It Is Wood, It Is Stone

by Gabriella Burnham

  Melinda chuckled. “This is a funny concept. We pay her to make you feel comfortable. You’re not getting paid to make her feel comfortable.”

  “No. No, that’s not what I meant.” I could feel my vocal cords tense; my voice dissolved into a low rasp. I cleared my throat. “I don’t need to be paid to make her feel comfortable. Or anyone for that matter. I’m just not used to having her around yet. That’s all.”

  “Don’t feel bad,” she said. “I’m not surprised you felt a little—what was the word you used?—awk-ward, when you first met Marta. She has a reputation for being quite an alpha for someone who works in a subservient position.”

  “I kind of like that about Marta.”

  Melinda shook her head as if she was exasperated by this. I thought, Don’t argue with her. It’s not worth the energy. Melinda was leading me down a precarious path, a conversation I would look back on with chilly humiliation. I was at the same time aware that you admired the Provost and his wife—in many ways, they held the ultimate power over your reputation as a professor. With the flick of a wrist, he could send you back to the United States with a scarlet letter emblazoned on your résumé. I couldn’t combat her. I reached inside my purse and pressed my finger against the sharp edge of one of my keys to try to contain my discomfort.

  “She is too brave,” she continued. “Too brave for the world she’s been built in. It would be better for her to adapt, for her own good.”

  I inched away from Melinda and closer to the road. The idea that you saw some of her in me, or me in her, made me retch. Her rant about Marta wouldn’t stop. She told me about a visiting neurologist from Nice who thought that Marta oversalted the food. Coming from a Frenchman, Melinda said, this was surprising, but he swore that he could taste quinine in the salt. He preferred the salt on the coast of France. Then one day, in the middle of a lecture, he fell forward from pain in his abdomen. Two of the larger students carried him to the men’s room, and he vomited into the toilet until a car arrived to take him to the apartment. While he was bedridden, Marta fed him soup until he got better. From that point on, all he had a taste for was Marta’s food. He asked for all of her recipes before he returned to France.

  “I’m not sure I follow,” I said. “It sounds like he got sick and Marta helped him.”

  “Sure. When I first heard the story, I felt it was innocent too.” She threw her cigarette into the street. “But then how do you explain the others?”

  She told other accounts. The Dutch veterinarian who developed a rash across her entire body, which was eventually linked to the starch Marta used in her underwear. The English psychologist who fell in the bathroom after Marta mopped the floor. The German chemist who nearly broke his back from a spring that burst through the top of the brand-new mattress.

  “Don’t you think it’s curious?”

  “It seems more like a coincidence than a conspiracy,” I said.

  “You’re young. You still see the good in people.” She stopped and looked at me directly. “Go look in her maid’s quarters. I’m sure you’ll find dolls in there with needles sticking out of their eyes.”

  When she said this, I heard a sharp ringing in my ear that blocked the drum of the traffic around us. I needed to go home and take a hot shower, then hide under our bedsheets. Ahead I could see we were only a few blocks from the Mercado Municipal. I wondered if I would be able to reach it without boiling over. Melinda droned on for the rest of the walk, and I folded into a narrow chasm, deep inside, until we found you and the Provost standing outside the mercado with grocery bags hanging from your arms.

  “There they are,” you said and embraced me. I whispered in your ear, I can’t believe you left me with her, but you either didn’t hear me or ignored the comment.

  The Provost wanted to show me all the exotic fruits you’d purchased. He pulled out a papaya and held it to my nose, told me to smell the skin, which had a faint perfume but mostly smelled like nothing, and did the same with a fig, a mango, and a small pineapple.

  “You won’t find fruit like this anywhere else. Here.” He handed me a bag filled with figs. “Take these. They will be the most delicious figs you have eaten.”

  “Obrigada,” I said, and Melinda smiled.

  “De nada!” she said. “You see, she’s speaking Portuguese. She needs to spend more time with me.”

  “Linda, I want you and Dennis to come to dinner at our apartment,” said the Provost. “I am traveling for two weeks, but when I return.”

  You held a steady expression. I knew you wanted me to say yes.

  “Sure,” I said. “We’d enjoy that.”

  “What do you like to eat?” asked Melinda.

  “Linda is tired of beef,” you quickly chimed in. “Our maid cooks a lot of beef.”

  I was startled by how the words “our maid” came so easily out of your mouth.

  “Whatever is easiest,” I said, looking at you. “I don’t mind beef.”

  The Provost’s wife gripped my back.

  “My dear. We will make sure there is chicken.”

  After my encounter with Melinda, I quickly became skeptical of your budding relationship with the Provost. It was clear that he had a special interest in you, but I also knew how easily you were mesmerized by authority. I told you that I couldn’t stand Melinda, that her personality grated on me, that she was a racist, that she abused Marta. I didn’t want to interact with her. You said that she and I didn’t have to become friends, but asked if I could pretend to like her when we met with them socially. “For me,” you said. I begrudgingly agreed.

