Coming clean, p.2
Coming Clean, page 2
“A new job in Florida is not something you decide on the spot,” she said.
She heard voices and clattering on her father’s end, pulling her father’s attention away from the phone. Relief filled her body like warm sunlight. She couldn’t believe herself. An invitation to Florida with a free job on the other end would have equaled hitting the lottery a few days ago. Had she really wanted to hear from Mrs. Folly that badly? Had she been waiting for it all those months? One phone call from Terry’s mother and she was sucked back in like they’d never blamed her for the accident in the first place.
“The rum guy’s here. Talk it over with your mother. Call me back later,” her father said.
“Okay. I will.”
“Don’t be manipulated, Dawn. There’s no way Sandy Folly invited you out of the goodness of her heart. She’s fishing for info. Plotting.”
“You don’t know that,” Dawn said.
“Nothing good comes from moving backward. Talk later,” her father said and ended the call. Her father offered her the job.
Dawn knelt beside the Turners’ Christmas tree and removed the red- and green-wrapped packages underneath. The stacks rose, two wobbly towers. Red lights covered the tree and twinkled like miniature video cameras. Dawn gave them the double bird. Imagine if someone really were watching. Not that Barb and Fred Turner had much time to spy, considering their herd of kids and the magnitude of the mess they generated.
Her father offered her the job. She’d wanted him to offer her a job, an escape, and now he had.
But attending the vigil didn’t have to mean moving backward. That was an assumption. Wanting a peaceful relationship with Terry’s mother had nothing to do with a job in Florida. She couldn’t help the timing. It was the holidays, for God’s sake.
She remembered it was Monday. Matthew wanted to begin shooting for his grant project.
Matthew! Oh, thank God. She’d made a commitment to him. Not officially, but she’d always known she’d tell Matthew yes. She reached for her phone to text her dad. Photography with Matthew this week. Today till Friday. He needs a model.
Her father responded immediately.
An excuse or are you telling me you’ll leave at the end of the week?
Dawn paused. Her mind overflowed. Her father didn’t usually push. Maybe it was an excuse, but it was also true. The deadline for Matthew’s art grant was the end of the month. She knew better than to tell her father he’d be taking her picture in the houses she cleaned.
He responded before she did.
Call me Friday with a yes or a no. Might be your last chance, kiddo.
The kiddo stung. She liked to think of Key West as an anytime option. For the future. Like if her mom finally got on her last nerve or her cleaning business didn’t work out. The kiddo implied her father, who generally treated her as an adult, thought excuses were childish.
Okay.
She speed-dialed Matthew. A rush of adrenalin replaced the bad feeling. She could think about her father’s invitation later.
“Hello, D-lightful.”
“Matt,” Dawn said.
“Don’t call me Matt.”
“The answer is yes.”
“Really? The whole week?”
The rising pitch of his voice rang like a kid on Christmas morning. Dawn couldn’t help smiling. Anything to further his art brought Matthew happiness, the kind that resulted in an in-depth analysis of symbolism and meaning and sudden hand gestures, like he was about to cover his ears but shifted to jazz hands.
“I’ve got no one to answer to. Let’s do it,” Dawn said.
“I thought for sure you’d leave me hanging.”
“I knew I’d say yes. That’s what friends do. As long as you remember it’s my first time. I might need some coaching.”
“Whatever you say, D-ceiver. Should I come over now?”
“You better. I’m almost out of here for the day.”
“Got it. Bye,” he said and hung up.
She stashed her phone, found her bottle, and aimed. She squirted Magic around the Christmas tree skirt and wiped it clean. Twenty-seven presents already and still two weeks until the holiday. How on earth could the Turner kids understand the meaning of gifts when they got all of that? That’s how it worked, whether it translated to toys or money or sex. Or sex toys. Barb had an impressive stash of vibrators hidden in her underwear drawer, a variety of torpedoes in an array of sizes and colors, some with feelers and ticklers. Matthew would love that; he was most interested in the things people wanted to keep secret.
