PITLESS CHERRIES

PROSE BY KEELY HOOD

Three times in seven years at this ironing board, she almost burnt down the room. At 6:00 AM, she irons alongside the taped programming on the box set television. While the coffee’s on, her hand guides the press over the faded blue hills and valleys of the fabric. Every few minutes she pauses to jot down a remark for the backburner of her mind—sharp one-liners from Fran Fine on The Nanny, whom she sees as her spiritual self. They are both from Queens, both from not much of anything, and both due for some luck. She irons in her cotton underwear because the air conditioning is for the guest rooms, not this closet of a room. She and the other live-in maids line a corner they call the slums of the hotel.

She could start a fire here. Scorch it all down. Say, if I don’t get air conditioning, you can all burn too. But it isn’t that humid today, she decides, so it can wait. She returns to her ironing with the steady breaths of counting sheep. Closing credits roll on The Nanny. Humming, Anita lifts the dress over her head, ties the waist, pins back her hair, and sets her stale coffee in the sink.

At 7:00 AM, she’s off. She shuts the door by half-leaning against it, then trudges down the stairs to the back room, where Randy sits in a big fur because of that cold air they can seemingly afford to disperse everywhere but the maid rooms. When she enters, he will say “Morning, honey,” because he doesn’t call any of the staff by their names and likely wouldn’t know Anita if someone came around asking for her.

Randy’s big fur looks like something he lifted from one of the wealthy older women he spends his time with. These women, in part, fund the hotel. Like a hunter’s trophy, the leopard hangs limply off of his lean body in an overblown declaration of what he must think is suave. He sits with his boots on the desk, only standing when all of the staff are gathered.

The thing about Randy is he thinks he is a pimp, despite being half a gigolo himself. “Round it up, ladies,” he says when this back room is full of blue uniforms like Anita—always smoking, always touching, always with an air of misplaced pride. He is not the hotel owner. He runs it, in a sense. No one knows what his job title is or what he does after sorting the maids in the mornings. The “ladies” pass around theories under their breath when they scatter for their duties.

Anita rolls a cart down the long hallway and counts the lilies on the hotel carpet. There are five hundred of them from end to end of each floor. For every door with a sign on the handle, she follows the routine.

She starts by stripping the bed(s). Some guests make them up, which is a well-intended but meaningless gesture, as she will always have to make them over again. After beating the pillow(s) back into shape, she tucks a mint beneath each. Then, the bathroom. Then, the general sweep. Some guests leave tips for her services on the bedside table, along with other indications of their identity: books, medications, and notes they’ve left for themselves on the pad by the rotary phone.

Anita’s third room of the morning doesn’t have a cash tip, but it has a lottery ticket and not so much as a quarter to scratch it with. The ticket isn’t a numbers game that requires you to tune into the radio. It’s a bingo card, a five-by-five board with simple instructions: if you get five cherries in a row, you get big bucks.

Anita picks it up for the hell of it and scratches it with her red nails. Her hands are the prettiest part of her, the only part of her she really takes care of. This act, the scratching, is more degrading than picking up the ticket in the first place. It makes her feel animalistic. She scratches away the first silver circle. Red peeks through, the same shade as her nails.

Cherry.

The silver is getting under her nails now, and she hates to dirty them, but she moves to the next.

Cherry.

A rush builds in her chest, and she tells herself not to feed into it.

Cherry.

Don’t get any funny thoughts, Anita.

Cherry.

Thoughts spread in a wildfire—a white-hot rush between the silver and the red. She can hardly keep the ticket still, wrists bloated by their beating pulse.

Cherry.

Hands trrembling, she leaves the room half-finished to go back to her own, where the ironing board still sits and the coffee waits in the sink, never to be cleaned. She will never clean another day in her life.

In a matter of five minutes, she throws her things into a laundry bag.

Down the hall she goes, a perked clack in the short black heels of her uniform.

The elevator takes a lifetime, the tropical music telling her to stay a while longer. She’s not allowed on the elevator unless she has the supplies cart. It doesn’t matter this morning. After getting off, she blows through the backroom door without the knock she has been trained to do.

He is looking over a girly magazine with his feet propped up on the desk.

“Randy, I’m leaving.”

“See you in the morning.” be refreshing, but she is dead scared by it. Everybody’s got somebody but her.

“I’m leaving.” She holds up the winning ticket.

“Sure.” He doesn’t look up.

“I’m never stepping foot in this hotel again. Neither will the other girls as soon as they get back on their feet,” she says with a slam of the door.

She and the other maids had been trying to get back on their feet for as long as she can remember. This makes her the only one to make it out. Second thoughts gnaw at her, so she bites the inside of her mouth to chew on fear and guilt. She cannot desert. She cannot go through it alone. She has money now, but that’s it. She’s never been on her own, not really— not a high school degree, not any sense of where she wants to go.

Turning the corner, she runs right into another one of the maids, Gina.

By the time she’s finished talking, Anita is almost panting. How much can change in a morning.

Gina pecks her cheek. “Go. Get out of here. Don’t stop until you’re on a beach somewhere, alright?”

“Give my best to the other girls.”

“Sure thing.”

“I’m going.” Anita starts off, half-running down the hall because she knows if she stays another minute she will lose the strength. “I’m going!”