The Hired Girl (12 page)

When Mrs. Rosenbach introduced me, Malka was at the stove. She had a dish of buttered eggs that she was cooking slowly, holding the pot off the heat. She looked at me without approval and didn’t say anything. I tried a little curtsy. Malka is very short, and I felt like a fool, curtsying to such a little black fly of a woman.

I don’t mean to be cruel, calling her a little black fly. That’s just what came into my head when I saw her. She wore a black dress, and a print apron, mustard colored with red and pink roses on it, and her head was wrapped in an old black shawl. She wore another shawl around her shoulders, an embroidered one with gray silk fringe. I couldn’t imagine wearing all those shawls in July, but Malka is always cold.

After Mrs. Rosenbach left, I asked Malka if I could help with breakfast, but she pointed to a chair and said the best way to help would be to keep out of her way. I said “Yes, ma’am,” and sat down, obedient as a dog. She wasn’t mollified, though; she said she didn’t want to be called ma’am — plain Malka was good enough for her. She looked very grim when she said it but also as if her humility were satisfying in some way. It’s as if she smacks her lips over things that are sullen or sorrowful. Yesterday she told me about a family she knew a long time ago and how they succumbed to scarlet fever, one by one. It seemed to please her that their dying was so hopeless and long-drawn-out. And she evidently felt that it was a rare treat for me to hear about it. Yet I don’t believe she’s a cruel woman, only cross-grained and old and like a little black fly.

While she fixed the breakfast, I had time to look around. The kitchen isn’t wholly underground, but it has windows looking out on the street, so it isn’t as dark as it might be. It seemed to me a queer kitchen because it had so much in it — so many cabinets and cupboards, and two gas ranges, and two sinks, and two refrigerators, North Stars, they are called. Since then I’ve learned that Jewish people need more dishes than ordinary people. Mrs. Rosenbach has two beautiful sets that she uses only on Passover, which is what the Jews celebrate a week before they celebrate Easter.

The kitchen was surprisingly clean, considering how old Malka was. The only dirty places were high up — shelves where Malka can’t see. I itched to prove myself by giving them a good scrubbing. At one end of the kitchen was a little cozy corner that I thought must be Malka’s. There was a small grate and a flowered carpet, and two wing chairs, one with a footstool. Between the chairs was a pretty worktable with a knitting basket. Another basket on the floor held an immense striped cat. He is not a mere humble Tom but is called Thomashefsky, after a great actor who is Jewish.

Looking around that kitchen only confirmed what I’d thought the night before: that this would be a good place to work. That cozy corner suggested that the Rosenbachs took good care of Malka, and from all the stoves and refrigerators and china, I felt pretty sure they had enough money to pay me six dollars a week (though I forgot to mention wages that first night. Now I don’t know how to bring it up).

I watched Malka cook. She fried fish on a gridiron and toasted bread in an electric machine called a toaster. She kept her eye on the eggs, so that they cooked slowly. Between turning the fish and the toast, and stirring the eggs, she made coffee and sprinkled sugar on three little glass dishes of blackberries. She darted back and forth between the stove and the table and a little closet across the room from me. There was a shelf inside, and she put plates and cups and silverware on the shelf. When the food was done — and she’d timed things so that everything was ready at once — she put the eggs in a china tureen, and the fish in a covered dish, and wrapped the toast in a towel. She laid them all on the closet shelf. Then she pulled on a rope pulley, and the shelf rose into the air — I could see it from where I was sitting. I’d never seen a dumbwaiter before, but I could tell it was a fine invention.

Malka turned back to the table. I hadn’t noticed it, but she’d prepared a plate for me, with a tiny scrap of fish and a spoonful of eggs and two thick slices of toast. She thumped the plate against the table, and snapped, “If you’re hungry.” Then she stripped off her apron and exchanged it for a starched linen one that hung over the back of a chair. She hurried out — I guessed she was going upstairs to wait at table.

Once she was gone, I went to the plate she’d prepared for me. I felt kind of mortified by the way she’d banged that plate at me, but I was too hungry to be proud, especially as no one was there to see.

We seldom had fish at Steeple Farm, and I’m not very good at cooking it. The thought of raw fish makes me shudder, so I tend to cook it dry. Malka’s fish was crisp and salty on the outside, and tender inside. The buttered eggs were even better. I’d have liked more of both, but I couldn’t blame the old lady for stinting me, because she hadn’t known there’d be an extra person for breakfast.

