Entangled Objects. Susanne Paola Antonetta
was not permitted to steal toiletries from her cleaning cart; in fact, her cleanser and her cloths were monitored. Her supervisor even counted the toothbrushes she gave Ef to use for scrubbing the faucets and the grout on the tile floor.
But the shoes gave her the long, slim, tapered feet she longed for: celebrity feet, she thought. She couldn’t wear heels, but even without heels, these shoes had the kind of slim elegance she associated with women like Angelina Jolie or Cate Crawley. The guest in this room hadn’t thought enough about them to remember them; how could she think to get them back? The woman had kept a bag of seeds on the dresser: sunflower and pumpkin. She had a wide mouth that always seemed ready to twitch into a smile and wore the standard outfit of professional women in this town, a shapeless suit with a sweater under it.
Ef always noticed jackets and sweaters. Her mother had moved here from Naples, Italy, her father from San Juan, Puerto Rico: they had moved here and gone on to be cold for the rest of their lives. They shivered. It seemed cruel to be given a life like that, having to feel the air around you always and in such a personal way, a sting.
Ef began to clean in her uniform and the new shoes, but the backs of the shoes arched far up from her heels when she knelt on her kneepads. And the light leather seemed as if it could draw a stain easily. She changed back into her loafers, dreaming of quitting time and reacquiring her new long feet, the kind of feet that stalked across the screen in the movies or on television, toward a lover maybe, each step planted like a challenge or a promise. She could imagine herself, dressed in these shoes, being watched: purposeful, noteworthy.
Ef brought nice clothing to work with her and changed for the day at 5:30 in the maid’s closet on the eighth floor, the last floor on her daily rounds, taking the elevator down as if she were a guest. Most maids went home in their uniforms, but this moment (unwinding in the chamber of the elevator and blending with guests, not one of whom ever showed a flicker of recognition that she was the woman who waited patiently at their doors while they finished Facebook posts and cell calls so she could clean) had become a ritual. It first happened when she rushed from work to get to a high school friend’s wedding, then became a passage she needed to end her day, going home to where she still lived with her parents, most of her low income gone to pay them rent, the rest saved for what, she didn’t know. In the moving square of the elevator, she felt the possibility of another life.
She had two dresses she’d bought from the Crawley line at Baums Department Store—a line of clothes advertised by—designed by if you believed their press—the Crawley sisters of the reality show Crawleys Coming On. Ef watched the show but not regularly, snapping it on while she cleaned, on various channels, so she might watch old shows, or new ones. What struck her after a while was the sense of the show as having just one timeline, one that cycled back, repeating and repeating: she would often assume episodes fit into the arc she’d just been watching, when in fact the events took place years apart: the same cheating accusations, tears, interspersed with trying on designer dresses that could look like ball gowns or science fiction battle gear. The sisters forking salads. Cell phone calls, photo shoots in which the women were filmed posing for the camera in the midst of already posing for cameras.
One of her two Crawley dresses was a tight red dress advertised as “body contouring,” meaning it squeezed her body in as a girdle would. It was meant, the label said, to nudge out her curves, and it did squeeze her slim body into rolling hills where just plains had been before, out front and along the sides. The other dress was a black one with a plastic belt tooled to look like leather, a belt that tended to pierce her skin. Ef brought both with her to work and chose one to put on at the end of day, unfolding her black hair from the messy cleaning ponytail. She found that when she wore these dresses with the new shoes, though, they changed: the feel of the fabric in her hand, thin and slithery, became cheap; she noticed what she could only think of as the over-simplicity of the red color, the one-note-ness of it, and it began to dawn on her that when people found something like a dress classy, it was due to the dress being complicated, in color and in fabric, in a way she hadn’t understood before.
She also realized that while the dresses did look a little like dresses the sisters and mother wore on Crawleys Coming On, they were simplified, dumbed down, as if the sisters tried to caricature their own style for someone they felt would never get the joke.
The camera followed the many couples on the show, from Cassie the mother and her latest squeeze, to Cate and J-lord, to the other sisters Candy and Carlotta with their boyfriends, up to the first moments of sex. It might be a scene of kissing and foreplay in bed, or maybe argument and giving in—as when Carlotta got pregnant by a boyfriend and refused sex for a while because she thought it would hurt the baby. The cameras would even stay long enough to blur the women’s nude parts, though the men’s never appeared. So all the Crawleys lived in a home in which each family member learned, not long after, when all of the others had had sex: the daughters had this knowledge of their mother, the mother, of her daughters. They knew whether the person wanted to or didn’t really, and even whether it had been good (the cameras often swooped back in as one person rolled off the top of the other).
Did the women want to have sex, or want to have it with the men in the show rather than someone else? When Ef saw them in bed she couldn’t stop wondering about this. Whose desires were expressed in those heaving bodies? Their own, or their director’s? Ef imagined the family having meetings with their director about their ratings and being told which of them should have more sex, and which less. They would accept these directions with a nod of understanding and go to work.
“You, Cate,” he might say. “Let’s see how close we can get to a boob shot without a nipple slip.” And Cate might tell J later to bend his thumb just over her nipple.
“From you, Cassie, not so much,” she imagined the director adding. Or, “we’ll just take the cameras out of your bedroom, thanks.”
And would that ever feel like rejection? Or just like television?
It seemed odd to Ef that people valued things like clothes more because they couldn’t quite pin them down; Ef felt more drawn to what she could name straight off. Though looking at these shoes—what would you call them? Was taupe right, or sand?—she felt an appreciation of such not-this-or-that-ness.
Ef no longer liked what she had. It made her nervous to steal all those cotton balls and the shoes. She kept imagining the woman who’d left them, chewing her seeds and calling the main desk to ask why her shoes hadn’t been returned. The woman had stayed at the hotel in the past, she knew, and was a guest of the Trin Group, one of their big corporate clients. If anyone found out she had taken the shoes, she might be fired. And her job at the Mariposa was a huge step up from her last job, cleaning at the Sheraton, all she could find to do after a year in community college that cost too much and bored her.
On the other hand, her unhappiness with her clothing—and her desire to keep up with her feet—became overwhelming. A few days after she took the shoes, she cleaned a filthy room: used tampons dropped on the bathroom floor, bloody and rank. As she grew angry over the mess Ef noticed a blouse hanging from the towel rack. It caught her eye, the sheen of the fabric that looked soft as human skin, the complexity of the color shading from cream to camel in the folds. The buttons, little fabric-wrapped pearls. Having touched the blouse’s animal softness, it became impossible that it not be hers. It matched her shoes.
You would think—Ef would have thought—that the threat of the loss of her job would, if not keep her from stealing altogether, at least keep her from wearing what she stole at work. But in fact, when she changed at the end of the day now, she wore the blouse, the shoes, and then the skirt and scarf that inevitably followed the blouse and shoes, from another guest’s room, a reasonably neat one at that. Then she waited for the elevator with other guests, most heading down to dinner.
Ef realized how risky this was, the stealing, and then wearing stolen goods at work. But the person she became in these clothes of hers could only exist at the hotel, a woman who came to be in transit, riding between one fixed point and another. As guests in the elevator looked at her, she transformed, became the person she was before only in her imagination. There she could tell her fine-boned body read to others as a body well-exercised, her dark skin as tan and leisured, like Cate Crawley,