She’d show him the way Fred Turner kept his socks stacked in rows in his top drawer, unpaired. And the way he draped his only fancy tie—branded with an extravagant Italian label on the back—over the first shirt in his closet to trick you into thinking all his clothes were that nice.
Dawn knew the more you had, the less the overall value of the thing. Not that the Turners were wealthy, they weren’t. It might be nice to be somewhere in the middle, in the place where poor people thought you were rich and rich people knew you weren’t. A house like this, Dawn thought, could totally be enough as long as you didn’t make it too much. One thing she knew for sure, she’d never let her life get this big or this messy. No matter where she lived.
Barb had fanned the Christmas presents in anal-retentive piles according to the pattern on the wrap. Candy canes for Bobby. Snowmen for Susie. Snowflakes for Johnny. Dawn replaced them in the same manner you’d deal a hand of poker.
She worked her houses from top to bottom, always taking care to remove cobwebs from the corners of the ceiling with a broom, dust between the slats of the window blinds, and douse the knickknacks with Magic. She scrubbed floors until her knees went numb. She stood on countertops, for God’s sake, to reach the dust on top of cabinets. She wiped drips and spills from refrigerators. Her efforts made it easier to take liberty now and then. With a thing or two. Here or there. Really, probably every domestic servant got retribution for the annoying habits of at least one customer.
She’d never go as far as stealing. And Matthew’s photography project, so what? The idea of studying the Turners’ private life seemed like a mandatory perk of the job. They’d never know. Figuring out a family’s deal was far from a crime.
Come on, Dawn. You have a look. It’s the right look. The cleaning concept is perfect. You can’t argue with that, Matthew had said.
I could probably argue, she’d said.
She backed into one of the Turners’ fat velvet chairs. Everyone should have a Matthew. She liked having a male friend, someone she could tell anything, and she especially liked the change in his expression when she talked about the future and he wasn’t in it. Matthew was a friend first. Everyone knew that. He dated other women—Jen, the latest. Still, Dawn could tell her friendship held significant worth to him. It mattered to her that she mattered to him. Whatever flashed across his face made her feel wanted.
Modeling for Matthew could help her get unstuck. So many aspects of her life had become sticky: living in the trailer, cleaning houses for a living, staying in upstate New York.
Only you can get back on your feet, her father had said. Sometimes it seems like you’re hanging around waiting for him to come back.
Dawn knew by now that being dead meant not coming back. Her fiancé Terry no longer existed and the engagement ring he’d given her seemed better suited for the little box tossed somewhere in her closet. Getting used to her finger without the ring took longer than she expected, considering she’d only worn it for a fraction of her lifetime. But being asked to be someone’s wife had changed her. Family was essential to the Follys. And they had chosen her. Terry always tried to please his parents, especially his father. He wouldn’t have asked without their approval. Dawn saw her future with the Follys so clearly, she wanted to believe she could still have it, even without Terry. That was ridiculous, she knew now.
Her bare hand came to represent everything that changed with Terry’s death and she became an adult she’d never envisioned, someone who visited the trailer park to inquire about availability and rent, someone who used the library computers to create an account on Craigslist to advertise cleaning services. She became the woman alone at home with the back of her hand pressed to her mouth in moments of grief or anger or fear or guilt. If she happened to catch a glimpse of the little ring box in her closet, it seemed like jewelry that didn’t belong to her. That was someone else’s life.
Enough time had passed now for Dawn to see that neither of the potential lives—the one married at twenty-one to Terry, or the one she lived at twenty-two, cleaning houses and going home to a trailer park—were like she’d dreamed about. She’d pictured herself as a college student at NYU, in the smells and sounds of the city, at a bar with other students, drinking whiskey, and discussing intellectual subjects. Or in jeans and a T-shirt on campus at Syracuse, walking down a shabby street to someone’s house for a study session. They’d smoke and watch football. She’d envisioned herself in Key West with her dad, working at the bar and going to community college, assuming there was one.
