the cutting board, Marta’s hair tied loosely over her shoulder. I imagined I’d have to pull a long black strand from my mouth, feel it tugging through the bits of food I’d already chewed. I swung nauseatingly between worry and disappointment in myself for being worried.

  “Please,” I tried again. “I’d really like to help.”

  From the look on her face, a face that was deeply settled into procedure, I didn’t think she would let me. But then she handed me an onion, a plastic cutting board, and a knife, and asked me to chop it for the pasta sauce.

  “Thank you,” I told her and set up my station next to her.

  It was a beautiful onion: perfectly round and white with a golden tuft of hair at the top. I peeled back the papery shell and admired the smooth inside, as shiny and lustrous as mother-of-pearl. I took the knife and pierced the onion at the root, as I’d learned from Julia Child’s cookbook, but the knife was dull and it slipped, narrowly missing my thumb. I looked at Marta to see if she’d noticed, but she was standing at the stove stirring the pasta.

  I let out an audible sigh. “I almost cut myself. This knife isn’t very sharp.” I waited for her reaction, but she didn’t respond.

  I looked for one of the knives I’d brought from home and found it tucked behind the silverware. The moment I cut into flesh, the onion’s acidic spray was released into the air. The farther the blade sliced, the stronger the burn, and I could feel my eyes begin to pour. I cried, chopping and chopping, tears dripping from my chin, my eyes swollen. I turned the onion sideways and continued until half of it was rendered into small, seeping dices.

  Marta heard me sniffle and handed me a towel. Her eyes sparkled with dryness.

  “How are you bearing this?” I asked, blotting my face with the dishrag.

  She shrugged and responded flatly, “Many years of cutting onions.”

  I left for the bathroom to rinse my face.

  Many years, I thought. I looked in the mirror and watched beads of water splay across my sunburnt cheeks, the roots of my hair frizzed from the humidity, unsure which way to turn. I had envisioned Marta and me together whimsically in the kitchen, chopping herbs and taste-testing each other’s sauces with a wooden spoon. I felt silly for believing that Marta and I would become instant friends, for having assumed that we would feel fundamentally connected, like an apprentice to her mentor. Maybe she thought I was feeble for almost cutting myself and crying over an onion. Why did I want her to feel sorry for me? I had felt a tug, just then, for her to stop what she was doing and acknowledge that I was in pain, that my eyes throbbed with tears, that I had been inches away from drawing blood. No, maybe it was that stupid comment I’d made about the cutting board. Why had I said that? I didn’t actually care which cutting board she used. Or maybe she had heard me pleasuring myself behind the bathroom door? Did I moan out loud? A hot flash drew into my hands and feet and the tips of my cheeks.

  I slinked back to the kitchen, ready to start again, when I saw that she had finished chopping the onion and had already stirred it into the pan.

  “You’re done?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. She took out her fan and waved it across her face; the baby hairs that framed her hairline blew majestically back. “Lunch will be ready soon.”

  Defeated, I left for the bedroom and shut the blinds. Marta never came to get me. Or maybe she did, but I wasn’t awake. I lay on the bed to rest my swollen eyes and dreamt through the passing hours. The silence woke me. On the kitchen table she had left me a plate of pasta with beef covered with plastic wrap.

  That night, you returned home with the flitting energy of an emptying helium balloon and began recounting your day as soon as you walked through the door. The bus ride had been busy, with people filling the aisle and the stairs from the front to back. You worried that you wouldn’t be able to get off at the right time. But another young professor recognized your faculty tote bag and helped you push forward through the crowds. You described the students as organized and mannered and much more diligent than the wealthy students you’d taught at St. Gregory’s. (Was it a matter of affluence, you wondered. Or stricter schooling? Or maybe you were projecting.) Your classroom was vast with large windows and glossy, round-lipped plants in every corner. The Provost had dropped in unexpectedly and introduced you in front of the class.

  “He told them it was a privilege to have me join them,” you said, your hands flailing. “A privilege!”

  We went to the living room sofa and you stacked your feet on the coffee table.

  “Anyway. Tell me about your day.”

  “It was good,” I replied.

  “Good?”

  “Yes. It was good.”

  “Anything interesting happen?”

  “Not really. I did some unpacking.”

  “How are things with Marta?”

  “Good.”

  You turned to me.

  “Good, huh?”

  “Well, what do you want me to say? I didn’t have as exciting a day as you. There’s still a lot to do at the apartment.”

  You yawned.

  “Did she cook dinner? I’m starving.”

  “It’s in the refrigerator.”

