What confused her was that she could not complain about her living conditions or the ease of the work — she had never dreamed such luxury possible — but the lack of human company made her feel as if she had already left the earth and existed in some kind of limbo. Wrong to say she wasn’t grateful to leave the filth and poverty, but she had also left the company of other human beings. One morning as Linda rushed out, Marie could not contain herself.
“What do you believe in?”
Linda stopped in her tracks — exasperated, irritated. “What do you mean?”
Marie regretted the question. “What makes you happy?”
“James. My house. All kinds of things. I don’t think it’s an appropriate topic.”
Linda never asked a single question about Marie’s life and clearly did not want to know. Marie might spend the rest of her life in that house, and she would die unknown, a stranger.
* * *
As soon as Linda left each morning, Marie turned on the televisions that were in every room, each tuned to a different station, so that as she moved through the house working, it was as if she were moving through a crowded village. She would stop and catch up with the goings-on in each room. Talk back to the screens. A soap opera on one; a game show on another; the news; a movie; a talk show. Her speech improved rapidly, moving from the stilted Queen’s English to American casual.
When her work was over for the day, she usually found herself lingering in Linda’s closet, looking at the clothes. Knowing that Linda would be away the whole day, at first she would try on a coat, a dress. Eventually, she grew braver, putting on whole outfits with shoes and makeup and jewelry. The girl that appeared in the mirror was unimaginable to her. This time she christened herself: Minna.
She did not intend it to happen, but the outside world began to fade, and the imaginary one created in the mirror became the only one that satisfied. Her dreams were the dreams of the girl in the mirror, not the real one dressed up in someone else’s life.
* * *
One day she opened the small drawer in Linda’s nightstand and found a gun. Heart pounding, she picked it up, surprised at its cold heaviness and how soothing it felt in the hand. She carried it carefully, marveling at its weight and how invincible it made her feel. It almost made her want an invader to break into the house so that she could prove her bravery. Each time she came upon a mirrored image of herself, she took aim, pretending she was one of the pretty actresses on television who aimed guns and were never hurt. What, she wondered, could frighten Linda so much, living in this perfect world that Marie found as safe, if dead, as heaven?
* * *
Although she knew her time here could not last forever, she hoped it would be long enough to plan what to do next. Almost two years had passed when Linda called her into the kitchen one night after she came home, and Marie saw something unfamiliar in Linda’s eyes: happiness.
“James and I are getting married!”
“That’s so good.” Marie felt honored that Linda was announcing it to her, as if they were family. She assumed her life would not change, except she would be cleaning after two people now. She liked James because he talked to her as if she were more than the girl who cleaned Linda’s house, as if she were a person with her own desires, as if they were in the same boat somehow, and once in a while he would slip her a couple twenty-dollar bills and say, “Go have a little fun.”
“We’re moving to Sarasota. A broker is listing the house.”
“What is Sarasota?”
“Where I’m moving, silly. I’ll give you two weeks, and then the movers are coming.”
Marie reached out and, much against Linda’s will, hugged her. Marie hid her face. When Linda felt her shaking, she patted her back.
“You sweet, sweet thing,” Linda said, then walked out of the room.
Later Marie wondered if she could have asked Linda to take her with them. But she always was too busy, too distracted, to listen. Always looking past Marie to more important things. But Linda was Marie’s whole life. Or rather, her house was. For a few days, Marie went through her usual routine in a trance, frightened. The threat of the outside world was too real, and she had grown cautious. She could not imagine going back to Coca or the dogs or Jean-Alexi. Her best hope was when she cornered James in the hallway one morning.
“Would you ask her to take me?”
He smiled and looked at her polo shirt. “Oh, sweet Maleva,” he said, and raised his hand to touch her breast through the fabric.
She let it stay there. After all, she knew the ways of the world. She even moved her hand toward his pants because this was how she knew to survive. A caught breath made her look up just in time to catch a glimpse of Linda’s face in the crack of an open door. They both heard the click of Linda’s bedroom door shutting.
“But I don’t need this kind of temptation in my house,” James said, pulling away.
* * *
Marie planned the time carefully — one of the days Linda would not be home till late evening.
She woke that morning, heart empty but light. Dusted the dustless house, then she clicked off the television in each room, one at a time, as if bidding adieu to acquaintances. She shut off the omnipresent air conditioner that tightened her shoulders and made her skin pock into goose bumps, made her nose run. That made living inside the box-house like living on the scentless, atmosphere-free moon and made the outside, with its bugs and smells and humidity, unreal and finally intolerable. She cranked open the windows; the rusted metal struts stuck, then screamed from long disuse as she forced them open; the panes of glass angled out like stiff, broad sails in the wind, letting loose a small universe of cobwebs never before visible.
She unbolted the shiny, brass latches on the French doors and spread them wide in a gesture of welcome, but of course no one was there, just the blast and tumble of hot, boiling air pushing its way in. The smell of wet grass and flowers, hot-baked, like perfume, calmed her. More faintly, the bite of salt, the flat sea smell of rocks and kelp, all of this shoving itself where before it had been denied — inside the sepulchral white box.
* * *
Marie prepared herself breakfast. First, four pieces of toast, greasy with butter, and on each piece she swirled a different jam: strawberry, blueberry, apricot, and plum. She drank from a carton of orange juice, ate a bowl of cereal, with blueberries and bananas. She made strong coffee, then poured cream into the entire pot, took that and a mug out on the patio. Sitting on a chair under an umbrella, she drank cup after cup until the pot was empty, savoring that morning more intensely than she had any other day in her life.
When she was ready, she made her way into Linda’s bedroom.
She took off all her clothes at the foot of Linda’s bed, then, on a whim, crawled onto the mattress, sprawled out in a big X with her head nested on the down pillows as she looked out the French doors to the pool beyond. She wondered what it must be like to have another life, Linda’s life, to marry James and live happily. But it was useless. Salvation, even salvation so close that one can see, hear, touch, and eat it, but that’s not one’s own, was maddening. Salvation just out of reach undoubtedly one of the first causes of cruelty in the world.
How to explain that this new life was harder than the one Marie left? Because here there was plenty — denied. Nothing here for her, simply a caretaker of other people’s things. Nothing that didn’t come with a price tag that would destroy the little that was left of value inside her.