Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

On the phone, in these months, Pepe spoke with all the fire, all the fever, of the new convert. He seemed to know what you were up to, in spirit if not form.

“Women your age forget what God expects of them,” he said. “Once they’re past childbearing and still not married, they stop guarding their virtue.”

He used words like fornication and adultery, words you hadn’t heard spoken this way since your days in the one-room parish schoolhouse. You almost felt his spittle through the phone line, landing on your sinful cheek. He said he had thought about becoming a priest.

Now you know you should have praised him more. Should have told him how much you looked forward to a crucifix made by his hands. But at that time you had your own urges to answer to. Sometimes you stopped listening, didn’t write him back. You fell asleep on the train home, too tired even to pray for him before bed.

You’re right, Pepe, you should have said.

In another time, another country, villagers would have stoned you to death.

—

You did not expect to see shoes in the street, high heels that women kicked off as they ran. You think of hallways inside dark apartments, shoes and neckties and discarded bras forming a trail into the bedroom, sounds of muffled laughter and unbuckling, people so distracted by excitement sometimes they forget to shut the door. In those apartments, you’ve been trained to help and be of use no matter what.

And so, along your way, you stoop and start collecting them. The shoes, computer parts, and paper. As if this wave of people walking toward you has just left the party: you are here to clean up after. This much you know how to do. Your left arm gathers what your right turns up: shoe, shoe, battered keyboard, paper, paper, paper. Where will you bring them, Esmeralda? The wastebasket on the corner? People might want them back. EARNINGS REPORT, one paper says — no doubt something important. Some of these shoes cost more than your rent. And some are not in bad condition. Nicked and dusty, perhaps a bit charred at the heels. You can restore them, bring them to the lost and found. Those nice men at reception held an umbrella for you for two days when you forgot it.

So much turns up that you unzip your tote to carry it. It’s possible that you look crazy, heading straight toward disaster, scavenging for scraps, but you don’t care. The heaps grow higher the closer you get. One shoe, a patent leather pump, gives you more trouble than the others. You pull harder, then drop it. It’s too hot. Your fingertips have swiped into the dust a shiny band of leather that reflects your face. Something inside the shoe has weighed it down. Your eyes move, slowly as the cold blood in your veins, from the shank, over the slender, melted heel, to the ankle. A woman’s ankle, dressed in nylon panty hose like yours.

You cross yourself. Start digging through the rubble. You’ll bear any sight — a bone, a face — to close her lids for her, in case she left this world with her eyes open.

—

One night you fell asleep inside John’s office and woke up at two.

“Did I snore?”

“A little,” he said. “I’m sure I did too.”

In the basement, you didn’t know enough to skip the time clock, go straight home, pretend that punching out had slipped your mind. Someone like Pepe would have known. Instead, as you had done five nights a week for six months straight, you fed your time card to the clock and listened to it bite.

Thirteen days later, the supervisor’s call almost went to voice mail. You were coming back from the Laundromat with Doris’s clothes.

“I’m doing payroll and your card says two-thirteen,” the supervisor said. “Which means you either took too long to do your floors, or tried to steal time from the company. Which is it?”

She had a pretty accent. Stealing time, you thought: how strange, to imagine you could hold minutes in your hand and hide them in your pocket. Had Pepe thought of such a scheme yet? Time is money. People said that.

“Which is it, Esmeralda? Are you slow, or do you steal?”

You tried to think: which was the worse disgrace, in your profession? Neither one was true. You could turn the foulest six-stall ladies’ room into a lab, in minutes flat. You’d never lifted so much as a slice of bread from someone’s pantry.

“I can’t hear you, Esmeralda.”

By the age of twelve or thirteen, Pepe could spin great yarns of where he’d been and when. He hid things under the wooden floor slats. He sent lists of books and supplies he needed money for, long after he had stopped going to school.

Because you’d met this supervisor only once, barely remembered what she looked like — someone else had trained you — the woman you imagined on the other end had gold hair and green eyes. John’s wife, her time — you’d stolen that. Ashamed, you chose the other lie.

“I have problem with my feet, ma’am,” you told her. Broken English in a broken voice. You, Esmeralda, who’d never griped to an employer in your life — even when you stayed late and earned nothing extra.

“I suggest you get them checked, then. There are doctors just for feet, in the big city. Now that you have medical, you can. Not many cleaning jobs around that give you medical, are there, Esmeralda? That’s why there’s always applications on my desk.”

“Of course,” you said.

“I hope the doctor helps you, Esmeralda. But if you can’t continue due to problems with your feet, I need to know. You understand — don’t you?”

“Of course.”

She went on. Words like unacceptable. Like verbal warning.

So you checked yourself in to your own kind of rehab. That night, when John turned his chair to look at you, you headed for the window, far from him. The glass squeaked as you rubbed at fingerprints that weren’t there.

“Es?”

“My boss. She could have fired me,” you said. Your night reflection faced you, checkered by the squares of light from other offices.

“That’s my fault,” John said. “I should have woken you. It won’t happen again.”

“No.” A line from Annie, which the Ronson children loved, came back to you. Miss Hannigan putting her girls to work until the orphanage shone like the top of the Chrysler Building. It takes a cruel master to keep cities clean. “It can’t happen again.”

“Es—”

“You know already,” you said, “all the reasons we must stop.”

For many nights his eyes still followed you. To work, with your head down, while being looked at in this way, took more resolve than anything you’d ever given up for Lent. More will than your first graveyard shift. Your hands shook, as you pushed the vacuum down the corridor, and headaches almost split your skull in half. In time, though, he gave up. In three weeks you were back to nods. Hello and thank you. In another three weeks you were nothing but two workers, in one tower.

—

When the splintering happens — or the splinterings, a million pieces cracking into millions more — when the clouds come pouring through the street, you stare at them for longer than you should.

Your mouth and nostrils burn. A thousand knifepoints prick your skin. Something like sand rattles your hat. But you keep looking till the dust chalks up your eyes.

And then you close them.

The world grows quiet inside you, and outside time, slow as the center of a storm. You hear only your breath against the mask, the way John must have heard his on your dress, that night.

You clutch the shoes and papers to your chest like things you love. As if they’re what you came to save. The bodies running past you, left and right, are a commotion you’re not part of. You’re prepared to let the monster swallow you.