The 77 on a Tuesday at ten past four is a rolling coat closet. By Kimball every seat is taken. By Damen so is the floor.
I had the seat over the rear wheel and I gave it up at California to a man with a walker, which is the last sensible thing I did that afternoon.
At Racine the back doors opened on a girl carrying a bucket.
A white plastic bucket with a mop handle out of it, a caddy of bottles inside, a rag laid over the top like a lid. She had a coat on over a work shirt, a backpack over that, and her Ventra card in her teeth.
She got as far as the yellow line and the bus pulled out and she went sideways into a man’s shoulder, said sorry, said it again in Spanish, and then we braked and she came back the other way and hit me.
“Sorry. Sorry, I’m sorry.” Round face, no makeup, dark hair pulled back hard off her forehead into a knot that had given up hours ago. Gold studs in her ears, one of them a different gold from the other.
“It’s all right.”
“The bucket.” She lifted it, as if I might have missed it. “It tips. I have to hold it with my foot.”
She was small. Five foot four in sneakers with the white worn off them, narrow through the shoulders and the ribs, wrists like a kid’s, and the coat hanging on her as though it belonged to a larger woman who was coming back for it. Then she turned to wedge the bucket between her feet and the coat swung open and the arithmetic stopped making sense.
She was built enormous in the chest. There was no way on that bus to look anywhere else, and no polite way to write it down.
The shirt was a man’s shirt, blue, washed soft, buttoned to the throat and tucked into black work trousers, and it did not fit her. It could not. The buttons were pulled into little strained Vs down the front, and between the third and the fourth a gap had opened the width of a finger, and through the gap I could see skin, and the white edge of a bra, and when the bus rocked I could see the shape of the weight moving under the cloth.
She stood with her arms folded underneath them, the way a woman does when they are more than she wants to carry on her back for nine hours. Her hands were red at the knuckles and the nails were cut down to nothing and there was a chip of polish left on one of them, and a thin silver ring on her thumb.
We went east. She did not look at me, and I did not stop looking at her, and the bus filled up at Western with nine more people and a man’s shoulder bag swung into her hip and she stumbled and put her hand flat on my chest and her chest came against my arm. Soft, heavy, warm through two layers of wool and cotton. She felt it happen as clearly as I did. Her hand stayed there half a second longer than it needed to.
“Sorry. I’m sorry. It’s the bucket.”
“It’s the bus,” I said. “It’s not the bucket.”
She laughed — one short breath out of the nose — and looked up at me properly for the first time, and she was eighteen and looked it. No lines under the eyes, just the blue-brown tiredness of somebody who gets up at five. Chapped lips. A small pale scar on her cheek that she had probably had since she was six. Lashes so long they looked like a mistake.
Then she looked away and adjusted her backpack strap and said nothing for two stops.
We came under the viaduct at Ashland and the bus dropped hard on its springs, and this time she did not catch herself. She came into me front on, both hands up, and for three full seconds the whole front of her from the collarbone down was pressed flat against me.
She was hot through the shirt. I could feel the shelf of it, the weight spreading sideways against my ribs, the hard little point of one nipple through cotton and wool and my own coat, and there was nothing at all I could do about what was happening in my jeans.
She pushed herself back. Her face had gone red to the ears. She looked at the floor, at the bucket, at the four inches between us, and then, fast, at my waist, and away.
“I’m sorry,” she said, for the fourth time, in a voice that had gone small.
“Stop apologizing. It’s a full bus and you’re carrying a bucket.”
“You are…” She stopped. Started again. “Your thing. I felt it.”
I could have lied. I have lied on buses about less.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry. It’s not on purpose.”
“No.” She shook her head. “No, I know.” And then, because she was eighteen and had not yet learned to leave a thing alone: “It’s not that I mind. It’s just that I never had anybody’s… ” and she stopped, and turned her face to the window, and the window had fog on it and she put her sleeve against it.
That was the sentence that finished me. Not the body. The sentence.
