How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones

Author:Cherie Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Mrs. Whalen

19 August 1984

Rosa is not having it. She is not tolerating any more nonsense. All of this pining not good, says Rosa, she can understand the loss, yes, but you ain’t the only body who ever lose. It is terrible, yes, but you have to get up, get out, start over. God take Mr. Whalen, him didn’t take you. While she is saying this Rosa is stomping around in the dark of Mira Whalen’s bedroom, flinging back the blackout curtains until the room is flooded with blinding sunlight and Mira Whalen cannot see anything but the faint shadows of the swinging flaps of skin beneath Rosa’s upper arms projected onto the far wall. Up until today, Mira Whalen has forbidden her to do anything but change the bed linen, and Rosa seems determined to make up for lost time. Rosa is picking up the bedding off the floor. Rosa is clearing the bedside table of glasses of stagnant tap water and empty pill packets and crinkly Kleenex stuck into position by Mira Whalen’s snot. Rosa is replacing the cordless telephone on the stand so that its red eye is relit and Mira Whalen feels again like she is being watched. Rosa is putting on top of the wardrobe the cricket bat that stands between Mira Whalen and death, almost out of her reach entirely.

“No!” says Mira Whalen. “No, you know you’re not to touch that . . . no!”

But Rosa shoves the bat a little farther back so that it is completely hidden from view.

“No?” asks Rosa. “No?” But all the while she keeps working and rousting: the empty bottles of fine rum, the mugs in which cocoa has clotted and coalesced into a sticky brown gel that myriad spores of fungi now call home, the tear-stained photos of Peter hastily shoved under the bed so that the children wouldn’t catch Mira Whalen looking and get upset.

You is not the first God make a widow, you is not the last.

Rosa is coming for her and tugging the robe off of her back and saying that it smells worse than the people Rosa serves meals to at the Salvation Army on Sundays after church. Rosa runs hot water and she says, Come here and sit in this here tub and let me clean you up, and there is something in her face that preempts the firing Mira Whalen wants to give her. This something will accept nothing but surrender, so Mira Whalen gets into this tub and lets Rosa scrub her skin and her hair and lets the steam poach her insides and sear her skin and decides that she will determine tomorrow whether she will fire Rosa or not but she knows she will not because a new person would not know her and they would not remember Peter and the children might not love them.

Rosa is not gentle with the scrubbing, she does not check whether the water is just the right degree of hot, she does

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