“What are you, a clean fanatic?” I demand of him.
He laughs. “Says the lady in the maid uniform.”
My face heats up in a fresh new wave of humiliation.
Mike stops smiling. “Tania, sit down. Please. Tell me what’s going on. Is this a bipolar kind of thing? You can trust me. I’m not going to judge you for it.”
Trust him. Trust him not. This is how my father met my mother: he was walking by Brighton Beach Pier early one winter morning when he recognized the tracks of a wolf in the sand. Not your usual kind of wolf, he thought. He took to sitting out at night with a scraps of meat. It took months of patience before he befriended the animal, who was skittish and wary of humans. He followed it through the dark streets of Coney Island until it climbed through a bedroom window. In the morning my mother came down to breakfast to find him drinking coffee with her parents, and their courtship started.
“I will tell you everything if you find me something to clean,” I vow.
He purses his lips, deep in thought, and then grabs his shoes. “Come on.”
Six blocks from Mike’s apartment, there’s an old building that was once a Jewish hospital. The courtyard is locked off by big iron gates. Mike has a key to the gates and then to a basement Laundromat that must have been the hospital laundry once. He flicks on some of the fluorescent lights and steers me past some old industrial washers and dryers. Dozens of paper and plastic sacks sit piled in the corner.
“How do you feel about doing laundry for strangers?” he asks.
Clothes that reek of vomit, sweat, spilled alcohol, stale cigarette smoke. Sleeping bags and towels with stains of brown and red and yellow. Underwear and clothing with very questionable stains on them.
“What is this place?” I ask.
“Homeless shelter,” Mike says. “I volunteer here. There’s about two hundred people sleeping on cots upstairs, and none of them can afford a Laundromat.”
I can’t help myself. I kiss him right there and then.
I’m in heaven.
Mike stays with me all night. I tell him he doesn’t have to; he says I owe him a story.
Between soap and bleach, fabric softener and lint sheets, I reveal the improbable tale of my parents and the were-curse, and what drives me to the streets every full moon. He drinks soda from a vending machine and nods in all the right places. He lets me teach him how to fold a fitted sheet, and we have a long conversation about the best way to fold socks (tie them together or invert one into the other), and near dawn he looks at the clock and says, “We better scoot before the day shift gets here.”
“What are you going to tell them?” I ask.
“That they were visited by the laundry fairy godmother.” He stretches with a grimace; plastic chairs are bad for the back. “I bet they’ll beg you to come back tonight.”
By the time we lock everything up and go outside, the sky is gray with pre-dawn light. The air is fresh and clean. Or as fresh and clean as it gets in a metropolis of grime. Mike says, “Let me take you home,” but that means he’ll know where I live. He’ll learn my last name. The were-maid’s final secrets will be revealed.
“Look, thanks for all you did—” I start.
He puts one finger to my lips to silence me. Uses the other to point at the sky.
“See that? It’s beautiful. Like dirty dishwater.” He steps closer, a warm smile on his face. “I don’t care that you’re cursed. I want to spend more time with you. Full moon, half moon, no moon. Maid uniform or blue jeans. Apron or high heels.”
It’s a risk, trusting people. They can break your heart as surely as lemon rinds make a garbage disposal smell nice. But I kiss Mike anyway. He touches my hair just as the rising sun makes my hair unwind and yellow gloves dissolve. The were-maid is gone for now, and cleaning is the last thing on my mind.
SHE DRIVES THE MEN TO CRIMES OF PASSION!
by Genevieve Valentine
The scene was this: Cocoanut Grove, Saturday night, packed so tight you had to hold your drink practically in your armpit, and the band loud enough that you gave up on conversation and nodded whenever you heard a voice just in case someone was talking to you.
You never went to the Grove on the weekends if you had any kind of self-respect at all—by 1934 all the stars had turned their backs on the Grove and fled to the Sidewalk Cafe, where they could drink themselves onto the floor without any prying eyes. The reporters had given up trying, and now they came to the Grove to dig up dirt on the third-rate bit players.
It was fine for the bit players, but I had some prospects.
Well, one picture. It hadn’t done well. I knew they were talking about putting me on pity duty with the melodramas that shot in four days on the same set. No extras, no stars; nothing to do but come to the Cocoanut Grove and look around at the bit players you were going to be stuck with for the rest of your life.
“You need a friend in the studio, fast,” said Lewis. “Come down to the Grove with me. There’s bound to be someone.”
I nursed my Scotch and grimaced at the crowd for an hour, looking for a studio man I could talk to.
None. Damn Sidewalk Cafe.
I was on my way across the floor to leave when the music ended, and the dance floor opened, and I saw Eva.
She’d been dancing—strands of her dark hair stuck to her shining brown skin, a spiderweb across her forehead. If she’d been wearing lipstick it was gone, but her lids were still dusted with sparkly shadow in bright green and white that shone in the dark like a second pair of eyes.
I saw her coming and held my breath. I could already see her at the end of the lens—turning to look over her shoulder at the hero, giving him a smile, tempting him to do terrible things.
“You should be in pictures,” I said, and it sounded like a totally different line when you meant it.
Her audition alone got me into Capital Films for a feature with her. I knew it would.
There was no point in making her into an ingenue (exotic and ingenue did not mix), so we went right to the vamp. I made her a fortune teller in
The Hollywood Reporter called her “Exotic Eva” in the blurb—couldn’t have planned it better—and went on for a paragraph about the passion in her Spanish eyes. They wrapped with, “We suspect we haven’t seen the last of this sultry siren.”
Capital signed me for another flick, and started making us reservations at the Sidewalk Cafe.
Eva wore green satin that matched her eyes, and as we danced under the dim lights there were shimmers of color across her skin.
“I think I love you,” I said.
She said, “You would.”
It sounded ungrateful, but I let it go. There was time for all that; right now, our stars were rising.
Capital didn’t want her being a heroine yet. (“Keep her mysterious,” they said. “The fan magazines can’t even tell if she’s really Mexican or if it’s just makeup. It’s perfect.”)
I made her a flamenco dancer next, in
The lead, Jack Stone, was nothing much—I was doing the studio a favor just having him—but at least he looked properly stunned whenever she was in the frame.
Originally Stone’s theatre patron was going to seduce her and leave the virginal heiress for a life with the variety show, but word came down that Capital was going to start getting strict about the Production Code, so the hero sinning was right out.
So instead Eva seduced the patron, and got strangled by the jealous stage manager in the last reel.
(The poster featured her bottom left, with a banner: “Eva Loba is Elisa The Spanish Temptress—She drives