by Tatjana Soli
Marie nodded, ashamed of her old cotton nightgown.
“Stats?”
She looked up, confused by the question.
“Name?” he said.
“Oh. Maleva.”
He grinned. “Bad girl. You must be. I was shocked to find food in Linda’s house.”
They both laughed. It was true, until Marie’s coming the cupboards and refrigerator were empty.
“She gets mad when I cook anything here. Cooking smells bother her. It reminds her of people actually living in a house. I’m James, by the way.”
“Maleva,” she said again.
He nodded. “Since you’re living here, watch out for Linda’s drinking, okay? She takes antidepressants, and she’s been known to take too many.”
Marie looked at him, blank.
“The last girl had to call an ambulance.”
He tapped his hand on the phone. “You know 911, yes?”
“Okay.”
“Good girl. Eat away.” James took a bottle of water and turned away. “Don’t worry—I won’t rat on you. We both need the job, right?”
* * *
In Linda’s bedroom was a table piled high with books, and some days she stayed at home and sat over these books, reading and writing.
“You like to read?” Marie said, bringing folded laundry through the bedroom to the closet. She always warned Linda of her presence with a few words because the habit of aloneness caused Linda to startle and get angry as if Marie were an intruder.
“Oh. My dissertation. For my doctorate. In case James doesn’t offer a ring.”
Marie shook her head, not understanding.
“Matrimonio, entiendes?” Linda said, tapping her ring finger. “I’m writing a biography about an author. Then I graduate.”
Marie continued to the closet.
Linda yawned. “Actually, you might find it interesting—the author Jean Rhys. Pretty obscure. I needed something off the beaten path to get my topic approved. She’s from Dominica, your part of the world.” Linda looked down at the paragraph she was marking with her finger.
“Yes, I would like to read sometime,” Marie said.
“Hmmm.” Linda had already forgotten her.
Marie was sure Linda would not remember because she never remembered their talks, repeating instructions to her over and over, although Marie always pretended to hear them as if for the first time, never telling her that French, not Spanish, was spoken on her island, but the next day Marie found a book on her bed, Wide Sargasso Sea.
Once she opened the book, she was home. She knew Antoinette’s mother-loss, but also knew the peace of her childhood in abandoned Coulibri, the joy of nature, living under trees, how it made the hatred not sting so much. She understood how the convent felt like a refuge, a place of sunshine and of death, because Linda’s house felt the same way to Marie. She never wanted to leave. Would her fate in Florida turn out better than Antoinette’s in Rochester’s bitter England? She would make something of herself, she hoped, she prayed.
She did not remember her work that day, much less to eat. For the first time, she had the experience that another human being had felt much the same as she did, that her life was not so unique. Never again would she have to feel so alone. This was the release of art, what Maman must have felt while she painted vodou figures. Loneliness had stuck in her bones since Maman died, and this was the first time the pressure released just the smallest bit. Parts of the novel made her cry, and when she bent her head down close to the pages, she imagined the tears on the paper smelled of the island’s flowers. Was it a lingering trace of Linda’s perfume or her own longing for home?
When Linda had left that morning, Marie had stayed in her room and did not clean a single thing, and when Linda came home that night, she absentmindedly praised Marie’s work, saying the place looked perfect. She was right because it was unchanging, never anything less than perfect. But reading that book, Marie was more exhausted than if she had cleaned without stopping all day.
* * *
The day before Christmas, Linda packed for a trip with James. “Tomorrow clean out my closet thoroughly so it’ll be straightened when I get home.”
“Tomorrow is Christmas,” Marie said.
“Oh, I forgot.” Linda went into her bedroom and came out with a hundred-dollar bill. “Here you go. I always have some stashed for a rainy day. Polish my shoes, too.”