I cleaned my plate and went over to the sink and washed the dishes. It was wonderful, how you could get hot water just by turning on the tap. I sat back down and started worrying what I’d do if I couldn’t get Malka to like me. I told myself there would be other places in Baltimore that would need a hired girl. But I’d made up my mind that I wanted to stay with the Rosenbachs. The house was handsome, and I admired Mrs. Rosenbach, and Mr. Rosenbach’s kindness had touched my heart.

I was roused from my thoughts by the sound of the dumbwaiter. The dirty plates were coming down. I took them off the shelf and carried them to the sink. I thought it would be good if Malka came downstairs and found me up to my elbows in dishwater; she’d see I was willing and maybe realize how nice it would be to have an extra pair of hands. I washed the blackberry dishes first, since they were glass. Then I picked up the tureen. It was white with painted flowers and a little cupid sitting on the lid. It looked special to me, so I washed it very carefully, and I was drying it when Malka came into the room.

She saw the water in the sink and the dish in my hand, and her eyes did that shocked-accusing thing they do so well. And she shrieked. That sounds like an exaggeration but it really was a shriek, and Mrs. Rosenbach heard it, because she came running downstairs to see what was the matter. Malka bore down on me and tried to yank the dish away. She cried, “What have you done?” with such ferocity I really thought I’d broken the dish — except there it was in my hands, without so much as a chip, and clean as a pearl.

Then Mrs. Rosenbach said, “Oh, Malka! For heaven’s sake!” and Malka went into a torrent of what I thought was German, but what I now know is Yiddish, which is Jewish German. While Malka railed at me in Yiddish, Mrs. Rosenbach tried to explain to me in English what I’d done wrong. It seems that the Jews — well, some of them — are very serious about how they eat, and meat and milk dishes are supposed to be kept separate. That’s why there were two stoves and two sinks. And the dish I was holding was a milk dish, because the eggs had been made with butter, but I was washing it in the meat sink. And Malka was saying that the
kashrut
— which is what they call the food laws — had been broken and that I’d ruined a dish called Meissen, from Germany, which had been a wedding present. I’d ruined it by putting it in the wrong sink, and that meant the sink was spoiled, too.

I was very frightened to think I’d done all that without knowing it. But Mrs. Rosenbach wasn’t angry with me; she was exasperated with Malka. She lost her temper. She didn’t shout or bang on things, the way I do. When I lose my temper, I’m like a bear with a big club. But Mrs. Rosenbach was like an archer shooting arrows; it was kind of delicate and deadly at the same time. She told Malka to calm herself at once, and though she didn’t raise her voice, it was sharp enough to cut paper. And she said they were a Reform household now, which I’ve learned means they aren’t so strict about
kashrut.
She said Malka could put boiling water in the sink, if that made her feel better, but Malka said the Meissen dish would have to be buried. Mrs. Rosenbach said that was out of the question. She said Malka could put the dish outside the next time it rained, which made Malka shriek again. Then Mrs. Rosenbach said she wouldn’t listen to another word, which made Malka shut up. On her way out, Mrs. Rosenbach shot an arrow of a look at me that told me I was being a lot of trouble and that she wished she hadn’t taken me in.

After Mrs. Rosenbach swept out of the kitchen — she wasn’t wearing a train, but she’d have looked good in one — Malka went to the other sink and filled it with water and cried as she washed the dishes. It wasn’t the breaking-down kind of crying but the stop-and-start kind; I’d think she was done and then she’d mutter and sniff some more. I heard her moan that she was the only person in the house who . . . sniff, sniff, grumble . . . and that she wasn’t too old . . . sniff, sniff . . . she could manage perfectly if only she didn’t have to . . . moan and sniff . . . and she knew a fool when she saw one, and probably Irish as well . . . she could manage, she’d always managed, if strangers didn’t barge in and add to her burdens . . . sniff, sniff, gulp . . . she might be old, she might be tired, she might be half dead, but she knew how things ought to be done . . . sniff, clear throat, little sob. She went on like that for some time, covering all the ground between pitiful and insulting.

At last the dishes were done and everything put away. When she turned around, I said humbly, “I’m ever so sorry about the dish. I didn’t know any better.”

