nodding, We are, Hanna repeating and, to end it again this time ended once and for all — sealing her victory while unsealing another container of tupperware would add, Have a little more artichoke salad I saved the hearts just for you (I always remember — that’s what I do, I safeguard & remember),
or, And how’s your son making out at whichever school at his whatever new job is he still with that girl who, with the father who, what’s her name?
On the day they’d both arrived incountry, they’d met at the Agency, were transported to work in the same windowless van, Agencydelivered right to the same street, right to their new doors right across the street from one another, behind which locked a thousandfold then alarmed they’d work for their lives in return. This Agency that was wholly owned though operated only on the evenings of weekdays by a descendant of the founder of the very town or village or muddied well from which neither of them came but that was near enough and in the same country at least as were their own towns, which were villages, dirty burrows or caves, though that country had first to become many other countries before again becoming that country once again his and theirs; this owner and operator a descendant of their shared nation, then, who now owned, operated, and exploited his heritage that was only a Heritage in America, exploited, too, the presently disadvantaged situation of their coconspiring country in order to supply this relatively affordable and dependable workstaff to the descendants of a people who had been killed by the ancestors of those who’d arrive here five days a week and without any official sanction, eager and earnest to cook and to clean: among them, though hailing from two estranged, mutually hating and universally hated cities that had become bombed into towns that had then become bombed into villages debased amid respective cataract and cess situated at opposite ends of two nations that had survived only to fall at opposite ends of their now redistributed and so unified nation, how Wanda and Adela had each overheard the other muttering obscenities in a shared, reunified tongue (as if a breathy length of conterminous flesh, which ensured they’d never get too far away from one another), an estranging language that sounded to Hanna like SZCZSZCZSZCZ and was apparently understood only by the three of them, the Agency proprietor, Wanda and Adela, and the dead ancestors of their employers, whose eyes, even in silent stairwell photographs, often retained a moisture that sustained flies the sound of whose beating wings would resemble the buzz of their talk; the two turning each to face the dry tongue of the other, flouncing over shoulders hair washed in dishwater, each dressed in the same model formless sweater purchased at State department stores laden with identical shelves, CZÓSZ
