When the Lights Go Out(25)

I eat part of my burger, wrapping the rest up for the trash. As I’m about to go, a voice stops me. I turn to see a woman standing beside me in jeans and a cardigan, a pair of white gym shoes on her feet. Her graying hair is wound back into a bun.

“Jessie? Jessie Sloane? Is that you?”

But before I can say one way or another if it’s me, she decides for me. “It is you,” she declares as she tells me that she remembers me when I was yea high, her hand pegged at about thirty-seven inches in the air. And then she embraces me, this strange woman wrapping her thickset arms around my neck and declaring again, “It is you.”

Except that I don’t know who she is. Not until she tells me.

And even then, I still don’t know.

“It’s me,” she says. “Mrs. Zulpo. Eleanor Zulpo. Your mother used to clean my home when you were a girl. In Lincoln Park,” she tells me, tacking on details as if it might help me remember. “Tree-lined street, beautiful box beam ceilings, rooms flooded with natural light,” she says, though she and her husband don’t live there anymore, not since the housing market crash when she had to give up her home. When they had to downsize. That’s what she tells me.

I draw a blank. I don’t remember.

Like me, Mom used to clean homes. Mostly upscale places that we could never afford. She taught me everything I know. My first foray into the family business came when I was about twelve years old and would get down on my hands and knees beside her and scrub floors.

But before that, when I was too young to clean, Mom would lug me along on assignments and there I’d spend my days playing pretend in strangers’ homes. Cooking imaginary meals in their palatial kitchens, tucking my imaginary children into their mammoth beds before Mom scooched me out of the way so she could wash the sheets.

“You don’t remember me,” Eleanor Zulpo decides, realizing that it must have been sixteen or seventeen years ago or so, when I was three or four. “Of course you don’t remember,” she says, loosening her hold on my neck, telling me that I look just the same as I did back then. “It’s those dimples,” she says, pointing at them. “Those adorable dimples. I’d know these dimples anywhere.

“I read about your mother in the paper,” she says then, sitting beside me on her own stool, unwrapping a hot dog. The sight of it alone, that hot dog, lying out on a foil wrapper, slathered in ketchup and relish—that and the smell—reminds me of the dead bird. The pigeon. And instead of a hot dog, I suddenly see blood, guts, gore, and I gag, vomit inching its way up my esophagus. I reach for my drink and force it back down, gargling, trying to get the taste of vomit from my mouth.

Mrs. Zulpo—Eleanor, she says to call her—doesn’t notice. She keeps going. “I saw her obituary,” she’s saying. “It was a great write-up, a lovely tribute for a lovely woman,” she says. I tell her that it was.

I submitted the death notice to the newspaper. I covered the cost of the obituary. I found an old photo of Mom to use, one that was a good six years old at least, taken back before she got sick.

We’d lived our entire lives in private, but for whatever reason I felt the whole world should know that she was dead.

“There have been other cleaning women since your mother. But never anyone as good as she was, as conscientious, as thorough. She was one of a kind, Jessie,” she says, and I tell her I know. Eleanor tells me stories. Things I didn’t know, or maybe I did. Memories that have been lost to time, erased clear from my brain’s hard drive. About the time I helped myself to her Wedgwood china when Mom was cleaning. How I snatched it right from her hutch and set the dining room table to have a tea party with. “Wedgwood china,” she tells me, grinning. “A single cup and saucer go for about a hundred dollars each. They had been my own mother’s, given to me when she died. Heirlooms. Your poor mother,” she laughs. “She nearly had a heart attack when she found you. I told her it was fine, that it wasn’t like anything had gotten hurt. And besides, it was nice to see the dishes being put to use for a change.”

And then she tells me that, at her suggestion, the three of us sat down at the dining room table and drank lemonade from the Wedgwood china.

It fills me with a sudden sense of nostalgia. A yearning for the past.

“What else do you remember?” I ask, needing more. Needing someone to fill in the gaps for me, all those details I can no longer remember.

Eleanor tells me how her children were grown by the time I arrived, and so it was nice to have a child in the house again. She didn’t work outside of the home. When Mom and I came, she was grateful for the company. She used to look forward to the days we’d come. Usually she’d play with me while Mom cleaned, hide-and-go-seek in her home, or build forts from the newly washed sheets.

“You were a funny girl, Jessie,” she tells me. “Silly and strong willed, a great sense of humor to boot,” she says. “A bit ornery too. But those dimples,” she adds as she takes a bite of the hot dog, speaking through a full mouth, “with those dimples you could get away with murder, Jessie.” She laughs.

She says that anything Mom wanted done, she had to ask me twice. That the lunch Mom brought along for me, I refused to eat. That I was a far cry from shy, and would spend half of my days in her home creating a show to perform for her and Mom before we’d leave.