Entangled Objects. Susanne Paola Antonetta
surgery Cate—would come across much as Ef herself did at work. To be alive in the right way required others, and their looking, which handed back to you the story you wanted to tell.
Ef thought of a phrase she ran across in a book left behind by a guest, folded open on the night table: a fleeting-improvised man. A memoir by a man named Paul Schreber. Well, she was a fleeting-improvised woman.
Ef began to feel the shoes send out a certain energy towards her, from her cart, as she cleaned. Once in a rush—she had spent far too much time in a room, absorbed in television—she knocked them over with her bucket. Nothing happened to the shoes, but the thought of them upended made her dizzy, till she could stoop down and straighten them.
The shoes reminded her of something she’d believed as a child—that her things had feelings only she could understand. At night her mother brushed Ef’s long hair, then tossed the brush into a drawer in the bathroom. As her mother drew the covers around her Ef would feel with intensity the brush’s feelings—cast sideways, coughing, choking on Ef’s hair. Ef would have to climb out of bed, remove the hair from the brush and place it carefully back, straight, with bristles pointing upward. Ef’s mother watched her do this—Ef would tell her mother what she was doing, if her mother asked—then she went into the living room and whispered to Ef’s father.
Ef did not believe as a child that there could be things that had no feelings. Nor was she certain of that now.
At the end of each workday Ef put her outfit on, feeling the inevitable end of this game of playing dress-up, yet smoothing her blouse down into the skirt with a sense of reprieve and release.
One day she stood at the eighth-floor elevator at the end of the day, slightly behind a guest, a man with short hair the color of a pat of butter. The elevators were old and ceremonious in this hotel, announcing their coming with a sound like a rushing of wings.
The doors opened and a waiter half-fell out. Another waiter stood behind him and both were laughing, clowning around. The man with the butter-colored hair stepped back, hard, to avoid colliding with the waiter, and his foot hit the toe of her right shoe with an audible crunch of leather, a sound like a hard crust breaking. He only crushed the cotton balls, but it knocked her off balance and she fell forward, pitching over as he grabbed and held her.
“Oh my God,” he said, “Oh my God.” He looked at her shoe, noticeably dented, at her body wobbling in his arms. “You’ve broken something. I broke your toe.” She said nothing, enjoying the fabric of his suit, soft and complex with a sheen to it, the cologne he wore, a smell almost like cucumber, but nice.
“You must be in agony.” His eyes swept from her eyes to her feet. “Can I call 911?” Then he bit his lip, as if he realized calling an ambulance for a broken toe would be ridiculous. But she could see from his slipping eyes that he had no idea what to do; he felt responsible and like he should drive her to get medical care, and probably pay, but he didn’t know how to say all this to the woman he saw in front of him at this moment—a smartly dressed young woman, one who could afford a room in a pricey hotel.
“I’m ok,” she said, not rushing to straighten up and out of his arms. “I’m alright.” She rubbed her fingers along the end of the shoe with a bit of ceremony, pressing down on the cotton balls, as if testing her feet.
“I don’t think anything’s broken. Not broken exactly.” She looked up into his eyes, holding her stepped-on foot in one hand, and leaning into him still. She brought her other hand up to the scarf at her neck, a beautiful silk rectangle of red, yellow, and orange leaves.
“It hurts,” the man said sympathetically. “It’s painful.”
She planted the foot on the floor, wobbling her leg back and forth as if uncertain it could hold her weight. Slowly she pulled out of his arms, favoring her left foot, hoping she was shifting her body in a believable way. She had felt nothing when he squashed the cotton balls, though her eyes and hand had instantly seized on the shoe; she thought it might have been blemished. A thought formed in her head, I am performing, and she had been, though she’d done it without thinking, in the way someone on a show like Crawleys Coming On must do.
“Are you right-handed,” the man said, then, “Oh God that’s idiotic. It’s not like you’d be right-footed,” and then, “I think I should stay with you until I’m sure you’re fine. I’m Tom.”
She extended her scarf hand, smiling weakly.
Tom said, “I was going to grab some dinner. Can I treat you to dinner here?”
In this way Ef ended up eating dinner at a table lit by a votive candle with a white napkin folded like a goose bending its neck toward her, at the hotel where she worked as a chambermaid (they used this word here, chambermaid), wearing clothing stolen from women who might well be in this room, all of them sipping from wine glasses that looked crystalline-ly lovely in the low light, but that she knew were cheap—about half a buck a glass, just well washed. She had a moment of panic entering the room but it went away as soon as she sat down; the low light and the man who held her by the arm, with his suit and tie happening to pick up colors in her scarf and blouse, were both a disguise and an armor. No woman who matched her man so carefully could be a thief.
She had tasted many of the restaurant’s offerings picking up room service trays, a habit all the maids had. She ordered the dry-aged steak with a swiftness that she realized made her seem like a seasoned guest. Ef was impressed with how well she handled this situation; she hadn’t had a boyfriend since high school and had little sense of what a date should feel like—those high school boys had seemed dropped into her world by nature, from some sort of restless social sky.
Tom told her he worked with people but didn’t elaborate. Ef told him she ran a cleaning business, thinking back to her first maid’s job, for a large chain company that had franchises all over. You bought one, the woman who led her group of four maids told her, giving you the right to use their name and advertising. It seemed believable.
“We both have to work with people,” Tom said, buttering bread. “People don’t always know what they want.”
She smiled and nodded her agreement.
Tom ordered a bottle of wine, some type that he ran past her before ordering it, though the words had gone by like music, sound without content. The waiter poured her a generous glass, and Tom kept refilling it. She grew up drinking wine with dinner, her parents’ habit, but she had had little to eat today and she felt very relaxed after finishing her first glass, then a little more than relaxed: swimmy. Her steak tasted delicious, very different from her mother’s made with lemon and oil, and the difference between the two steaks resembled the difference between her old and her new clothing: the old dresses had a kind of beauty, but it was simple and you couldn’t have said a lot about it, while she could have talked and talked about this steak, which she’d only tried before when it was cool and congealed: its tenderness, the way the coating of peppercorns had a charged flavor but little heat, the notes of sweet and cream and mustard in the sauce. The way, like good clothing, the flavors kept subtly changing.
“I like the pepper,” she told Tom, but didn’t want to say too much.
Tom proved to be the kind of person who always had a question he could ask, though he didn’t seem to listen too much to the answers—a good thing, because Ef couldn’t invent much about running a cleaning company, and stuck to responses she had heard from her team leader’s supervisor: You had to clean well—I mean, remind your employees to clean well—under the bed and under the mattress (but never, she left out, mention what you found there to the wives: tissues stuck together with body fluids you didn’t want to think about, used condoms—look, her supervisor said, married couples don’t use condoms, the woman in a marriage gets the birth control). For whatever reason, most of their clients were straight married couples, a man and a woman. You had to clean in such a way that people might believe the woman who lived there had done it, so another girl on the crew got in trouble for folding the toilet paper into points, the way she’d been taught at a hotel.
“So I had to tell the girl, cut it out with the toilet paper!”