Short Story Contest Winner: Hospitality

HOSPITALITY

by Alicia Oltuski

Winner of the 2016 ScreenCraft Cinematic Short Story Contest

If I see three tens or—God bless me—a fifty on the television console, I get nervous. Anything over twenty dollars usually suggests the guest has ejaculated all over the carpet or bled on the sheets. Or they’ve mistaken me for one of the girls who give hard cleans. Of course those girls exist. And no, I’m not one of them.

My second room today, there’s no fifty, but a man answers my knock. Sometimes they’re there while I clean, working on laptops, holding phone conferences. “Don’t mind me,” they say, muting the call, and the truth is, I do not. Or they scurry out, emphasizing by their haste that they trust me—why do they trust me? I would not trust them.

The man stays. He wears khaki pants and a button-down shirt, as though a business-casual encounter is imminent, but there’s no laptop, and no phone. He takes out a paperback, sits down on the chaise, starts reading. Behind him is a view of the pool. Go use the pool, I think.

I do the bed first; it always comes first. I used to think it was the bathroom where people’s bodies left their mark, but it’s the bed: the faint smell of scalp rising from the pillows, their loose hairs, their contact lenses, everything they manage to contain during their public waking hours. The save-the-environment card has not been disturbed from its place on the night table, so I strip the sheets down to the foam comfort pad.

When I first started, Marley Jane asked me if I did much stripping. “Sheets! Jesus, you’re uptight,” she said, before I even got the joke. “Your cousin’s not that uptight. Are you at least happy to be out of the cold? I’m assuming Poland is colder than Atlanta.”

“In the winter,” I said, and she squinted at me as though I’d ruined another good laugh.

My cousin Wioletta had e-mailed me a picture of Marley Jane, because I wanted to know the staff before I started. I was scared of their names. Half the American population, she said on the phone, had two, the way they had two cars. The couple I work for in the afternoons, her name is Sarah Grace. Her husband is from Poland. They hired me to clean, but really they hired me to translate; in his old age, he has become stubborn and taken to saying anything important in Polish. “I need to take a whiz,” he tells me. “I need an aspirin. I hope I die before tomorrow.” Lately, he speaks Polish almost exclusively, and Sarah Grace wants me to come mornings, too, but she can’t pay as much as the hotel, which, trust me, isn’t much. When her husband is asleep, she tells me about what he was like when he spoke English. More or less the same, it would appear. Sometimes I consider telling her that he is leaving her, that he is flying back to Poland and taking me with him. I could tell her anything and she’d believe it. I don’t, but I could.

I dress the bed back up, scaring the feathers from the linens with a quick strike to the mattress. This wakes the man from his reading.

“I can never do that the right way,” he says. “I thought they would have invented something better than fitted sheets by now.” He looks maybe forty. The ghost of previously worn sunglasses blanches the skin around his eyes. His hair is brushed all to one side as though a great wind left it so.

I replace a half-used memo pad on his night table with a full one (what sorts of urgent thoughts come to him at night?). When I finish, the paperback is on his lap. Maybe Wioletta would say he’s watching as I bend to get the wastepaper basket, but Wioletta also thinks obstetricians get into it for the view. The basket is just papers and a baby vodka. No perishables, no appreciable liquids. Once, someone left a five for a trash can of vomit. Only after I scrubbed for an hour did Marley Jane tell me to throw it out. She can be that way, but I think it’s just the job. I don’t believe it was her who added HC for Hard Clean next to the diplomat’s room number on Wioletta’s clipboard that morning four months ago. But I also know it wasn’t Mario, the security guard who got fired along with my cousin. I heard from the other girls—Wioletta and I don’t talk about it—that she made four hundred dollars from the diplomat that day, and that the only reason she got caught was that as she closed the door behind her, a new girl from management saw her. Someone needed to get fired and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be the diplomat. He was Swiss. Or Austrian. Does it even make a difference? Was Mario even at the hotel that day? No, he was home for his daughter’s confirmation. But Mario’s usual hours overlapped with my cousin’s extra shift that night, and plus, he was new, and from Ecuador, i.e., wrong place, wrong time. Now he works at one of the party lodges on 285. Sometimes I see him at the grocery store and he can’t look me in the eye and I can’t look at him, not because either of us did anything, but because we’re both thinking of Wioletta kneeling on the decorative throw pillow beside the bed.

“Please replace the decorative throw pillows,” says the man’s presence in his room. I do.

I move on to the bathroom, where I arrange the toothbrush, paste, floss, and razor into an uncurving row, as if so overwhelming is the chaos of toiletries that they require containment. The watch beside the soap dish, I leave it right the hell where it is.

On the luggage bench is a cluster from the Atlantmarks souvenir store down 285: a Braves cap, an Interstate 20 decal, a pair of cuff links that are peaches that say Georgia. The blandest of the bland, not the souvenirs of a man looking for anything but a clean room. It is only as I round up the towels that I see two are missing. I look back into the body of the room, and they are sprawled out beneath the desk.