“No, you don’t,” she snapped, “and you never will.”

I tried again. “I can clean,” I said, and held out my hands so she could see them. “I’m used to hard work, heavy work. Isn’t there something I can do for you?”

She stared at me, and a witchlike gleam came into her eyes. Then she went and got a big bucket and started filling it with washing soda and hot water. “The floor needs washing,” she said. “You know how to scrub a floor?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said eagerly. I
was
eager. I was downright abject.

She stood back from the sink, so that I could lift the bucket out. Then she handed me a brush.

“I’ll need more buckets,” I said, “and a sponge and rags. And vinegar.”

I saw her eyebrows rise up very high, but she brought me the vinegar and pointed at the closet where the buckets were. I filled a second bucket with plain water and added vinegar water to a third. Then I settled down to scrub the floor.

No one can say that I don’t know how to scrub. Ma taught me, and frail though she was, when she did a thing, she did it thoroughly. I worked as she taught me, a square yard at a time, first scouring with the brush, and then sponging off the wet dirt and rinsing the sponge in the second bucket, and then finishing with vinegar water and drying the floor with rags. I reached under the cupboards and the stoves and dragged out wads of dust and cat hair and things that I couldn’t say
what
they’d been. Sometimes it’s better not to know.

Except for those underneath things, it wasn’t a bad room to scrub. The floor was linoleum, and linoleum’s a wonderful thing. It keeps the dirt on the surface, where you can get at it. Ma always wanted linoleum, but the cheapest she could find was eighty-six cents a yard, and Father wouldn’t let her spend all that. This linoleum was probably the expensive kind. It wasn’t exactly a cheerful pattern — olive-green squares with garlands of flowers — but it was dandy for hiding the dirt. When the rinse water turned dark, I raised my hand and asked Malka if I could change the water. She said, “What, you think you’re in school?” which I decided to take as a
yes.

I changed the water and went back to work. Malka settled down in the wing chair. A little while later, I heard a soft thundery sound. When I glanced sideways, I saw that the cat Thomashefsky had climbed into the old lady’s lap. He was purring, and she was scratching the top of his head.

It occurred to me that I might try praying, so I mouthed the words to a Hail Mary as I scoured the floor. Without speaking out loud, I explained to the Blessed Mother that I wanted to stay here and I needed that touchy old woman to like me. Clear as a bell I heard her voice — the Blessed Mother’s, I mean, not Malka’s. She said, “Be kind.”

That irritated me, because the Blessed Mother is always telling me to be kind, as if that were the solution to everything. But I’ve found it often works — only it’s like scrubbing the floor; you have to put your back into it. It takes imagination to do the thing thoroughly. So as I scrubbed I tried to imagine being Malka: old and tired and unable to reach under things. And I imagined how I’d feel if a stranger came in and broke my kitchen rules and ruined my Meissen dish and dirtied my sink.

When I finished I emptied the dishwater and rinsed the sponge and washed out the rags. Then I spoke to Malka.

“I’m sorry I made that mistake with the dish,” I said. “I didn’t mean it, though.”

“I never said you did,” she said. I guess I looked at her reproachfully, because she blinked and said, “You’d be all right in a Gentile home. Why don’t you work for the Gentiles?”

“I don’t know any Gentiles,” I said.

She snorted. “You’re a Gentile yourself. Gentile means
not Jewish
— don’t you know that?”

“I guess I don’t,” I said. I’d read the word, of course; it’s in
Ivanhoe
and the Bible, but I’d never looked it up. I had the idea that the Gentiles were like the Philistines or the Ishmaelites: people who lived a long time ago. “I’m Catholic,” I explained, “but I’m not Irish.” I thought it would be best to get that straight. Father says the Irish are worthless, and it seems that Malka agrees with him.

“What are you, then?”

“I’m American,” I answered promptly. Which was more than she was, with her ravings that sounded so German.

“So who isn’t?” said Malka. “What was your family before that?”

“We were Scots,” I said, “but that was a long time ago.”

“The Scots aren’t too bad,” she said as if she hated to admit it. “You can scrub a floor; I’ll say that for you.
I
can’t get down on my hands and knees, not the way I used to.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I knew better than to say anything pitying. Then the Blessed Mother inspired me, and I thought of the perfect answer. “The way you cook, I’d say scrubbing was a waste of your time.”