Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

—

As the school year ended, the monsoons began in earnest. Rain fell so hard and fast it struck up fat white stars along the ground. It became difficult to see in front of us. Still, on the last day of school, I insisted on seeing Annelise home. My chair gave us some trouble down the hill. Along the ravine, children were laughing in the storm, shirtless or bare-legged or naked altogether. Their rubber tsinelas clapped along the mud. Below them, the creek collected raindrops with a sound like frying oil. Some of these children might soon lose their houses. Annelise might have to sleep, as she sometimes did, in the Safety convent.

I noticed as the children played that they were trying not to slip and fall. The care they took had slowed their movements into a kind of dance. I turned to Annelise, who said, “The rain has crippled everyone,” and laughed. I laughed too. She curtsied to me, and I bowed my head: a joke, the first movements of the kuratsa we’d watched for months and never had to do ourselves. She promenaded around me, her arms outstretched, and I moved my wheels to turn with her. It wasn’t easy. But for one brief moment, in the rain and mud, I saw a world where everyone was struggling in the body he or she’d been given. That world and struggle seemed bearable to me, and even beautiful.

Some squatters had dismantled their homes and were carrying the scraps to higher ground. Others stayed put and held up as hats what used to be their walls. Our cold, drenched uniforms clung to our skin. A mighty stench was rising from the creek. And soon the rain made it impossible to dance, even as a joke. Annelise gripped the handles of my chair and plowed it through the dirt toward a shining, solitary scrap of tin that we claimed as ours.

That morning you are woken by an airplane, humming so close overhead it seems to want to take you with it. The clock says five — an hour ahead of your alarm. You’ve lived close to two airports for almost two decades. You’re used to planes. They even show up in your dreams. In last night’s dream, you died; your body crumbled into ash. Before you could learn what came next, before you could see where your soul went, a machine — some giant vacuum cleaner, which in real life was this plane — came down to sweep you off the earth like dust.

After today, you’ll never hear a plane in the same way again. But you don’t know that yet.

The boy whose bedroom you sleep in is now a man. He moved out long ago. His mother, Doris, keeps his room the way it was when he lived here: school pennant, baseball trophies, dark plaid bedspread. You pay low rent, and have agreed to leave this room and sleep out on the sofa when the son visits. (He never does.)

You know you won’t fall back asleep, so you switch on the lamp. Because the years of work have given you a bad back, bad knees, and bad feet, you like to pray in bed. A wooden Christ Child and Virgin Mary live inside the nightstand drawer. You lay them on the pillow next to you like shrunken lovers, wrap a rosary around your wrist. You interlace your fingers, shut your eyes, and squeeze your lips against your thumbs as if kissing His feet.

The God that you imagine looks like Father Brennan, the man who baptized you: tall and Irish, with white hair and kind blue eyes, shooting a basketball in black vestments on the parish playground. The Virgin is one of the nuns who ran the adjoining schoolhouse: a spinster with a downy chin, her veil a habit. Old and sacred words, they taught you. You would not invent your own any more than you would try to build your own cathedral. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Bead by bead, you whisper the same words Saint Peter spoke in Rome, the same words spoken today by all believers in São Paulo and Boston and Limerick and Cebu:

He rose again from the dead.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.

You pray by heart the way you’d plow a field of soil, the way you push a mop across a floor. One foot before the other. After looping your way around the rosary, you coil it in its pouch. You tuck Mary and the Santo Niño back into their drawer, thanking them for the strength to rise another day, on two aching feet.

—

“Like the gypsy,” John said, the night he asked your name.

You weren’t listening. “Eee, Ess, Em, Eee,” you started spelling in reply, as you changed the trash bag from the can beside his desk.

“Mine’s John. Not quite as fancy as yours.” He held out his hand.

“Please to meet you.” You stared at the freckles on his long, pale fingers. When he didn’t pull them back, you wiped your latex glove, still damp from the dustrag, on your uniform. Then, embarrassed, you snapped off your glove and tossed it in the mother trash bag hanging from your cleaning cart. His hand was moist and smooth. The hand of a man who studied numbers on a screen and now and then picked up the phone.

He had the kind blue eyes of a priest. His hair was white (though he had all of it), his face almost as pale, but pink in sunburned places. On his desk, three computer screens folded outward like a panel painting at church. A woman with gold hair and green eyes, probably his wife, smiled in a frame beside his keyboard.

This new night job had just begun. You were still learning the floor, along whose windowed edges sat men like John, who had their own offices. These men stayed later than the ones who worked in open rows along the middle of the floor. You’d notice, over time, that John stayed latest out of everyone.

—

Since Doris is still asleep, you hold off on the vacuuming and step into the kind of fall morning that really does remind you of a big apple, bright and crisp. You buy skim milk and grapefruits, whole wheat bread and liquid eggs that pour out of a juice box and have less cholesterol. Nineteen years of Tuesdays you have shopped and cleaned for Doris. Longer than her son lived in the room you rent for two hundred a month. On Wednesdays you clean the apartment under you, for the Italian landlord and his wife, whose children you have watched grow up and have their own. Thursdays you are in the city early, cleaning Mrs. Helen Miller’s loft downtown. And Fridays you clean uptown, for the Ronson family, who own a brownstone top to bottom. Saturdays your fingers smell like pine oil from polishing the wood pews of the same old church that found you Doris and her extra room, those nineteen years ago. And in between you’ve cleaned for other people, one-time deals — after a party, or before somebody sells or rents out their apartment, or as a gift from one friend to another — never saying no to an assignment. Nineteen years of cash in envelopes, from people who never asked to see your papers as long as you had references and kept their sinks and toilets spotless.

The other day you pulled a knot of Doris’s white hair from the shower drain, trying to remember when those knots were brown.

Now that you’re no longer hiding, you have one job on the books, at night, in the tower where John works.

The living room TV is on when you get home. “Good morning,” you call out, unloading bags onto the kitchen counter. Doris doesn’t answer through the wall. She likes to do Pilates — counting bends and raises, panting — to the news.

Putting the milk away, you hear a sob.

“Doris?”

She isn’t doing leg raises. You find her on the sofa, eyeballs red, fist covering her nose and mouth.

“Did Matthew call?” you ask. Over the years, her son has said things on the phone to make her cry.