“I didn’t want to get the carpet wet after my shower,” he says as I crawl under the table to retrieve them. When I crawl back out, he’s standing behind me, the novel in one hand. “’Preciate it,” he says. “Have a nice day.”

At home Wioletta wants me to shave her. She’s so big she can’t see over her belly anymore. No, it’s not the diplomat’s; it’s Siddy’s, which I think might be worse. The diplomat would pay for a bigger apartment, a nurse. The diplomat’s, and I wouldn’t be squatting at the ledge of my cousin’s bathtub, moving a razor around her nether region.

“Get everything,” she says. “I want to be clean.” It’s seven o’clock and my arms are killing me from lifting the corners of mattresses and cleaning Sarah Grace’s bathtub. I want to tell her that if Siddy leaves her over a poorly shaved pussy, then maybe it wasn’t meant to be, but of course it wasn’t meant to be anyway. None of it was, not him, not the belly. According to what I know about that day in late July, Atlanta’s record dew point of ninety-one percent inspired in Siddy less a decision to reproduce himself than a decision to undress himself.

Unfortunately, Wioletta only started showing after the whole incident with the diplomat, so there was no real way to claim unjust sacking. It wasn’t as if she was going to file a lawsuit anyway. The morning she was let go, Marley Jane pulled me into a vacant room and said, “I’m going to assume these things don’t run in the family,” and I just nodded. Maybe I’m gullible, but I still don’t think Marley Jane runs the show. Her hands are callused like the rest of ours.

“Hold it back,” I tell Wioletta. “I don’t want to cut you.”

She fumbles around and pulls up, making it look weird, like it’s not a part of her body, but some kind of grinning insect creature you find on the hotel’s indoor mezzanine and sweep aside. Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m sadder for her or for me. I didn’t want to come here. I knew she was just bragging when she wrote to us about the American engineer she had met. What Wioletta had met was a positive pregnancy test courtesy of an exterminator the hotel had on call three days a week. She and Siddy bonded over the fact that Americans think Russia is in Poland, or Poland in Russia. He was American only insofar as his fake ID said New Jersey.

“Ow!” yells Wioletta, and I pull away the razor. “You want that baby to taste blood on his way out?”

“That’s it,” I say, but she looks at me so miserably, I lather up my hands again.

I say, “I feel bad for your kid, has to deal with you for a boss.” And I regret it immediately.

There’s a slight problem with the baby, with its neural tube. Wioletta found out a few weeks ago. “It’s not a deal breaker,” she told me when she got back to the waiting room. “It’s just a glitch,” is what she told Siddy.

“What kind of a glitch?” He lifted his chin skeptically, as though staying the advances of a particularly devious salesperson.

Walking might come later, or it might never come. Our family back in Poland knows nothing about any glitches. Taped to my aunt’s nonmagnetic fridge in Niedzica is a bouquet of preggie pictures.

“Give me a mirror,” Wioletta says when I put down the razor. I sit on the toilet cover and look at the ceiling while she admires herself, pouting. “It’s so pretty and it’s gonna be all ruined in just a few months. Do you know how tiny I am right now? I swear Siddy can hardly fit. I’m like a little girl.”

“That’s disgusting.”

She giggles some more. When Siddy gets home she grows up a hundred years, sits quietly, and practices her smoldering stares while he fails to notice.

At the library, during the silently agreed-upon time when I leave them to each other every evening, I go straight to the computer queue to stake my twenty minutes among the other immigrants. We have long, unforgivable names, choked with consonants. The lady manning the clipboard looks like she might cry. “Grizn . . .? Grziiin?” she starts, and it is our job to rescue her before she suffers through a third syllable, waving our hands to lay claim to our mess.

I pay my phone bill. I e-mail my mother. When I’m done, I Google-map my grandmother’s house. The blurred form of what I know to be my late uncle’s car stands parked in front. I Google-walk from her neighborhood to my school, to the soccer field where my friends and I used to mess around with beer and field hockey. Lingering for a moment, I can see the fogged-out poster for chocolate milk that has lived on the fence exterior for years, our district being a relatively unprofitable advertising venue. The computer tells me my time is running low, so I hurry, prodding the mouse northward, actually jittering, Google-running past the hydroelectric plant toward my building, where the unmistakable terrier of our landlady is time-trapped on a walk with his owner just outside our entrance. The face of our landlady is privacy-protected, but I recognize her rain boots and for the remaining minute of my computer time, I Google-cry.

The screen freezes on our home, showing the insolvent construction zone that’s bordered the property since our block was swept up in a wave of second-rate development. In the afternoons, the demolition guys used to pee through the fence and when we caught them we threw fruit peels. My grandmother, when she visited, said she could feel the dust in her nose on demo days. Who said I wanted to leave that?

