Candy is a scullery maid

The taste lingered in her mouth. Salt, soap, and underneath that, the coffee she'd drunk at dawn in the sissy refectory—a bitter aftertaste that wouldn't go away, as if the coffee and the man were one and the same and she could no longer separate them. Candy held her hand still in front of her mouth a second too long, the back of her hand against her lips, her eyes closed. Her left knee ached against the gravel. The water of the large pool was still and blue behind her, empty like a waiting room.

Then he felt the heels.

Not on the gravel—the gravel would swallow them. She heard them on the concrete beyond the edge, a steady, calm ticking, in no hurry to arrive. Candy opened her eyes. She didn't turn around. She knew who it was before she saw her, and knowing was of no use, because her body stiffened anyway, her back straight, her hands at her sides as if someone had just read the rules aloud to her.

Rosa stopped a meter away. No closer. Candy counted it—a meter, maybe less—and understood that that distance was a choice, that Rosa never approached a recently used sissy without a reason. The scent reached her before the words: something sweet and chemical, sunscreen and jasmine, and underneath it all, the cold metal of the neck tattoo that Candy could only glimpse sideways.

Rosa didn't look at her. She was looking at the tablet.

Her thumb touched the screen once, twice, with the precision of someone skimming a list they've already read. The morning light caught her platinum blonde hair and made it look lighter than it was, almost white, and Candy thought—without wanting to, and hating herself for thinking it—that Rosa was beautiful. She thought it every time. She thought it, and every time it cost her something.

“Breakfast’s over,” said Rosa.

It wasn't a question, and Candy didn't answer. Rosa's voice was as velvety as ever, that tone that seemed to caress you but instead made you queue. Candy felt the knot in her stomach—that knot that tightened every time Rosa opened her mouth, as if her insides knew what was coming before her head.

"Now you work."

Rosa finally looked up from her tablet. His blue eyes swept over her once, from her crooked blonde wig to her heels dug into the gravel, and they rested on nothing in particular. It was worse than if he'd been looking at her. Candy lowered her head—a reflex, not a decision—and felt the red velvet collar tighten slightly around her throat as she swallowed.

"Men's restroom, everything first. Then stall three—the guest left the sheets to be changed. Then the bar veranda, the floor needs mopping before lunch."

The words came out of Rosa's mouth as if she'd said them a hundred times before, and indeed she had said them a hundred times before, to a hundred different sissies, and Candy could sense it in the way they sounded flat, weightless, with no one putting anything into them. Only the last part changed. Rosa paused, and that pause was also a command.

“You have three hours.”

Candy counted. Three hours for a bathroom, a cabin, and a veranda. She didn't know how long it would take; she'd never cleaned anything in her life—she had a woman at home who came on Tuesdays, and this thought hit her like a slap, the thought of the house, of the Tuesday woman, of everything she'd been and was now gone. She put it away. She put it away quickly, in the back, where she kept the things she couldn't look at.

«Every extra minute is a waste.»

Rosa said "lack" without raising her voice, and the word hung in the air like something left there, which sooner or later would have to be picked up. Candy knew that word. She'd learned it on her first day, when she'd seen a sissy kneeling on the concrete pier for two hours with her arms raised because she'd been late to a customer. The word didn't explain what was going to happen. It wasn't needed.

Rosa bent down slightly and picked something up from the ground—Candy hadn't seen it before; it was behind the edge of the pool, where the gravel turned to concrete. A white plastic bucket. Inside, a stiff-bristled brush and a badly folded rag. Rosa handed it to her, holding it by the handle with two fingers, like someone passing something they don't want to touch.

Candy reached out. The handle was cold and smooth, and it slipped a little because her palms were sweaty—she noticed it only then, she always noticed it later. She squeezed. The bucket swayed against her knee and made a hollow, plastic sound, that stupid sound things make when they contain nothing.

«E Candy.»

