The Maid(16)

“What did they call you?”

“Rumba,” I said. “Gran and I used to watch Dancing with the Stars, and the rumba is a very lively partner dance.”

Giselle winced. “I don’t think they meant the dance, Molly. I think they meant Roomba, as in the robotic vacuum cleaner.”

Finally, I understood. I looked down at my hands in my lap so Giselle wouldn’t notice the tears springing to my eyes. But it didn’t work.

She stopped brushing my hair and put her hands back on my shoulders. “Molly, don’t listen to them. They’re idiots.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I sat stiffly in the chair, staring at myself and Giselle in the mirror as she worked on my face. I was concerned that anyone could come in and find me sitting down with Giselle Black, having my makeup done. How to handle guests placing you in this exact situation had never been covered in Mr. Snow’s professional-development seminars.

“Close your eyes,” Giselle said. She wiped them, then dabbed cool foundation all over my face with a fresh makeup sponge.

“Tell me something, Molly,” she said. “You live alone, right? You’re all by yourself?”

“I am now,” I said. “My gran died a few months ago. Before that, it was just the two of us.”

She took a powder container and brush and was about to use it on my face, but I stopped her. “Is it clean?” I asked. “The brush?”

Giselle sighed. “Yes, Molly. It’s clean. You’re not the only person in the world who sanitizes things, you know.”

This pleased me immensely because it confirmed what I knew in my heart. Giselle and I are so different, and yet, fundamentally, we are very much alike.

She began using the brush on my face. It felt like my feather duster, but in miniature, like a little sparrow was dusting my cheeks.

“Is it hard, living alone like that? God, I’d never last. I don’t know how to make it on my own.”

It had been very hard. I still greeted Gran every time I came home, even though I knew she wasn’t there. I heard her voice in my head, heard her traipsing about the apartment every day. Most of the time, I wondered if that was normal or if I was going a bit soft in the head.

“It’s hard. But you adapt,” I said.

Giselle stopped working and met my eyes in the mirror. “I envy you,” she said. “To be able to move on like that, to have the guts to be fully independent and not care what anyone thinks. And to be able to just walk down a street without being accosted.”

She had no idea how I struggled, not the slightest clue. “It’s not all a bed of roses,” I said.

“Maybe not, but at least you don’t depend on anyone. Charles and I? It looks so glamorous from the outside, but sometimes…sometimes it’s not. And his kids hate me. They’re close to my age, which I admit is kind of weird. His ex-wife? She’s weirdly nice to me, which is worse than anything. She was here the other day. Do you know what she said to me the second Charles was out of earshot? She said, ‘Leave him while you still can.’ The worst part is I know she’s right. Sometimes I wonder if I made the right choice, you know?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” I said. I’d made my own wrong choice—Wilbur—something I still regretted every single day.

Molly picked up some eye shadow. “Close your eyes again.” I did so. Giselle continued to talk as she worked. “A few years ago, I had one goal and one goal only. I wanted to be swept off my feet by a rich man who would take care of me. And I met this girl—let’s call her my mentor. She showed me the ropes. I went to all the right places, bought a couple of the right outfits. ‘Believe and you will receive,’ she used to say. She’d been married to three different men, divorced three times, taking each man for half his net worth. Isn’t that incredible? She was set. A house in Saint-Tropez and another in Venice Beach. She lived alone, with a maid, a chef, and a driver. No one telling her what to do. No one bossing her around. I’d kill for that life. Who wouldn’t?”

“Can I open my eyes now?” I asked.

“Not yet. Almost, though.” She switched to a thin brush that felt cool and tender on my eyelids.

“At least you don’t have a man telling you what to do, a man who’s a hypocrite. Charles cheats on me,” she said. “Did you know that? Gets jealous if I so much as glance at another man, but he has at least two mistresses in different cities. And those are just the ones I know about. He has one here too. I wanted to strangle him when I found out. He pays off the paparazzi so they don’t leak the truth about him. Meanwhile, I have to give him a full report on where I’m going every time I leave this room.”

I opened my eyes and sat up straight in my chair. I was most distressed to learn this about Mr. Black. “I detest cheaters,” I said. “I despise them. He shouldn’t do that to you. It’s not right, Giselle.”

Her hands were still close to my face. She’d rolled her pajama sleeves up well past her elbows. From that vantage point, I could make out bruises on her arms, and as she leaned forward and her top shifted, I saw a blue-and-yellow mark on her collarbone too.

“How did you get those?” I asked. There had to be a perfectly reasonable explanation.

She shrugged. “Like I said, things aren’t always great between Charles and me.”