When the man answers his door again the next day, he says, “I’m taking a lazy day,” and smiles. Have I been mistaken for someone I’m not? It is daytime, I remind myself; I am clothed, as is he; no one wrote Hard Clean on my room assignment; he has a paperback. It occurs to me that this could be a test, management doing quality control the way they rain fire drills down upon us during low-occupancy weeks. 1102 is one of the rooms we don’t always fill, because people don’t like sleeping next to the stairwell.

Today the shades are drawn. The book is propped open to a page on the chaise beside him, but he doesn’t read, just sits. I do the bed, fresh linens again. When I turn to glance at him on my way to the cart with the dirties (though nothing is actually dirty), he asks, “What’s that?”

I set down the dirties. He’s pointing to the shelf beneath the night table, which, yes, has me kneeling to retrieve a bundle of chenille. I shake it open. “Extra blanket,” I say.

“Would you mind adding it to the bed?” he asks. “Thank you,” he says as I spread it over the comforter, one knee on the foot bench. I don’t think he’s quality control. When I’m upright again, I pull my maroon work shirt over the waist of my matching slacks. I dust the full-length mirror.

The only outlet that will accommodate the vacuum’s oversize plug is in the closet; to reach the three-holed socket, I bypass a row of shirts and blazers. Even after I back myself out, the faintest whiff of a wooden kind of cologne lingers on me, so different from anything the men I knew at home wore. There, you wanted to smell expensive—not like cedar or pine, things you could get at the hardware store.

Perfume is what I sent home first. Perfume and aftershave wrapped in colored tissue, and my brother e-mailed to say, “Dipshit, throw me something I can’t buy on the Internet.” But everything existed on the Internet, so much so that it seemed to render the entire idea of America obsolete. Only my parents and grandmother were unsuspecting of this information.

On Sundays, we used to gather in the living room and, on my late uncle’s laptop, stream American CNN. Our own president, his wife, and ninety-four of our countrymen had just plummeted to their deaths a few kilometers above Russian soil, the investigation ongoing, but we watched instead the investigation of the death of a certain American singer/dancer/performer/robot impersonator. We watched special reports on the proliferation of bedbugs at venerable chains of American hotels, looking for the name of Wioletta’s hotel (Wioletta’s hotel, that is what we called it). We watched shows detailing the real lives of average American citizens exercising and fighting with their families, and we wondered if Wioletta would come back to us insect-ridden, famous, or dead.

We looked at pictures of her at a country club, where she wore a beige suit covering everything that had earned her a reputation back home. I could see my mother planning my wedding. I knew even then the suit did not belong to Wioletta (the club was a one-day gig serving hors d’oeuvres). But when one night we got an e-mail saying she had a job lined up for me, my grandmother—our family push factor—said she could “really see me in America,” and I cracked. I finally gave my father permission to apply for a visa on my behalf and he said good, he’d filed weeks ago. He pulled some fragile strings five years in the making to expedite an application for the entire family. When only mine went through, it was too late to argue the finer points of a jackpot.

The main difference between the hotel and Sarah Grace and Edvard’s apartment is World War II. Every room of their home has a token of remembrance: pictures of him in uniform for the Home Army; medals strung across the wall; in the bathroom, toenail creams to treat the eternal aftereffects of frostbite. My first afternoon in their home, Sarah Grace asked if I’d be willing to bathe Edvard, but I couldn’t imagine my hands on his bare body; I said I wasn’t trained in eldercare. At the time I didn’t know how to say eldercare, so I said “old men,” and Sarah Grace reminded me that old men such as her husband prevented my country from going up in flames.

When I get there today, Edvard is watching some kind of war countdown on TV. “I did that,” he says to me in Polish as one of the reenactors uses the butt of an empty rifle as a weapon. His nostalgia seems to be rooted mainly in military combat. “Afterward, there were fingers in the river.”

“What’s he talking about?” asks Sarah Grace.

“The countryside,” I paraphrase.

“Anyway,” she replies, “you can start with the bathroom.” She has groceries to buy.

By the time I remind myself to slow my pace—I’m used to working on the double—I’m near done. I wipe the vanity, but leave the products where they are; their sink doesn’t have to look beautiful, just clean.

Then I go back to the den to make Edvard drink water. He hates drinking water. He fights me a bit as I slide my arm beneath his head to support it, and mis-swallows. This has happened before, but today it lasts longer. He is gasping, squeezing my arm, and pleading for air, as am I, I find. I panic. I kneel down behind him and start to wrap my arms around his belly, but just as I muster my force, Edvard sucks in a torrent and lets out a hearty cough. I, too, resume normal breathing. I stand up and wipe his mouth, the tears forced from his eyes. I retrieve the water glass from a nook in his chair, where he let it fall. On his track pants, a dark, wet patch has begun to bloom, his issue pooling at his feet and on the carpet beneath him. How such a vast amount can come from a man whom I’ve never witnessed willingly consume a fluid is a mystery to me, and it keeps going for a while. Edvard looks desolately at his lap, then at me, and I do my best to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary has happened, that the den is as good a place to urinate as any, and I ask him as casually as I can whether he’d like to have a bath.

