The Half Life (6 page)

Knock knock knock . . . and then—fuck me—the sound of a key. I shut my eyes, cringing, thinking that my mother or, worse yet, my Nana will come storming through the door, full of energy and advice and plans to get me out of bed.

Instead, someone comes and sits on the side of the bed, and touches my shoulder, which must be nothing but a lump underneath the duvet.

“Rachel,” says Brenda, the most troubled and troublesome of my clients. Oh, God. I'd given her youngest son, Dante, a key the year before, so he could water the plants and take in the mail over spring break, a job for which I'd promised to pay him the princely sum of ten bucks. He'd asked me shyly if I could take him to the comic book store to spend it, and we'd walked there together with his hand in mine.

“Sorry I missed you,” I mutter. My voice sounds like it's coming from the bottom of a clogged drain. I clear my throat. It hurts. Everything hurts.

“Don't worry,” says Brenda. She squeezes my shoulder and gets off the bed, and then I hear her, moving around the room. Up go the shades. She opens the window, and a breeze ruffles my hair and raises goose bumps on my bare arms. I work one eye open. She's got a white plastic laundry basket in her arms, which she's quickly filling with the discarded clothing on the floor. In the corner are a broom and a mop, and a bucket filled with cleaning supplies: Windex and Endust, Murphy's Oil Soap, one of those foam Magic Erasers, which might be useful for the stain on the wall from when I threw the vase full of tulips and stem-scummed water.

I close my eyes, and open them again to the sharp-sweet smell of Pine-Sol. Brenda fills the bucket to the top with hot, soapy water. I watch like I'm paralyzed as she first sweeps and then dips her mop, squeezes it, and starts to clean my floors.

“Why?” I croak. “You don't have to . . .”

“It isn't for you, it's for me,” says Brenda. Her head's down, her brown hair is drawn back in a ponytail, and it turns out she does own a shirt that's not low-cut, pants that aren't skintight, and shoes that do not feature stripper heels or, God help me, a goldfish frozen in five inches of pointed Lucite.

Brenda mops. Brenda dusts. She works the foam eraser until my walls are as smooth and unmarked as they were the day we moved in. Through the open window come the sounds of my neighborhood. “The website said Power Vinyasa, but I barely broke a sweat,” I hear, and “Are you getting any signal?” and “Sebastian! Bad dog!”

I smell hot grease from the artisanal doughnut shop that just opened down the block. The scent of grass and mud puddles. A whiff of dog shit, possibly from bad Sebastian. I hear a baby wail, and a mother murmur, and a pack of noisy guys, probably on their way to, or from, the parkour/CrossFit gym. My neighborhood, I decide, is an embarrassment. I live on the Street of Clichés, the Avenue of the Expected. Worse, I'm a cliché myself: almost forty, the baby weight that I could never shed ringing my middle like a deflated inner tube, gray roots and wrinkles and breasts that only look good when they're stringently underwired. They could put my picture on Wikipedia: Abandoned Wife, Brooklyn.

Brenda's hands are gentle as she eases me up and off the bed and over to the chair in the corner—a flea-market find, upholstered in pink toile, the chair where I sat when I nursed my girls, when I read my books, when I wrote my reports. As I watch, she deftly strips the sheets off the bed, shakes the pillows free of their creased cases, and gives each one a brisk whack over her knee before settling it back on the bed. Dust fills the room, motes dancing in the beams of light that stream in through the dirt-filmed windows I'd been planning to have cleaned.

I huddle in my nightgown, shoulders hunched, knees pulled up to my chest. “Why are you doing this?” I ask.

Brenda looks at me kindly. “I am being of service,” she says. Which means she's sober again, in some kind of program, or maybe she's just read a book. She carries her armful of soiled linen out of the bedroom and comes back with a fresh set. When she struggles to get the fitted sheet to stay put, I get up off the chair and help her. Then she goes to the bathroom and turns on the shower. “Come on,” she says, and I pull my nightgown off over my head and stand under the water. I tilt my head to feel the warmth beating down on my cheeks, my chin, my eyelids. Tears mix with the water and wash down the drain. When I was a little girl, my mom would give me baths when I'd come home from the hospital, with Steri-Strips covering my stitches. She would wash my hair, then rinse it, pouring warm water from a plastic pitcher in a gentle, carefully directed stream. She would wipe the thick, braided line of pink scar tissue that ran down the center of my chest. My beautiful girl, she would say. My beautiful, beautiful girl.

My sheets are silky and cool as pond water, but I don't lie down. I prop myself up against the headboard and rasp out the question that I've heard hundreds of times from dozens of clients. “What do I do now?”

Brenda gives a rueful smile. “You start again,” she tells me. “Just like the rest of us.”