Our uncle, he of the promiscuous towel he hangs on any hook vacant, enters a stall to scrub the wrinkling work of day from the coppery skin and copious hair of his limbs, in preparation for the luxurious adultery of the next scheduled rotation, ignoring in his nude a husband voluntarily repurposed down here for hard labor S & M: there’s a rag hanging from a pants pocket, a niggun on his lips; misting up an enclosure with three quick shpritzes from a pump of noxious solution: Mist Mist Mist, he’s singing, Dadadadadoo, Mist Mist Miss a Spot, Lose a Yacht, Then get mad and sue…through the showering facility now, through its further door, its threshold heaped with mats filched from the trash of houses topside, then into a more spacious expanse this walled with yawning wooden doors as cedar as anything rooted. This room, too, heaped in a decorative disassociative state, schizophrenic, half class half crass, with its variegated pillows and rugs and pelts of fur below the valanced false windows (as we’re now what’s the equivalent of six floors Underground), shaded anyway, possibly for what’s thought of as relaxing effect, with strung nautiluses and conch shells schlepped home from houses timeshared down the Shore, counties Atlantic and Cape May, that fronted the most endangered of dunes. It’s neurotic here, almost insane, as if these Domestics didn’t know what to do with their new country’s bounty, have been irremediably confused by the power of purchase lately acquired; elegance mismatched with pretension jumbled, arranged haphazardly, ungepatched in every imitation of the ideationally venerable, the misguided antique, the fauxworn, the anything-went, anythingworks: plush with loveseats, and with fleshy settees and divans, leatherette taborets, tuffets and tufted ottomans, canapés, flutelegged couches and highbacked gossipbenches, a host of instantaneous heirloom, an inheritance made new on the cheap — thanks to a participating husband, if you have to ask, who’d portfolioed a rash of warehouses stuffed with like kitsch out on the Hudson and was so far free with his inventory and love: this the room to which our uncle will come, and come again and again, the room where the Development’s female Domestic Workers — FEMDOMs, in the know — would whore themselves out at prices reasonable enough to be renegotiated every year to the lusts of their male professional employers (MALPROs), and their firstborn male kinder (FIRMA) as well, many of whom actually brought here by their fathers for their very First Time, an experience in bonding or just light bondage, the virginal both, a sacred rite of the wellventilated, dimly lit passage: sometimes they shared, doubled up, and at other times they took the same Domestic in turns, the fathers always first (respecting at least one half of the Fifth Commandment — Thou Shalt Honor thy Father whether he be timid, or Pharaoh, or God), often the two or more — and whether they’re business associates, carpool friends, synagogue acquaintances or only neighbors not necessarily social or on talking terms — all taking on the very Domestic or Domestics they employed, the maid who’d fix them brunch just an hour later aboveground, with the yolk of the sun just beginning its shine and her asking those who’d bask in it, how do you like your eggs? whether farm fresh, free range, Grade A or doubleyolked, purchased from a facility situated far on the opposite side of the Social Union’s expanse: a supermarket grounding an excellent mall in which, both of them, even the most discerning Domestic would find anything ever itemized on any list whether it be that of grocery, or To Do; special diets no problem, diabetic and sugarfree, sure, lactose, we know, with a kosher section the largest in the state; clothing and cosmetics, too, flowers and jewelry and movies and literature made in native languages for their own pleasure and more — all without the hassle of lines and unseasonal markups, the terror that is public shopping.
