blades, a deep itch fluttered and pressed for freedom.
I pictured the city until it passed.
MOONLIGHT AND BLEACH
by Sandra McDonald
My mother was the most beautiful werewolf in Brighton Beach. Four legs, sleek silver fur, and a mouth full of well-brushed teeth that could rip your throat out. My father was a Russian immigrant who started a janitorial company that at one time serviced every public school and city building on Coney Island. As their only kid, I inherited the worst of both worlds: my mother’s were-curse and my father’s ruthless passion for cleanliness. Every month I transform into a magical creature who slinks along the city streets carrying a bucket and a mop.
Yes. I’m a were-maid.
“Like that’s the worst thing in the world,” Mom used to say, her face beet-red as she scrubbed at pots with steel wool. Until she and my father retired, she did her own housework every day. “Sweetheart, you’ll see. A woman who cleans and cooks is a woman who will always have a husband.”
She’s from German stock, very traditional. She wanted me to be a wife; I wanted to be a career woman. She hoped that I would settle down in Park Slope with my boyfriend Jason after we both graduated from Fordham Law. Instead Jason announced he was dumping me for a public defender in Queens who didn’t sneak out of the apartment late at night and return smelling like furniture polish. I told him about the curse. He insisted I had some weird obsessive-compulsive disorder.
“He’s an idiot,” Mom said when heard the news. “His bathroom will never be as clean as it was with you.”
My parents’ sympathy is long distance these days. They spend most of each year in Germany, where Mom can run free through the Black Forest when her arthritis isn’t acting up. I’m their only child, and by day I’m an ambitious junior partner at the law firm of Sidoriv and Puginsky. I wear nice suits and expensive shoes. Under the full moon, whatever I’m wearing transforms into a black polyester dress, a white apron, and ugly black shoes. The yellow rubber gloves that coat my hands won’t come off until sunrise. My hair curls itself up into a bun, tight and impossible to dislodge.
Tonight’s one of those nights.
“Hey, baby!” A red car slows down and the driver leers out his window. It’s one of those hot summer nights that makes you glad for the miracle of air conditioning. “Going to a party? Want to clean me up?”
I ignore him. The perils of walking around in a maid uniform at night in New York can’t be underestimated, but I’ve got a bottle of industrial grade cleaner in my bucket and I’m not afraid to use it.
He makes some lewd suggestions about sponges and finally drives on. Ten minutes later I reach my destination and knock on the alley door.
“There you are,” grumbles my cousin, Alexi, after he opens it. “You’re late.”
“I had to get ready for a meeting with the D.A. tomorrow,” I say.
The smell of chlorine is heavy in the humid air, but the halls are dark and empty. This is one of the smallest, most exclusive Russian banyas in the borough. A banya is a bathhouse to you and me. The bathroom stalls, locker room floors, steam room benches are all prime breeding grounds for germs and grime. It’s good, hard work.
Alexi is top masseuse here. He’s a big beefy man, and when he has bad news he comes out and says it. “Look, Tania. The customers. The morning after you come, they say it’s too clean.”
I push my maid’s cap higher on my head. “Too clean? What does that mean?”
“Too much bleach. Makes them sneeze. Could you maybe try, I don’t know, vinegar?”
“It’s not as good.”
“I’m just saying.” Another shrug, a spread of hands. “Olga wants you to stay in the morning. She wants to meet you, talk it over.”
Olga is his boss. We’ve met before, at business functions, but never while I’m under my curse. “I can’t! She’ll recognize me!”
“Then you better take tomorrow night off. Find someplace else for a month or two.”
It’s not that New York lacks places that need cleaning. It lacks
Alexi holds up one finger. “Good news, though. I’ve got a guy for you. Needs help.”
I squint at him. “What kind of guy?”
“Nice guy,” he insists. “Widow. Not a pervert, okay? Just needs a little help.”
I trust Alexi with my secret and I’d trust him with my wallet, but you’ve got to be careful with a curse like mine. Some guys get off on having a woman in a maid’s uniform visit them late at night. Leering can lead to groping, and groping can lead to me hitting someone hitting over the head with a mop. I prefer to avoid personal injury lawsuits.
“Nice old guy,” Alexi repeats. “University professor. I’ll give you his number.”
“Fine.” It doesn’t seem like I have much of a choice. “But first I’ve got some toilets to clean.”
Not only am I the most ambitious junior partner at Sidoriv and Puginsky, I’m the only partner the firm actually has. My bosses are Igor and Boris, two cantankerous old farts with hearing problems, high blood pressure and a fondness for cheap cigars. They’ve been partners in law for fifty years and closeted gay lovers for at least as long. Or maybe not so closeted. My father used to roll his eyes whenever he saw them, and wring his hands, and then say, “You’d think they could at least marry, have some children. A few seconds of poking and you’re done. For appearances.”
Most of the firm’s work is citizenship problems, workman’s compensation and landlord disputes for the economically disadvantaged Russians of Brooklyn. I like most of my clients. They’re loud and colorful, on bold new adventures in a foreign land, and the older ones bring us onion and cabbage pirozkhis. I also like being useful. America is full of predators who prey on immigrants the way my mom, during her werewolf nights, is a threat to stray dogs, feral cats, and luckless animals of the forest. Occasionally I do some criminal defense. My current client is an elderly cabbie named Vlad who tried to run over a couple of punks who stiffed him on a fare. I’m dead tired from scrubbing porcelain all night but I make it to the district attorney’s office on time for my meeting.
“It was attempted murder,” says the prosecutor.
“My client was upset and confused,” I reply. “He thought they were trying to rob him.”
“He braked, reversed, and then jumped the curb again.”
Vlad has big blue eyes that make you want to believe him, but if he ever gives you a hug, be sure to check your pockets afterward. He waves his hands around and speaks rapidly in Russian.
“He thought he saw a gun,” I translate.
“Your client is a menace,” the prosecutor says.
By the time we leave I have a pounding fatigue headache, and the wretched heat of the day makes my suit cling to me like wet leaves. Back at the opulent offices of Sidoriv and Puginsky—that would be four small ancient, cluttered rooms over what’s now an Indian grocery store—I gulp down a giant cup of iced coffee.
“She stays out too late,” Igor says, the unlit cigar in his mouth bobbing as high as his bushy gray eyebrows.
“She needs a social life,” Boris retorts, shuffling through a mound of folders. Both of them refuse to use computers. “Girl like her, who wants to be alone?”
At times like this, it’s best to ignore them entirely.
When I get home to my apartment I feed Alfred, the gray tabby I adopted after Jason left me, and crash for a few hours. The full moon rising in the east calls to me, invokes the change. Like all were-curses, it digs unyieldingly into my sleep. Some were-folk dream of woods dark and deep. I get bleach and moonlight, and oven cleaner that never works as well as it should, and those extendable feather dusters for use with chandeliers and ceiling fans.
