The Vintage Book of International Lesbian Fiction by Naomi Holoch

Author:Naomi Holoch [Holoch, Naomi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56101-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1999-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

THE LANGUAGE AND THE GIRL

If Inger had known beforehand how awful it was to go abroad, she never would have gone. But now she was here. Abroad one had to vacuum on three stories—with “the sweeper” and “the Hoover,” respectively. She surveyed them with deep contempt the first morning when Mrs. Mayfield hauled them out of a broom closet under the stairs. Mrs. Mayfield had a small, round, and distinctly low-sitting rear end. The sweeper was a yellow thingamajig with roller-thingies underneath. The Hoover was a vacuum cleaner with a brown bag along the handle. I’m leaving, thought Inger. She was also given the “mopper.” The mopper was a long handle with a bristle at the end, the type that until now she had only seen in the movies. So she had labored under the misconception that the tool was a joke. Marilyn Monroe dusting her pink telephone.

There were lots of things she’d thought were a joke that now turned out not to be. She stood in the drawing room upstairs and was filled with a dizzying boredom at the thought of the year ahead of her. The only thing that helped her were the Fredrikstad eyes. They were in the ceiling and in the walls and everywhere and followed her with unbelieving looks. Then they immediately died laughing.

“Don’t you have an apron?” Mrs. Mayfield said. Inger stared stupidly at her. The Fredrikstad eyes eagerly followed along.

“An apron?!” Mrs. Mayfield repeated more loudly, as if the very sound of the word indicated its meaning. The appalling fact dawned simultaneously on her and the entire population of Fredrikstad: she’d gone out into the world without an apron!

“Dust the house every day,” Mrs. Mayfield said. Dust, dust, dust. Dust! If only she could see it! But everywhere she saw nothing but bright, shining surfaces. She was to use the Hoover upstairs on Monday, the sweeper downstairs, the sweeper upstairs on Tuesday, the Hoover downstairs, and the sweeper and the Hoover and the Hoover and the sweeper. But in the attic (a room concealed by a closet door one flight up) she was only to use the sweeper, because the cord on the Hoover wasn’t long enough to reach up here.

She always knew what date it was. It was one day less until the day she was going home. She missed Mama and Papa. The longing sank down inside her like something heavy and unbelievable as soon as she was alone in her room. They weren’t there. She wanted to go to them and tell them everything. They were waiting. And then they weren’t waiting. She couldn’t go to them. For the first time in her life there was no living room to go into where Mama and Papa were sitting.

From one day to the next she was reduced to a nobody. It would’ve been much better for everyone concerned if she’d had a little more training in this. But she had no experience as a nobody. There she had stood with her diploma.

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