“The kitchen’s that way,” the old woman says.
The marble hallway leads past a curving staircase and dark library to a modern kitchen that’s all steel and granite. The recessed lights cast pools of cool light. The sink is empty, the counters clean enough to eat off, but the white floor is stained and scuffed. Nothing I can’t handle. Some soap and hot water and scrubbing, hands-and-knees work that I’m good at, with wax and buffing—
Rocco growls from behind me. He’s sitting now next to Mrs. Vasilyeva, who is fiddling with something in her lap.
“Maybe you could put Rocco in another room?” I ask, trying to sound deferential.
“He likes to watch.” She lifts up a video camera and gives me a smile of her own. “I like to watch, too.”
My throat dries up. “Okay. I need to use the bathroom first.”
The bathroom is down the hall. I lock the door behind me, admire the cleanliness of the handicapped-accessible tub, and then shimmy out the window over the toilet. My uniform tears on the sill and I think my bucket cracks the glass. Soon I’m sprinting away from Brooklyn Heights and yelling at Alexi on my cell phone.
“I can’t believe you sent me to that crackpot! I was going to be the star of some snuff video on the internet!”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Who knew?”
“You’ve got to let me into the banya to clean it.”
“I can’t. I’m in Jersey. Why don’t you go see Ivan Federov?”
“I can’t do that.”
“What are your other choices?”
Clean an alley full of puke and other excretions. Been there, done that. Swab down the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall. Hard to do since they opened a police sub-station across the street. Hospitals always need cleaning but I’ve nearly been caught twice—the black dress and tea apron always stand out.
The need to clean something makes my skin itch like there’s an army of germs dancing all over me. The compulsion to scrub the world fresh has me strung out like a heroin addict needing a big bad fix.
You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, Mom always says.
I don’t have Federov’s number, so I go straight to St. Mark’s Ave and slip through an ajar side entrance. Up on the fifth floor, I knock on Federov’s door. The hallway is too bright, too open, and I feel totally vulnerable. Please don’t let Mike be home and waiting for a pizza. A minute of silence passes, and the only sound is the humming of the fluorescent light overhead. I tap on Federov’s door again.
Mike opens his door.
“Hey,” he says, face neutral. “You’re back.”
I nod, unable to think of a single thing to say.
He leans against his doorjamb. His hair is tousled and there are sofa creases on his face, as if he fell asleep while watching TV. “Ivan went into the hospital a few days ago. Broken hip, but he’s okay.”
“Do you have a key?” I ask. Surely beyond Federov’s door there are dirty dishes that need scouring, and dust bunnies under his bed, and a coffee filter turning moldy.
Mike’s eyebrows go up. “You look—kind of anxious. Are you okay?”
At times like this, my nose goes on high alert. From behind Mike I smell something going bad—old Chinese food, I think, sour with old soy. If he doesn’t move out of the way I’m going to knock him flat and storm the apartment.
“Please don’t ask questions,” I tell him. “It’s just this thing. I need to clean something. Your kitchen or your bathroom or anything you want, but please.”
He hesitates, maybe cataloging my mental state for the call to 911. But then he says, “Go for it,” and steps aside.
His apartment is dark and minimalist, with some old movie posters hanging on the wall over secondhand furniture and bookshelves filled with DVD cases. The Chinese food is right where I expect it to be, and there are some dirty dishes in the sink, but aside from that I’ve evidently met the cleanest firefighter in Brooklyn. His bathroom has only one stray hair in the sink. The tub looks like it was scoured by magic brushes from some cartoon TV commercial. Even his bed his perfectly made, and smells freshly laundered.
“What are you, a clean fanatic?” I demand of him.
He laughs. “Says the lady in the maid uniform.”
My face heats up in a fresh new wave of humiliation.
Mike stops smiling. “Tania, sit down. Please. Tell me what’s going on. Is this a bipolar kind of thing? You can trust me. I’m not going to judge you for it.”
Trust him. Trust him not. This is how my father met my mother: he was walking by Brighton Beach Pier early one winter morning when he recognized the tracks of a wolf in the sand. Not your usual kind of wolf, he thought. He took to sitting out at night with a scraps of meat. It took months of patience before he befriended the animal, who was skittish and wary of humans. He followed it through the dark streets of Coney Island until it climbed through a bedroom window. In the morning my mother came down to breakfast to find him drinking coffee with her parents, and their courtship started.
“I will tell you everything if you find me something to clean,” I vow.
He purses his lips, deep in thought, and then grabs his shoes. “Come on.”
Six blocks from Mike’s apartment, there’s an old building that was once a Jewish hospital. The courtyard is locked off by big iron gates. Mike has a key to the gates and then to a basement Laundromat that must have been the hospital laundry once. He flicks on some of the fluorescent lights and steers me past some old industrial washers and dryers. Dozens of paper and plastic sacks sit piled in the corner.
“How do you feel about doing laundry for strangers?” he asks.
Clothes that reek of vomit, sweat, spilled alcohol, stale cigarette smoke. Sleeping bags and towels with stains of brown and red and yellow. Underwear and clothing with very questionable stains on them.
“What is this place?” I ask.
“Homeless shelter,” Mike says. “I volunteer here. There’s about two hundred people sleeping on cots upstairs, and none of them can afford a Laundromat.”
I can’t help myself. I kiss him right there and then.
I’m in heaven.
Mike stays with me all night. I tell him he doesn’t have to; he says I owe him a story.
Between soap and bleach, fabric softener and lint sheets, I reveal the improbable tale of my parents and the were-curse, and what drives me to the streets every full moon. He drinks soda from a vending machine and nods in all the right places. He lets me teach him how to fold a fitted sheet, and we have a long conversation about the best way to fold socks (tie them together or invert one into the other), and near dawn he looks at the clock and says, “We better scoot before the day shift gets here.”
“What are you going to tell them?” I ask.
“That they were visited by the laundry fairy godmother.” He stretches with a grimace; plastic chairs are bad for the back. “I bet they’ll beg you to come back tonight.”
By the time we lock everything up and go outside, the sky is gray with pre-dawn light. The air is fresh and clean. Or as fresh and clean as it gets in a metropolis of grime. Mike says, “Let me take you home,” but that means he’ll know where I live. He’ll learn my last name. The were-maid’s final secrets will be revealed.
“Look, thanks for all you did—” I start.
He puts one finger to my lips to silence me. Uses the other to point at the sky.
“See that? It’s beautiful. Like dirty dishwater.” He steps closer, a warm smile on his face. “I don’t care that you’re cursed. I want to spend more time with you. Full moon, half moon, no moon. Maid uniform or blue jeans. Apron or high heels.”
It’s a risk, trusting people. They can break your heart as surely as lemon rinds make a garbage disposal smell nice. But I kiss Mike anyway. He touches my hair just as the rising sun makes my hair unwind and yellow gloves dissolve. The were-maid is gone for now, and cleaning is the last thing on my mind.