  You heated pasta in the microwave and brought it back to the couch. I could smell the reheated meat, ripe like an old dish sponge, steaming from the bowl.

  “This is delicious,” you exclaimed and spooned faster than you could chew.

  “I make that dish all
the time at home.”

  You didn’t answer. We sat for a few minutes as I listened to you clink the spoon against the bowl, filling your mouth with Marta’s pasta.

  “Can I tell you something?” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “I get the sense that Marta doesn’t like me very much.”

  You stopped chewing.

  “Where’d you get that sense?”

  “I tried to help her cook and she practically batted me away.”

  “It’s her first day. You just need more time together.”

  “Do we? I mean, I know I’ve said this before but…do we even need her?”

  You rolled your eyes and put down your empty bowl.

  “You’re the only woman I know who would complain about having a maid,” you said. You then brought your dish to the kitchen, unbuttoning your dress shirt as you walked. When you returned I could see your chest hair darkened with perspiration. “I’m going to take a shower. Maybe try and think of all the ways it will be useful to have Marta around.”

  I listened to your feet pat against the shower tiles. The words, useful, Marta, useful, Marta, spun in my mind, until all I could hear were sounds with no meaning.

  For days I would sit in the kitchen over the course of an afternoon, reading, eating, sorting through papers, while Marta washed dishes, cooked, ironed, swept. You said she and I needed to spend more time together, and so that’s what I set out to do. I tried to lure her into conversation with different entry points. I asked her opinion on Portuguese versus English, if she spent any free time in São Paulo, what her hometown was like. She answered me thoughtfully (it depended on what she was trying to express; she liked to go for walks through Ibirapuera; Atibaia was a humble town in the mountains), but these questions did not hook her for long. She was always concentrated on the pot she stirred, the shirt she folded, the dish she washed. She didn’t do these tasks absentmindedly. I could see that there was an energy behind her brown eyes, the careful lines that formed at the corners of her lids and across her forehead, the way she held on to her hip with one hand. Marta retreated into a deep meditation as she cleaned and cooked; in an instant, as if by magic, she blocked all exterior noises and clamor to form a quiet, solitary bubble inside her mind. Occasionally she would ask me a question over her shoulder: How much coffee do you want? Will you eat dinner at home tonight? Who does this shirt belong to? I would respond, and then she would return to the inside. There wasn’t much room for me.

  It crossed my mind that maybe I should leave her alone. I could stay on one side of the apartment, she on the other. But even when we were separated, my thoughts would tiptoe out of my ear, through the kitchen, and next to her. What was she doing? Folding? Washing? What was she thinking about? I wondered if she wondered about me. Or did I escape her memory as soon as she walked out the door?

  I read every travel brochure discarded in drawers around the apartment. I went for walks down Avenida Paulista, stopped at street vendors, and circled around sidewalk performances. I saw art exhibitions at MASP and Pinacoteca. I tasted strawberries at outdoor markets and photographed Beco do Batman graffiti murals. I spent several afternoons lounging on a blanket in Ibirapuera, watching a group of boys practice soccer, or trying to read a book, but I would glaze over the pages, wondering what you were teaching that day or what Marta was doing at the apartment. I saw every tourist site in a ten-mile radius, until I realized that experiencing São Paulo alone, guided by old tourism pamphlets, felt like observing the city through backward binoculars, distant and warped. Each day I tried to feel a part of the world around me, but more and more I felt like I had jumped into a well when I wanted to swim in the ocean. I wanted to feel involved, surrounded, woven through. At the very least, I wanted to have a small sense of purpose when I woke up in the morning.

  And so I concocted a plan, whereby Marta and I would have separate but equal shares of the apartment duties. She would have hers, and I would have mine. I decided to run this idea by her while she was brushing her teeth at the laundry room sink, using the bamboo toothbrush she kept in her apron.

  “Marta, how would you feel if we divided the cleaning and cooking?” I asked.

  She responded inaudibly, her mouth full of toothpaste, and nodded, so I took that as an indication that I should show her what I meant, though somewhere in my mind I knew that I had purposefully asked her at a time when she couldn’t really answer.

