The Hired Girl(35)

“Yes, ma’am,” I said eagerly. I was eager. I was downright abject.

She stood back from the sink, so that I could lift the bucket out. Then she handed me a brush.

“I’ll need more buckets,” I said, “and a sponge and rags. And vinegar.”

I saw her eyebrows rise up very high, but she brought me the vinegar and pointed at the closet where the buckets were. I filled a second bucket with plain water and added vinegar water to a third. Then I settled down to scrub the floor.

No one can say that I don’t know how to scrub. Ma taught me, and frail though she was, when she did a thing, she did it thoroughly. I worked as she taught me, a square yard at a time, first scouring with the brush, and then sponging off the wet dirt and rinsing the sponge in the second bucket, and then finishing with vinegar water and drying the floor with rags. I reached under the cupboards and the stoves and dragged out wads of dust and cat hair and things that I couldn’t say what they’d been. Sometimes it’s better not to know.

Except for those underneath things, it wasn’t a bad room to scrub. The floor was linoleum, and linoleum’s a wonderful thing. It keeps the dirt on the surface, where you can get at it. Ma always wanted linoleum, but the cheapest she could find was eighty-six cents a yard, and Father wouldn’t let her spend all that. This linoleum was probably the expensive kind. It wasn’t exactly a cheerful pattern — olive-green squares with garlands of flowers — but it was dandy for hiding the dirt. When the rinse water turned dark, I raised my hand and asked Malka if I could change the water. She said, “What, you think you’re in school?” which I decided to take as a yes.

I changed the water and went back to work. Malka settled down in the wing chair. A little while later, I heard a soft thundery sound. When I glanced sideways, I saw that the cat Thomashefsky had climbed into the old lady’s lap. He was purring, and she was scratching the top of his head.

It occurred to me that I might try praying, so I mouthed the words to a Hail Mary as I scoured the floor. Without speaking out loud, I explained to the Blessed Mother that I wanted to stay here and I needed that touchy old woman to like me. Clear as a bell I heard her voice — the Blessed Mother’s, I mean, not Malka’s. She said, “Be kind.”

That irritated me, because the Blessed Mother is always telling me to be kind, as if that were the solution to everything. But I’ve found it often works — only it’s like scrubbing the floor; you have to put your back into it. It takes imagination to do the thing thoroughly. So as I scrubbed I tried to imagine being Malka: old and tired and unable to reach under things. And I imagined how I’d feel if a stranger came in and broke my kitchen rules and ruined my Meissen dish and dirtied my sink.

When I finished I emptied the dishwater and rinsed the sponge and washed out the rags. Then I spoke to Malka.

“I’m sorry I made that mistake with the dish,” I said. “I didn’t mean it, though.”

“I never said you did,” she said. I guess I looked at her reproachfully, because she blinked and said, “You’d be all right in a Gentile home. Why don’t you work for the Gentiles?”

“I don’t know any Gentiles,” I said.

She snorted. “You’re a Gentile yourself. Gentile means not Jewish — don’t you know that?”

“I guess I don’t,” I said. I’d read the word, of course; it’s in Ivanhoe and the Bible, but I’d never looked it up. I had the idea that the Gentiles were like the Philistines or the Ishmaelites: people who lived a long time ago. “I’m Catholic,” I explained, “but I’m not Irish.” I thought it would be best to get that straight. Father says the Irish are worthless, and it seems that Malka agrees with him.

“What are you, then?”

“I’m American,” I answered promptly. Which was more than she was, with her ravings that sounded so German.

“So who isn’t?” said Malka. “What was your family before that?”

“We were Scots,” I said, “but that was a long time ago.”

“The Scots aren’t too bad,” she said as if she hated to admit it. “You can scrub a floor; I’ll say that for you. I can’t get down on my hands and knees, not the way I used to.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I knew better than to say anything pitying. Then the Blessed Mother inspired me, and I thought of the perfect answer. “The way you cook, I’d say scrubbing was a waste of your time.”