Entangled Objects. Susanne Paola Antonetta
makes their husbands romantic.”
Tom smiled appreciatively, though his eyes kept flicking around the room. He had a habit of not really meeting her glance but looking at her until she looked at him, then letting his eyes slip away, though not in a shifty or nervous way. It felt confident, as if he felt certain he knew enough about her, and she liked him for it.
He was a good-looking man, though in a bland way that made him hard to describe. His eyelashes were his most striking feature, long and fair as his hair, palely framing his eyes like brushy halos. “Which room at the hotel is your favorite?” Tom asked. “I love the tub in the window one.” He topped off her glass. Had he bought a second bottle of wine? He might have.
“Me too,” Ef answered, thinking of the shoes.
Ef, even when she wasn’t lying her head off as she was now, often found people hard to talk to. They looked at her in ways she couldn’t interpret, and she felt the things she was saying were making some entirely different impression than the one that formed in her mind as she pulled the words out of their separate places and squashed them together. She rehearsed what she was about to say and anticipated the reaction, but, like a bad actor or unfunny comic, rarely got the response she imagined.
Tom, however, was easy to talk to. It didn’t seem as if he were that interested, just that he could absorb the words bouncing at him and lob them back easily, pleasant, neutral, like someone playing a sport so familiar he probably wasn’t more than a little conscious about it. He didn’t care what rooms she liked, he just wanted to keep the word-ball moving. He had no wedding ring. He was at least a dozen years older than she was, mid-thirties, an age difference that seemed proper as long as the man was the older. Why shouldn’t he want to be with her again?
Tom didn’t blink at spending thirty-two bucks on her steak, and he had the suit and a watch of shiny metal, some real metal that came out of the earth like that, just needing to be polished up, with many smaller wheels telling various things within the larger wheel-face of the watch. They were easy together in a way that promised they could always be easy together, sit together at a table and do this every night.
Ef thought: this is how people develop lives that work. They have good clothes and stand at elevators at nice hotels where someone might step on their shoes and then see them for the first time, see them as a person equally worthy.
She had another thought that caused her to jolt slightly in her seat. It wasn’t just okay in the moment that she had stolen, but it was right in a larger sense: of course, stealing must be the only course of action, and people who did well in life—even those who stayed solidly in place—did it by stealing what they wanted from others, who would steal it too if they got a chance. If nothing else, successful people, like the Crawleys, decided what they wanted to be and changed into it, stealing who they became from God or the fates or whatever you happened to believe created the world as it is, and kept an eye on it.
Ef thought of all her parents’ stories, their sisters and brothers and friends and even a parent who died young of typhoid and cholera and pneumonia. Or the girl known as “my cousin Maria that killed herself, God bless her,” in the words of her mother, who invoked Maria and then crossed herself. Life itself was theft.
Ef noticed, by dessert, which was a custard flavored with roses and topped with a crust of sugar, that Tom’s inattention and looking around the room seemed purposeful in a way she hadn’t realized at first. Being nervous, she hadn’t noticed, but he kept glancing, trying not to let her see, at the entrance to the restaurant, as if looking out for some particular person coming in. As she absorbed this fact, another one hit her: he had mentioned, in the stream of conversation, that he lived in town. So why was he here at all, and how did he know the rooms?
Ef thought it was likely Tom had come to the hotel for an affair, and that the affair had been going on a while. He didn’t want his lover to see him in the restaurant with her; he didn’t want to try to explain the toe and the waiter and his feeling bad towards her. It might have been an affair with someone married, and he might even have taken his own wedding ring off for his lover’s sake. He had his own used condoms stuffed in dark places where they didn’t belong. It was the other thing about life and about stealing, which had just seemed so simple and clear: sometimes what you wanted to steal had been stolen already. And your own desire, though it pierced you as you looked, say, at a blouse on a rack, maybe was not enough.
Ef got up at the end of dinner and did not think about her foot, putting weight on it as usual. Tom walked her to the outside of the hotel, a well-lit circular entrance, and said goodbye.
“I’m so glad you’re alright,” he told her, smiling, which scrunched up his eyes and made his pale lashes that much more visible. They reminded her of the silks from an ear of corn. Shucking ears was one of her jobs around the house—her father loved fresh corn—and she thought of the cling of the silks, which she’d be wiping off her fingers and her clothes for the rest of the day. She imagined his lashes hanging onto him as they fell, fine curls caught in the watch, on the suit. “Please call me if you need anything else.”
Tom ducked down, and in the process looked at Ef’s shoes, and she saw them through his eyes: on her petite body, far too large for her feet.
“I’m fine,” she said, hearing the stiffness in her voice. “Thank you.”
The next day Ef came to work hauling, as always, her new shoes and stolen clothes, in a Shop Rite Grocery Store bag. She put her hand into the bag without thinking about it, fingering the soft fabric of the blouse, the cotton-balled fullness of the shoes, but without a faith she had had the day before. Maybe these things, with all their ties to a certain way of living, still could not bring you to that way of living, the nightly careless conversation at the dinner table. Maybe they could only get you so far and then, like a streak of dye in the hair, they’d fade. She could not remake herself: she was no Crawley.
At work Ef saw Anna, a woman who came to the Mariposa from Portugal. She ran into Anna in the maid’s closet, loading up her cart with tiny bottles of soap and shampoo and skin lotion, as she loaded up hers. She had thought about the possibility of running into Tom at the hotel that day but didn’t really care. She could duck easily as if getting something out of her cart, and she doubted he’d look hard enough to notice her, just see her uniform and her hair.
One of her new shoes slipped out of the Shop Rite bag onto the floor. Anna picked it up and handed it back to her.
“Beautiful,” she said, adding, “a little big?”
“Oh actually,” Ef admitted, “it is big. It’s not really mine.” It occurred to Ef the other woman may have seen the shoes before; better to tell her. “I guess I kind of took it. That woman who stayed in the tub room? She left her shoes here, in her room. It feels like stealing, kind of.” She was a bit embarrassed.
“Ha, her,” said Anna. “She always leaves a pile of stuff behind. You didn’t steal it. She didn’t want it. This is stealing,” Anna laughed as she slipped tiny shampoo bottles into her purse. “She’s odd, that one, leaving piles of crap behind, all folded neat. I guess she doesn’t know what suits her.”
Ef had not stolen the shoes, then. And for all she knew, maybe she had not stolen the blouse, the skirt, and the leafed scarf either; the blouse had been jammed on a towel rod, for God’s sake. Maybe these women were just as glad to be rid of these things, or they had so little to do with them they never noticed their absence.
A flush crept up her neck. Maybe she had instinctively reached for the clothing these women knew, in the safety and security of their lives, was inferior; clothes lacking the magic that kept the wealthy women up above her where they floated; clothes that had deflated somehow.
When Anna wheeled out of the room with her cart, Ef poured the contents of the Shop Rite bag into the white plastic Lost and Found bin in the room. She straightened out the shoes, pulling the cotton balls out of the toes and tossing them in her open yellow garbage bag. They were all she felt truly sad about, dignified shoes, giving her feet reach and purpose. She had a little money in the bank she’d been hanging on to but as she couldn’t go back to her old clothes