Rosa

V. Piety Corner

V.

Piety Corner

Next day she drags herself to Piety Corner, check on Helen Schade, woman who spent most of her life in Metropolitan State Hospital. Now she’s inherited the big old mansion where her parents used to live on Lura Lane and lives there for spells between the hospital.

Straighten up the house and check she’s eating, the agency tells her. She’d like to see them straighten up this place, she thinks, clearing a space so she can get into the foyer, her womb still dragging at her.

Once in, she encounters a new obstacle: a forest of entangled aluminum legs, crutches, walkers, commodes—stuff the old parents left behind. You suppose I can put these out to the trash? she calls into the kitchen, where Helen lives in a space cleared around the breakfast nook—she eats at the table, sleeps in the window seat on a bare dirty cushion.

DON’T THROW ANYTHING OUT!

Hokay, hokay. Just vacuum a little and straighten up, they told her at the agency. Well that’s not possible, thinks Rosa. She’ll follow, rather, her aunt’s advice: a house is clean if the toilet, sinks, and refrigerator are clean. She starts in the bathroom, which takes the three hours she’s allowed. You didn’t throw anything out, Helen yells.

No, no. I’ll just fill this wastebasket with some of those flyers messing up the floor there. There is a mountain of mail in the corner of the breakfast nook, from which small avalanches have toppled inward to cover half the floor. That’s my mail. I need to sort through it.

Just the ads, I mean.

I might need them. I order things.

Oh, well, maybe I help you…

YOU ARE NOT TO THROW ANYTHING OUT!

Hokay. I throw only this dirty water outside.

Let me see it.

Rosa shows her the water. Inmundo, she thinks.

She takes the pail outside and down to the little stream at the bottom of the hill with a little wooden bridge to cross and throws the water into it. She admires a bed of withered lilies of the valley still sweetening the air and indulges in a little dream of bringing Wolfie here someday in his chair. She has a feeling Wolfie would appreciate Piety Corner with its old houses and big trees.

And let me see in your bag now, that you take nothing, she is told when she goes back in the house to get her things. This hasn’t happened to Rosa since she first worked in the apple packing and Mr. Haffenhover used to check them as they left work. What he think they take? Apples? They saw too many apples to ever want one again.

She hands the bag to Helen. Someone is taking stuff out of this house, and I have to find out who it is, Helen says.

Rosa looks around at the subsiding stacks of supermarket flyers and Wal-Lex coupons, the upside-down furniture and clothing on rolling racks that look as if they come from a dress store…

My sister, I think it is. She was always jealous of me; now I got this house. She has a twenty-room house herself and three cars. Why does she have to come snooping around here when I’m gone?

You go out? Rosa asks. She looks so permanent there on her bench in the breakfast nook surrounded by coffee cups she won’t let Rosa wash…

Of course I go out. I have my supermarket cart so I can take my most valuable things with me. Rosa used to see her downtown with her cart full of rags and blankets and an orange cat on top, but not lately.

Maybe I not go back, thinks Rosa, walking back down Lexington Street to the bus from Lexington, which is always full with her people, who work for the rich people there.

But the next week on Friday, following her aunt’s rules of cleanliness—kitchens first, then bathrooms—she spends her three hours on the refrigerator. It is the most daunting of her tasks, and she had thought to leave it till last; but, like Mrs. Rose with her music, Rosa likes to do the hard parts first.

In the front are cartons of Chinese food, from the Celestial Mandarin at Wal-Lex Plaza. All of Helen’s food seems to come from there. No wonder her legs are all swollen up. These all look fairly recent, and she has orders to not throw any of them out, so these she sets on a small space she finds on the floor without even looking inside. What is in back of them looks to have been in there for years, so long even the wax paper around some of them has decayed and has a fuzz all over: inmundo inmundo. She scrapes it all out with a spatula into a plastic bag.

I need to know where is your garbage, she asks Helen, who is seated in her usual place with her swollen legs up.

I don’t know where it is since I came here. I take it downtown to the dumpster behind the Cozy Kitchen when I need to.

Rosa stands up from where she’s been kneeling on the filthy floor. Madre de Cristo! she hollers. I not taking this filth back downtown with me! I will find something!

She stalks outside with the pestilent bag and notes the neighbors have their cans out to the curb. She finds a half-empty one next door, where it looks like no one’s home, and shoves the bag in. If Wolfie could see her now! Then she finds a large plastic bucket under the back porch and hauls in inside. This is your garbage, see! Today is Friday. It go out on Friday.

Well I hardly ever have anything. Rosa doesn’t hear. She has her head inside the refrigerator scraping green fuzz, black fuzz, white fuzz, with a knife. The hard part first. She’ll feel better after.