Marie learned to adjust to silence and quiet. The only people she saw each week were the people who serviced the house—postman, gardener, pool man. They waved at Marie through the windows, and she waved back. Once a month, she called Coca, who invited her to family dinners, but the trip back and forth was too long for Linda not to complain of the inconvenience of not having her. Marie went twice: for Christmas Day and again in the spring for a funeral.
But Coca and Marie did not really know each other. When Marie was lonely, she called Jean-Alexi. Sometimes just to hear his voice, then she’d hang up. Sometimes she’d cry on the phone. He would not comfort her, but he would not hang up either. When he was in a good mood, which was less and less frequently, she got him to talk about the island, the village, and Port-au-Prince. Their days in her father’s abandoned house grew into a missed opportunity, something she knew was false from reality, but they both allowed this. The story of the lone cricket turned into a whole orchestra of crickets that serenaded their lovemaking. Eventually Jean-Alexi would ask her where she was or suggest they meet, and then she would quickly hang up. She knew her loneliness and homesickness were misleading her. But he was the only link to who she was.
* * *
Linda finished the long paper on Jean Rhys, and James threw a party at a restaurant because she did not want the house dirtied. Although it was at a Caribbean restaurant, with food and music of the area, they had not thought to invite Marie. Afterward, Linda put a signed, first-edition copy of Wide Sargasso Sea in a glassed shelf of her bookcase—a present from James. When she left for work, Marie took the book out and stared at the signature, thrilled at this proof that the actual person who had expressed her deepest thoughts had held those pages. She imagined the yellowed paper smelled of spices.
What confused her was that she could not complain about her living conditions or the ease of the work—she had never dreamed such luxury possible—but the lack of human company made her feel as if she had already left the earth and existed in some kind of limbo. Wrong to say she wasn’t grateful to leave the filth and poverty, but she had also left the company of other human beings. One morning as Linda rushed out, Marie could not contain herself.
“What do you believe in?”
Linda stopped in her tracks—exasperated, irritated. “What do you mean?”
Marie regretted the question. “What makes you happy?”
“James. My house. All kinds of things. I don’t think it’s an appropriate topic.”
Linda never asked a single question about Marie’s life and clearly did not want to know. Marie might spend the rest of her life in that house, and she would die unknown, a stranger.
* * *
As soon as Linda left each morning, Marie turned on the televisions that were in every room, each tuned to a different station, so that as she moved through the house working, it was as if she were moving through a crowded village. She would stop and catch up with the goings-on in each room. Talk back to the screens. A soap opera on one; a game show on another; the news; a movie; a talk show. Her speech improved rapidly, moving from the stilted Queen’s English to American casual.
When her work was over for the day, she usually found herself lingering in Linda’s closet, looking at the clothes. Knowing that Linda would be away the whole day, at first she would try on a coat, a dress. Eventually, she grew braver, putting on whole outfits with shoes and makeup and jewelry. The girl that appeared in the mirror was unimaginable to her. This time she christened herself: Minna.
She did not intend it to happen, but the outside world began to fade, an
d the imaginary one created in the mirror became the only one that satisfied. Her dreams were the dreams of the girl in the mirror, not the real one dressed up in someone else’s life.
* * *
One day she opened the small drawer in Linda’s nightstand and found a gun. Heart pounding, she picked it up, surprised at its cold heaviness and how soothing it felt in the hand. She carried it carefully, marveling at its weight and how invincible it made her feel. It almost made her want an invader to break into the house so that she could prove her bravery. Each time she came upon a mirrored image of herself, she took aim, pretending she was one of the pretty actresses on television who aimed guns and were never hurt. What, she wondered, could frighten Linda so much, living in this perfect world that Marie found as safe, if dead, as heaven?
* * *
Although she knew her time here could not last forever, she hoped it would be long enough to plan what to do next. Almost two years had passed when Linda called her into the kitchen one night after she came home, and Marie saw something unfamiliar in Linda’s eyes: happiness.
“James and I are getting married!”
