Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes. Lauren Baratz-Logsted

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СКАЧАТЬ with her bare hands and she gets right to it. Ask a 200-pound man and before he’s even touched the damn thing, he’s calling Worker’s Comp on his cell phone to verbally file papers for his bad back. Give me a six-pack of chicks any day.’ Naturally, I poked him in the gut with my pool cue for saying ‘chicks,’ but, believe you me, I know from whence he speaks.”

      “So what did you do last night?” Stella asked, snapping her omnipresent gum as she keyed up the ignition. “What’re you reading today? Not that Hemingway guy again. Isn’t he the one who hated chicks?”

      I knew that the barrage of questions—Stella was a relentless talker—would continue until we picked up Conchita and Rivera, at which point Stella’s attentions would focus solely on them. Unlike me, but very much like Stella, Conchita and Rivera were big talkers.

      Like me, Conchita and Rivera were short and dark. But unlike me, where in Stella’s uniform I would have looked like a reject extra from March of the Penguins, Conchita and Rivera looked hot hot hot, like maybe they worked at an upscale Hooters or something.

      “Stel-la!” Conchita and Rivera jointly trilled as they hopped into the van.

      Conchita and Rivera lived in a neighborhood that would have depressed me, one of Danbury’s few rough neighborhoods, but they never seemed to mind, greeting each day of being alive with an exuberance I could only envy. Of their former home in Brazil, obviously worse, all they would ever say was, “You don’t even want to know, Delilah. Better for us here.”

      The Girls From Brazil, as Stella and I referred to them, were illegal aliens. But I was sure not going to be the one to turn them in. If their situation here wasn’t scary enough, the tone they got in their voice when they told me I didn’t even want to know what it was like where they came from. During the three years I’d been working for her, whenever Stella had put ads in the paper prior to hiring them, despite the fact that Stella offered a generous hourly wage, the only people to apply were other Brazilians. The way I figured it, they weren’t stealing jobs from legal people, because no one legal wanted their jobs; no one except me, that is.

      The Girls From Brazil also always greeted Stella as though they were trying to pick her up, in that way, which was not far from the truth since Conchita and Rivera were free-living lesbians, always willing to expand their circle of love. But while they incessantly flirted with Stella, they never once flirted with me, making me feel somehow pathetic in the extreme: my hot meter was turned so low, I wasn’t even hot enough to be desirable to free-living lesbians.

      Oh, well. At least I owned the title of The Golden Squeegee.

      And I did love the women I worked with, if for their sheer vibrancy alone, even if they did have a tendency to pick on me.

      “Stel-la.” Conchita poked her head between the front seats. “How come she always gets to sit in front?”

      “She” was their name for me.

      “Because she gets carsick,” Stella explained for the umpteenth time. “And I don’t want her vomiting in my hair.”

      “Sounds pretty flimsy to me,” said Rivera. “Have you actually ever seen her get carsick?”

      “Well, no,” Stella conceded. “But do any of us really want to?”

      A valid argument, I thought, even as I muttered, “‘Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.’” Honestly, did there have to be three of them to devil me?

      “What did she say?” Conchita asked.

      “Something about fire and bubbles,” Rivera said. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s singing some kind of dumb-ass song?”

      “Where are we working today?” Conchita asked.

      “First job, a big house in Westport,” Stella said. “Movie star.”

      Westport and the towns around it had more movie stars per square mile than anywhere else outside of Hollywood and it seemed that they were all clients of Squeaky Qlean. In fact, we did so many homes belonging to famous people that Stella occasionally flirted with the idea of adding “Window washers to the stars!” to her business cards but worried that her upscale clientele would find that too presumptuous.

      “So no salsa dancing on the ladders,” Stella cautioned. “You girls need to act like professionals today. The job is way overpriced and I’m hoping to talk them into having us back each month.”

      Monthly window cleaning might seem like a ridiculous expense for a private homeowner, but Stella had secured one such client already, a famous record producer who lived out on the water. When we first did his house, he hadn’t had it done in ten years and he spent the whole morning following me from room to room—I was always the inside person—stoned out of his mind, laughing and muttering, “Clean windows. Way cool. I can see. I can see!” Mister Famous Record Producer had moved in around the time of the Clinton impeachment, something he still hadn’t gotten over all these years later. “The man got impeached for a blow job—a blow job! If people in the music business got fired for that, there’d be no music left anywhere in the world.” Stella had actually needed to talk him out of having us come every week, which was what he originally wanted, and, good as the money was, none of us wanted to listen to him do his “I can see!” number that often or listen to him whine about how Bubba had gotten treated, even those of us who agreed with him. If every window washer lost their job over a…

      If traffic was kind and Rte 7 wasn’t one long parking lot, Westport was a good thirty-five minutes from Conchita and Rivera’s apartment, so I pulled out my book and went back to my Hemingway, figuring on getting some reading in. A few more chapters—I’d started the book the night before—and I would have read everything Papa’d ever written.

      “What you reading today?” Conchita asked.

      I held up the book, showed them the cover.

      “No shit, chica,” Rivera said, “but the sun also sets, too, you know, every damn day.”

      Indeed.

      Stella had not been whistling Windex when she said the client we were doing was a movie star. Elizabeth Hepburn, star of stage and screen, may have been as old as television, but even I, who preferred pages to celluloid, knew who she was. She had two Academy Awards on her mantel—I was tempted to dance with them when she went down for her morning nap, book in hand, but resisted the urge—and had starred in my all-time favorite movie, A Bitter Pill, about a starlet who overcomes her strumpet past only to be taken out by brain cancer on the night of the Oscars. “Did someone turn the lights out in here?” was a line that always made me bawl like a baby and always made Hillary laugh at me for bawling like a baby.

      Due to my fear of heights, I was always the inside person. Still, even though there were three of them outside and only one of me inside, despite Stella’s earlier admonitions to take this job seriously, they all goofed around so much that I was done long before they would finish.

      Hey, they don’t call me The Golden Squeegee for nothing.

      So I grabbed my lunch bag from the van and sat out on a far corner of the fieldstone terrace, figuring no one in the house could object to that too much so long as I cleaned up after myself, and pulled out my now-cold Amy’s Cheese Pizza Pocket, popped open my Diet Pepsi Lime and polished off my Hemingway.

      Food done; drink done; book, and therefore all of Hemingway, done. Crap, I hadn’t thought to bring СКАЧАТЬ