It is a very long process to bathe Edvard. His skin gives with every push of the washcloth, so that, really, I am only cleaning the same spot many times until I make a concerted effort to pick another. Edvard looks small and blue in the water. His body reminds me of the bodies I used to see at the sauna where my grandfather took Wioletta and me when we were young. On our way to and from the hot room, we passed the naked old men in the halls, their packages hanging from them, forgotten, like vestigial organs, and my grandfather would point out everyone who used to be a Communist.

“Oh good, you came around,” says Sarah Grace before I notice her, and I understand that, from now on, Edvard and his bath will await me every time I see them. I know it’s foolish, but I can’t help thinking it’s the man at the hotel who has landed me here; that without letting him watch me clean and bend I would also not be washing a naked Edvard.

“You’re wet,” says Siddy when I get home, and I start to cry.

The shades are drawn again, but there is no paperback. The man sits and stares at me, smiling, daring me to ask him to leave his own hotel room for doing nothing but lounging quietly on his chaise. Beneath each of his bare feet is a hand towel. I change the linens, dust the night tables, and nod when he tells me Atlanta’s beautiful this time of year (it is not). I catch my breath in the bathroom and replace his shampoo, throwing out his half-used bottle. I try to move as quickly as possible as I vacuum, but his eyes keep pace. When I approach the chaise, he slowly picks up his feet, one at a time, for me to retrieve the towels.

“Wait,” he says, as I drive the vacuum toward the door.

He goes into his wallet.

“It’s okay,” I say, waving away the money.

“No. I want to thank you for a great stay.” Maybe it’s the lack of laptop, or that I’ve never been handed cash by a guest, but when he folds a single bill into my hand, I feel as though I’ve transacted in some new and unsanctioned way. I don’t look at it; I’m afraid to look at it, because I already know what it is.

On the bus ride home that evening, I hold my bag closer to me, then farther. It smells the same way the man’s shirts and blazers did. I worry that the passengers with whom I share my commute every day will notice my nerves. I’m not thinking anymore of my hands on Edvard’s nakedness; somehow I feel I’ve done more in 1102. Wioletta would laugh at me—You’re offended because he left towels on his floor?—but I have a hundred dollars in my bag and a sickness in my stomach.

My first day in this country, Wioletta picked me up from the airport in her uniform and said, “What? It’s still hospitality. You thought you were going to concierge the Ritz?” I suppose I could have looked more enthusiastic.

In the rental car, she told me there’s a show at every hotel, and that if I wanted, she could introduce me to the person who ran it, but if I didn’t, I should keep my mouth shut and my judgments to myself. I don’t think about who runs the show at ours. If I started to wonder, I’d suspect everyone. Marley Jane, the management girl, maybe even Mario.

Mario used to be the only good part of the hotel for me. He and Wioletta and I would sit by the industrial bins outside dining services and vibe about home. He told us about the volcano near his parents’ town and the foreign honeymooner-imbeciles who climbed it; about his father’s heart and his mother’s babies, his ugly time in his beautiful country. We taught him the slightly Soviet jingle of Niedzica’s best ice-cream truck. Mario made up words to it (“I die without ice cream, please give it to me. I give you my number, I get cone for free”) and sang them in our accent. Wioletta, after she stopped laughing, got mad at Mario about the accent and stormed off.

There’s a lot of good to her, too. My first month in the country, when the terrible days outweighed the livable ones, she never made me get out of bed when I couldn’t. How did she explain my absence to Marley Jane? How did she explain it to the others on the service? Others who had terrible days of their own, who felt the sting of a new country perhaps more sorely than I, for they had children to take care of or, in some sorrier cases, children they had left behind. Only Wioletta can persuade a team full of hurting immigrants not to hold it against you when you decide your hurt matters more than theirs. Only Wioletta can see those same people on our way to church and wave as though we’re not all going to negotiate the survival of our souls in this country.

Only Wioletta can wear what she wears to church and pretend it’s all right. We go to an American church, not a Polish one, because it makes her feel as if we’ve assimilated. After services, they set out sugar cookies and apple juice, as though we are all children, and we stand in the social hall and talk. The people we talk to over cookies are people Wioletta thinks are good to know. For example, an American-born mechanic who owns a car shop. I don’t have a car, Wioletta doesn’t have a car, but in the event that we get one someday, the mechanic is good to know.

