Like me, Mom used to clean homes. Mostly upscale places that we could never afford. She taught me everything I know. My first foray into the family business came when I was about twelve years old and would get down on my hands and knees beside her and scrub floors.
But before that, when I was too young to clean, Mom would lug me along on assignments and there I’d spend my days playing pretend in strangers’ homes. Cooking imaginary meals in their palatial kitchens, tucking my imaginary children into their mammoth beds before Mom scooched me out of the way so she could wash the sheets.
“You don’t remember me,” Eleanor Zulpo decides, realizing that it must have been sixteen or seventeen years ago or so, when I was three or four. “Of course you don’t remember,” she says, loosening her hold on my neck, telling me that I look just the same as I did back then. “It’s those dimples,” she says, pointing at them. “Those adorable dimples. I’d know these dimples anywhere.
“I read about your mother in the paper,” she says then, sitting beside me on her own stool, unwrapping a hot dog. The sight of it alone, that hot dog, lying out on a foil wrapper, slathered in ketchup and relish—that and the smell—reminds me of the dead bird. The pigeon. And instead of a hot dog, I suddenly see blood, guts, gore, and I gag, vomit inching its way up my esophagus. I reach for my drink and force it back down, gargling, trying to get the taste of vomit from my mouth.
Mrs. Zulpo—Eleanor, she says to call her—doesn’t notice. She keeps going. “I saw her obituary,” she’s saying. “It was a great write-up, a lovely tribute for a lovely woman,” she says. I tell her that it was.
I submitted the death notice to the newspaper. I covered the cost of the obituary. I found an old photo of Mom to use, one that was a good six years old at least, taken back before she got sick.
We’d lived our entire lives in private, but for whatever reason I felt the whole world should know that she was dead.
“There have been other cleaning women since your mother. But never anyone as good as she was, as conscientious, as thorough. She was one of a kind, Jessie,” she says, and I tell her I know. Eleanor tells me stories. Things I didn’t know, or maybe I did. Memories that have been lost to time, erased clear from my brain’s hard drive. About the time I helped myself to her Wedgwood china when Mom was cleaning. How I snatched it right from her hutch and set the dining room table to have a tea party with. “Wedgwood china,” she tells me, grinning. “A single cup and saucer go for about a hundred dollars each. They had been my own mother’s, given to me when she died. Heirlooms. Your poor mother,” she laughs. “She nearly had a heart attack when she found you. I told her it was fine, that it wasn’t like anything had gotten hurt. And besides, it was nice to see the dishes being put to use for a change.”
And then she tells me that, at her suggestion, the three of us sat down at the dining room table and drank lemonade from the Wedgwood china.
It fills me with a sudden sense of nostalgia. A yearning for the past.
“What else do you remember?” I ask, needing more. Needing someone to fill in the gaps for me, all those details I can no longer remember.
Eleanor tells me how her children were grown by the time I arrived, and so it was nice to have a child in the house again. She didn’t work outside of the home. When Mom and I came, she was grateful for the company. She used to look forward to the days we’d come. Usually she’d play with me while Mom cleaned, hide-and-go-seek in her home, or build forts from the newly washed sheets.
“You were a funny girl, Jessie,” she tells me. “Silly and strong willed, a great sense of humor to boot,” she says. “A bit ornery too. But those dimples,” she adds as she takes a bite of the hot dog, speaking through a full mouth, “with those dimples you could get away with murder, Jessie.” She laughs.
She says that anything Mom wanted done, she had to ask me twice. That the lunch Mom brought along for me, I refused to eat. That I was a far cry from shy, and would spend half of my days in her home creating a show to perform for her and Mom before we’d leave.
“You used to march around, insisting like the dickens that your name wasn’t Jessie. Because you didn’t like it back then, I think,” she says then, saying I was adamant about it, insistent that my name wasn’t Jessie. That my name was something else, but she doesn’t remember what. “You would pout your face and stomp your foot and insist that people stop calling you Jessie.Stop calling me that, you’d cry, face turning red. Your mother would go along with it for a while, trying to ignore your antics. Because she knew you were doing it for attention and, if she didn’t give in to you, sooner or later you’d quit. Though rarely did you quit,” she smiles, telling me I was a headstrong little girl.
“You knew what you wanted,” she says.
Eventually Mom would have enough of it, Eleanor tells me, and she’d get down to eye level and say,That’s enough, Jessie. We talked about this, remember?
But I have no memory of this at all.
Why would I go around masquerading as something other than Jessie? I don’t have time to come up with an answer because soon Eleanor is telling me how I used to carry an animal everywhere I went—a stuffed dog or a bear or a rabbit—but I couldn’t care less about that because what I’m wondering is why in the world I would be so unrelenting about that name. About the name Jessie. Why I would insist it wasn’t mine.
“And then there was your mother’s name,” Eleanor says before I have a chance to think it through, and I ask, “What about it?”
Her eyebrows crease. She removes a pair of glasses and sets them on the countertop, rubbing at her eyes. “It’s just that most little girls call their motherMomorMommy.”
She leaves it at that and so I ask, “And I didn’t?” thinking suddenly that Eleanor is mistaken. That she’s wrong. Time has altered these memories of hers, or she’s mistaken Mom and me for some other cleaning lady and child. Another child with dimples like mine. Because in all my life, she’s only ever been one thing to me—Mom—or so I think.
Eleanor shakes her head and at the same time I see my hands before me, gripping the edges of the countertop, also shaking.
“You didn’t,” she says. “You called her by her given name.”
Eleanor tells me that Mom would put up with it to a certain extent but then every now and again she’d get down and whisper in my ear,We’ve talked about this, Jessie. Remember?Same as she said about my own name.You’re to call me Mom.
“For a short while, you’d remember. You’d remember to call your motherMom.But before too long, you’d forget and go back to calling her by her Christian name. Eden.”
I don’t remember doing that.
eden
January 16, 1998
Chicago