  I began to wake with my hands clenched. In the mornings I found them tucked underneath my chin, wrenching into themselves. I had seen infants sleep like this, with their soft, bulbous hands bundled together, except that my hands lacked the same fleshy cushion. After hours of pressing my nails into the creases in my palms, I would wake up aching and sore, barely able to extend my fingers.

  “Look,” I said, holding my palms out to display the red lines where my nails had dented the skin. I managed a laugh. “I’m punishing myself in my sleep.”

  You sighed. I could feel your breath blow against my wrists.

  “Maybe cut your fingernails?”

  I turned my hands over and looked at my nail beds. They were chewed down from years of nail biting; even the skin around the cuticles was dry and bitten.

  “I barely have any. It’s like I’m self-harming with a butter knife.”

  I did file down what little nails I had and moisturized them to try to dull the edges. It didn’t work. Instead the nightmares started. I had a postapocalyptic dream where I found my mother crushed underneath a car. She cried out for me to help her, so I tried to lift the car with my bare hands, but I knew she wouldn’t survive. I jerked awake with my hands in tight fists, digging into the wall behind our heads. A layer of skin on my knuckles had been pushed off like a white film, revealing a smooth pink layer underneath.

  Sometimes the dreams were closer to memories, darker and darker than the memories that emerged while I was painting. I dreamt of things I tried to forget. I dreamt of an old college fling who, on a snowy morning in bed together, rolled on top of me while I was still asleep—I could barely breathe underneath his weight—and pushed inside me. I woke with tears in my eyes. I dreamt of the time my father, drunk and upset that I hadn’t cleaned the house, flipped all the furniture upside down and wrote me a letter saying that he might never come home. I dreamt that I was falling into a ravine, that I was dangling by a wire, that I was alone, that you had left me. I woke and held on to your hand until I fell back asleep.

  The issue with the nightmares was that they allowed the real pain in my hands to integrate seamlessly with the world playing out in my head. The digging and scratching didn’t wake me up. I assumed I was in pain because of the knives I dreamt I was batting away or the glass I had falle
n into. You woke me up when I woke you up with my tossing and turning, but that happened only after the scratching had already gone too far. In a matter of a couple weeks, I began to develop sticky red sores in my thumb creases. I couldn’t use soap or shampoo without upsetting the open wounds. I held my hands under cold water for minutes until they numbed, and then let them air dry by the fan.

  There were other remedies we tried. I’d seen mothers put mittens on babies who scratched their own faces at night, so I tried to wear oven mitts to sleep. Every morning I’d wake up with them flung across the floor and my fingers curled in victorious fervor. I practiced deep breathing before bed. I meditated when I woke up. I didn’t touch a sip of alcohol. None of it helped.

  The worst of it was, I couldn’t paint anymore. That broke my heart more than it hurt my hands. Even if I did manage to pick up the brush and eke out a few strokes, one wrong bend and my knuckles would send a violent quake through my radius bone, forcing me to stop. Just breathe, I told myself. If it had only been the isolated pain, I believe I could have fought through it. I used to work through period cramps that left me in a ball on the bathroom floor. The mental exhaustion was the real culprit, the chronic interruptions, that caused me to unravel.

  Because you were teaching most of the day, Marta suffered the worst of it. At one point a terrible thought struck me, like an arrow that had been shot from miles and miles away. I remembered the story that Melinda had recounted, the one about the professor from France who didn’t like Marta’s cooking and fell ill while teaching. Maybe it was Marta who had caused this turmoil in me, just as Melinda had suggested? I fretted about this possibility while at the bathroom sink trying to brush my hair and burst into tears out of pure frustration.

  “Let me help you,” I heard her say, and she reached for the brush.

  “No!” I demanded. “Stop. I can do it.”

  I regretted immediately the tone I’d taken, the thoughts I was having, how cruel I was being to her. I regretted it all—the chore map, the tension about cooking, my insistence on taking up more and more space in the apartment. I had become frantic. I just wanted the pain to go away.

  “I’m sorry, Marta,” I said to her. “It’s me. It’s the pain. I shouldn’t take it out on you.”

  She brushed it off like it was nothing. It seemed Marta preferred not to admit when I had hurt her.

  It was only after the sores became infected that I decided to bandage my hands. I had been resisting the idea because I felt they needed to breathe air to heal. There was also something depressing about seeing bandages on my hands, like I was powerless over my own body, that made me reluctant. I was reminded of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus.” A bandaged woman I would be.

  Peel off the napkin

  O my enemy.

  Do I terrify?—

  The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?

  The sour breath

  Will vanish in a day.

  I could do the left hand myself, but you had to wrap the right. The white gauze turned yellow and moistened against the tender spots. You tucked the bandage end between my knuckles and kissed the tops of my hands. The bandages did prevent me from scratching myself, though I still tried. I’d wake up with loose, frayed edges from where I’d tried to pry for skin. We broke a Popsicle stick in half and wedged the pieces into my palms to make it harder to clench my hands. For the most part I kept the bandages on all day, but sometimes I would take a peek at the damage, the dark purple and puckering wounds. It gave me a strange thrill to see the ugly progress, to know the more disgusting it looked, the better I was doing.

