“Do you often clean telephones when you visit people?” Juan asked.
I laughed and said: “No, I just got a part-time doing this.” The brothers looked at each other as if I was a compulsive type. I ignored them and finished my task of protecting them from a horrible disease.
That week I worked very hard. My part-time job turned into a full-time because I insisted on using the pink cream. Aileen was right: there was no time to use it. I worked twice as long but I wasn’t paid by the hour. I was unable to write a single word. The burden of writing paled by comparison with the weight of my new ethical responsibility for all the people who would be saved from tuberculosis if the pink cream really was effective.
One morning, Aileen and I encountered each other as we picked up our satchels and job lists for the day. Aileen told me she had heard how late in the afternoon I returned the day before. I saw fear in her eyes because she thought I could accuse her. But no, why would I do that? That would be as bad as letting someone unwittingly catch tuberculosis from a contaminated telephone. Her paycheck and her invalid husband’s pitiful disability money were the only things keeping them off the streets.
Friday came, and tired and tormented as I was, I had my paycheck and was happy. I could eat a decent meal. I went to a cafeteria on Broadway to listen to the Jewish intellectuals. In Yiddish and English they discussed literature, books, writers, ideas, anything but the concentration camps which many of them survived. Some had long beards and wore black skullcaps acknowledging a superior being. They smelled of the naphthalene from the trunks and closets of the people who had donated their clothes. They were all dressed in black pants and jackets with white shirts, except for a woman named Rebecca, who always had on a discolored red velvet dress with a lace collar that once was beige or white, but had turned pink. She recited, in English and in a clear, soprano voice, insightful poems about life in the Polish ghetto. Everything about the cafeteria’s clientele evoked East European pogroms, the war, an eternity of fear and poverty, but they mainly spoke of ideals and dreams. I felt comforted listening to these people and ate my plate of kosher meat loaf, mashed potatoes and carrots. It was expensive for my budget, but a delicious change from the canned macaroni and meatballs I had lived on every night.
By Sunday morning this warmth was gone and I was feeling deeply depressed, a tree trying to grow with its roots in the air. The uplifting feeling produced by the conversation of the Jewish intellectuals and the other joyful experience of speaking Spanish with the Puerto Rican brothers, who were now very excitedly planning their futures as successful songwriters, contrasted sharply with the daily task I was facing. I woke up Sunday morning dreaming that the telephone cords were strangling me, maybe a flashback to my birth when I turned blue, strangled by the umbilical cord. All day Sunday I lay in bed starring at the Olivetti on the desk a few feet away. Sunday night, I had nightmares about people dying of a new strain of cancer from talking on the phone while Dr. Klein frantically tried to discover another pink cream to exterminate it.
On Monday, I was waiting at the door for Ruth and Esther to arrive. They were so pleased with my diligence that they gave me a brokerage office on Wall Street. The elevator door opened on infinite rows of desks with black telephones, one of which was dimly ringing. I unlocked the glass door and ran to the desk. “Nobody here,” I answered to stop the shrill ringing. “You are somebody,” said a voice. “Tell Smith to sell. Sell. Sell. Sell!” he screamed. I hung up. Then all the telephones began to ring, each with a different tone. The apparatuses vibrated on the metal desks, demanding for attention. I ran around senselessly trying to answer them, “Nobody here. Nobody here. Nobody here.” As soon as I hung up, more started to ring.
I observed myself from the ceiling as happens in dreams, in the middle of that big room lighted with spectral neon tubes and surrounded by row after row after row of ringing telephones. I watched myself open my mouth very wide to scream.
Leaning against the wall of the elevator I let out a sigh of relief. I had to go home to think. On the subway, I noticed the satchel in my lap and realized I had to return it to the directors somehow without letting them convince me to stay. I could see them offering me more tea and cookies and I would be lost. I trudged up the stairs to my room rehearsing possible excuses I could give to leave the job. I needed something out of the theater. A terrible fall. A fall so horrendous it would crush my leg and make it impossible for me to walk ever again. But I had to walk there, to the office, so the fall would have to be serious enough to prevent me from working, but not from going once to see the sisters.
I ran to the drugstore downstairs and bought a roll of gauze. The next morning I wrapped the whole thing around my left leg and went to the office.
I had just come out of the subway near the New York Public Library when a woman started to follow me. I walked faster but finally she grabbed my arm. “May I help you cross the street? How did you do this to yourself? I’m a retired nurse, and I’ve never seen anybody with an injury as extensive as yours able to walk,” she said.
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