She stopped. Candy raised her head abruptly, and this time Rosa was actually looking at her, with that expression that was neither sweet nor cruel, but both at once, her mouth slightly quirked to one side, her eyes reading her face like a page you know by heart.

“You missed a stitch behind your ear.”

Candy felt the blood rush to her face. It wasn't the humiliation—the humiliation was something else, the humiliation was the taste in her mouth, it was her knee in the gravel, it was the empty bucket. This was different. This was the fact that Rosa had looked at her long enough to see a spot behind her ear, and that that spot was there, and that Candy hadn't noticed. She instinctively put her hand behind her ear and felt the dry crust beneath her fingertip—coffee, or maybe something else, maybe the taste of breakfast that had seeped there when the man's head had pressed her down, against the gravel, against the edge, against everything.

"Don't touch it," Rosa said. "You'll fix it later. Work first."

Candy brought her hand back down. The crust behind her ear throbbed, now that she knew it was there, like something that exists only because someone had mentioned it. She felt dirty in a new way. Not physically—it had already been dirty since she'd gotten off the boat—but in that precise, small spot behind her ear, which Rosa had seen but she hadn't.

“The client’s towel is on the bed.”

Rosa nodded, without turning, toward the white plastic chairs at the edge of the pool. Candy followed her gaze. The lounger—one of those low ones, made of white canvas, with metal legs—was there alone, and on it was the towel. White. Folded badly, thrown there, one corner hanging down toward the gravel. The man had left without taking it, without even looking at it, the way you leave something that was never yours.

“Take it to the dry cleaners before you start.”

"Yes, Mrs. Rosa."

It came out like that, softly, her voice lower than she intended. Candy felt the collar move again on her throat. Mistress. Not mistress. Rosa wasn't a mistress—Rosa was a sissy, like her, and Candy knew this, they'd told her, and every time she said it to herself, she couldn't quite believe it. Rosa didn't have masters who used her. Rosa had the tablet. Rosa had three hours. Rosa had the power to say "missing" and make it linger in the air.

Rosa stared at her for a moment longer. Then she did something Candy hadn't expected—not entirely. She leaned down a little, just enough so their faces were close, and spoke in a lower voice, as if the edge of the pool could hear.

“You got away with it yesterday,” he said. “Not well. Got away with it.”

Candy didn't answer. There was nothing to answer. She felt her heart beating in a strange place, in her throat, where the velvet collar was tightest.

"I don't care how you do today. I care that you do the three things and that you do them within three hours. I don't care if you're tired. I don't care if your knee hurts—and you do, I've seen it." A faint smile, barely there, that didn't reach your eyes. "I care that when I get back, the men's room is clean, cabin three is redone, and the veranda doesn't have the same floor it has now. Everything else is yours. The stitch behind your ear, your face, your swimsuit. Yours."

"Yes, Mrs. Rosa."

"Well."

Rosa straightened. It was as if a door had closed—her face returned to its former self, smooth and professional, her eyes already on the tablet. She touched the screen one last time, a sharp gesture, and Candy knew it was over, that from that moment on there were no more words, only the three hours and the bucket.

"The men's restroom is behind the gym. Cabin three is the third one after the bar, on the shaded side. The veranda is all you'll find."

And she turned. Her heels began to click on the gravel again—first the click on the concrete, then the muffled sound on the gravel, then the concrete again—and she walked away along the edge of the pool without another word, without turning around, tablet in hand and her platinum blonde hair that the sun caught from behind and made a pale halo around her head.

Candy remained on her knees.

She felt her left knee throbbing, now that no one was watching and she could feel it. She felt the empty bucket swinging slightly against her thigh. She felt, behind her ear, the spot Rosa had seen but she hadn't, and she imagined carrying it around all day, that little dark crust, like something stuck to her and couldn't be removed for three hours. Then she looked at the towel on the bed. White, badly folded, with the corner hanging down.

He stood up.