And then I could not stop thinking about them. That is the honest version. I stood on a bus with my hand on a rail and a hundred people around me and I thought about the two inches of skin at the third button and about what the weight of them would do in my hands, and about how a girl that small carried that much of anything up three flights of stairs, and by the time we crossed the river I had talked myself into and out of four different sentences.
We stood there. She had one hand up on the rail now and her coat sleeve had fallen back and there was a wet patch on the shoulder of the shirt where the glass had run.
“You work,” I said. “Cleaning.”
“Houses. With my aunt’s crew. Three a day. Sometimes four.”
“That’s a lot of houses.”
“It’s a lot of money.” She said it flat, the way people say true things they are tired of explaining. “Rent. My mother’s insulin. My brother is fourteen and he eats like a horse and he is not sorry about it.” She shrugged. “I left school at seventeen. It’s fine. The money is better than fine.”
Then, after a stop, she said: “Do you have a house?”
“A flat. Two bedrooms. Nobody has cleaned it since August.”
She made a face like a plumber being told about a leak.
“I need somebody,” I said. “Today, if you want it. Two hundred for a deep clean, cash, before you start. And Thursdays after that if it goes well.”
Her mouth opened and shut. “Two hundred.”
“Two hundred.”
“I have to be home by nine.”
“You’ll be home by eight.”
She looked at the bucket. She looked at me. Then she got her phone out and sent a message with one thumb, and put it away, and said, “Okay,” and that was that.
We got off at Southport and the cold came up off the sidewalk like a hand on the back of the neck. She carried the bucket and I carried her backpack, which she let me do after a block of pretending she was going to argue.
She talked the whole way. About her aunt, who had four crews and answered the phone at midnight. About the client in Lincoln Park who left the dog out on purpose. About a man in River North with a wall of protein powder who wanted his bathroom done twice a week. She talked fast, in threes, the way people talk when they are nervous and also when they have spent the day alone in other people’s rooms.
The laundromat on the corner had its door propped with a milk crate. Somebody had put the Christmas lights up over the taqueria already. Her shoes were wet through and she did not once complain about it.
On the second block she said, “What is your name?” and I told her, and she said hers was Yessenia and that everybody called her Yesi except her mother, who used the whole thing, and then she asked me nothing else about myself for the rest of the walk, which I have decided to take as a compliment.
The building is a three-flat with a radiator in the hall that knocks. Third floor. I opened the door and stepped back and let her see it, because there was no hiding any of it: four days of dishes, a bike on its side in the hallway, mail across the table, a laundry basket with things growing out of it, and a bathroom at the end of the corridor that had not been properly cleaned since the summer.
She walked in and stopped and did a slow full turn, taking inventory like a surveyor. “Okay,” she said. “This is two days. Not one.”
“You have until eight.”
“Three hundred.”
“Three hundred.”
I counted the money out of my wallet onto the counter and put the sugar bowl on top of it so it would not blow away, and she looked at it, and then at me, and something in her face settled. Not softened. Settled. She had been doing this since she was fifteen and she knew exactly what a man’s kitchen looks like when he means it.
She put on gloves, yellow, up to the wrist, and a bandana over her hair, and she started at the far end of the kitchen and worked toward the door, and in ten minutes the room smelled of vinegar and lemon instead of cigarettes and old grease.
I sat on the arm of the sofa with a coffee and pretended to read the mail. She was on her knees under the sink with her back to me, and then she was up on a chair doing the top of the cabinets, reaching, both arms over her head, and the shirt pulled out of her trousers and rode up and the whole front of her went up with it. I forgot what the letter in my hand was about.
“Do you mind if I shower while you work?” I said. “I’ve been on a boiler since seven this morning.”
“The bathroom is the worst room,” she said, without turning around. “Do it last.”
“It’s the only place I can get clean.”
She laughed at that. “Fine. But do not use all the hot water, because I am going to want some.”
I stood in the tub with the water as hot as it goes and the mirror went white and the steam came up to the ceiling. She came in with the caddy and the spray bottle and started on the sink, and neither of us said anything for a while.
