by Kim Purcell
“Good?” Lillian said.
“Very good. Thank you.” Hannah sucked on the chocolate, but didn’t enjoy it nearly as much with Lillian watching her like she was a poor village girl. She glanced at the clock on the nightstand. It was eleven. “Well, I’d better let you change.”
“We’re both girls.” Lillian laughed. “Don’t you want to hear about my night?”
She was trapped. “Yes, of course.”
Lillian took out a bottle of moisturizer from her vanity and rubbed it on her legs while she told Hannah about the restaurant. “It was really upscale, you know, like New York. It was a dark gray building, no sign out front, but in back, we went through some industrial doors. It looked like a warehouse. I wondered where he was taking me.” She laughed, massaging the moisturizer between her perfectly manicured toenails. Hannah saw a flash of her black lace panties and looked away as Lillian continued. “But then there was a doorman and we were in this magnificent place with an open skylight and a garden with a brook running around the tables and the prices—wow—they were high. It was twenty dollars for just the salad.” She laughed, then added quickly, “Not that we have to worry. Sergey’s new business is doing well. I’m so proud of him.”
That was a good opening. She could ask about the money, Hannah thought, but then she heard the unmistakable sound of a garbage container rolling down the driveway next door. She jumped up. Lillian gave her a questioning look as she closed up the bottle of moisturizer and placed it back on her vanity.
“I have a few more things to do,” Hannah said.
“Always working,” Lillian said, clicking her tongue. “Sometimes, Hannah, you’re a little boring. Now that you are in America, you should develop some interests.”
Develop some interests? Lillian didn’t even care enough to ask what her interests were. If she did, she’d know that she’d love just an hour during the day to sit down and read a book. Or maybe go for a walk up to the Hollywood sign. Anything but work all day long.
“That’s a great idea,” Hannah said, trying to keep the bite out of her voice. “Maybe I could start going to English school at night.”
She listened to the boy’s footsteps back up the driveway. There was one more container for the trash and then one for recycling.
“Every night?” Lillian asked, perfuming her breasts with little finger dabs. “You don’t even speak a word. Why don’t you study by yourself from an English grammar book? I think one student in the family is enough. When I’m finished, perhaps you can take a class.”
“Do you have a grammar book I could read?”
Lillian looked annoyed. “Of course I do. I’ll give it to you tomorrow.”
Another garbage container rolled down the neighbor’s driveway. “Thank you very much,” Hannah gushed. “I’ll let you finish up. Good night.” She turned to go. If she didn’t run, the boy next door would be gone.
“Why are you in such a hurry?” Lillian asked.
Hannah stopped. “I have to take out the garbage,” she said, making one last attempt.
“I’ll get Sergey to do it tomorrow morning.”
“It has leftover fish in it.” Hannah shrugged like it didn’t matter to her. “It will make the kitchen smell.”
Lillian hesitated, then said quickly, “I’ll deal with it. You go to bed. I want some time alone with my husband.” Lillian flashed her a wicked smile.
Hannah headed out of the room, disappointed. In the garage, she plunked down on the sofa. Her stomach ached, she was so desperate for a friend. It had been over a month since she’d had a normal conversation with anyone. And she needed to learn English, to feel like she was improving at something other than cleaning. Sometimes when Lillian wasn’t around, Maggie read to her in English and explained the words to her. But without practice, she’d never be fluent.
She picked up one of the children’s English books and read it a few times, until finally she realized the house was silent. No television, no stairs creaking, no laughter, nothing. Perhaps they’d gone to bed and she could sneak outside, maybe go for a walk if the boy wasn’t there.
She opened the door to the laundry area to listen. The house was quiet. She took off her slippers, slid down the hall, and peeked around the entrance to the living room, just in case. She froze. They hadn’t bothered to go upstairs.
Lillian’s red dress had been flung on the white carpet and shimmered like a pool of blood. She had a zit in the middle of her back. Sergey groaned and looked up at Hannah.
She yanked her head back around the corner. He’d definitely seen her. Maybe he’d think she’d been watching them. That was disgusting.
She slid down the hall in her socks, hoping, at least, that Lillian would not hear her. She hurried around the corner, past the washer and dryer, and through the door to the garage, where she jumped into her sleeping bag on the sofa.
Her heart pounded. She was breathing hard. And her foot was twitching inside her sleeping bag. She made it stop and slowed down her breathing. There was no reason to be afraid. They were having sex. She’d been warned to stay in the playroom, but she hadn’t listened. It was her own fault.
Through the door of the garage, she heard a moan. Her stomach twisted and she was back inside the taxi with the bad agent, outside the airport, waiting to see if he would give her the plane ticket. He was undoing his zipper, telling her she could pay him for his troubles in another way. She clenched her teeth together. Stop thinking about it.
She could not listen to their moans. It was too much. She covered her ears and started to hum an old village tune her mother had loved. She heard her mother’s voice in her head: Spin, turn around, up and down. Spin . . .
Chapter Seventeen
It was the middle of the night. Light drifted into the garage from the hallway. Sergey was standing in the doorway, holding his hands behind his back. Hannah closed her eyes so he’d think she was asleep. Even from the sofa, she could smell the vodka on his breath.