Her legs were shaking a little—not from fear, but from the position, from the time she'd spent kneeling on the gravel. She leaned on the bucket handle and pushed up, and for a second her head spun, the large pool rotating slowly behind her, blue and still. When she stabilized, she looked at herself—unwillingly, but she looked at herself—in the reflection of the water at the edge. There was a face. It wasn't hers, or it wasn't hers anymore: the lipstick smudged on one side, a pink halo that almost reached her chin, the blonde wig askew on her head, and behind her ear, yes, the small, dark spot that in the water looked larger than it was.

He ran the back of his hand over his mouth one last time. It didn't help. The taste lingered.

She crossed the edge of the pool, the bucket swinging in her hand, the brush inside tapping against the plastic with every step. Gravel dug into her heels. The sun was already high and beginning to burn, and the bar's veranda, at the far end, had a floor that glistened with something—something that needed to be scrubbed before lunch, within three hours, every extra minute a waste.

She reached the bed. The towel was still warm, as if the man's body had been on it a moment before. Candy picked it up with two fingers, as Rosa had done with the bucket, and felt it heavy with sunlight. The cotton remained in her hand, white and soft, and for a moment—just a moment—she wanted to bring it to her face, to smell if the scent was still there. She didn't. She folded it awkwardly, with one corner hanging down, and tucked it under her arm.

Then he looked toward the gym, where the men's room was, and toward the bar, where the veranda was, and he counted the hours in his mind as one counts money in his pocket—three, and not one more, and every minute that passed was already spent.

The gym was a low concrete block behind the pool, with windows tall and narrow like slits and the air conditioning belching out a hum from inside, like a tired car. Candy crossed the shaded lawn, the bucket tapping against her thigh with every step and the client's towel under her arm, and she felt the sweat begin to roll down her back before she even reached the door. The sun was high. The three hours had already begun inside her, a clock she couldn't stop.

The men's room door was painted green, chipped at the bottom where someone had kicked the paint. Candy leaned the bucket against her knees, turned the cold handle, and opened it.

The first breath entered her like something solid. Disinfectant, old urine, spray deodorant, and underneath it all, a lingering male smell, like a body trapped in an airless room. The white tiles on the floor were shiny but not clean—there was a dull layer beneath the shine, the kind you see when people mop but don't bend down. Two urinals on the back wall. Three stalls on the side. A long mirror above the sinks, stained with dried splashes. Candy looked at it for a second and saw the face with the smudged lipstick that was no longer her own, then looked away.

And then he felt it.

The sound of water hitting metal—that specific, loud, shameless sound of someone pissing in the urinal with their weight on their hips. Candy stopped mid-step. The door had already slammed shut behind her. She couldn't get out. She couldn't stand there like an idiot. The three hours waited for no one.

The man was at the first urinal, his back turned. Tall, with a broad back and a white polo shirt, his hair wet as if he'd just stepped out of the shower or the pool. He had one hand resting on the tile in front of him, his arm outstretched, and the bent elbow of his other arm revealed exactly what he was doing. His neck was wide. His legs planted. He didn't turn around. He hadn't heard the door, or he had and didn't care.

Candy knew what she had to do. They'd told her, Rosa had told her in that flat voice, and they'd told her on her first day—when a customer is using the bathroom, you don't start. You wait. Not standing, not behind, not to the side. On your knees, with your head down, and you wait for them to finish.

She set the bucket flat, so the plastic wouldn't rattle. Then she placed the towel, folded as it was, on the edge of the nearest sink. Then she knelt. The tiles were cold through the thin fabric of her uniform, and hard. Her left knee—the one that hurt from the gravel—sent a sharp pain that made her clench her teeth. She didn't let it pass. She stood straight, her hands at her sides, her head bowed toward the floor, and waited.

The sound of the water continued. Candy counted the seconds without meaning to—she got to fifteen, twenty, and then stopped because counting was something the mind did when the body couldn't move, and the mind, at that moment, was the last place it wanted to be.

