“She came once a week. We loved her. And then she moved back home and we never heard from her again.” You looked down at the welcome packet splayed on the coffee table. “I almost forgot about Dottie.”
“Well, I never had a maid. If anything, my parents gave birth to me so that I could be their maid.”
We laughed, even though I was halfway serious.
“It’s normal in Brazil. Everybody has one. It’s not even an upper-class thing. The Provost said her union cleans many apartments in the neighborhood. Which, by the way, is a nice neighborhood. Did you see—”
“Does the maid have a maid?”
“You mean, do we get two maids?”
“You said everyone in Brazil has a maid. Does Marta have a maid to clean her home, or does she do it herself?”
“I don’t know. You seem irritated by this.”
“I’m not irritated. It’s just”—I paused, searching for an explanation—“if Marta cleans our apartment and cooks our food, and you’re at work, what am I going to do all day?”
Even as the words left my mouth, I heard how desperate they sounded, maybe even pathetic, and I wished I could collect them and shove them back inside. But it was an honest concern. The house had become a way for me to gauge my emotional health. How many days had it been since I made the bed? Did I have clean underwear in the drawer? Did we have more than alcohol and deli meat in the refrigerator? Giving these tasks to someone else felt, in a way, like taking away my walking cane when I couldn’t see.
You pulled me into your chest.
“I’ll ask the Provost for some information on her. Maybe it’ll make you feel more comfortable. And then you can start to imagine all the things we’ll do in São Paulo outside of our home.”
The Provost sent an email with more information on Marta’s background. She was the only English-speaking maid they could find, which made her “especially unique.” She’d learned English by watching American television shows in the maid’s quarters where her mother worked. Her mother had been a maid too. The university liked to use her for American or British professors who traveled there for residency. She had grown up cleaning houses, so her expertise was “unparalleled,” he wrote.
“Maybe she’ll want to split cooking with me,” I said. “It might give her a nice break.”
“Maybe. I’m sure you could talk to her about it.”
“Like I could do lunch, and she can do dinner.”
“She might be able to teach you some Brazilian dishes.”
“That would be nice.”
“See, there you go. It’s not so bad.”
I picked up the welcome package and flicked the pages against my thumb, watching the pagination race backward like a flip-book animation.
“It’s not so bad. It might even be good.”
The night after I met Marta, in the middle of the night, I got up to use the bathroom. The air sagged with humidity. I could hear the last dregs of a party in the adjacent apartment echoing through the windows, which we kept wide open with the fan turned on high. A woman was singing Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” but she only knew a few of the lyrics. Like a virgin. Touched for the very first time. I imagined the scene clearly: a snacked-over bowl of potato chips, edamame shells strewn on the glass coffee table, red-rimmed wineglasses and empty bottles, the woman, her lipstick faded and feet bare, unable to sleep, a song stuck in her head.
I thought of something Marta had told me earlier in the day, while she gave me her tour of the apartment. Her nephew had been the altar boy at mass. He wore a white-and-red robe, she said, and swung the thurible down the aisle, incense whirling behind him. When he got to the end, he turned and gave the crowd a thumbs-up, something she had taught him to do. She was so proud.
Your arm was splayed over your head, mouth agape with slumber. The woman at the party broke something, a glass, and you stirred, rolled over to the other side, and snored softly. I watched you sleep from the bathroom doorway, your face slack and gentle, your arm reaching to my side of the mattress, while the woman swept glass and sang.
You’re so fine. And you’re mine.
Marta’s nephew was seven years old and already studying English in school, which was around the same age Marta had begun to learn. He and Marta called English their secret language and would practice together in front of the family to demonstrate their special bond. Her sister had a small gathering at her house in the mountains of Atibaia, where they lived, to celebrate after church. Her nephew ate the biggest slice of chocolate cake. He wouldn’t take off his altar robe, even for bed, which seemed to be Marta’s favorite detail.
I sat on the toilet. It was one of those endless pees, the kind that comes and stops and comes and stops. I rested my elbows on my thighs and my head in my hands and looked toward the open window. There I noticed a strange thing happening. All the way up on the fourteenth floor, a thin green snake had found its way into our apartment. It was hanging off the ledge and searching for a grip on the tiles.
The woman was getting tired. I imagined her sitting upright in a chair, and every time she began to sleep she would tip forward, sing a lyric, then doze again. I was tired too. The snake wasn’t a snake, I realized; it was more likely a millipede or a caterpillar. With your heartbeat, next to mine. It had crawled down the wall and was halfway across the floor. Marta’s nephew and his older brother loved to collect dead caterpillars on the mountain trails, she told me, and save them in a shoe box that he kept next to his bed.
This snake-caterpillar-millipede charged toward the closed door. I watched, thinking, It’s closed. You’ll have to turn around and go back to the window. But the crack was just wide enough for it to slip under. I flushed the toilet and flung the door open. Where was it? I searched and searched in the glow of the bathroom light. It had disappeared.
After I fell back asleep, I dreamt that I was sweeping dirt into my own mouth and vagina while I lay like a doormat on the floor. I woke up suddenly, worried that no hole in my body was safe, that it would find a way inside.
The morning you left for your first day of teaching at the university, I woke salty with sweat. Water thumped in the shower like dead piano keys, the faucet squeaked shut, you gargled, walked with wet feet across the tile floor. Everything moved in an anxious slow motion. Drawers opened and closed. The bedroom door shut. Pots clanked and the kettle whistled. In bed I waited for the sound of a closed door. Shuffle. Hitch. Lock. Silence.
I prodded my way to the bathroom and turned on the shower. Sunlight angled from the window to reflect quivering white diamonds around the glass stall. It took a bit of coaxing at first, going from hot air to frigid water. The chill hit me front-on, seized my lungs, and I swallowed deep gasps of air. After a few minutes, with my arms clasped tight, my body acclimated and the cold water began to feel warm. I pressed my fingers against my skin and watched the impressions turn from pink to white.