She heard his footsteps cross the room, and then he crouched by her and brought his face close, as if he was about to kiss her. She jerked back and let out a short scream. He pressed a calloused hand to her mouth.
“Shhh,” he said softly. “It’s only me.”
Only you? Her heart pounded in her chest. Why did he think she wouldn’t be afraid of him?
“Don’t scream,” he said. “Promise?”
She nodded, fully intending to scream if he tried anything.
He lifted his hand. “I’m sorry I scared you.”
“What are you doing in here?” she asked, tears in her voice, despite herself.
“I have a present for you.”
She sat up on the sofa, holding the sleeping bag up over her chest. She was wearing a T-shirt, but she’d taken off her bra to sleep. “Can’t you give it to me tomorrow?”
“No.”
“Turn on the light then,” she said, thinking that it had better be a real present, not the present of his middle-aged body. Maybe he was going to pay her.
He pulled the long cord on the bare fluorescent lightbulb in the center of the room. She blinked and pulled the sleeping bag even higher. He walked back and picked up a pink rectangular box from the floor next to the sofa, not unlike a cake box, and handed it to her.
It was surprisingly light. She opened the lid. Under a mound of pink tissue, she discovered seven pairs of cotton underwear, all with different colors and designs. She rubbed the fabric between her fingers. It was soft, not scratchy, and had a thick elastic band with a brand name written on it. Not cheap. But she would have preferred money.
She thought of how Lillian would react if she learned he’d bought her underwear and tried to hand back the box. “I can’t accept it.”
He stepped back, refusing to take it. “I saw your panties hanging on the rack.”<
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Hannah glanced over at the old wooden rack where she hung delicate clothes, including her own underwear, not because they were fancy like Lillian’s, but because the dryer had already destroyed four pairs and she had only two left.
“They are not the kind of panties for any girl to wear.”
If these were the sexy kind, lace or silk, or even bikinis, she’d refuse, but they were simple cotton underwear. She picked up the striped pink pair and stretched out the thick elastic band. At least these panties wouldn’t slide down while she was cleaning the floor.
“What will I tell Lillian if she sees them?” she asked.
“Tell her that you bought them,” he said. “The store is by the Russian store on Santa Monica Boulevard across from the Whole Foods grocery store.”
“Good luck getting her to believe that,” she said sarcastically. “Lillian doesn’t let me leave the house or the yard. Ever.” Despite her attempt to act like it didn’t matter, her eyes started to tear up. “And she hasn’t paid me yet, so I wouldn’t have the money to buy anything.”
Understanding dawned on Sergey’s face, and he seemed to feel a little guilty. He cleared his throat. “Tell her you brought money from Moldova, and I’ll try to arrange for you to go out of the house, maybe to do an errand.”
“Okay.” She waited for him to say more about the money, but he hurried to the door and turned off the light.
“Wait!” she said. “What about my pay?”
He cleared his throat. “Lillian deals with all the household expenses, but I’ll talk to her.”
To him, she was just another household expense. Soap, toilet paper, Hannah.
“Thank you,” she said, hoping that if she seemed grateful for what he had given her already, perhaps he’d give more. “Thank you for the underwear.”
“Good night, Hannah,” he said, speaking her name through the dark with a tenderness that surprised her. She realized he cared for her, at least a little bit, and she wondered why.
Chapter Eighteen
The next day, Hannah was standing at a bus stop with a bench. She wanted to sit, because it was so odd to have a bench at a bus stop, but she didn’t, for fear that the bus wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t mess up this opportunity. She wasn’t going anywhere exciting, just to a store, but it was more freedom than she’d had for the month and a half since she’d arrived in America.
She’d been sent to buy madeleines, little vanilla sponge cookies. Paavo’s wife, Rena, loved them, and since she was coming over in half an hour, Sergey had been able to convince Lillian to let Hannah go.
It was her first time standing on the sidewalk of a busy street in America. Cars were buzzing past her, but the sidewalk felt ghostlike compared with the crowded sidewalks of Chişinău. All she could see was one homeless man with a shopping cart full of cans half a block away. Lillian had warned her not to talk to anyone, because people might try to steal her money or she could be arrested if anyone suspected she was illegal, but there was no one to talk to anyway.
The number 14 bus came up. A female driver? Strange, she thought, and started to walk past her, but the woman held up a hand with long painted nails to stop her. “Money?”
In Moldova, on the big buses, a money collector came around and gave change, and on the small buses, people would sit down first and pass their money up to the person in front of them. The money would travel over many sets of hands until it reached the driver, and the driver would pass the change back in the same way. Hannah looked down at her map and instructions. Lillian had written only that it cost one dollar thirty-five, which seemed like a fortune, compared with two lei, the equivalent of seventeen cents, which she paid at home.
Hannah fumbled in the small silver change purse Lillian had given her and tried to give the money to the driver, but she waved her hand in front of her face. “I can’t take that. Here.” She pointed one of her long fingernails at a metal contraption.