“That’s so good.” Marie felt honored that Linda was announcing it to her, as if they were family. She assumed her life would not change, except she would be cleaning after two people now. She liked James because he talked to her as if she were more than the girl who cleaned Linda’s house, as if she were a person with her own desires, as if they were in the same boat somehow, and once in a while he would slip her a couple twenty-dollar bills and say, “Go have a little fun.”
“We’re moving to Sarasota. A broker is listing the house.”
“What is Sarasota?”
“Where I’m moving, silly. I’ll give you two weeks, and then the movers are coming.”
Marie reached out and, much against Linda’s will, hugged her. Marie hid her face. When Linda felt her shaking, she patted her back.
“You sweet, sweet thing,” Linda said, then walked out of the room.
Later Marie wondered if she could have asked Linda to take her with them. But she always was too busy, too distracted, to listen. Always looking past Marie to more important things. But Linda was Marie’s whole life. Or rather, her house was. For a few days, Marie went through her usual routine in a trance, frightened. The threat of the outside world was too real, and she had grown cautious. She could not imagine going back to Coca or the dogs or Jean-Alexi. Her best hope was when she cornered James in the hallway one morning.
“Would you ask her to take me?”
He smiled and looked at her polo shirt. “Oh, sweet Maleva,” he said, and raised his hand to touch her breast through the fabric.
She let it stay there. After all, she knew the ways of the world. She even moved her hand toward his pants because this was how she knew to survive. A caught breath made her look up just in time to catch a glimpse of Linda’s face in the crack of an open door. They both heard the click of Linda’s bedroom door shutting.
“But I don’t need this kind of temptation in my house,” James said, pulling away.
* * *
Marie planned the time carefully—one of the days Linda would not be home till late evening.
She woke that morning, heart empty but light. Dusted the dustless house, then she clicked off the television in each room, one at a time, as if bidding adieu to acquaintances. She shut off the omnipresent air conditioner that tightened her shoulders and made her skin pock into goose bumps, made her nose run. That made living inside the box-house like living on the scentless, atmosphere-free moon and made the outside, with its bugs and smells and humidity, unreal and finally intolerable. She cranked open the windows; the rusted metal struts stuck, then screamed from long disuse as she forced them open; the panes of glass angled out like stiff, broad sails in the wind, letting loose a small universe of cobwebs never before visible.
She unbolted the shiny, brass latches on the French doors and spread them wide in a gesture of welcome, but of course no one was there, just the blast and tumble of hot, boiling air pushing its way in. The smell of wet grass and flowers, hot-baked, like perfume, calmed her. More faintly, the bite of salt, the flat sea smell of rocks and kelp, all of this shoving itself where before it had been denied—inside the sepulchral white box.
* * *
Marie prepared herself breakfast. First, four pieces of toast, greasy with butter, and on each piece she swirled a different jam: strawberry, blueberry, apricot, and plum. She drank from a carton of orange juice, ate a bowl of cereal, with blueberries and bananas. She made strong coffee, then poured cream into the entire pot, took that and a mug out on the patio. Sitting on a chair under an umbrella, she drank cup after cup until the pot was empty, savoring that morning more intensely than she had any other day in her life.
When she was ready, she made her way into Linda’s bedroom.
She took off all her clothes at the foot of Linda’s bed, then, on a whim, crawled onto the mattress, sprawled out in a big X with her head nested on the down pillows as she looked out the French doors to the pool beyond. She wondered what it must be like to have another life, Linda’s life, to marry James and live happily. But it was useless. Salvation, even salvation so close that one can see, hear, touch, and eat it, but that’s not one’s own, was maddening. Salvation just out of reach undoubtedly one of the first causes of cruelty in the world.
How to explain that this new life was harder than the one Marie left? Because here there was plenty—denied. Nothing here for her, simply a caretaker of other people’s things. Nothing that didn’t come with a price tag that would destroy the little that was left of value inside her.
