Sotah (41 page)

All that yelling, all that abuse, from everyone, all morning! And so much work. And tension. Ho, boy, let’s talk about tension! And talk about fulfilling everyone’s expectations! And it never being good enough … Even all that kosher food she’d gone to all that trouble to find and buy (precious little appreciation she’d gotten for that!). And for a maid, for goodness’ sake, who’d been sleeping all day! And on top of it all, to get a lecture from her! “You wouldn’t be so smart if you had any children of your own!” Joan sobbed.

The words affected Dina like a blow. She seemed to totter and lose her equilibrium. A look as tragic and heart-breaking as any Joan had seen on any human being passed over the girl’s face. She seemed to age almost visibly. A single tear rolled down from the corner of each eye.

Joan, even more upset at having upset Dina, and Dina, feeling the full shock of her loss, both sat there, crying their eyes out, unable to regain control. It’s the last straw, the last straw! both women thought, totally absorbed in their own pain.

After a while Joan finally looked up. She rummaged around in her pocket for another tissue and silently handed it to Dina.

“I’ve never made anyone cry before. I mean aside from family. I’ve never made a stranger cry. I feel awful,” Joan said.

“I never did, either.” Dina shook her head. “I ask forgiveness.” What right have I to judge anyone else after what I’ve done?

“I forgive you, Dina.” I forgive you because you haven’t done anything wrong. The kids treat each other like dirt and have precious little respect for me or their father. A lot of it is my fault. I was too busy, too tired, too full of psychology textbooks, to educate them when they were little, and now I let them get away with murder because it’s the path of least resistance.

I’ve given up hope that I can change anything.

There was silence as the two women sniffed back their last sobs and made their last blows into their tissues. Surprisingly, both felt better, almost refreshed from the sudden emotional outburst. And, strangely, it brought them closer together, like strangers on a camping trip who have crossed in each other’s company some arduous terrain.

“Joan, I will work for you. I will do a good job for you.”

“Do you feel up to it?” Joan said doubtfully.

“I am ready,” Dina assured her, standing up quickly.

“Well, first off, we’ll put you into a pair of jeans,” Joan suggested, looking over the girl’s long silk skirt with dismay.

Dina shook her head. “I don’t wear jeans.”

“Well, a lot of women who shouldn’t, do, but you’re so small, they’d look great on you. Not to mention practical …”

“I must not wear jeans,” Dina repeated, wondering if she’d gotten the English words mixed up.

“Well, it’ll be a shame to ruin that nice little outfit.”

“It’s not modest to wear pants. It shows the legs and where the legs meet.” Dina blushed.

Joan looked down at herself. Now skirts that hardly covered your butt, tank tops that looked like bras and see-through blouses,
that
was immodest. But jeans? Even born-again Christians wore jeans.

Joan examined Dina’s skirt to hide her confusion. The material was silk, she was sure of it. Scrubbing toilets in silk. Jewish milk. She shrugged helplessly. “Well, maybe tomorrow we’ll take you shopping, get your hair cut and styled, get you some kind of uniform,” she said, trying to be kind. “But today there is just so much work that needs to be done. I don’t even know where to tell you to begin …”

“I will begin and I will finish,” Dina said firmly. “I will do everything.”

Joan felt herself smile, touched by Dina’s desire to prove her worth. “I don’t want a corpse smelling of Ajax on my hands when I get back, so take it easy. Besides, there’s a girl coming this afternoon who’ll do the floors and windows. So don’t touch that.”

“Another girl?”

“Not to worry.” Joan laughed. “There’s plenty left.”

Dina was worried. The cleaning products, the equipment, were all so new and unfamiliar to her. Although Joan had explained them all to her before leaving the house, she found she couldn’t keep straight which was for sparkling toilet bowls and which for greaseless stovetops. At home she had used bleach and ammonia from huge plastic containers for almost everything. She faced the cornucopia of brightly colored little cans and bottles with hopeless confusion.