  I hadn’t anticipated the new batch of pain that came with healing. The itch, the unbearable itch, that traveled underneath the bandages. I thought I’d known healing until I learned the pain of healing. The itch was so unbearable I had to rub the bandages against my legs for relief. Then one evening, I decided that I would take them off and let my hands breathe for the night, that maybe I wouldn’t need them to sleep anymore.

  “I’m going to sleep with the bandages off,” I told you, lying on the mattress with my palms facing the ceiling fan.

  You gave me a suspicious look and switched off the light. Hours later, you nudged me awake.

  “Linda,” you said. “You’re shaking.”

  The moment I opened my eyes, pain flashed into my hands.

  I opened my palms. “I think I’m bleeding.”

  It was true. I had broken skin on my left hand. The blood started in the meatiest part of my thumb, ran into the creases of my palm and down my wrist. You led me to the bathroom and rinsed off the blood with water, which was alarming and roused so much feeling I had to cry. You didn’t say anything, just wrapped my hands in gauze, gave me a hug, and led me back into bed.

  You asked Marta if she would watch me, to make sure I didn’t take off the bandages while you were gone, a precaution that was probably unnecessary while I was awake, but that Marta took very seriously. She watched me as though I would disintegrate if she looked away for too long. She made me bone broth soup and offered to hold the spoon for me after I dropped it on the floor from the soreness. I felt embarrassed having to rely on Marta so much, especially considering my testy mood, but this transference of care, me giving in to her, her allowing me to give in, opened up a sense of trust between us.

  “Do you want water?” she asked, already handing me a glass. “You should drink more water.”

  I asked for ice and she let me have some, even though she was convinced that ice caused pneumonia. I took a sip. The cool liquid traveled from my head to my feet, numbing every part of me.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Better,” I said. “I just wish I could paint again.”

  She fluffed a batch of white rice she’d made and spooned it into a bowl.

  “Don’t worry. You will paint again.”

  That night, I slept more soundly than I had since we’d moved to São Paulo. When I woke I wandered to the kitchen in a blissful haze, the corners of my mouth dewy and smiling, my eyes glimmering with rest.

  “I slept!” I announced to nobody. You had been at school for hours and Marta was in the other room folding laundry.

  I looked around the kitchen and planted myself more firmly into consciousness. That’s when I noticed the wall. Not the wall, exactly, but what had been hung on the wall: a five-by-four-foot rendering I’d done of the woman who resembled Celia, lying in a bathtub, her face flushed pink, her breasts cresting from the turquoise water. My stomach fell to my knees.

  “Marta?” I called. “Was this you?”

  She appeared in the laundry room door.

  “Yes. I thought it was a shame that they were all in a corner.”

  I didn’t know what to say. My mind jumped through rings of shame. What if you ran into Celia on the street and recognized her from the painting? What if Celia somehow ended up in our kitchen and saw what I had done?

  “I—” I began to stutter. “I—”

  I felt my mind unclench.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for being so kind to me, Marta.”

  She smiled and began to walk away, but I went over to her and wrapped my arms around her, until she gave in and hugged me too.

  Celia finally called the day before we were meant to have dinner at the Provost’s. I hadn’t heard from her since we met, but I kept her phone number folded tight inside my purse and would check occasionally to make sure it was still there. I think there was a part of me that believed she wasn’t real, that she had been an apparition I’d imagined, and if I called her and she didn’t answer, it would only prove that it was all a fantasy.

  Marta was eating lunch in her room, and I needed to get her attention. I could hear the hum of a radio through the kitchen wall.

  “Marta?” I called, but she didn’t answer.


  I went to the door and tried the handle. It was locked, so I tapped on the doorframe. The radio went silent.

  “Just a minute,” she said, and listened for my exiting footsteps before she turned the radio back on.

  I sat at the kitchen table waiting for Marta to resurface, but by the time she did I’d forgotten what I originally wanted to ask her.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “We’re going to the Provost’s for dinner,” I announced.

  “Good.”

  She turned to wash her plate.

  I asked if she had ever met Melinda. She said she hadn’t, but she knew one of her maids, Ana.

  “What does Ana say about her?”

  She finished drying the plate with a towel before she responded.

  “Nothing bad.”

  “I can’t imagine that’s true. Come on, tell me. What does she say?”

  She tried to brush it off, but I pressed her. “I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Ana has to wear a uniform,” she said. “Senhora likes fresh pastries in the house so that it smells sweet, but she doesn’t eat them.”

  “I like fresh pastries,” I said and winked at her, but Marta didn’t think it was funny. She gave me a firm look and continued with the dishes.

  “We’re going to their home for dinner tomorrow night.”

  “Good. You’ll see Ana.” She put a shrimp salad in front of me and retreated to her room.

  Then an unusual thing happened: the telephone rang. I picked it up, expecting that I would have to call Marta to translate. It was Celia. I could tell from the first breath—she paused before she said hello—and I nearly choked.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello. Linda?”

  “Yes, hi.” I swung the telephone cord around my neck. “You remember me.”