Sometimes I spot one of the other women from the housekeeping team, a short lady around my mother’s age who dresses up the same hat with a different ribbon every week. Her hair is a brilliant red right at the brink of what the employee manual terms “natural hue,” as though daring anyone to suggest its color is not her own. Her job is to inventory supplies, combine lightly used toiletries, and answer guest calls to housekeeping. She’s the only other staff member who goes to our church, but we don’t wave. Wioletta and I eat cookies and listen to the mechanic deliver confusing tips on engine longevity. After church we all line up, along with the other nonnative congregants, in the administrative office, where a weekend maintenance person signs us into the computer to Skype with our families. After logging us in, he shrugs and says, “That’s it. You’ll have to figure it out among yourselves,” as though we are about to go to war over a Dell Inspiron. We form a neat line that snakes out of the room and, one by one, address our families on-screen. Siddy’s mother doesn’t own a computer, but he sits with us while we call home, shooing people back if they hover, like a bouncer, so Wioletta and I can have something close to privacy. After my grandmother gives her advice on growing a tall child, my father tells me I look professional, which is his way of wishing me well. My mother and aunt cannot ask enough questions about the heat, the MARTA, and all the rest of Atlanta’s features that have been advertised to them online. Somewhere along the way, my cousin and I silently agreed to imply that we’ve been to the aquarium and visited World of Coca-Cola, that we frequent all the museums and gardens, that our time is not instead spent just like theirs. When we’re done talking to them, we wait outside the door, half eavesdropping on the others, half waiting for the effect to taper off.

I try not to stare at the woman from the hotel. Standing near the middle of the line, she has lost herself inside a book of coupons as if it’s a novel. When her turn comes, I watch her set her hat down beneath the chair and address a collection of very young and very old people compacted onto a large gray couch somewhere in Central Europe.

Sometimes, after church, I’ve seen her get picked up at the corner by one of the girls on the housekeeping team, a girl who doesn’t go to our church. I assumed they were friends, or family. I assumed the reason Wioletta doesn’t talk to the red-haired woman is the same reason she does talk to the mechanic. But this week, I watch the woman get into the car. She doesn’t say hello to, or even look at, the girl in the driver’s seat. I suppose I’m smarter than I want to be this week, I notice more, and I understand what it all adds up to, the pickup and the hair that no one makes her soften, rythign g about **the woman’s direct access to any guest who calls with a request for housekeeping services: she is the one who runs the show.

Outside the church, our crowd dissolves quickly; we try our best not to gather, so we won’t look as if we’re all friends. Consequently, we are not friends.

When I end up at Mario’s it is literally an accident. I’m at the grocery store just to get out of the apartment while Wioletta and Siddy go over the list of supplies their doctor told them to rent in advance—special crib, braces, and things. In a few days, I will approach Marley Jane and ask about insurance options and she will say Wioletta has some nerve sending me after what happened. So I’m at the grocery store pretending to wander the aisles, fortifying myself among the spices, when I run into Mario. We stop and talk for a few minutes, strolling toward the marinara. He tells me his wife and kids moved back home. I pretend not to already know.

We talk about how hot it will get here in just a few months. Paradise compared to Ecuador, he says smiling. Hell compared to Poland, I say. Siddy has a second job now, I add, so he will smell worse than ever by summertime.

Mario cracks up. He laughs so hard he bends over, and when he comes back up, he topples a jar of pesto sauce. It explodes when it hits the floor. A second falls, but only cracks, doesn’t leak. My work pants are totaled. He feels terrible, and offers to take me to his apartment to clean up. He lives right next door to the grocer.

His home is two bedrooms, but the second room is really a closet that was “converted.” There is nothing on the walls, not even letters from home, like there are at our place. The closet-room is painted blue. The toys have all been taken or thrown away. Soon he will need to rent it out. His face is not kind, but he is. That is my favorite combination.

Our sex is so necessary it feels like an official global transaction, the stamp on your passport after you receive your green card.

What you know from the outset: You are allotted international travel as a permanent resident. For reentry, present Form I-551. You have up to a year. A year is a long time. Don’t abuse it. What you don’t know: You will never abuse it; you will never even use it. You don’t have the money. You will feel closer to someone whose language you do not speak, whose culture you know nothing about, than any American, whose language you do speak, whose culture you spent years studying. Pot roast! Bill Gates! July 4! ­You will seek these people out and will go on knowing nothing about them, except the most important thing, which is that they are the same as you. It is not only Americans who will see you in the same category. You will see yourself as such. The word homesick will not even come close. Nausea is the most straightforward of the physical symptoms. The others you cannot even begin to explain. When your little brother asks you if cleaning up other people’s messes is disgusting, you find yourself wishing you found it more disgusting than you actually do. You wonder what it is that made you consider it better to be poor in America than poor at home and come to the conclusion that the only difference is that here no one sees you being poor. And the very moment, the very second you have counted two consecutive days without crying, you will seriously consider citizenship. Your family is egging you on from the sidelines like soccer fans. They’re so happy for you, for what you have. What do you have? What do you even have?

The man on the futon beside you is all you have. He smells like pesto sauce and, though he is polite, you know nothing about him. Why his wife and children left, for instance, though wives and children are always leaving here.

He doesn’t know how to get your top off, the uniform has two hidden buttons. They are always making things more complicated than things need to be. He is so hard, it proves dicey to unzip his pants without hurting him. Then you realize: you are his first since her. He has not been with anyone else, has not visited the corner after dark. He lies back and lets you maneuver him out of his jeans the same way you do the extended vacuum nozzle. He seems suddenly unwieldy. He is looking at your face. You ignore the stain on his sheets—one of his children in the middle of the night?—and hug him, just hug him.

