“Whom do I pay?” I said to the gaggle of women sitting on the front steps. They all had the same flat, long, brown hair, the same pinched eyes, bulbous mouths, and throats like frogs. Their bodies were so fat, their breasts hung and rested on their knees. They pointed to the matriarch, a huge woman sitting on a piano bench in the shade of a large oak. Her left eye was swollen shut, bruised yellow, black, and blue. I gave her the money. Her hand was tiny and plump, like a doll’s, fingernails painted bright red. She stuffed the bill I gave her in the pocket of her worn cotton housedress, pulled a sucker from her mouth, and smiled, showing me—not without some hostility—a lone bottom row of teeth rotted down to stubs, like a baby’s teeth. She was probably around my age, but she looked like a woman with a hundred years of suffering behind her—no love, no transformations, no joy, just junk food and bad television, ugly, mean-spirited men creaking in and out of stuffy rooms to take advantage of her womb and impassive heft. One of her obese offspring would soon overtake her throne, I imagined, and preside over the family’s abject state of existence, the beating hearts of these young women pointlessness personified. You’d think that, sitting there, oozing slowly toward death with every breath, they’d all go out of their minds. But no—they were too dumb for insanity. “Rich bitch,” I imagined the mother to be thinking as she plunked her sucker back into her mouth. I lugged the lamp up the street, thinking of her flesh spreading around her as she lay down on her bed. What would it feel like, I wondered, to let myself go? I was eager to get home, uncrinkle the little fortune in my pocket. If the sunlamp did work, I would bring it back down to the city with me. The light could soothe me in the winter and clean my dirty city soul each night.
It’s not that I lacked respect for the people of Alna. I simply didn’t want to deal with them. I was tired. During the school year, all I did was contend with stupidity and ignorance. That’s what teachers are paid to do. How I got stuck teaching Dickens to fourteen-year-olds is a mystery to me. I’d never planned on working all my life. I’d had this fantasy that I’d get married and suddenly find a calling beyond the humiliating need to make a living. Art or charity work, babies—something like that. Each time seniors had me sign their yearbooks, I wrote, “Good luck!” then stared off into space, thinking of all the wisdom I could impart but didn’t. At graduation, I’d take a few Benadryl to soothe my nerves, watch those tasseled caps float around, all the idiotic high fives. I’d shake a few hands, go home to load my car with musty summer clothes and a case of sparkling mineral water, then drive the five hours up to Alna.
When I got back to my house with the lamp that day, a girl was standing in my front yard. She had her back turned, and she seemed to be staring up at the windows, a hand held over her head to block the sun’s glare. Nobody had ever come into my yard before. In all my time in Alna, nobody but Clark had ever even knocked on my door. I put the lamp down by my car and cleared my throat.
When the girl turned around, I saw that she was pregnant. The swell of her baby made a tent of her long black sleeveless shirt. She was thin otherwise, a scrawny young mother, the kind my sister abhorred. Her leggings were pastel purple, and her hair was short like a boy’s, and blond. She approached me, her hands supporting the small of her back, wincing in the sunshine, trying to smile.
“Is this your house?” she asked. As she came closer, I thought I detected rose perfume. A raised mole on her chin glistened with sweat. I folded my arms.
“Yes,” I stammered, “it’s my house. I’m the owner.” I guessed at who she was then—a former tenant. A Teri or Maxine or Jennifer or Jill, whatever their names were. Maybe she’d forgotten something in the house. Those girls always left things behind—a hairbrush, a bobby pin, empty boxes of crackers, tampons in the medicine cabinet, stray socks and underwear between the washer and dryer. I happily used up their leftover bars of vanilla-and floral-scented soaps, each laced with hairs and gouged by their fingernails in sharp half-moons. “Can I help you?”
The pregnant girl stood before me now, face gleaming, and looked down at the sunlamp. She held up one hand to wave hello. In her other hand she carried a sheaf of flyers.
“I’m a housecleaner,” she said. “I wanted to drop this off.”
She handed me one of the flyers. It was a hazy photocopy of a handwritten ad that included her name and phone number and a long list of the services she provided. “I do laundry. I sweep and mop. I straighten up. I dust. I vacuum,” I read aloud. She’d drawn stars around the page, a smiley face at the bottom, at the end of a line that read, “Ask about babysitting.” Her hourly rate was less than what a person would make working at a fast-food restaurant. I considered pointing that out to her but didn’t. I picked the lamp back up.
“Do you need help?” she asked. I ignored her tanned, outstretched arms and let her follow me across the yard. “I cleaned your house last year, actually,” she said. “After you left, before the students moved in, I guess.”
Clark hadn’t told me he’d outsourced the cleaning.
“So you know Clark,” I said, pulling out my keys.
“Yeah,” she said, “I know him.”
I didn’t bother to wonder whether Clark might be responsible for her pregnancy. He didn’t have it in him. Even with me he’d been fiercely dedicated to his fancy brand of condoms. But it burned me to picture him ogling the girl, counting out the cash to pay her for cleaning up my filth. Poor girl. She was pretty for Alna, and tough in a way that came through in her shoulders. They weren’t wide, per se, but angular and taut with budding muscles like a teenage boy’s. She must have thought I was old and ugly. I could have been her mother, I suppose. I struggled with the sunlamp as we climbed the few steps to my front door.
“Clark should hire you to clean before I arrive, too,” I said, opening the door and putting the lamp down inside. “The bathroom especially is always yucky when I get here.”
“I can usually do a house like this in an hour or two,” she said, still standing out on the doorstep. “But I’ve been getting slower and slower, with this baby thing.” She pointed down at her belly, then looked up at me, as if she would find some sympathy there. Her eyes were clear and blue but hooded and tired. She spoke with the grumbling, rhythmless lilt of Alna talk. Maybe she had a dragon or a devil tattooed on the small of her back, or a Playboy bunny on her lower abdomen, now stretched and mutated by her pregnancy, that “baby thing,” as she called it. I studied her face as she peered over my shoulder into the darkened house.
“Want to clean now?” I asked her.
“Okay, sure.”
Then, despite the information I’d just read on the flyer, I asked, “How much do you charge?”
She shrugged, those gleaming shoulders twitching, clavicles glistening in the sunshine. “Ten bucks?”
“For the whole house?”
She shrugged again.
“Come on in,” I said and held open the door.
“Let me just call my mom.”
I pointed to the phone on the wall by the fridge and watched her waddle past me toward it. She put the flyers down on the counter. Her belly was huge, nearly ready to pop. What kind of mother lets her pregnant teen wander around outside in the sweltering heat? I wondered. But I knew the answer. This was the Alna way.
I stared at the girl’s face as she passed, her tiny pores, her small, upturned nose, oily purple makeup darkening into the crease of her heavy eyelids. She dialed the phone and lifted the collar of her shirt to wipe the sweat off her chin. I opened the cabinet under the sink and gestured toward the cleaning supplies down there. She nodded. “Hi, Momma,” she said, turning away from me, coiling the cord around her thin wrist.
I left her there, went into the den, unwrapped my sandwich on the coffee table, and unscrewed my soda. I was a grown-up. I could sit on the sofa and eat a sandwich. I didn’t have to call my mother. I didn’t even have to clean my own house. I listened to the girl talk. “I’m fine, Momma. No, don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be home in time for dinner.” After she hung up, I heard her rattling the bucket of sprays and cleaners from under the kitchen sink.