Florida(43)

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Just before the public library closed for the night, she rode the elevator to the top floor and went into the grand stained-glass conference room set like a crown at the top of the building. She’d discovered an unlocked closet behind a leaning blackboard, barely long enough to hold her body in its sleeping bag. In the dark of the closet, she ate what she found during the day and listened to the library empty out. It was orange season, and she plucked satsumas for breakfast and spat the pips into the road.

She neglected to call her mother for Christmas or New Year’s. When she tried to read during the day, the words lost their meaning and floated loosely in her eyes.



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    She didn’t make it to the library in time one evening and spent the night shivering in her light jean jacket. She was walking by a club that had just closed when a cluster of undergraduates in strapless dresses tottered by, fingering their cell phones. She recognized one of them, a girl from her comp-lit class last year. She’d been a frightened, silent thing who’d earned her C?. No matter how hard she was drilled, “its” and “it’s” had eluded the girl. Tonight, if she and the girl came face-to-face, the girl would look through her former instructor, not seeing her in this worn, dirty woman; and she, whose words had once lashed, would have nothing to say.

Its, it’s, she said aloud now. Who cares?

A man stacking the chairs in front of the patio area heard her and laughed. Twits, he agreed.

She leaned against the railing and watched him work. He was a skinny, short brown man and exceptionally fast: he’d already rolled up the rubber mats and was hosing down the bricks when she realized he was still talking to her. I’m telling you, he was saying, sillier and sillier each damn day, filling up those heads with tweeters and scooters and facebooks and starbooks and shit. He looked up at her and grinned. His front four teeth were gone, and it gave him the mischievous air of a six-year-old. Name’s Eugene, but everyone calls me Eugene-Euclean. I clean, right? I got three of these clubs to set right before morning, so’s I can’t stop to chat.

Okay, she said, and took a step, but he meant that he couldn’t stop; he could still chat. This land, he told her, was full of living twits and unsettled spirits, both. The spirits were loud and unhappy, and filled the place with evil. All them dead Spanish missionaries and snakebit Seminoles and starved-to-death Crackers and shit. He, Eugene-Euclean, came down from Atlanta near on four years back and got infected with the spirits and they were inside him and he couldn’t find his way to leave.

By now, they were inside the booze-stinking club, and Eugene had poured her a glass of cranberry juice. He began to mop the floor with a bleach solution so strong it made her eyes water. He looked up at her and stopped, struck by a thought. I like you, he said. You keep your words in tight.

Thanks, Eugene, she said.

I could use some help, he said. Three clubs is hard to clean alone by morning-time come. You could do bathrooms, stuff like that. You got you a job?

No, she said.

He looked at her shrewdly and said, Fifty bucks Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights, twenty bucks other nights. Monday off.

She blinked at the empty bucket he thrust into her hands. Partner, he said.



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    There was a sensation in cleaning that she used to get in her other lifetime when the books she was reading were so compelling they carried her through the hours. Words were space carved out of life, warm and safe. Polishing windows to perfect clarity, scrubbing porcelain, working caustic chemicals into the tiles until they gleamed like teeth; all this detached her mind from herself. She grew hard muscles in her skinny arms.

In the mornings, she would walk into the cold and feel herself wrung out. Eugene-Euclean sometimes bought her breakfast, and they’d sit, stinking of chemicals, in their booth, surrounded by the smells of warm grease and hot coffee. She wanted to laugh with him, to tell him of the horror of her mother’s house when she was little, the cockroaches and the dirt-crusted linoleum, how strange it was that she was cleaning now; but Eugene spoke so much she had no need to say anything. He’d tell her about this talking dog when he was a kid, or he’d describe his moments of illumination, when the world slowed and the Devil spoke in his ear until he was chased away by the brightness that grew inside Eugene and bathed the world in light.



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She took a room by the week in a squat concrete motel sticking out over the highway. It was called Affordable—Best Price—Comfortable, but she had to borrow some chemicals and rags from Eugene to make the bathroom usable. She liked the sound of the trucks rumbling past and the steady rhythms of her neighbors’ voices and the boys who hung out at the roasted-chicken place next door, with their swooping boasts and hoots of derision.

One morning, she was walking home to the motel when she saw a familiar bicycle at the coffee shop where she used to grade papers. She looked in the window, hiding her face with her baseball cap. Two of her former friends sat at a table, both frowning into their laptops. How fat they looked, how pink. They were nursing their plain black coffees, and she remembered, with a surge of ugliness, how they all used to complain that they were too poor for lattes. How rich they had been. It was a kind of wealth you don’t know you have until you stand shivering outside in the morning, watching what you used to be. One of her friends, the man, sensing eyes upon him, slowly looked up. A knot pulled tight in her gut, but when he looked past her to a sleek young woman gliding by on a bicycle, the knot frayed and broke apart.