You don’t cry. You cry so much the rest of the time, you are spent. As you bounce yourself on top of him—a futon does not allow for much grace—you know the sort of face you are making. It feels the exact same kind of good it did in Poland. This is crazy in itself: that even one thing can be the same.

You think about your high school boyfriend, who was not even that attractive. Or skilled as a lover. He works as a computer technician now, two streets down from where you used to live, where you used to fuck him in your parents’ TV room after they had gone to bed. The first time you went to bed with him, he asked you to scream and you said no. Now you scream. A part of you wonders whether it’s just an excuse to scream, an acceptable context in which to cry out. You realize the only reason you miss him is because of his proximity to that TV room, that house, your parents. You can still smell the tang of the carpet cleaner. You can still recite the order of the five audio cassettes--Madonna, Mariah, Whitney, Boy George, Fryderyk Chopin-- your mother displayed on the coffee table.

The night before you left, she had regrets. On the way to the airport she asked you three times if you were sure, until your father said, Enough. At the gate, she ran to the bathroom with a stomach emergency. “I’m all right,” she said when she emerged, “but don’t kiss me, in case I’ve got a virus.” So you didn’t kiss your mother, because you didn’t know what it would be like to have a virus in America.

Even if you could afford to visit home, what would you have to show? You’ve no marketable skills. Housekeeping was supposed to lead to events prep was supposed to lead to guest services. So far it has led you to nothing, to secondary breadwinner of a household to which you don’t really belong, and a few stories about the States (or, really, only the one state). Like every third loser in your graduating class. America is shockingly irrelevant outside of America.

When the back of the futon crashes down into the second of its adjustable settings, you realize it’s been only six minutes since you took off your shirt. The clock on his radio doesn’t stop clicking. How can Mario sleep with that? Does he sleep? Mario pretends the futon crash didn’t happen; he reenters (Form I-551). You check to see if his eyes are open. They’re not. You guess what kinds of generous acts his wife performs behind those lids. When he opens them, he sees you looking and comes so quickly, it is whole seconds before he even blushes over it, but you are not embarrassed for him until you see the cracked jar of pesto sauce by the door on your way out.

It is after dinner when I get home, and Wioletta has tallied up the cost of the medical devices plus the birth. The cost is Welcome to America, Go Fuck Yourself (Siddy’s words, but true). Still, my cousin has been in a great mood lately; one of the procedures they found out the baby needs, “and I mean needs,” is something they don’t even do in Europe, let alone Poland. Here, they have top therapists. They have options. Now she’s convinced it was Jesus that led her to Atlanta. She doesn’t even think about money. She goes to church like it’s her job, sometimes twice a day. She covers up her cleavage when she steps inside the sanctuary. At home she tells Siddy she’ll only fuck him if he comes to services. He gets really into evening mass.

When they get back, Wioletta stirs us mugs full of the Polish brand of instant while we watch TV together. She drinks too much coffee for a pregnant lady. Next to her, on a plate, she keeps a solid stick of cocoa butter, occasionally getting up to warm the plate and rub the stick over her belly. She makes us speak English, so the baby will think that’s his language when he comes. Maybe it will be. One night, during a show about house construction, she settles on the name Slate. Before I go to bed, I kiss her belly and say, “See you later, Slate’s mother,” and Wioletta says, “Hello?” so I say it again in English.

I’m not sleeping when Siddy comes into my room hours later that night, but I startle as if I was. For a moment, he just stands in front of the closed door, looking at me. Then he walks toward the bed. I pull up my cover, holding on to it with fists, wondering what he’s doing, if he’ll try to get in without my blessing. He just sits down. His hands are in his lap, as are his eyes, and his wallet.

“I want you to take care of them,” he says.

For a moment I think he’s dying. Then I notice he’s dressed in all his warmest clothes. He’s shaking. I don’t need to look to know his packed bags are waiting at the door. He takes all the bills out of his wallet except for two. They are more than I’ve ever seen someone hold, but they are not that many, after all. Not enough for a life, a child, once Siddy is gone. He will go. He will leave tonight. I let go of the covers.

“I waited as long as I could,” he says, standing up. He turns around and looks at my things, the dresser I inherited from our neighbor, the rug the hotel was going to trash, my small collection of scarves.

“You could wait more,” I whisper.

He shakes his head.

“But it’s your baby.”

“I was never even supposed to come here,” says Siddy. “My brother was, but then he got married, so he stayed home.” He’s wearing the red loafers he wears only on Saturday nights. I know he bought them in Noginsk in anticipation of becoming an American. I bought new platform sandals in Niedzica before I left. We shopped for the United States like it was a formal event. “I just can’t,” Siddy says, looking straight at me, ready to forget this place.