  When I heard Marta close the door to her room, I went and found a large sheet of grid paper underneath the bureau. I drew a map. A large square in the middle for the living room. Below the living room, a smaller rectangle for the kitchen, and below that another square for the laundry room and Marta’s room. To the right side of the living room I sketched a Tetris snake hallway with two small squares for the bathroom and bedroom. HOME I wrote in big bubble letters at the top, then scribbled over and rewrote, OUR HOME, and then, even better, OUR TEMPORARY HOME. I drew little pictures to represent the chores that belonged in each room and circled the ones that belonged to me. Marta’s chores I enclosed with a square. I drew a circle around the spider plants in the living room and kitchen. I put a box around the dishes. The bathroom too—I carved a large box around the bathroom box, and circled the chicken and apple in the kitchen and wrote “Linda—Lunch.” I would cook again.

  That’s all to say, the map looked quite beautiful by the time I’d finished, but Marta was not pleased.

  “Why am I square?” She stood over me while I sat at the kitchen table. She had just come back out of her room wearing a denim dress with a white lace trim.

  “I was already circle,” I told her. “So I made you square.”

  She seemed apprehensive—hands on her hips, clucking her tongue—and so I explained what each picture symbolized and how we could schedule the chores around different rectangles and squares. As I spoke, she took a damp sponge from the sink and began to scrub a few stray ink marks I had left on the table.

  “Does that make sense?” I asked, and she nodded, but I sensed she wasn’t paying attention. Once I finished, she went straight to the laundry room to hang her clothes and fold ours.

  I hurried after her.

  “Marta,” I said, and pointed to the blue shirt I’d drawn with the circle around it. “I can do the laundry.”

  She had my underwear in her hands, a particularly ugly pair that was faded and worn, which she finished folding and then faced me, her eyebrows pointed.

  “You want to fold the laundry?” She had one hand on the pile of clothing.

  “Yes,” I said and pointed again to the map.

  Marta brushed past me and into the kitchen.

  “Okay,” she said. “Then can I do the dishes?” But before I could answer I heard the faucet squeal.

  I had entered a fight over territory without realizing that Marta ruled the universe. The apartment had never been mine for the taking. I left the map out on the kitchen counter every night before bed so that Marta would see it as soon as she arrived in the morning. She didn’t offer it a glance or a touch. And why would she? Her routines were hardwired into the floorboards, the rafters, the walls. There was no use in trying to make my own. She had been there long before us, and she would be there long after. Some days I would remind her about the division of labor I had proposed, like an old tired song bellowing from the jukebox, and she would politely nod and smile as though it were the first time she’d heard it. Then she would proceed to clean and cook faster than I could keep up.

  “I think it would be good for you to go outside,” you said and pulled some money out of your wallet. “Breathe some fresh air.”

  “I’ve been outside,” I said, splayed on the bed. “There’s nothing left for me out there.”

  “How about lunch?” You threw the money next to me. “Take yourself out.”

  “I don’t want your money,” I said, and rolled
to face the window.

  It had been days, possibly even weeks, since I’d gone outside. I couldn’t let go of the apartment, even just for an afternoon, for fear that Marta might grow roots in our bedroom and reorganize the air so that I could no longer breathe. She had called that morning from a pay phone to say the buses were delayed because of the rain. I could hear the commotion in the background—the anxious stir of late commuters rumbling like a wasps’ nest. She wouldn’t be in until noon.

  You left, and, in the silence of the apartment, I knew you were right. I needed to get out. The only problem was, I didn’t have an umbrella. Somehow I’d remembered to pack a garlic press and an English copy of Anna Karenina, but I hadn’t brought any rain gear with me. I found a pair of rubber sandals and a shower cap, one of those transparent plastic caps that come in hair dyeing kits, stuffed inside the side pocket of a suitcase. I riffled through the closet hanger by hanger searching for a suitable outfit. I didn’t want to wear anything I owned. It all felt drab and old, already used. I emptied half my clothes onto the floor when your white linen suit appeared from the back of the closet. You had placed it there after your first day of school, I remember, because you were afraid that it would lose its dry-cleaned crease.

  Initially I thought, Let me just try it on, and I did. The shoulders were too broad, the crotch too low, the sleeves and pants too long. It shouldn’t have worked. But when I looked in the mirror, I was captivated. I rolled the sleeves and trousers to reveal the silk mustard lining. It was as though I’d grown a new nose and needed to touch my face to make sure it was real. I fitted the shower cap over my head, tucking my hair inside, and put fifty reais in my (your) pocket. I walked out the back door before I could begin to think of reasons why I shouldn’t.

  As I stood sheltered under the apartment entrance, the rain sprayed like the edge of a waterfall. So much water had collected in the streets, the gutters formed rivers that sent clumps of black leaves the size of small animals streaming down the current. I contemplated each step to the street, testing the slipperiness of the entry’s brick path. It took only seconds before the suit was completely soaked through.