She looked at the tiles in front of her knees. There was a hair. A single one, short, black, with the tip bent. And farther away, near the base of the urinal, a dried drop of something that wasn't water—yellowish, old, that no one had cleaned because no one ever bent down to look there. The drop had been there for days. Maybe weeks. Candy stared at it and realized she would have to remove it, that it was exactly the kind of thing Rosa would see, because Rosa always saw the spot others couldn't, and that if she left it there, it would be a mistake.

The water stopped.

Silence came all at once, full, and in the soundless room Candy heard the hum of the air conditioning as if it had just been turned on. She felt the man stir—a brief movement, the rustle of fabric, the sound of a zipper. Then his footsteps on the tiles, heavy, approaching the sink.

The tap water. Two seconds. It turned off.

Candy kept her head down. She could see only her feet—white sneakers, one lace undone—and her black ankles above the soles. The man dried his hands on the paper towel, threw the paper in the wastebasket, and stood there for a moment, in front of the sink, looking at himself in the mirror. Candy could feel him looking at himself. She knew he saw her, in the mirror, kneeling on the bathroom floor like something left there waiting.

“What are you doing?” he said.

His voice was low, distracted, as if he were half-talking to himself.

“I’ll wait until the gentleman is finished,” Candy said.

It came out softly. Her voice trembled slightly at the end, and she heard it and hated herself, because she didn't want to tremble, not in front of someone who wouldn't even look her in the eye. The man didn't respond. He ran a hand through his wet hair, pushed it back, and then turned—and finally Candy saw his face. He was in his forties, his jaw covered by a short gray beard, his pale eyes looking down at her without any particular expression. Someone who had paid to be there. Someone for whom she was part of what he'd paid for, like the buffet and the sauna.

“You’re new,” she said.

“Yes, sir.”

"I saw her yesterday at the pier." A half-smile, without warmth. "With the sign."

Candy felt the blood rush to her cheeks. The sign. FREE BLOWJOBS. The letters written in marker on a piece of cardboard, and her in the middle of the dock with it hanging around her neck, and the three men who had used her one after the other as the sun set over the water. She didn't answer. There was nothing to answer. The man looked at her for a second longer, as if looking at an object he'd seen before and whose price he remembered, and then he grabbed a badly folded towel from the edge of the sink.

“Do your job,” he said.

And she went out. The door opened, a sliver of sun and warm air entered, and then closed again. Candy remained on her knees for a moment longer, alone in the stinking bathroom, her heart pounding in her throat and her hands trembling as they rested on her thighs. Then she took a breath. Then she stood up.

Her knee hurt when she extended her leg. She leaned against the edge of the sink and waited for it to pass, and while she waited she looked at herself in the mirror—she didn't want to, but the mirror was there and so was her face, and for a second she saw it: the crooked blonde wig, the smudged lipstick, the red collar that marked her throat, and the dark spot behind her ear that Rosa had seen but she hadn't. She looked away. She picked up the bucket. She picked up the stiff-bristled brush.

And then he knelt down in front of the first toilet.

Because that's what she'd been told. Not with the rag, not with the brush—those were for the floor, for the porch, for things you could touch with your hands. Not the toilets. Toilets were cleaned with the tongue. Rosa had told her that first day, in the same voice she'd used to tell her the three hours, and Candy had thought she'd misheard, and Rosa had repeated the sentence a second time, word for word, without changing tone, until Candy had stopped believing she'd misheard.

She leaned over. The rim of the cup was cold beneath her lips, and the porcelain tasted of iron and old soap. Candy closed her eyes and ran her tongue along the rim once, from left to right. It didn't clean anything. The taste lingered in her mouth along with that of her breakfast, and for a moment the two blended together until she couldn't distinguish them, and she had to rest her forehead against the porcelain and breathe through her nose until her head settled back down.

Then it started again.