Before he leaves, he tells me the mechanic we know might have a part-time job for me—he wrote down the number in the kitchen. I nod. I won’t go to the mechanic; I know nothing about cars.

I leave for work before Wioletta wakes up. When I get home, I clean up the mess she’s made of Siddy’s leftover belongings in the hall. She cries a little in front of me and a lot in the bathroom. After she goes to sleep, I take the money out of my drawer and sit with it. I try to keep from doing the math I’ve been doing since Siddy handed it to me—how much of it I’d need for a one-way fare to John Paul II Airport. I could fly home. I could fly home tomorrow. I could take Wioletta with me, fly us home on Siddy’s money. Even with my work at the hotel and Sarah Grace’s, the cash won’t last us three months here. I spend the entire night constructing a case for getting on a plane. But I know she won’t leave. She’ll stay for the surgery, and then the therapy, and then for citizenship. Her baby’s name is Slate. But I could fly home.

I pack whatever I can fit into my fake leather purse, one that was gifted me by the woman who inhabited my room before Wioletta kicked her out to make space for me. Where does she live now? I never thought of America as a place you could leave, only arrive. But I arrive and arrive and arrive.

I go to work with a stack of cash and extra underwear in my bag. If anyone looked inside, they’d think I was a prostitute. Every morning, I wonder if I’ll end my day in Europe or America. I take my bag with me to church on Sunday. Wioletta won’t go anymore. When I sit down to talk to my family, I picture telling them everything: that I imagine jumping from the hotel’s mezzanine balcony, or making a stopover in Russia to proclaim Siddy a coward before all who know him. That what seems unimaginable is my day-to-day life, commuting to work and back home. I tell my aunt that Wioletta is hungry, round, and happy. I push a sonogram up to the webcam like a badge. My aunt implores me to convince Wioletta to reconsider the name and I explain to her that this is a name people have here, that it’s good for the baby to have their kind of name. I’m still explaining this when I understand I won’t leave Wioletta, that this time next week, I’ll be sitting here again, reporting on the progress of our lives. When I wipe my eyes, my mother says she misses me, too. My father mentions again how professional I look. I tell him I’m about to get a raise.

The elevator bank near the church office is filled with people who have already Skyped. The woman from our hotel is among them, her hat tucked beneath her arm, a cream-colored ribbon hanging, like a tail, against her hip. Her red hair bears the hat’s shape. She closes her coupon book when I approach her, the ribbon undulating as she sways from foot to foot. She is looking at my body.

“Do you have a family?” she asks me.

I nod.

“A husband?”

I shake my head.

“Okay,” she says.

In the mornings, I scan my clipboard. I start to imagine him, what his face looks like, what his requests will be when they come, and when he will call upon me. I shower before work instead of after. I keep two condoms in my pocket. I eat my lunch early, so I don’t end my day on a full stomach. I summon up what Wioletta told me my first week, before we stopped talking about it. You look at the bridge of his nose, right between the eyes, so you’re smiling not at him, just his skin. Whatever you think he’s going to ask for, you suggest it first, and then you’re not doing anything you didn’t start. If he has a lip sore you make him drink vodka. You press the bottle to his mouth. You talk about another woman you saw, whose body you liked. You ask him what he’d do if he had two of you, and then he comes.

Maybe it will be the same Austrian diplomat. Maybe the girl from management will see me, as she saw Wioletta. Maybe this is the point for him. Maybe he will call down from the room and say there’s a leak in his air conditioner, and just as she steps in, he’ll be riding me and we’ll both look up, surprised, only neither of us will be. What’s the difference, I’ve begun to ask myself, between Edvard’s naked body in my hands and some other man’s? What’s the difference between a man who makes you crawl under tables before him and a man in a bed? It takes a week and a half, and then the letters HC are penciled in next to one of my rooms. That night, I make my way back to the hotel after Sarah Grace’s. I pick up two fresh towels from the supply closet on my way up.

“Cal,” says the man when I’m inside 1427. He puts out a hand, and—what else am I going to do?—I shake it. He is already undressing, but his eyes are on the wall, as though he hopes I don’t notice. I take off my shoes and place them by the bathroom. I put the towels beside them. Outside, I hear the late check-ins pulling into the lot, suitcase wheels riding the gravel. Cal’s hands are cold, but his legs are hot. I feel as though I’m touching two people.

I see it come to life a little as he removes his pants and folds them over the back of the chair. He peels open the bed, wrenching the sheets from beneath the mattress, where I tucked them earlier today. “Is the temperature all right?”

“Thank you,” I say.

He takes a seat at the edge of the bed. “Where are you from?” he asks. “The Ukraine?”

“Poland.”

“Oh.” He looks disappointed. “My grandparents were from the Ukraine. Small city in the south. Actually, that’s a lie. I don’t know where in the Ukraine, I just know the Ukraine.”

I nod. I’m scared talking about family will make it harder for him, and that it’ll take longer. I get into the bed, undressing beneath the comforter.

