The next morning at 6 A.M there was a phone call from the doorman announcing the arrival of “Adela”. Having cleaned the house in preparation for the house cleaner, I was nervous as to how things appeared. I had made sure that I wiped all the pee from the toilets (I had three!) and had hidden the more offensive pieces of laundry under the bed. Now I waited. And waited. More than five minutes passed and I opened my door. Nobody. The elevator lights registered that it was firmly on the first floor and not moving. Where the hell was she? Just then a faint sound drifted into my ears from down the stairwell. A labored wheezing, combined with a slow but rhythmic slapping of flip flops on stone. Surely she wasn’t…? I lived on the eleventh floor! But sure enough, a good five minutes later, one of the tiniest women I have ever seen in my life, ancient and stoop shouldered, conquered the last of the steps and grabbed the railing while she gasped for air.
“Senora? Are you okay? Esta bien?”
“Si….” She whispered/wheezed.
“Adela?”
Again a whisper/wheeze in the affirmative.
“Please… por favor… come in… entrada.” Adela must have been at least 70 years old. She wasn’t more than four feet tall and the second most noticeable thing about her was a profusion of long dark hairs growing out of a tremendous mole on her chin. Adela scuttled past me and into the apartment. She dropped her bag onto the kitchen floor and, still gasping for breath, began filling the sink with soap and water and pulling clean dishes out of the cupboard and literally throwing them into the sink. Conscious of being late for my bus I looked at my watch and saw that I was. Adela’s long arrival had thrown off the precision clockwork of my morning ritual. With a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach and lacking the words to give voice to it, I put on my shoes and grabbed my bag.
“Gracias Adela.”
“Si. Si.”
“Hasta luego. See you later.”
“Si. Si.”
The bad feeling in the pit of my stomach only increased as the last thing I heard before the door clicked shut behind me was the distinctive tinkling of broken glass.
When I returned, the first thing that hit me, even before I got my key in the door, was the smell. Burning. Specifically, burning plastic. It was at that moment that I remembered Adela. Until then, the anarchy, riot, and chaos of a typical school day had forced her out of my mind. Nervously, I unlocked the door and opened it slowly. The 70 year old hunchback was perched on my balcony, outside the rail, 11 stories up, washing the outside of the window with one hand while holding on with the other. I had to look away. Nervous that if I startled her, she would plummet to her death, I tried to slip as unobtrusively as possible past the window. She saw me though, and sure enough, she startled, momentarily losing her grip on the railing and only regaining it at the last second before plummeting to her death. I almost had a heart attack on the spot. I’m amazed she didn’t. Maybe her ticker was in good shape from all the stairs she climbed. I felt terrible though, having a great grandmother risking life and limb in order that I might have sparkling clean windows. Venturing into the kitchen, I opened the fridge to grab a beer. The fridge had been completely rearranged, but even after a thorough rooting around, I could not find a single beer. I had bought twelve the previous day. Did she drink them all? Is that what inspired the daredevil window cleaning? More curious than angry, I started looking through the cupboards. Everything was different. Where dishes had been, rice and beans were. Where soap and cleaning supplies had been…. beer was. Twelve cans, all neatly lined up. Twelve very warm cans. I threw a few into the freezer and then cracked one warm. It foamed all over the floor and when I went to look for a rag I noticed the ironing board.
I have never been a huge neat freak. Ironing is something that was done for me as a child, but my pants never saw a crease or my collars a nice neat press again. Until the Medellin Academy. Within the first few days of my being there Elaine had complained about the state of my clothes. As a conscientious and brand new employee eager to please I went out and bought an iron and an ironing board. I had taught myself more or less how to use them, but after a few weeks when I realized that pressing pants and shirts for the Medellin Academy was like washing deck chairs on the Titanic, I stopped and the iron and board had stood unused since. Now however, with the arrival of Adela, the iron was clearly back in service. .
What had once been a green floral printed ironing board cover was now a melted, hardened coating of blackened polyester. The puzzle of the burnt plastic smell was solved. The iron, cord coiled neatly around it’s base, sat on the melted surface, its metal face smeared with polyester, the steam holes clogged with blackened nodules. This discovery propelled me to my closet where no words can adequately describe what I found. I drained the rest of my beer and went directly to the freezer for another.
