Merging into the right lane before her exit, all she got was a measly middle finger, which had about as much effect as a blown kiss or a catcall — the juvenile methods of American men. The frequency with which these methods were applied to her was an absurdity of daily life. Though it wasn’t really an absurdity if you looked around. Women left home in unfitted pants, wrinkled jackets, and the ultimate ignominy: sneakers. It didn’t have to be a stiletto, but anything less than two inches was indecent! Of course she’d been prepared for the sorry state of the American female; the stereotype had spread across the globe. The surprise was that her friends — Lyuba, Vera, Irina — hadn’t wasted any time. Their physical assimilation had been total. In the few years Marina hadn’t seen them, they’d lost their waistlines, cropped their hair to ear length, and fully converted to the religion of comfort, wearing trousers that could fit a diaper inside and the modern equivalent of bast shoes. They’d all been equally brusque with themselves, as if one day they all shook hands on their resignation and since then held monthly evaluations. Marina made a promise not to succumb. She smoked twice as hard and pretended to dislike the taste of French fries. A passion for Coca-Cola was impossible to conceal.
She pulled into the cobblestone driveway of a house at which it was best not to look directly so as to avoid being overwhelmed by its dimensions. It was two houses, really, conjoined. Better to take it room by room, which she did every Saturday, though a once-a-week scrub-down hardly kept the place out of the grip of chaos. A concatenation of bolts was unlocked, and the fancy door from the Russian-owned door store swung open.
Oh, said Marina.
It’s me, said Shmulka. Charna fled today.
Shmulka was younger than Marina but had six kids under the age of ten, all boys, all running around the house in formal attire. Isolated locks of hair hung like the strings you pulled in the old country to flush the toilet. Charna, who usually opened the door, was Marina’s age and had her own flock. The patriarchs were brothers. They wouldn’t have hired Marina were she not Jewish, but neither did they consider her Jewish. She considered them the filthiest people she’d ever met in her life. They paid by the hour. Maximal accumulation didn’t take much ingenuity.
Charna’s out? said Marina, eyeing the carpets.
She had to go by the hospital, said Shmulka, relocking bolt twelve.
Everything OK, I hope?
Another tsibele in the bake, it looks like.
Enough! At this point the functionality of Charna’s oven was suspect. The tsibelach she baked in there were deteriorating in quality. The last one looked plain inedible. But what would Charna do without recourse to being out of commission? As a girl she had laughed. She had that look, as if her mind had been blasted by laughter. Her eyes were like neglected goldfish bowls, the water unchanged for months. Surrounding wrinkles were many and deep. The laughter had leaked out for the most part, but occasionally it still shook her. It hadn’t evolved — little girl’s laughter. She was squat, haggard, prematurely aged, and she was always home, whereas her sister-in-law, Shmulka, the size of a pinkie finger, was hot with ideas, always hatching up plans about opera drapes or flowerpots or skirt-length alterations and out attending to them. But here was Shmulka with her round brown eyes gleaming under a heavy, dead wig. Her entire life force battled that wig, which nevertheless remained fastened to her scalp, though not securely; she clawed at it so hard it slid onto her forehead or down one side. Although a shaved head was supposed to be underneath, Shmulka had a full head of thick chestnut curls. The layering probably caused discomfort, but Shmulka wasn’t one for shortcuts.
Though Marina arrived early and left late, the husband-brothers rarely made an appearance. Being tall, broad-shouldered, handsome, they confounded preconceptions. They were like actors playing Hasidic brothers in a Hollywood movie. Marina dreaded their entrance. Only when they were around did she suddenly transform into a cleaning lady. They could step over her abandoned ankle without a glance in the direction of her head. It was hard to maintain illusions around them, though objectively it would seem they were the ones to have strayed from reality.
You need what? said Shmulka.
Marina looked at her, not comprehending.
To go by the closet…
Don’t — I know where is all what I need.
She began with the basement — a windowless space filled with every gadget and contraption ever created and put on this planet. She intended to compile a list of these devices — or rather their descriptions, since aside from the few she recognized from late-night infomercials, the majority of their names and functions eluded her — and submit this list to a committee that kept track of… Jewish history? Hoarder mentality? Basements of the twentieth century? The problem would be figuring out which committee most deserved the list, and if no one knew what to make of it, at least they’d put it on file. The fact that she might be the only person to set eyes on this basement was disconcerting. Of course other cleaning ladies had seen it, but they didn’t count, because they were cleaning ladies. Marina was cleaning only because life reserved its most pungent humor for those special enough to get the joke.
Though the bathroom was often cited as the horrible representative of cleaning-lady duties, Marina enjoyed her time there. It was dense and fertile ground, offering plenty of opportunities to linger. The shower curtains were where the cash was. Marina took her time with every fiber and slit. Then she moved on, with less enthusiasm, to floors. Wall-to-wall carpeting was a chief discovery in terms of pure shock value. Marina had just one question: Why? The carpets were like a bib for the house, soaking up everything that never made it to the mouth. As Marina was brushing the crud out of the carpet, Shmulka burst into the room. An emergency had come up, and she needed to go out, but would be back to the house in twenty minutes max. The only emergency was that if Shmulka stayed inside five more minutes, she would spontaneously combust and pieces of her flesh, which Marina suspected would be very tough and rubbery, would have to be brushed out of the carpet fibers. In Shmulka’s eyes: guilt, apology, a plea for understanding. She and Charna obviously had an agreement that the cleaning lady should never be left unsupervised. When Charna was around, this wasn’t a problem, as she would’ve gladly spent the rest of her days without another gulp of fresh air, but Shmulka had ideas. She was addicted to the world’s possibilities.
I’m fast, said Shmulka with her emaciated neck. Watch the kiddies. Make sure they don’t… you know.
How many kiddies were currently in the house and to whom they belonged was irrelevant. They were runty, underdeveloped, somersaulting. Once in a while, they flew down the stairs, let out a shriek, carried on. In their crooked mouths, the true shapes of which couldn’t be determined as they were never closed for long enough, was a sprinkling of tiny teeth. Teeth everywhere. A few half-submerged molars inside their large ears would’ve been no surprise. The older kids knew who was one of them and who wasn’t better than anybody, and to them Marina was a large cockroach methodically covering their house. They couldn’t kill her (she was too large), so they ignored her. But Shmulka’s three-year-old, whom Marina called Krolik because his real name was unpronounceable, followed her around as she cleaned, rarely deviating from her path. She would’ve chosen him anyway. He was more aristocratic in the cheek. And Marina’s principle with babies was the fatter the better. She encouraged largeness, equating size with importance: A big baby mattered more than a small one. Krolik could beat up his older siblings, which was admirable. Not to mention he liked Marina and wanted to hold discussions with her. Marina’s English was roughly on a par with Krolik’s — both could use the practice.