She had pushed her sleeves up to the elbow. The water off my back was bouncing off the tiles and landing on her, and she did not move away from it, and by the time she had finished the mirror the front of the blue shirt was soaked from the collar to the waistband.
The cotton had gone the colour of a wet paper bag and it was stuck to her. There was no gap in it anywhere now. The bra underneath was white and thin and it had stopped doing the one job it had, and the weight of her hung in the wet cloth in two long heavy curves that moved when she reached up to spray the top corner of the glass.
Her nipples were dark and small and hard and they showed through two layers of wet cotton as clearly as if there had been nothing there at all.
I stopped washing. I did not even pretend.
She watched me in the mirror while I did it. She sprayed the glass, and wiped it, and sprayed it again, and her ears went red, and she did not tell me to stop, and the not being told was louder than anything either of us had said on the bus.
“You’re not washing,” she said.
“I forgot how.”
“Give me the soap.”
I gave her the soap. She came to the side of the tub and put her hands on my back and washed it, both palms flat, slow, shoulder to shoulder and down to the base of the spine, and her chest came against my shoulder blade and she did not move it away. The water ran off her wrists and down the inside of her forearms and soaked her sleeves to the shoulder.
“Turn around,” she said.
I turned around.
She looked at it and did not jump and did not laugh. She just stood there with her wet hands at her sides and did the arithmetic. “Ay,” she said, quietly, to herself, the way you say it at the price of something.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Stop saying that.” She wiped her hands on her trousers. “You say it too much.”
Then she took hold of the hem of the shirt and pulled it up over her head, and the wet cotton came off her with a sound like a sheet being pulled off a line, and the bra followed it, one hook, and they came out of it so heavily that they kept moving after she had stopped.
I have seen a lot of women. I am telling you that so that you understand what I am about to say. I have never seen anything like them on a body that small.
They were enormous — full, low, heavy, too much for her frame, the way a peach is too much for its own skin. Pale where the shirt had been and pink where it had not. Faint silver lines across the tops of them, the marks of growing too fast, and the weight of them pulled her skin tight and shining. Her nipples were dark brown and wide and they sat high on the swell and they were hard. The undersides were round and full enough to rest on the heel of her hand, and she held them there without thinking, the way you hold something heavy while you decide where to put it down.
“You are staring,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Okay.” Her chin went up. “The money is on the counter. I am not doing this for the money.”
“Then why?”
She thought about it. She was eighteen and she thought about it honestly. “Because you looked at me on the bus like I was not a bucket,” she said.
She got into the tub with me. There was not much room and the water went over the edge onto the floor, and she laughed and put her hand over her mouth, and then she knelt down in front of me in the hot water with her hair already coming loose and the steam running down her face, and she took me in both hands.
“Madre,” she said, and then, in English, “You are so big.”
She pushed them together around it. Both hands, both arms, all her weight leaning in, and the head of it disappeared between them and came out the other side, and she looked down at that and made a small sound, and then she started to move.
It was slow at first, learning the shape of it, and then it was not slow. She spat on her own chest to make it slide and pushed them together so hard the skin went white at her fingers. Up and down. Long strokes from the base to the head. The head coming out at the top each time, wet, and her watching it, and then her thumb over it, and then down again.
“Like that?” she said. “Is that good?”
“Don’t stop.”
“I’m not stopping.” She said it with her teeth together. Her necklace swung against her chest and she pulled it off over her head and dropped it in the corner of the tub. “Fifteen minutes. I read it. A man takes fifteen minutes.”
“Not always.”
“Then we will do twenty.”
She did fifteen. She did more than fifteen. Her knees had gone red on the porcelain and she had water in her eyes and her arms were shaking and she did not stop, and every time I got close she slowed down and looked up at me and smiled with her chapped lips and started again, and I understood that she was not being generous, she was playing.
Her hair had come down out of the knot and it was stuck to her cheek and her throat, and she kept blowing at it and it kept coming back. The steam had made the whole room soft at the edges. Now and then she rested her forehead against my stomach and caught her breath and then sat back up and went at it again with her chin down and her eyes on what she was doing, and the sound of it was wet and steady and louder in that tiled room than it had any right to be.
