UNEDUCATED WOMEN
1
“I’M GOING TO strangle him. Last week he swears to me he’ll get the toilet to stop gurgling so I can get a single decent day’s sleep, but when I get home it’s like there’s someone in there taking an eight-hour tinkle. He says I’m the janitor, why don’t I fix it? That’s not the point. That is not the point. You think I want to come home, dead on my feet, toes swollen up like gum balls, and just for fun stick my hand into the ice-cold water of the toilet tank? I’ll stick his head in the tank.”
Zelda is carrying on about Brewster. Brewster is Zelda’s husband. Brewster is no good. Elisa has lost track of the odd jobs Brewster has held, the multitude of colorful ways he’s been fired, the depressive dives he takes into his Barcalounger for weeks at a time. The details don’t matter. Elisa is grateful for them however they come and signs appropriate interjections. Zelda began learning sign language the day Elisa arrived, an effort Elisa doesn’t believe she can ever repay.
“And like I told you, the kitchen sink’s been running, too. Brewster says it’s the coupling nut. Whatever you say, Albert Einstein. If you’re finished with your theory of relativity, how about you go to a hardware store? And you know what he says? He says I should just sneak a coupling nut from work. Does he even know where I work? All the security cameras here? I’m going to be honest with you, hon, about my future plans. I am going to strangle that man and chop him into little pieces and flush those pieces down the toilet so at least when the toilet’s keeping me awake I can think about all those Brewster bits zooming off to the sewer where they belong.”
Elisa smiles through a yawn, signing back that this is one of Zelda’s better murder plots.
“So tonight I get up for work, because somebody in this family needs to afford luxury items like coupling nuts, and the kitchen is the Chesapeake Bay. I march right back to the bedroom, and because I haven’t bought my strangling rope yet, I wake up Brewster and say we’ve got us a Noah’s ark situation developing. And he says good. Baltimore hasn’t had rain in forever. The man thinks I’m talking about rain.”
Elisa studies her copy of the Quality Control Checklist. Fleming doesn’t warn them when he changes it; it’s how he keeps his workers on their toes. The three-sheet carbon form enumerates the labs, lobbies, restrooms, vestibules, corridors, and stairwells assigned to each janitor, each location tied to a numbered list of correlated tasks. Fixtures, water fountains, baseboards. Elisa yawns again. Landings, partitions, railings. Her eyes keep slipping.
“So I drag him into the kitchen where his socks get all soggy, and you know what he says? He starts talking about Australia. How he heard on the news Australia’s drifting two inches a year, and maybe that’s the reason everyone’s pipes keep coming loose. All the continents, he tells me, used to be shoved together. He says if the whole world is drifting like that, then all the pipes are going to bust one day and there’s no sense getting upset about it.”
Elisa hears the wobble in Zelda’s voice and knows where this is headed.
“Now, look, hon. I could have taken that man’s head, drowned him in two inches of water, and still made it here by midnight. But you ever known a man who could wake up from a deep sleep and talk like that? He mixes me up so bad. Some weeks we can’t put food on the table. Then this man of mine says ‘Australia’ and suddenly I get emotional? Brewster Fuller will be the death of me, but I’m telling you, the man sees things. Then, for a second, I see them, too. Past Occam, that’s for sure. Way past Old West Baltimore. The Chesapeake Bay in my kitchen? This too shall pass.”
From the lab to the left, a ruckus. They halt their carts; toilet scrubbers swing from pegs. For weeks, they’ve heard rumbles of construction behind this door, but that’s unexceptional. A room isn’t on your list, you ignore it. But tonight the door, previously unadorned, has been given a plate: F-1. Elisa and Zelda have never encountered an F. They always clean together the first half of every night, and together they frown and consult their matching QCCs. There it is, F-1, planted on their lists like a bomb.
The women angle their ears at the door. Voices, footsteps, a crackling noise. Zelda looks worriedly at Elisa; it pains Elisa to see her friend’s yakkity mood so easily snuffed. It’s her turn, Elisa tells herself, to be the bold one. She falsifies a confident smile and makes the sign for “go ahead.” Zelda exhales, gathers her key card, and inserts it into the lock. The gears bite down and Zelda pulls open the door, and in the outrush of chilly air, Elisa has a swift intuition, from out of nowhere, that she has just made a disastrous mistake.
2
LAINIE STRICKLAND SMILES at her brand-new Westinghouse Spray ’N Steam iron. Westinghouse built the atomic engine that fueled the first Polaris submarine. That says something, doesn’t it? Not just about a product, mind you, but a company. She’d been sitting at the back of Freddie’s, her beehive inserted into the pink plastic of the flip-top dryer hood, when she paused, right in the middle of an interesting and, she thought, important story about a place called the Mekong Delta, where a group called the Viet Cong had shot down five US helicopters, killing thirty Americans, soldiers just like her Richard, so that she could instead linger upon the full-page advertisement. It depicted a submarine unzipping the white ocean on its dive down. All those brave boys. The intrinsic danger of water. Would they die, too? Their lives depended on Westinghouse.
The image had resonated enough that she’d resolved to ask Richard what sort of brand of submarine a “Polaris” was. An army man since age nineteen, Richard’s reflex to any question about his job is to clam up, so she’d waited until he was well fed and pacified by the popcorn gunfire of The Rifleman before asking. Without breaking his appraising gaze of Chuck Connors’s ambidextrous gunmanship, he’d shrugged.
“Polaris isn’t a brand. It’s not like one of your breakfast cereals.”
The word cereal snapped Timmy from his television stupor. Electricity crackled between the shag carpet and his corduroyed knees as he turned to resume a two-day-old conversation. “Mom, could we please get some Sugar Pops?”
“Froot Loops!” Tammy added. “Oh, Mommy, please?”
Richard has always been gruff. It’s just his way. Before the Amazon, though, Richard didn’t let her dangle from the cliff of her own ignorance like this, watching her flail without offering a hand. Lainie had yet to figure out the right reaction and chose to laugh at herself. Then Chuck Connors had been replaced by a Hoover Dial-a-Matic with variable Suction Control, operated by an actress who looked a bit like Lainie. Richard chewed his lip and looked down at his lap in what might have been remorse.
“Polaris is a missile,” he said. “Nuclear-armed ballistic missile.”
“Oh!” She’d wanted to soothe him. “That sounds dangerous.”
“Better range, I guess. More accurate, too, is what they say.”
“I saw it in a magazine and I thought, ‘I bet Richard knows all about this,’ and I was right.”
“Not really. It’s Navy shit. I avoid those bastards the best I can.”