Entangled Objects. Susanne Paola Antonetta

It might even work to go out sometime, shopping or some such, with Anna. There were always things to do, weren’t there? No matter what happened to people, they did things.

      And she found pleasure just in being with women. She smoked with the other chambermaids from time to time, bringing Kools she lit by pressing the unlit tip to the coin of flame on another woman’s cigarette, a gesture that felt so intimate it made her startle with the thought of having sex with that woman, with women. She imagined what she might do with her hands, her tongue and would touch herself, later. At these moments, laughing, smoking, she wanted to make a move, but she felt like she didn’t understand how to start or to give pleasure the right way, and would make a fool of herself, in bed.

      Still, the thoughts that tumbled through her head as she wheeled toward her first rooms felt old and used, images from a self she thought she’d left behind. She had a lot of life in front of her—probably a good sixty years, all of it wheeling in front of her and heavy to push. Would she always do this, or something like it? That life to come felt like a weight in her body, something she was doomed to carry but never truly give birth to, her version of being forever cold.

      At the same time, each turn of the wheel of her life was final, in a way the rooms she cleaned were not; the same rooms came back, but a day would never. It was just gone. And both thoughts—the weight of now and the finality of its ending—were sad.

      Her mother watched a television show called Cosmos. In it Ef learned that the universe held endless strangenesses: warped time, or backward time, or no time, astronauts chugging along without getting any older, the vast erupting from the pinprick. There was a thing called Hilbert space and we exist within it and it has infinite dimensions, though we do not. She had felt a little of that Hilbertness, she thought, during her dinner with Tom, and then her body passed back into one dimension only, that one of rags, smears, Clorox.

      Ef went into her first room. It seemed a man was staying there; she noticed undershirts draped over the back of a chair, a wide brown brush with coarse bristles, aftershave the color of blue detergent in the bathroom. She began the bathroom with Rust-Out in the toilet—the old hotel pipes sent rust-blushes onto all the enamel—a putty knife and Windex on the glass shower door.

      She went back to her cart, parked in the doorway, for a rag when Anna appeared, holding the shoes in her hands, the long and elegant shoes, toes pointing towards her.

      “In the Lost and Found?” Anna said, then, when Ef didn’t answer, “Filomena?”