Maidenhead

‘My room is my private property, thank you very much. And Faith is not a maid.’

‘Of course she’s a maid!’

‘No,’ Jody said. ‘She just helps mom with the housework. She’s a cleaning lady. I mean, a cleaning woman. A domestic worker. She comes once a week, not every day. She doesn’t look after us.’

‘Yeah, but how is a cleaning lady different than a maid?’

‘A cleaning woman is a domestic worker who works in lots of people’s homes. She’s freelance. She can raise her fees. She doesn’t need to walk the dog, for example. She doesn’t need to put kids to bed. And my room is fucking private. End of story.’

‘Well, if you don’t want Faith in your room then we should clean the toilets, we should vacuum, we shouldn’t have her in our house at all. That’d be better, anyway.’

Jody got mad at me. ‘Mom is giving Faith a job, Myra. You don’t know all the details. It’s complicated.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘I know she was abused, all right?’

Jeff put down his book and we watched Jody storm out. ‘Mom is sponsoring Faith, Myra. That costs a lot of money. You don’t know everything, you know.’

I was totally parched climbing up the maid’s stairs. The floor felt like paste. Faith never came back from Jamaica. On the slanted third floor there was a tiny landing with two doors to enter. I faced the brown one that was open a bit and plastered with skateboarding stickers. Elijah was fifteen years older than everyone here. Faith returned to a husband who abused her, she had to live there on an island with him forever.

I saw the older brother in his room. He lay on a mattress on his side on the floor, reading a book without a cover. His hair was greasy, sticking up, with one gluey black curl on his forehead. An old fried egg on a plate on the floor was orange and hard. I entered and the older brother looked up at me. It didn’t look like he was surprised to see me – a freak with peach-coloured makeup half-off. The older brother was drinking a plastic red cup of beer. His mattress had faded flowers on the sheets.

I was glad to be away from Jen and Charlene. The older brother looked smart. Most girls are fucking mean. If they’re nice, it’s an act.

The older brother motioned for me to come over, come closer, as if he knew that I was having these bitch-like thoughts. I stumbled and sat on his mattress.

‘I drank too much,’ I whispered. My white T-shirt felt wet. I didn’t know if I’d drooled or spilled beer. ‘I walked up the maid’s stairs ... ’

The older brother’s eyes roamed around my face. I smelled the oil of his hair.

‘We used to have a domestic worker named Faith but you guys have real stairs for a real maid.’

(GAYL: Oh shit. Don’t let her get into this topic. Forward, forward. She’s with a guy!)

‘I was talking to you when you came up the stairs,’ the older brother said.

I remembered that the older brother wasn’t even in the room when I got to the top of the stairs, I didn’t think.

‘I wanted to trick whoever was coming up the stairs, like, trust in them and trust in myself ... ’

The older brother assumed that I understood, the way he was looking at me nodding, trying to get me to nod too.

‘See, I’m experimenting with two complicated actions, to see if I can do them both at once. I mean read and intuit. Like, read and feel someone’s need for connection intertwined with my own need for connection. See how we can play these little games with ourselves?’

All of a sudden, the older brother hugged me. It felt so strange that I went blank. He smashed me into his chest, his oil-smelled shirt. I didn’t have enough air with my lips on his chest. My secrets weren’t going to be secrets anymore. I pushed myself out of the older brother’s arms.

&

nbsp; ‘You know, you’re different from the rest of those girls downstairs,’ he said. The older brother stared at my face. ‘You’re way more mature.’

Yeah, I almost had sex with a guy who pissed on me!

‘You don’t have to be weirded out or anything, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘You know I’m Aaron, right? I’m Jeremy’s bro.’

Aaron patted the space right beside him on his bed, like – come a bit closer, not gonna bite you. I nodded and nodded. It was easy to do. I lay down then and Aaron lay down beside me. I dissolved into the mattress, down through the floor.