“Please,” I said.
“Please what?”
“You know what.”
“Say it in Spanish.”
“I don’t know it in Spanish.”
“Then say it in English.” She pushed them together harder. “Say what you want.”
“I want to come.”
“Where?”
“On them. On your chest. On your face.”
“Okay,” she said, and her voice had gone thick, and she leaned in and licked the head of it once, just once, and then pulled them up around it and went fast and short and did not slow down this time, and I said I was close, and she said, “Yes. On them. On my tits, do it — ” and my hand closed on the back of her wet head.
It came out of me in long hard pulses and she did not pull away from any of it. It went across the tops of them in stripes — one so far over the right breast that it ran down to the nipple, one down into the groove between them where it pooled and then spilled over her fingers, one that reached as high as her collarbone, one that caught her on the chin.
She kept them closed around it the whole time, both hands, and looked down at what she had done, and said something in Spanish under her breath that was not for me. The rest of it ran slowly down the underside of the left one and dripped into the water between her knees.
When it stopped she stayed exactly where she was, kneeling in the hot water with her chest painted and her hair stuck to her cheek, and then she began to laugh — a real laugh, surprised, the first free one I had heard out of her all day.
“Look at this,” she said. “My aunt is going to ask me what happened to the shirt.”
“Wash it.”
“I am going to have to wash me.”
She stood up and got under the water properly and washed her chest and her throat and her chin with the soap, and she was businesslike about it, and then she stayed under the hot water with her head back and her eyes closed for a while and I sat on the edge of the tub and looked at her and did not say anything at all.
The water went cold. She got out and I gave her a towel and a clean t-shirt of mine, which came down to her thighs, and she put her wet hair up in it and went back to the bathroom with the spray bottle and finished the grout, and then she did the kitchen floor, and I made coffee and did not offer to help because I had already learned that offering would only slow her down.
At eight o’clock she was done and the flat smelled like a different flat. She put the bucket by the door and the bandana in the caddy and stood in the hallway with her coat over her arm.
I got the wallet out again: the three hundred under the sugar bowl, and another hundred on top of it.
“No,” she said.
“Take it.”
“You already paid me.”
“That’s for the shirt.”
She looked at me for a second and then took it, and counted all of it twice, the way poor people count, fast and with the thumb, and folded it into the inside pocket of her coat.
“Do you want my number?” she said. “For Thursdays.”
“I want your number.”
She wrote it on the back of the receipt from the taqueria with a pen from the caddy, in handwriting that was still a schoolgirl’s, round and careful, and put it on the table by the door.
“Thursday at six,” she said. “And I am bringing my own mop, because yours is a crime.”
Then she went down the stairs with the bucket knocking against her leg, and I stood at the window and watched her get to the corner with about a minute to spare, and the 77 came down Belmont with its lights on and she ran for it, and made it, and the doors folded shut behind her.
My Bus Adventures #10: Close Quarters
My Bus Adventures #9: The Back Row
My Bus Adventures #8: Night Shift
My Bus Adventures #7: Beginner’s Luck
My Bus Adventures #6: Standing Room
My Bus Adventures #5: Late Pass
My Bus Adventures #4: Straight Lines
My Bus Adventures #3: The Signal
My Bus Adventures #2: Window Seat
My Bus Adventures #1: The 9:40
Related posts:
My Bus Adventures #6: Standing Room
My Bus Adventures #2: Window Seat
My Bus Adventures #1: The 9:40
My Bus Adventures #8: Night Shift
My Bus Adventures #3: The Signal
My Bus Adventures #4: Straight Lines
My Bus Adventures #7: Beginner’s Luck
My Bus Adventures #9: The Back Row
My Bus Adventures #5: Late Pass
My Bus Adventures #10: Close Quarters
Sleepwalking Mom – Chapter.03 – Part.06 – Twins find out. Now it’s three on one
Sleepwalking Mom – chapter.02 – part.06 – Dad’s on travel, twins are away, Mom and Dex enjoy each other.
