“Do you want me to show you the apartment?” she said.
I said I did, and followed her into the bedroom.
The welcome package had emphasized the historical importance of the apartment. It was situated in the center of São Paulo with many desirable landmarks. Renowned professors, like you, had resided there over the course of thirty years. Before we arrived, I had imagined a palatial estate, modern and new, the kind of place that would ruin whatever previous notion I had of luxury. Rather than regal, though, the apartment was manageable. It looked lived-in, with sun-bleached carpets and a sagging sofa, scuffed doorknobs and browned light switches. It was clear that we weren’t the first to stay there and we wouldn’t be the last.
Marta’s manner made this even more apparent. She moved swiftly through each room with the ease of someone who is comfortably at home. She kept a trash bin next to the sink, about the size of a gingerbread house, which she emptied into a large metal can in the laundry room. She used a squeegee to wipe excess water around the sink. Don’t hang damp towels on the door, she warned me. Hang them on the bar or else they’ll never dry with the humidity. Toilet paper goes in the bin, not in the toilet (a mistake we would make for weeks before we learned). Keep the water canteen three quarters of the way full; it leaks if it’s filled to the brim. The vacuum has a sucking problem—it doesn’t work on the linoleum floors or the straw rug in the living room, only on the carpet in the bedroom.
The tour finished in the kitchen. Marta untied her apron and announced she needed to leave.
“Can I make you a coffee first? I boiled water before you arrived.”
She said she had a bus to catch in an hour.
“Please, let me make you a coffee,” I said again, already pouring the sputtering teakettle over the grounds. “As a thank-you for the tour. It will only be a few minutes.”
She agreed to a few more minutes, and sat down on the edge of the chair, half on, half off, watching as she flexed her toes against her sandals. I would come to learn that it was rare for Marta to sit. She was always moving—she hardly ever lingered. Only once did I see her stop to peer out the living room windows to catch a sunset falling behind the stucco-and-glass cityscape.
I handed Marta a coffee with warm milk. She took a small sip and smiled.
“You don’t like it?” I asked.
“It’s delicious. American coffee is like this—weak.”
She stood and pulled a jar of instant Folgers from the back of a cabinet.
“You won’t be offended if…” But before I could tell her no, I wouldn’t be offended, she had spooned two tablespoons into her cup.
I would have liked to believe that once Marta and I sat face-to-face, woman to woman, the imprints of housekeeper and kept woman would dissipate into the coffee. If only I knew how little I knew. Marta and I didn’t talk about her, or me, or what she did, or what I did, or what she loved, or what I loved, like two old pals gathering for an afternoon tête-à-tête. We talked mostly about you. It was our point of communion, the reason why we were both there.
“What does he teach?” she asked.
“United States history,” I said.
I explained that you were the youngest professor to be awarded this residency. You had published a paper that garnered a lot of attention in certain academic circles, and the Provost was a lauded member of these circles. She asked what the paper was about. I told her I hadn’t finished reading it. You had given it to me in starts and stops while you were drafting—half an introduction, a sentence or two read aloud before bed. But when it was eventually published, I never sat to read it in its entirety. Part of me felt more comfortable relating to the process than interpreting the finished product. I knew it was about a slave revolt aboard a whaling ship from New Bedford, one you had been researching for years. After the Provost read the paper and learned that you were fluent in Portuguese, and, better yet, that your grandfather was from Portugal, he called you directly to invite you to teach.
“How impressive,” she said. “Do you have children?”
“Children?” I forced a chuckle. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Well, certain things have to happen for—” I stopped, startled by the idea that I might talk about our sex life with Marta. I gulped down my coffee. A murky lake of grounds and milk sat at the bottom of my mug. “Do you?”
“No.” She pressed her hand against her stomach.
“Not everyone needs children,” I said, at which point she gladly changed the topic.
“Is it very cold where you are from?”
“It is. But it’s almost spring there.”
“Better you are here then,” she said. “Where it is warm.”
“I actually like the cold.” I thought of the iced-over cliffs on the side of the highway. I thought of the time a red fox dashed across the snow in our backyard. “Have you worked in this apartment for a long time?”
She paused as if to calculate, though I sensed she kept this number on the tip of her tongue.
“Next month it will be thirteen years.”
She stood and slung her purse over her shoulder. “Desculpa, Linda, but I should leave. My bus home is in thirty minutes.”
I walked her to the door and thanked her.
We shook hands goodbye, which afterward felt too formally American.
And then she said, “You know, your name, Linda. In Portuguese, this means beautiful. Leen-da.”
I thanked her by smiling forcefully, unsure how to respond, until she closed the door behind her, latching it shut with her key.
When I first learned about Marta, I insisted that we didn’t need her. What would we need a maid for? We were two people moving to an apartment for a year, two people who had spent our lives together without a maid. I didn’t even have a job—how could I justify having a maid? And I could only imagine what Marta would think of me, “the Professor’s Wife.” Even the word, “maid,” evoked images of the Gilded Age, with women in pastel lace petticoats who couldn’t fart without a servant holding up their skirts.
“That doesn’t sound like us,” I said. “Since when does having a maid sound like us?”
We were sitting on the blue sofa in our living room in Hartford, reading through the paperwork the university had sent you.
“Actually, my family had a housekeeper growing up,” you said.
“Really? I didn’t know that.”
“I never told you about Dottie?”
“No.”