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Order this writing in the collection book Bending the Curve available for only 1495 |
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This appears in a pre-2010 issue
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Into my Unmade Bed
Pamela Fox
I walked in and she threw a look at me that I couldn’t deflect. Looking down her bulbous nose she sized me up. I saw how she saw me, white and weak. Flimsy. Like a soda cracker. I couldn’t hide how I saw her, grotesque like maggoty meat, like that bucket of hot dogs that I’d used for bait but left in the garage when I was nine. She was thick, every part of her, parts that I or any decent woman would have tried to hide. Or have removed. Girls are supposed to be skinny and delicate and she was so unapologetically thick. Her fuzzy teeth were orange under the red lights, framed by her thick sausage lips. She never stopped grinning. She balanced herself on that bar stool and something heavy and invisible steamed out of her, filling up the room. I started to choke on it.
She was a collage of contrasts. Her skin was green. Her immaculate red hair was in a style like Jackie O. used to wear. She leaned back with her knees spread. The dress hanging off those thick shoulders bulged like two abscesses where it should have been flat or at least smashed down. Her nose belonged to an obese woman, broad and swollen and so upturned that her mother could’ve been swine. The sunny yellow dress with purple flowers that tangled their way around her form, the kind of dress that I would’ve worn to church, hung like a peep show curtain between her knees. It billowed in and out like it were breathing. Yeast and vinegar drifted across the room and up my nose.
Her appearance was both shocking and repulsive but what scared me were the eyes.
They were like mineshafts. There, in the place where it should’ve been twinkling and bright were these two light-swallowing chasms. I stood across the room teetering over their edge. They were like black holes. They were like wormholes. They were infinity over naught. I could not understand what she was, but she had pinned me there and she wasn’t gonna let me go. I breathed deep and hard and was afraid that someone had noticed but I couldn’t turn my head to see.
Her sexuality was thick like the rest of her. Thick and shameless. The smell had already gotten into my clothes. She threw back a drink, a shot of something that I wouldn’t know about. She smiled at me and I threw up in my mouth. She wanted to fuck me. She blinked and I ran. I left her in my bed and went to my job at the hotel.
I was a maid. I cleaned up people’s sex.
Evidence of other people’s fucking is supposed to be offensive and it’s usually more work to clean up. The sheets twisted around themselves. The chairs rearranged or overturned. Every last towel crumpled up on the bathroom floor. It’s supposed to be offensive and the other maids complained about it. But not me. I found it erotic, and dampeningly so. I liked these rooms. I pulled the air in slowly to savor what was left of the sex. I surveyed the room to gather how it must have went. I imagined how he pushed her back onto the bed, flung her dress up, ripped her panties at the seam and drove his hand into her pussy. She always had perfect creamy thighs with no stretchmarks or blue veins like mine. And when she was dripping, he would grab her by the hips, pull her to the edge of the bed and slam into her with a force that made her scream. It made us gasp. Our eyes rolled into the backs of our heads. Her shivering hand slid down her stomach and he yanked her head back by her hair and bit her throat. These rooms made me think twice about Oscar, the guy who stocked the linen closets.
I needed a cigarette.
I hoped for these rooms. I loved where they took me. But the feel of real skin with its sweat and texture was unbearable. I couldn’t wait to get it over with. I couldn’t wait to get them off of me. But more than that, I hated their faces. It was easier to ignore what was far away but their faces were always right there, twisted and whimpering, heaving with their tongues curled. Real sex was repulsive. But by the time their tongues curled, you couldn’t just stop. Ohbabyohmygodohitfeelssooogooood. You had to wait it out, pinned there with my fingers tearing into the skin on my hips and my teeth clenched. Once I even cracked a tooth. You had to wait it out, but then you could slip out from under him and scald it off in the shower and be sure he’d be asleep by the time you got back. And in the shower you had the time and privacy to examine all the things you hoped he didn’t notice, the cellulite, the scars, the little blue veins. Real sex was humiliating. I envied the prostitutes and whores I cleaned up after with their pubic hair and their aggressive hips and their lack of apology.
Outside, Oscar was already smoking. He was ten years older than me, at least, with brown skin and brown eyes. I had driven him home a couple of times to his spot in the projects. I liked the way he looked at me, sometimes biting his lip. I threw my hips when I knew he was watching. He followed me inside and then down the hall into my next room and shut the door behind us. You’re not supposed to do that. If Mary, my supervisor, came around and saw us in that closed room we would have both been fired. I’d never been fired before. The room was a suite with a king sized bed and a stocked minibar. They had checked out already. No one would be coming back. I worked with my back to him. He sank into the arm chair with his legs stretched as far as they would reach, I think trying to trip me. I stripped the bed and threw the bundle on the floor. He watched as I stretched, pulled, bent and lifted. His watch terrified me. I stopped and turned to confront him.
“I’m just a kid,” I said. It was more like a squeak.
“I know,” he said. “I can see that.” I wasn’t sure what he meant but I didn’t like it. The humiliation burned my face.
“I can’t do this,” I said, feeling exposed.
“Come ‘ere,” he said. I couldn’t say anything. The terror had taken my tongue. I waited for something bad to happen. It was the moment when you see it coming but there’s nothing you can do about it.
“I can’t,” I managed as a whisper. “I have to make this bed.” If he had touched me I think I would have thrown up. If he’d touched me, he’d have felt my body throbbing.
His eyes pinched. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He stood and shook his head and left the room. As he walked past me he grabbed my right hip and shoved me toward the bed just hard enough to make me lose my balance.
“Cunt.”
I was cold. I didn’t stop shaking until I got in my car to go home.
We, the maids, had thirty minutes to do each room. We stripped it like vultures erasing the evidence like a crime scene clean-up crew. The twisted sheets were rolled into a snarl and disappeared down the laundry shaft. The used condoms were flushed away. The room was restaged. This is where I learned to make a bed, straight and tight, creating the illusion, day after day, that nothing real ever happened here. That every day was the same as the one before and the one after. That every event is erasable. That a bleached white sheet is a pristine denial. It took me longer than most of the other maids. I tended to be a little perfectionistic.
At home, the green-skinned sausage-lipped woman from the bar is still there. I don’t see her but as the light blue uniform dress drops to my ankles, her hot salty scent rushes upward and clouds around my head. I inhale slowly to capture it. But I don’t touch her. I run from her into the shower where I scald her skin. I reach down my throat and heave her out of me. I carve out exit wounds and watch her trails slide down my arms and legs until and I am exhausted and collapse, still dripping and red, into my unmade bed.