No one pictured herself getting engaged at twenty, but Dawn knew how situations could evolve that transformed you into a different person. Or perhaps you realized the person you were wasn’t the person you thought. Maybe it was impossible to know whether Terry had changed her into the person willing to envision a totally different future or if Dawn simply hadn’t known herself before that moment at the Folly family reunion when Terry put his arm around her and Dawn watched Mrs. Folly nod at a group of cousins as though all had fallen into its right place.
Nothing mattered more than making him happy. Thoughts of NYU and Syracuse dissolved. Life changed course. She gripped the arms of the Turners’ chair and let her palms slide forward and back against the grain of the velvet. She stopped thinking about it here, she had to. The very idea that an event might put into motion Dawn having a life like Barb Turner, or any one of her customers, overwhelmed her with its infinite possibilities. More so that anything in motion could stop and restart. Stop forever. Restart again. And again. Stop.
Dawn craved a cigarette. She weighed the pros and cons. Smoking at the Turners’ required too much effort and who wanted to stand in the cold, in full view of the wannabe neighbors, tapping ashes into her palm? Not her, not today. The Chens were the only ones who smoked and they weren’t until Thursday. Sometimes Dawn vacuumed there with a cigarette in her mouth just because she could. Sometimes Wei Chen follow-
ed her around with her own cigarette, yapping away though Dawn couldn’t hear.
Every house she cleaned offered a different kind of satisfaction. She took what she could get. Who didn’t? No one, that’s who, and she guaranteed that every other cleaning lady spied, snooped, or stole. People who handed house keys to hired help had it coming. The clues couldn’t be ignored: clinking vodka bottles in the trash, a crumpled bank statement on the kitchen counter, a magazine under his side of the mattress. Every house told a story.
Focusing on their stories kept her mind off her own.
So if Mondays were imitation middle-class comfort, and Tuesdays were old-school money, and Wednesdays were uptown condominium enormity, Thursdays were smoke-soaked white carpet, and Fridays were a vast cedar deck overlooking the forest. No one saw a thing on Fridays. Except for Dawn because she saw everything. Fridays were the Letwinskis. If she wanted to be anyone, which she really didn’t, it would be them.
She took a lap around the first floor, dropping the bottle of Magic next to her supplies—bucket, mop, broom—waiting near the front door. Her gaze drifted to the yellowing gouge on the leg of the table in the hallway. That was the problem with the Turners. Each possession seemed scarred: the frayed edge of the carpet, a burn on the linoleum from a dropped pan, chipped paint on the doorframes. As though Barb were being punished for each and every one of her trendy desires.
Dawn came to expect the imperfections. When the living room got freshly painted, a dent appeared a few weeks later from a child’s toy or book thrown across the room. The few times she’d encountered Barb in person, there had been salad shrapnel covering one of her front teeth, a run down the back of her pantyhose, a sick kid clutching her leg and making awful whining noises. Not that Dawn was perfect or close to it, but aside from keeping her scars covered, she knew Barb saw her as someone, if not enviable, at least reliable and under control.
Dawn ripped the Velcro straps on her kneepads and tossed them in the bucket. She massaged her elbows and longed for the tight red skin to be more elastic, forgiving. It had been a year and a half, for God’s sake, would they ever get better? The doctor said maybe, maybe not. Everyone said movement was the best solution. Movement. Motion. All she did was move. She’d become a moving target without a clear sense of who was aiming at her in the first place.
Pointing her elbow toward the ceiling gave the best view. Red and wrinkly, but taut too, like a shirt that comes out of the dryer in a ball and won’t smooth no matter how much you iron it. The red patch burned and pulled as though her elbow might pop through the skin. She almost wanted it to. That skin belonged on her thigh anyway. The grafts would settle in, the doctor said, and eventually blend to be less obvious. Now, when she rotated her shoulder to see it with her arm straight, the skin rose a little and puckered. She imagined she could peel it off like a sticker. Until then, she thought, just keep moving. At least Dawn could make the Turners’ place gleam and smell nice.
