It Is Wood, It Is Stone Page 2

  The welcome package had emphasized the historical importance of the apartment. It was situated in the center of São Paulo with many desirable landmarks. Renowned professors, like you, had resided there over the course of thirty years. Before we arrived, I had imagined a palatial estate, modern and new, the kind of place that would ruin whatever previous notion I had of luxury. Rather than regal, though, the apartment was manageable. It looked lived-in, with sun-bleached carpets and a sagging sofa, scuffed doorknobs and browned light switches. It was clear that we weren’t the first to stay there and we wouldn’t be the last.

  Marta’s manner made this even more apparent. She moved swiftly through each room with the ease of someone who is comfortably at home. She kept a trash bin next to the sink, about the size of a gingerbread house, which she emptied into a large metal can in the laundry room. She used a squeegee to wipe excess water around the sink. Don’t hang damp towels on the door, she warned me. Hang them on the bar or else they’ll never dry with the humidity. Toilet paper goes in the bin, not in the toilet (a mistake we would make for weeks before we learned). Keep the water canteen three quarters of the way full; it leaks if it’s filled to the brim. The vacuum has a sucking problem—it doesn’t work on the linoleum floors or the straw rug in the living room, only on the carpet in the bedroom.

  The tour finished in the kitchen. Marta untied her apron and announced she needed to leave.

  “Can I make you a coffee first? I boiled water before you arrived.”

  She said she had a bus to catch in an hour.

  “Please, let me make you a coffee,” I said again, already pouring the sputtering teakettle over the grounds. “As a thank-you for the tour. It will only be a few minutes.”

  She agreed to a few more minutes, and sat down on the edge of the chair, half on, half off, watching as she flexed her toes against her sandals. I would come to learn that it was rare for Marta to sit. She was always moving—she hardly ever lingered. Only once did I see her stop to peer out the living room windows to catch a sunset falling behind the stucco-and-glass cityscape.

  I handed Marta a coffee with warm milk. She took a small sip and smiled.

  “You don’t like it?” I asked.

  “It’s delicious. American coffee is like this—weak.”

  She stood and pulled a jar of instant Folgers from the back of a cabinet.

  “You won’t be offended if…” But before I could tell her no, I wouldn’t be offended, she had spooned two tablespoons into her cup.

  I would have liked to believe that once Marta and I sat face-to-face, woman to woman, the imprints of housekeeper and kept woman would dissipate into the coffee. If only I knew how little I knew. Marta and I didn’t talk about her, or me, or what she did, or what I did, or what she loved, or what I loved, like two old pals gathering for an afternoon tête-à-tête. We talked mostly about you. It was our point of communion, the reason why we were both there.

  “What does he teach?” she asked.

  “United States history,” I said.

  I explained that you were the youngest professor to be awarded this residency. You had published a paper that garnered a lot of attention in certain academic circles, and the Provost was a lauded member of these circles. She asked what the paper was about. I told her I hadn’t finished reading it. You had given it to me in starts and stops while you were drafting—half an introduction, a sentence or two read aloud before bed. But when it was eventually published, I never sat to read it in its entirety. Part of me felt more comfortable relating to the process than interpreting the finished product. I knew it was about a slave revolt aboard a whaling ship from New Bedford, one you had been researching for years. After the Provost read the paper and learned that you were fluent in Portuguese, and, better yet, that your grandfather was from Portugal, he called you directly to invite you to teach.

  “How impressive,” she said. “Do you have children?”

  “Children?” I forced a chuckle. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, certain things have to happen for—” I stopped, startled by the idea that I might talk about our sex life with Marta. I gulped down my coffee. A murky lake of grounds and milk sat at the bottom of my mug. “Do you?”

  “No.” She pressed her hand against her stomach.

  “Not everyone needs children,” I said, at which point she gladly changed the topic.

  “Is it very cold where you are from?”

  “It is. But it’s almost spring there.”

  “Better you are here then,” she said. “Where it is warm.”

  “I actually like the cold.” I thought of the iced-over cliffs on the side of the highway. I thought of the time a red fox dashed across the snow in our backyard. “Have you worked in this apartment for a long time?”

  She paused as if to calculate, though I sensed she kept this number on the tip of her tongue.

  “Next month it will be thirteen years.”

  She stood and slung her purse over her shoulder. “Desculpa, Linda, but I should leave. My bus home is in thirty minutes.”

  I walked her to the door and thanked her.

  We shook hands goodbye, which afterward felt too formally American.

  And then she said, “You know, your name, Linda. In Portuguese, this means beautiful. Leen-da.”

  I thanked her by smiling forcefully, unsure how to respond, until she closed the door behind her, latching it shut with her key.

  When I first learned about Marta, I insisted that we didn’t need her. What would we need a maid for? We were two people moving to an apartment for a year, two people who had spent our lives together without a maid. I didn’t even have a job—how could I justify having a maid? And I could only imagine what Marta would think of me, “the Professor’s Wife.” Even the word, “maid,” evoked images of the Gilded Age, with women in pastel lace petticoats who couldn’t fart without a servant holding up their skirts.

  “That doesn’t sound like us,” I said. “Since when does having a maid sound like us?”

  We were sitting on the blue sofa in our living room in Hartford, reading through the paperwork the university had sent you.

  “Actually, my family had a housekeeper growing up,” you said.

  “Really? I didn’t know that.”

  “I never told you about Dottie?”

  “No.”

  “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 ca
ne 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.

  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.