“Aw, lord, Maxi, yuh nuh easy. I will see you lata.” She blows him a kiss.
Once Margot is on the property, the hush returns. She walks toward the front desk, holding her head as high as possible. The security guards, groundsmen, and concierges are not immune to her magic; but the housekeepers and other administrative staff, mostly women, are. Visitors seem to single her out to ask for directions or recommendations. She can also hold conversations with tourists longer than any other front desk clerks, who tend to be overly polite and too eager to smile, as though apologetic for their lack of knowledge. She’s the best front desk clerk at Palm Star Resort. It’s the only job that she has ever known. But soon this will change.
“Morning, Pearl,” Margot says to one of the housekeepers who happens to be signing in. The older woman draws her lips together. The two younger housekeepers—Pearl’s oldest daughter and youngest niece, respectively—nod at Margot, then look away as though embarrassed about something. Margot has an inkling that Garfield told everyone what he saw—Margot getting fucked by Alphonso in the conference room. Though this is old news—it’s one of those pieces of gossip that could easily be a myth, given how smoothly Margot plays it off. Had it not been for the mysterious occurrence of Garfield’s death shortly after—serves him right—then perhaps it would have been completely forgotten. Margot carries on with her business, greeting the lower staff whenever she has to assign them to clean vacant rooms. She makes direct eye contact that forces them to look away, ashamed for their filthy imaginations. She also dares them to retort with information they have bottled up and kept for when she writes them up. But this never happens. They keep the damning secrets among themselves. Occasionally these might slip out to new employees in the middle of spreading linen, folding towels, washing pillowcases, or emptying trash—tales of Margot’s bare backside making their rounds among shoulder-jerking, tear-eyed laughter that is an amalgamation of envy and disgust—boisterous, as though the brutes think that they’re alone and unobserved at work. But whenever she’s around, the laughter drains like the last bit of water from a bottle.
“What oonuh laughing at?” Margot had asked Pearl’s daughter and niece one day. They gasped when Margot appeared from a corner by the large ceramic vase where she had been watching them. Their heads immediately bowed. “A joke.”
“What kind of joke sweet oonuh so?”
“Ahm . . . we was talkin’ ’bout somebody we know.”
“What did they do?”
The young housekeepers glanced at each other, damp-faced and shining under Margot’s glare. When they couldn’t answer, Margot knew. And because she slips easily and stealthily into occupied rooms at night and emerges looking as she did when she entered, a spy—be it a lone housekeeper catching up on the day’s cleaning tasks or Neville, the room service attendant, knocking on people’s doors with food—would think she was coming from a serious business meeting. Whereas they might speculate freely about her affair with Alphonso, her late evening deeds float under their noses. Besides the one or two run-ins on the property that she has had with staff that work late shifts, no one, as far as she knows, suspects anything.
Thandi makes her way to the nearest restroom by the upper school and locks herself inside one of the stalls. It’s where she eats her lunch, enduring the pungent smell of urine and womanly excretions. She takes out a pencil from her bag and draws on the whitewashed wall like she draws in the dust on furniture at home, or in mud after it rains. She pauses when she hears voices.
“Are you serious?”
“I’m dead serious. It happened aftah devotion yesterday morning.”
“I missed it!”
“You’re always late for school, that’s why.”
“What was she thinking?”
“I asked myself the same question.”
“It’s like she lives in her own world.”
“She’s just cuckoo.”