Embarrassed, Hannah searched for a place in the side to put the money, but she couldn’t see any holes. The driver tapped a long, obvious slot on the top and gave her a look like she had to be the stupidest person who ever lived. The money slid down, made a couple of beeping noises, and the driver raised her eyebrows as if to ask why she was still standing there.
Hannah continued down the long aisle and the bus rolled forward. She sat down in the middle of the bus and shrank down into the seat. She’d thought taking a bus would be no problem, but nothing was familiar. In Moldova, the bus always held a blend of businesspeople and students, Romanians and Russians, young and old, poor and middle class. But on this bus, everybody looked poor with old clothes, and they all had dark skin. She was the only light-skinned teenager, and it seemed dangerous to stand out.
At the front of the bus, in the seats for old people, a Latino man with a strange fishnet stocking on his head was staring at her. What if he sat next to her? She slid her hand in the wrist strap of Lillian’s change purse and looked out the window. The bus was passing houses now, but ahead it looked like there were more stores. She looked back at the man with the fishnet stocking, but he’d lost interest in her and was now looking down at his basketball shoes. Above his head, a bee was crawling along the window. Its behind bent in and kissed the glass. Hannah winced, worried for him. She hated bees more than anything. In the village, there were so many bees that it was scary to go to the outhouse.
The bus stopped at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland. There was a doughnut shop on the corner called Donut Time. A tall, muscular woman strode out in a short, hot pink dress. Hannah stared at the woman’s square jaw and realized she was a man. Her first transvestite.
She thought of her uncle Vladi. When she was just eight, she’d gone with her parents to visit Vladi and Babulya in Gura Bicului. Hannah had been so excited to see them that she’d run from the mini bus stop, like she always did, down the dusty road, and through their front door, yelling, “I’m here!”
Vladi was standing in the middle of the living room next to his Ukrainian egg art table, kissing a skinny dark-haired man, his gentle fingers clenching the man’s jeans. He stepped back quickly, but Hannah had seen everything. Her mouth hung open. Vladi held up a shaking hand, as if he was stopping a bus that was about to run him over. Perhaps he thought she was about to scream. She could hear her parents outside, talking to her babushka as they came toward the house. The other man hurried out the back door.
“Please don’t say anything,” Vladi had begged.
“I won’t,” she’d promised, and she never had, not even when he went missing.
The bus honked at someone. Hannah looked at the street sign outside—La Brea. Up the street, she could see the Hollywood sign.
Hannah sighed. The bad agent’s words came into her head. “You don’t know how to listen, do you? You’re just like your uncle.” She had been opening the door to the taxi at that moment, her whole body shaking, and she blinked back at him. “Petru?” Volva gave her a look. “The other one. The sick one.” Then he told her to get out of the taxi.
She looked back at the bee. It was crawling toward her. Someone had found out about Vladi, that was for sure. If Volva knew, that was a bad sign.
“Hi,” a voice said.
She looked up to see the neighbor boy standing right next to her, smelling of baby powder deodorant. He looked down at her and smiled. She gave him a quick smile back, making sure to keep her lips closed and her teeth covered.
He was so close, she could see every detail of his face. His nose curved to the side, just a bit, something she hadn’t noticed from far away. His blue eyes were framed with long blond eyelashes, each separated and glossy, and his cheeks were red as if he’d just been running, maybe to catch the bus.
She forced herself to speak. “Hello.”
“What’s up?” he said.
She rea
lly didn’t know how to answer that. She stared at him, feeling foolish.
“You live next door to me,” he said, as if he were reminding her.
“Yes,” she said, surprised that he’d said she lived next door, instead of that she worked next door. She realized he didn’t know she was just a maid. For all he knew, she was still a girl with possibilities. She moved over into the empty seat beside her, and to her relief, he sat down.
“Where are you headed?” he asked.
She didn’t know what “headed” meant, but he’d said “where,” so she figured he was probably asking where she was going. “Store,” she said, making sure to keep her lips curled over her crooked teeth as she spoke, well aware that American girls did not have teeth like hers.
“Oh,” he said, glancing out the window. The street was lined with restaurants, banks, shops, and grocery stores. Her mind was clogged with Russian, and she feared if she tried to speak in English, he wouldn’t understand her at all. In Russian, she wasn’t as talkative as Katya, but she certainly knew how to have a conversation.
She thought of a question in English. “You go to school?”
“Not in the summer,” he said.
Of course not. She winced at her own stupidity.
He continued, “I thought I’d go to Santa Monica, maybe hit the beach.”
Almost nothing made sense. Hit the beach? She couldn’t even have a basic conversation. There was an uncomfortable pause. His nose twitched and his cheeks turned red. She realized he was just as nervous as she was, and this realization helped her find the words. “The beach? I no go to beach. I—”
The bee zipped around his head, straight toward her.
“Aaah!” She waved her hands in front of her face.
It landed on the window by her head. She jumped up in her seat and fell backward onto the boy’s lap. His hand fluttered near her, as if he was afraid to touch her, and then he patted her arm tentatively. “Take it easy.” He let out an embarrassed laugh.
“Oop, sorry.” She slid back into her seat, but the bee came back, buzzing around her head. She screamed, waving her hand in front of her face.