She was suddenly very glad she didn’t have to do the floors because the mop didn’t look anything like the Israeli kind, either. It seemed like a big sponge. She had no idea what to do with it. In Israel one threw buckets of water on the floor and simply swept all the water and dirt out the front door or porch with a
sponga
, a sharp rubber blade on a long wooden handle. But here in America, they used a
sponga
to clean the windows!

There was no way to throw water over these floors anyway, she realized, with so many rugs, plants, vases, baskets, lamps, and sculptures all over the place. Not to mention wall-to-wall carpeting in almost every room.

So she rolled up her sleeves and began from the top working her way down, as she had seen her mother work; as she had worked in her own spotless home. She moved everything and cleaned thoroughly beneath and behind. She scrubbed and polished and straightened and dusted. She carried the bag full of bottles and sprays into the bathrooms, trying out each one to see which seemed to do the job best. Down on her knees, she scrubbed the toilet bowls of strangers, breathing in the unfamiliar, intimate smell of unknown bodies, of people who were not her own family. She tried not to think. To just move one foot in front of the other. She felt sick. Don’t think, she told herself. Don’t feel. This is your punishment. What you deserve.

The house was enormous. It was as big as an apartment house in Jerusalem. Dina kept wondering where all the other people were. It couldn’t possibly be that one small family owned and used all these rooms. She kept thinking that there might be more children, but the bedrooms showed evidence of only the three she’d already met.

Stacey’s room was striking. A series of unique collages covered the walls, as if someone had cut out pictures from magazines and put them together with a wonderful sense of humor and a perceptive eye for color. There was a sense of order in the room, yet not a sterile cleanliness. A distinct personality came through: fun-loving, intelligent, talented … Dina tried and failed to reconcile it with the badly dressed, disrespectful young woman she had met in the morning.

The young child’s room was also lovely. The closet was enormous. Why, you could actually walk inside it! And the clothes—it seemed like a store, everything hung on hangers and covered in plastic. There were exquisite little party dresses trimmed in lace and velvet, matching tiny skirts and sweaters. And the shoes! Tiny patent-leather T-straps and small Nike jogging shoes lined up in boxes filled with tissue paper. The bed was canopied with yards of pink calico that matched the curtains and the bedspread. A thick pink rug warmed the floor. There were shelves and shelves and shelves of gorgeous dolls and stuffed animals, a vanity with a large mirror, and a bay window with a beautiful view of the private gardens.

Dina sat on the bed, trying to reconcile the exquisitely privileged child who had such a room with the unhappy, whining little youngster named Suzy. Yet she could not fail to be grateful to both girls for their neatness. There was hardly anything to do in either room.

But if the girls’ rooms were unexpected fairy tales, the boy’s was a predictable nightmare. At first she couldn’t believe her eyes. It was like a place ransacked by brutal criminals who felt no respect of any kind either for things or for the human beings who owned them. She began the horrific task of making order.

All over the room were expensive electronic gadgets: video games, a television set, everything covered with debris so that they were practically buried. She picked clothes off the floor, touching them gingerly. Everything was well made, the most expensive quality, and practically brand-new. Yet there was no question that these things had not only been thanklessly worn and thoughtlessly discarded, but positively trampled underfoot like so much garbage.

A desk drawer had been emptied out onto the floor, and little pieces of paper from crayons and Magic Marker labels mingled with Yo-Yos and stamps and stickers. Had she been more experienced, she would simply have swept the whole mess back into the drawer and replaced it. But she was thinking of her own home, her parents’ home. She tried to treat the things with a respect their owner obviously lacked. She had almost finished the sickening task, exhausted, when she suddenly spied another door. She opened it and found the boy’s closet. It made her want to cry.

Then the phone rang. From what she could make out from the voice emerging from the answering machine, it was a cleaning service and they were very, very sorry, but the girl wouldn’t be coming this week after all to wash the floors and windows.

Dina stood in the huge dining room, her sleeves rolled up, the pail and brush in front of her. This was the last one. She had already done the kitchen floor and the patio. She had vacuumed every inch of all the other floors and cleaned all the windows. And now, practically numb with tiredness, she surveyed the vast, tile-covered floor.

