At thirty-four my body was still smooth, but no longer buoyant. My cheeks and belly were elastic, my breasts large and soft. I massaged the black bar of Phebo soap between my hands until suds ran down my arms, then rubbed it up and down my body, feeling for the prickly hair on my calves.
This small standing shower reminded me a lot of the shower we’d had in our first apartment in Boston. We’d both cram inside to shower together, alternating underneath the water stream, part of my body always touching yours. This was almost ten years ago, when I was twenty-five and working at a sporting goods store in the CambridgeSide Galleria mall. I wrote occasionally for zines, flyers, hotel brochures—anything to save me from minimum-wage doldrums. You were an academic with soft hands and a propensity for contemplation above everything else. It felt so easy to combine my life with that of a handsome PhD student at Harvard, who rode his bicycle down Comm Ave alongside the T. I would wave at you from the Green Line until we reached your bay-windowed apartment in Coolidge Corner. Once, we baked a whole roasted chicken with thyme and Maldon salt that you got from the alumni lounge. You played me bossa nova classics that your grandfather had played for you, and I read you a Frank O’Hara collection that was two months overdue at the library.
You convinced me to stop working at the mall after we had been dating for only three months. You said I was too talented, even though it was never a matter of talent but of necessity. That was our essential difference—you approached life as a series of strategic decisions, and each one led to the goals you had established as a young boy (comfort, prestige, money, intelligence, flexibility). I saw life as the unavoidable consequence of a system much larger than me. My goal was to find a wormhole, a channel to escape the odds, so that I too could achieve those things.
I guess, in a sense, you were my wormhole. We married under the gazebo in Provincetown that your father had built for your mother in 1978, carried away by your uncle’s vintage Aston Martin. Your parents bought us an apartment in Boston, where I had my own desk and computer to write. I didn’t have to work at the mall. You paid off my student loans. When my father got sick, you made it financially possible for us to move back to Hartford so that we could take care of him. These kinds of huge decisions were easy for you; you had the confidence that nothing was too big for you to accomplish—or buy.
It was this same confidence that drew so many people to you. I still sometimes wondered, even after all these years, how it was possible that you had chosen me. The fact that you had, unequivocally, made me feel both special and insecure. I imagined you inside the University of São Paulo with your new students. You wore your white linen suit and combed your hair to the side. I thought about the pretty young ones as they watched you in the halls. The young professor, with your nurturing smile. The students, eager for your attention. Did you ever look at their fey, supple bodies? How their necks and hips moved with natural elasticity? How they traveled in packs, the rest huddled behind while one emerged to ask you a question? Did you ever think about my body when admiring theirs, or theirs when admiring mine? Which did you find more attractive? I warmed my fingers inside my mouth and worked them between my legs.
But before I could finish I heard a loud noise from the other side of the wall. I turned the faucet off and stood, still naked and dripping. For a moment I thought perhaps you’d forgotten something. I pushed the bathroom door open half an inch, just enough to see a moving body fill the crack. Marta was bent over our bed tucking sheets into the corners. I closed the door and wrapped myself with a towel.
“Marta. I didn’t know you were in the apartment,” I said through the flimsy wooden door. “How long have you been there?”
She turned on the vacuum.
“I didn’t know you were in the apartment!” I shouted over the noise. “You’re early!”
Still no answer. I opened the door and tiptoed my damp feet across the carpet to the dresser.
“Marta?”
She turned off the vacuum.
“Bom dia,” she said. “I come at nine.”
I found my hairbrush on the dresser and began slicking my hair back, looking for something to occupy my hands.
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you for making the bed.”
When she left for the kitchen, I lay facedown on the mattress and replayed the interaction again and again in my head (You’re early! I come at nine! Thank you! Goodbye!) I flipped to the cold side, let the towel fall off, and watched the walls cocoon around me.
The room was so starkly white, even the slightest glimmer of sunlight bounced from surface to surface. I curled up and massaged my eyelids with the tips of my fingers. An early memory of my mother began to percolate inside me. As a small child, when I didn’t want to be hugged, I begged not to be hugged, she would squeeze me until finally I gave in and hugged her back. I remembered that deep relief, the feeling that she hadn’t let go. I don’t know how long I had been lying naked, but I began to smell lunch cooking in the kitchen. I put on a dress and went to see if Marta needed help.
“No,” she said. “It’s okay. It will be ready soon.”
I watched her cut up carrots and celery and put them in a small glass bowl. She was preparing ground beef lasagna, which I’d learn was her specialty dish. She also made ground beef kibi, or ground beef patties with lime juice, or beef stew with potatoes, or ground beef pasta and tomato sauce sprinkled with dried basil. Every afternoon she would wipe the table from breakfast and put a plastic tablecloth down, a white one with red flowers, and set a meal for me—a can of Guaraná, some variation of a beef dish, vegetables, sometimes bonbons she brought from home—then go to the closet in our laundry room to watch novelas on her small television.
“Are you sure? I like to cook.”
“No,” she said. The knife hit the cutting board with metered thuds. “Don’t worry.”
There were two bottles of tomato sauce and dried pasta on the counter. Oil smoked in a skillet on the stove. She scraped the raw meat off the wooden cutting board and into the pan. I could see that a watery pool of blood had filled in the divots on the cutting board.
“I don’t want to impose.” I spoke gently. “But maybe you should use the plastic cutting board for raw meat.”
She rested her chin on her left shoulder and formed a peculiar gesture with her hand, pressed her index finger and thumb into a circle, and scratched her nose. She dropped another piece of beef into the pan.
“Wood is fine for meat.”
“Sure. It’s not a big deal.” I pointed to the cutting board. “But you see. The juices seep into the wood.” The mixture of raw beef and humidity made my stomach turn.
She ripped a paper towel in half and sopped up the bloody juice from the board. “I have always used wood. Wood has been around much longer than plastic.”