“Hey.” He puts his finger on the corner of my mouth and pulls it up toward my cheek. “Smile.” He winks at me. I can’t tell if I’m smiling or not when he takes away his finger. “Don’t be scared,” he says. “I’m not going to make you put it in your mouth. I want you to feel very comfortable. Do you want to know a little bit about me first?”

I don’t. I don’t even want to know what he looks like (he is white; blond; blue). But he opens his hands, as though to say: Anything.

“What is your work?” I ask him.

“Well. I’m an engineer.” And now I can’t help myself; I feel my mouth lifting where he tugged at it before. Imagine telling my family I’ve found my own American engineer.

“Is something funny?”

How can I tell Cal that the most disappointing thing about him is that he exists? Even as I rode the bus back to work, even as I knocked on his door, I had hoped for some other outcome. I deny that anything is funny.

“I deal with energy,” he continues, “which means everything that gives you power.” He tells me about his work, or the work he wants me to think he does: environmental compliance. “I’m not from here either, you know. I’m from Illinois. You probably think: same country, no big deal. The states in America are actually more like countries are in Europe. Different cultures, different weather.” He throws three of the four pillows off the bed.

I pull my bundle of clothing up from under the blanket and place it on the night table, everything but my underwear. Some people don’t mind them on, and I’m not going to do anything I don’t need to.

“I want you to know,” he says as he slides them right off, “that I’m not married.”

He asks me if I’m on yet. “Maybe I’ll go see for myself,” he says, and laughs a little as though he’s joking, but goes and does it anyway. I don’t know why, but I am on. It doesn’t feel good, just recognizable. Maybe my body thinks he’s someone else, I’m somewhere else. This morning, in the shower, I got myself going, as I’ve done every morning since I joined the show, just in case it’s the last time I’ll want to touch my body. I put down the soap and closed my eyes, and gave myself everything I wanted. Afterward, I made Wioletta breakfast and tucked her into my bed. She fell asleep instantly, spreading her cocoa butter smell all over my sheets.

Cal is telling me what he bets I like. He bets I like phone booths, spanking, handcuffs, teachers. “Am I close?” he asks.

I tell him he’s close.

“Come on. My goal is to make this as pleasing for you as possible. I want to know what you want.”

He’s not ready yet. He reaches down in between his legs, flips it this way and that. He gets up on his knees, and I ready my breasts for what he’s angling to do. He forgets all about his goals. I find myself wishing I hadn’t washed my hair that morning.

“I’m not as bad as the other guys,” he says. “Right?” He’s changed his mind about what to do to me. I let go of my breasts.

“No one’s bad,” I say.

“I bet the other guys want you to fuck them tied to a chair, or against a mirror or something. Right?” I can almost see the other men. He sits up now. “What do they like from you? Just tell me.” I see he’s fighting a losing battle. The night swells out before me. So I tell him about them. They are managers and brokers and diplomats. They lick my feet and comb my hair. They bite, they cry, they write (on weekends). They tell me this is crazy, but I might possibly be the only one in the world who sees them. Their names are Barry, Mickey, Sandy, Lou—the names of baseball players, I will realize eventually. For years they pay my bills and live on my skin at the end of the night—their hair, their spit, their pleasure. I buy our first car off their patronage. I find it hard to believe that, once, a man with a paperback who didn’t even try to touch me could have scared me. They see me every time they’re in town, and say, “Hi, beautiful,” or “Take off your dress and get on the floor,” or, sometimes, both. They want me to think they’re the nicest or the meanest and, really, the differences are not astronomical. They don’t want me to go, or they want me to be gone already. I start buying the cheapest kind of panty hose; they like to rip things. They like to feel as if this is the last time they’re getting away with something. They want to make a mess, and apologize, and make another.

“Crazy fucks,” laughs Cal. “I just like the normal stuff.” And he is in, resurrected and red-blooded, and not letting the opportunity slip. He takes my hands and presses them into his buttocks, until I’m cratering his skin.

“You keep that up, you’re gonna make me come,” he says, though I am doing nothing, he is doing everything. “Is that what you want?”

I think about my shoes outside the bathroom. I think about them walking me all the way home.

“Say ‘Come,’” he says. “Tell me to come,” so I do, and he does. I press his hips off gently with my feet, so he doesn’t overstay his welcome, and he breathes, low and deep, like a giant warming his hands.

“If I said I’ve never done this before,” he says, as I reach for a tissue, “you wouldn’t believe me, so I won’t say it.”

“Me, too.” It already feels like a lie. While he probes his wallet, I start to dress. To the bills he adds a small, gift-wrapped item. I don’t know what’s in it, but I know I’ll sell it.

“A little present,” he says. The first of many. Sometimes they offer me minibar liquor, an episode of light television, a host of small gilded treasures, trying to make their room a place I don’t want to leave as quickly. Sit down, they say, why don’t you stay a little longer, and I almost always relent, because what, really, is another thirty minutes?