Invaluable, Dad, just like you said.
She’d been doing this for nearly a year and had never lost a customer.
***
Dawn thumped upstairs to the Turners’ bedroom. Late afternoon had settled into the house, from the sunshine that broke through the clouds and warmed the slices of space it occupied to the clicks and creaks of west-facing walls that relaxed as the day wore on. The last time she passed through the kitchen, the digital display on the microwave said it was quarter past three. Dawn tried to think back to a time at the Turners’ when someone came home for the day. Nothing came to mind, and she was almost positive she’d stayed until five. The kids must have latchkey or afternoon activities.
She paused in the Turners’ bedroom doorway and waited for the silence to wrap around her. The rigidity of the room came into sharper focus under the glare of the overhead light: the stacked books on the shelf, the precise angle of the photographs on the dresser. Their bed, too small for the large room, a queen. Each week, Dawn avoided the damp outline of Fred Turner on his side of the mattress. The fitted sheet had wrinkled beneath his weight and faded. She couldn’t bear the idea of touching Fred’s place for confirmation that it was, indeed, moist. The rate at which she tore the sheets off the bed might break records.
Barb’s side of the bed, dry and barely mussed, edged so close to the perimeter it was hard to believe she didn’t fall out. The Turners’ marital bed solidified everything Dawn believed about marriage, mainly that it made no sense. Her own parents, divorced since she was six, couldn’t think of one positive trait about the other after sixteen years apart. Her mother simply raised an eyebrow (leaning over to tap her cigarette on the side of the ashtray) and scrunched her mouth into a knot.
Oh, Dawn, I don’t know what I saw in him. There must have been some kind of attraction there.
The Turner’s bed, now that it was clean and fresh with new sheets and the comforter pulled up, gave no indication that within a day or two, a silhouette would appear to depict a couple sleeping separately with little, if any, crossing over the dividing line. She knew Barb took antidepressants, Zoloft, and had once drawn a complex diagram of all the reasons a person’s fingers could be dangerous: tickling and grazing, whatever that was. Sweeping, though she assumed not a floor.
Dawn moved to the threshold of the Turners’ walk-in closet. At least she could look for something to wear. She scanned the section of robes and nighties—some classy, others skimpy—hanging on the rack between the shelves of Barb Turner’s sweaters. The drawers contained her underwear and other unmentionables, like the vibrators and a travel-sized bottle of K-Y Warming Jelly. The way they were shoved to the back and buried, she doubted Fred knew they existed. Dawn stepped into the small room, disturbing the perfectly groomed carpet. One of her trademarks was backing out of a room with the vacuum so her customers walked in each time leaving fresh footprints.
She appraised the robes with her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. She wanted a garment to appeal to her by sight, not texture. Matthew took pictures, after all, so the feel of whatever she wore could only be visualized. Assuming he wanted her in a garment. She released her curls from the knot and smoothed her hair. Were anyone to judge, it wasn’t like Dawn cared.
Despite herself, she reached forward and fingered the lapel of a floral kimono. She could be art wearing a kimono like that. Its pinks, reds, and blues shimmered under the lights. The pure white background seemed as clean as the flesh inside a coconut. She pulled the belt from its loops and circled her neck like a scarf. Glorious, the feeling of silk on skin. It slid off and fluttered to the ground in a coil.
None of the lingerie in Barb’s closet looked used. Some still had store tags affixed to the label or sleeve. What a waste. Dawn remembered the nightgown on the back of the closet door. She swung it shut. There, the navy-blue, plaid flannel from Lands End hung in a thick, matronly line. That one she wore.
Dawn picked up the belt and snaked it back through the loops. She left it untied like she’d found it. Matthew probably wouldn’t want her in clothes like that anyway. Too classy. The purpose of art was to make you feel, he said, and the type of feelings stirred up by Matthew’s photos had nothing to do with class. Dawn hadn’t been lying when she told her dad it was a serious project: a Krindle visual arts grant was twenty-thousand dollars.
