Nekropolis by Maureen F. McHugh Read Free Book Online Page A

smiles tentatively. Well, she may not be fashionable, the way my old mistress was, but she looks kind, praise God. I hope so, I would like to live in a kind household. I smile back at her.
    That’s it. I’m impressed.
     
    * * *
     
    My new household is much smaller than the old one. I must be frugal; there’s a lot less money in this house. It’s surprising how accustomed I’ve gotten to money at Mbarek’s house; this is much more like the way I grew up.
    I inventory the linens and clean all the rooms from top to bottom. My mistress sits at the table and watches me scrub the counters and clean the grime that has collected in the cracks.
    “Things are different in a big house, I assume,” she says. Her name is Zoubida. That’s what she wants me to call her, but it feels too informal, so I don’t call her anything at all.
    “Yes, ma’am,” I say. “A lot more people.”
    I open the cold box. “Do you want to keep any of this?” I’ll be cooking.
    She waves her hand. “Oh no, keep what you need.”
    It is full of half-eaten things that I am afraid to keep. Some of them are really old. I empty it out and scrub it, the cold wafting out as I do. Then I put back the handful of things I’m certain aren’t spoiled. I wash out the sink.
    I make a salad of chicken and greens and oranges for lunch. It’s something that the old mistress used to like. The new master shuffles in, the backs of his slippers flattened by tromping on them. “What’s this?” he says.
    “It’s a recipe from her old house,” my mistress says.
    He looks at it doubtfully. He’s not a salad eater, I suspect.
    “For dinner, I can make couscous,” I say.
    He nods and tastes the salad gingerly.
    “Did you eat this a lot at your last place?” my mistress asks.
    “Oh, not me,” I say. “But my mistress liked it.”
    I’ll eat chickpeas later, after I clean up after lunch.
    The master seems pleased by the salad and eats every bit. “Hariba,” he says while I’m picking up the plates, “how do you stop a lawyer from drowning?”
    “I don’t know, sir.”
    “Take your foot off his neck,” he says, and laughs, watching me with watering eyes.
    I laugh, too. He is always telling me dreadful jokes, but the mistress wants us to get along. I always laugh.
    The master shuffles off to go meet some friends at a coffee house. The mistress doesn’t seem to know what to do with herself.
    “I would like to clean all the cupboards,” I say.
    “Why don’t you sit for a moment and have some tea?” she says. Watching me work makes her nervous.
    “Oh, really, I’m not thirsty,” I say. “But thank you, ma’am.”
    I don’t know what to do with her. I don’t want to make her uncomfortable. “Have you always lived here, ma’am?” I ask.
    She tells me all about her family, starting stories and losing track, and getting names mixed up. But I pretend to follow and be interested. I take everything out of the cupboards and wash them. Things are incredibly dusty!
    “Before you we had a girl who came in during the day and went home at night,” the mistress says.
    She didn’t seem to do much.
    I shop and make couscous and chickpea soup for dinner.
    The daughter is sixteen. Her name is Tereze. She has her hair hennaed and she wears Indian filagree and a blue dot in the middle of her forehead to look like an emancipated Indian woman. Girls are all dressing like Indian gender terrorists. She has a phone card flipped open and is talking to one of her friends.
    “Stop talking on the phone. Now,” her mother says.
    She rolls her eyes. “My mother wants me to stop talking,” she says to the phone. “So what do you think, should we tell her or not?”
    The mistress reaches over and grabs the phone card from her and crumples it up.
    “That had more than half an hour left on it!” the girl says.
    “Then you should have listened to me,” the mother says. “I got my credit chip statement today. There are a lot of charges on here that I