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[Fiction]
Las Empleadas
by Erin O’Neill White
Excerpts:
Nellie didn’t even give two weeks notice. One morning she was out back scrubbing my underwear against a rock and the next morning she was gone. I came into the kitchen and saw Señora Salas standing at the kitchen counter, chopping the stems from tree tomatoes and throwing the pieces into the blender. She looked tired. I crossed the room and kissed her on both cheeks. “Where’s Nellie?” I asked.
“Se fue,” she said, disgusted. “Se fue a la ciudad.”
So Nellie had gone to the city. We had long suspected that Nellie, in addition to being the empleada (maid), was also a woman of the night in Quito. Maybe she had decided that being a woman of the day as well might be more lucrative than domestic work. The kitchen was strangely quiet without the sound of Nellie’s radio coming from the closet off the kitchen where she and her three-year-old daughter, Evie, lived during the week.
“I can’t understand,” said Señora Salas, shaking her head. “We were so good to her. How could she leave us?” . . .
. . . I had joined the Salas household at the very end of Ecuador’s rainy season. I arrived in San Miguel with a busload of other foreign students who had arranged a semester exchange. Señora Salas and her daughters, Jimena and Luci, met me at the bus stop. They stood waiting for me beside the car, Señora Salas with an umbrella over all three of them, the girls holding tight to small bouquets of flowers they had picked for me. When it became clear that I was theirs, Señora kissed me on both cheeks and herded me into the car . . .
. . . I slipped into place in the Salas house without any of the adjustment or culture shock I had been warned about. I loved living with them, loved simple things like eating dinner and doing my homework. Every night I would study in my bedroom and Señora Salas would come in the room, lie down on the bed and check my grammar. She laughed at my mistakes and encouraged my to keep trying. “Work. Learn more words,” she demanded. “Soon we can gossip!” . . .
