Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,60

cactuses sat in pots near the spider plants, and she draped philodendron vines over the curtain rods. I’d sneaked to snip off a couple of baby spider plants and took them home to put in pots. I wanted to be surrounded by green growth, by life, too. I just couldn’t afford to buy the starts from a store.

There weren’t any plants in the bathroom. But there was mold. I stood on the edge of the bathtub to clean it from the crevice where the wall met the ceiling. The wife would leave the shower curtain rolled up and folded over the rod. She removed the rugs and towels to place them in the wash. By the time I arrived, the bathroom was bare, stark, white. I turned off the humidifier that she used to filter the air so that all of my movements echoed. I liked to sing in that bathroom with my voice reverberating off the walls.

As a child, I had performed in school swing choirs, fall plays, and spring musicals. I never sang a solo, but I liked being onstage. My friends and I would break into harmonies as we walked down the street. The empty houses gave me space to sing again, without fear of anyone listening. I’d belt out Adele, Tegan and Sara, and Widespread Panic.

That Monday after Mia’s surgery, I stood in the Plant House’s bathtub and sang loud, my voice booming, until I started crying and couldn’t stop.

With the final wipe to dry the shower walls, tears brimmed in my eyes, and I immediately put my hand to my face to catch them. I pressed palms to my eyes, letting out a choking sob, lowered myself to my knees and remembered how we’d been rushed out the door from the recovery room. As soon as Mia sipped down some juice and went pee, we had to leave. I couldn’t even sit with her in the waiting room. But I wasn’t ready to stop holding her; I was unable to drive with the expectation to watch the road. I’d leaned up against the car, still warm from the morning sun, and let her body drape over mine, feeling for both of her pink flip-flop sandals, then moving my hand up to squeeze her calf, then thigh; then I wrapped both of my arms around her, burying my face in her neck. I’d been there for Mia, but I’d needed someone to hold my hand, be there for me. Sometimes mothers need to be mothered, too.

Mia rarely saw me cry. Crying meant admitting defeat. It felt like my body and mind gave up. I did everything I could to avoid that feeling. An inability to stop crying was my fear. Of gasping for air. Of the way my mind tricked me into thinking that I might die. Crying like that, in that bathtub, felt almost the same, like I had lost myself in that uncontrollable way needed for my body to release. With all the things swirling around me that I had no control over, I could, at the very least, control my reactions to them. If I started crying every time something hard or horrible happened, well, I’d just be crying all the time.

As I was on the brink of feeling like I could give up, something shifted. The walls of the Plant House closed inward. I felt safety. That house had spoken to me. It had watched me go through its phone book to find churches that might donate funds to help me pay rent after I learned that the waitlist for Section 8 was five years long. That house knew me, and I knew it. I knew that the owner had constant sinus infections, that she’d stockpiled home remedies, that she worked out to old aerobics videos from the eighties in her bedroom. The house had been witness to my desperate calls to caseworkers, asking if there was any way I’d qualify for cash assistance. While cleaning its kitchen, I’d fought doggedly with Jamie. I’d cleaned the entire living room while on hold, waiting to renew my food stamps. For a few minutes, as I kneeled in the cradle of the tub, the walls of the Plant House protected me and comforted me with its stoic silence.

15

THE CHEF’S HOUSE

When we lived in the homeless shelter, I sat up late at night, long after Mia went to bed. As the night stretched out before me, I created a vision of a “happy” life. There