She rolled over and picked up the phone, called Jean-Alexi’s number. More and more lately, he had been strange and jacked up on the phone, barely hearing what she said. Coca said that he was more involved with selling drugs, taking them, too. His liquor license fell through. He was losing himself. No one answered.
She rose and moved into Linda’s bathroom, turned on the lights, and saw her blackness reflected many times over in the mirrors. Those feet, those legs, hips, breasts, that throat, that kinked hair, none of it worthy of belonging in that bathroom? Wouldn’t James gladly exchange Marie for Linda in his arms? Wouldn’t he rather fuck her? Marie, who had never had sex with a man she loved, except maybe one, and even him she was not sure of. Love a luxury not allowed the desperate. Who had now been celibate for over two years. Why was she undeserving of love? She took a long bath, scented her skin with the expensive oils from Linda’s cabinet, then dried herself on the plush towels that she washed and stacked, but was not allowed to use. She walked into the closet, turned on the light, inhaled the scent of the lavender sachets that she herself had put in those drawers and shelves so that Linda didn’t have to smell her own odor.
She pulled out shoes and put on one pair after another. She chose a pair of strappy, gold sandals with a tall heel that made her legs look a mile long, the calf muscles bunched. Her stride was long and graceful thanks to Jean-Alexi, and she walked back and forth in front of the mirrors, mesmerized by her own feet. Those feet belonged in that room. How was it that the smallest of changes could transform how one felt about one’s place in the world?
She searched for the dress she loved more than any other—a long, dark dress that had large flowers in red and gold twisting around the body. She felt at home in that dress, having worn it countless other times for games of make-believe, pulling it over her head, letting the silky fabric slide over her skin. The straps, thin and dark, were invisible on her shoulders. Almost as if the dress were painted on her. She searched through the drawers and put on black lace panties, a lacy black bra. She sprayed herself heavily with Linda’s most expensive French perfume. At that late date, she was not too modest to say that she had never looked finer. The woman in the mirror belonged in that house.
She swept the bottles of pills in the medicine chest into a towel and took them with her to the living room. She stopped in the kit
chen and took the smallest, sharpest paring knife—the one capable of cutting an apple peel as thin as a strand of hair. In the bar, she opened the best bottle of French red wine, poured a glass until it was filled to the brim, and took a deep drink to fortify herself.
She swallowed down two bottles of pills with the wine, then rose to refill her glass. In the sudden calmness, she was sure it was enough pills, but needed more wine to celebrate. The blade ran smoothly across her skin, so that she had to hold her wrist close to her blurred eyes to see the delicate thread of blood swell.
She sat in Linda’s long, black dress. Black dress on black body on white couch in white room. A black speck in a white universe. Carefully she held the glass of red wine because if it spilled, it would be the same color as her blood. Red on red on black on white. That simple. A tragedy of color.
Time passed through her mind like a needle pulling thick thread so that it seemed either a blink of an eye or an eternity. She thought of pouring the wine on the carpet, a vévé to bring Papa Legba to open his gates for her. The sun was higher, beating overhead, unbearably hot. The room humid as a greenhouse. All she could feel was a sensation of floating, as if she were one of those colored balloons that skinned its way across the ceiling when let loose. She longed to burst, to be released.
She thought of home, lòt bò dlo, going to the other side of the water, for the first time in a long while. She could bear the current pain because she knew she was about to return to the small house by the ocean where she was raised, loved in Maman’s arms. The sun made the tin roof a burning semaphore at noon. As unlike the room she breathed in that moment as two rooms could be. Burning and hot and blinding. Her maman—had she ever been so young? Prettier even than the Minna in the mirror. She felt a stab of happiness that had not been hers since early childhood.
Maman used to say when someone died that they were returning by the slow road lan Guinée, to Guinea. She told of her grandparents in Africa having been made to circle the forgetting trees so that they wouldn’t pine away to go home. That’s what the slaves said, and what was Marie if not a slave in every sense that counted?