It was as large as all the floors in her parents’ home combined. There was a fraction of an instant, just before she fell to her knees, that she felt her soul ache with humiliation. Then she dipped the brush in the soapy water and scrubbed until her arms and back ached. Her soft, delicate hands turned rough and red in the hot, soapy detergent, her pretty sleeves and skirt soaked through, wetting her underwear, her skin. She felt dirty and degraded. When she was finished, she crawled into a corner and looked at her reflection on the floor. It shone with an indistinct, distorted glow. She was a stranger to herself.

Maid, she thought. In Hebrew it was an
ozeret bayit
, usually a heavy Arab woman or a poor middle-aged Moroccan or North African Jew. Poor and uneducated, she cleaned other people’s homes because she needed the money for food and did not know how to earn it any other way. And now that’s what I am, Dina thought, a little flash of anguish prickling through her raw, newly ragged cuticles. They felt like burned flesh.

At four o’clock the boy came in. He threw his books and sweater on the floor, went straight for the refrigerator, which he held open as he grabbed and ate things off the shelves. Then he put his feet up on the living room couch and put on the VCR.

“Shalom,” Dina said.

He looked at her, puzzled. “Oh, the new maid.” He nodded. “Hi, new maid,” he said, his eyes returning to the screen.

She felt humbled by his arrogant tone. Yet he was only a child, and she was an adult and a mother. He was just a little boy, like one of her brothers who would have never dared speak to an adult, any adult, with such disrespect.

“Where is your sister?”

“Who cares?” he answered, his thumb pressing the little buttons on the remote control, a slow smile spreading over his face.

She walked around, curious to see what he was watching. The old taboo against watching TV or movies seemed so far from her now. She sank onto the sofa and tried to understand what was happening on the screen.

Her eyes grew wider and wider, her heart pounding with distress. A young couple with a small child were walking down a city street when someone brutally smashed the young father in the head, then brandished a gun in the face of the terrified mother and child. Then the screen switched abruptly to a man screaming as he fell into a bubbling vat of acid, and then again to a man, his face horribly deformed, pumping bullets into another man to the accompaniment of happy carnival music. And then suddenly a man was caressing a blond woman, kissing her passionately. And then they were in bed together … And then one man burned another man alive and laughed uproariously at the burned corpse …

It was horrible, horrible! She had never in her life witnessed such terrible things!

A little boy should not see such things! she thought suddenly, looking at Steven. He laughed at intervals, but mostly he sat smiling impassively as his practiced fingers fast-forwarded and rewound, manipulating the images on the screen, pinpointing his favorite parts.

She had to protect him, she thought wildly. After all, wasn’t he just a child, a little boy like her small, innocent brothers? … Her breath caught in her throat at the idea of any of them seeing the sickening things she had just witnessed. She rushed over to the set and began to frantically press the buttons, trying to shut it off.

“Hey, dummy, what’s the idea!”

“Your mother would not like it! For you to watch that!” She had no idea how to turn the thing off, so she stood in front of it, blocking the screen with her body.

“Hey, you’re not my mother. You can’t tell me what to do! It’s a free country!” he screamed.

Dina stood her ground.

The boy got up and walked over to her menacingly.

“You can’t tell Mom I didn’t ask you nicely. I’m asking you nicely to please move.”

Dina shook her head. “It is wrong! You are just a child!”

Joan stood in the doorway. The wisdom tooth sent throbbing waves of agony down her jaw. Her head ached. Her tired feet throbbed.

“What’s going on here?”

“Oh, Joan, it was terrible! The things the boy watched! I tried to stop him, but I did not know how to—”

Joan slammed down her packages. “Steven! Have you been watching the R-rated stuff from Daddy’s room again? How many times have I told you never …” She grabbed his arm, shaking him.

“Leave me alone! Stinking liar!” he yelled at Dina. “I haven’t done anything wrong! I was just watching
Batman.”

“
“Batman?
” Joan dropped his arm, looking up at Dina in confusion.
“Batman?
That’s a children’s movie! Anyhow, he’s seen it about two million times …”

“You allow it? You permit this?”

“Well, yesss, I suppose.” Why did she feel so uncomfortable? Why did she need all this aggravation?