Her tongue on the inside rim, where people never reach. Her tongue under the rim, where there was a yellowish layer that wouldn't come off, that stuck to her tongue like a film and left a bitter taste that made her nauseous. Candy licked it all over. She licked it twice. She stopped, spat into the cup, and started again, because Rosa would look, Rosa always looked, and if there was still a stain, Rosa would see it and it would be a mistake.

Her hands were shaking. She held them on the sides of the bowl, to keep from falling forward, and they were shaking, and she couldn't help it. Behind her, the air conditioning hummed. In front of her, the toilet, with its white porcelain and its taste, and under her knee, the hard floor, and inside her, the clock ticking—three hours, every minute spent, and she'd already wasted ten of them on her knees waiting for a man who hadn't even looked at her.

He moved on to the second toilet.

She leaned over again, and her tongue hurt now, her tongue and jaw, and she thought she'd never taste anything again without tasting that taste underneath. She licked the rim. She licked the bottom of the cup, where the water was still and yellow, and she had to close her eyes and swallow, and tears welled up in her eyes, not from crying but from the effort of not vomiting, and one slipped down her cheek and fell onto the porcelain, and she wiped it away with her wrist, quickly, because there was no time for tears, no time for anything.

When she'd finished the two toilets, she pushed herself up onto her knees, her back straight, and ran the back of her hand over her mouth. Her mouth burned. The taste was inside her now, not just on her tongue—it was in her stomach, like something swallowed, and she knew it would stay there all day, like the taste of breakfast, like the spot behind her ear, like all the things Rosa saw that she couldn't.

She looked around. The floor was still opaque. The mirrors were still stained. The wastebasket was still full. And she had three hours, and she'd spent at least twenty minutes of it just on the toilet.

She took the brush. She dipped it in the bucket. The water was cold. She started at the bottom, the tiles near the door, the hard bristles scraping the opaque layer and bringing it up in a gray foam. As she worked, she felt her knee, her back, her tongue burning, and she felt—most of all—time passing over her like the water in the large, still, blue swimming pool, waiting for no one.

The brush scraped. Candy worked on all fours, her weight on her knees, her arm moving back and forth in a rhythm she'd forgotten about—up, down, up, down—and the sound of the bristles on the concrete was the only thing filling her head, better than the buzzing, better than her thoughts. The gray foam accumulated in front of her in small piles, which she then collected with the rag and wrung out into the bucket. Her nails ached. Her back, bent for half an hour, sent a dull ache between her shoulder blades with each stroke.

She paused for a second. She straightened on her knees and wiped her forehead with her wrist, because the sweat was running down her eyes and burning. She looked at her work: half the floor, maybe less. The bucket was already gray. The water inside had turned cloudy, with foam floating on the surface like something alive.

And at that moment the door opened.

Candy spun around, her heart leaping into her throat, and saw her before she realized who she was—the silhouette backlit in the rectangle of sunlight, her platinum blonde hair catching the light like glass, her heels clicking on the tiles with a dry, regular sound, like someone who isn't in a hurry because time is hers.

Rosa.

She stopped halfway across the room, hands on hips, and looked at Candy on her knees, brush in hand and wet rag on the other. Her dress clung to her body as if it were sewn on. On her neck, the black dick tattoo was a dark stain that Candy knew by heart, because it was the same one on her hip, under the fabric of her bikini, still fresh, still sore when she leaned against it.

“You’re here,” Rosa said.

The voice was the same as always—velvety, calm, without a crack. But Candy had learned in a day to hear the note beneath the voice, the one you hear not with your ears but with your back, the same one that had made her stomach clench when Rosa had told her three o'clock in the morning.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Candy kept her head down. The brush trembled slightly in her hand, and she placed it gently on the edge of the bucket, so as not to be seen.

Rosa crossed the room. Her heels clicked. She passed Candy without looking at her, reached the two toilets, and stopped. She bowed her head slightly, like an animal sniffing the air, and Candy felt her stomach tighten because she knew what she was looking at. Rosa always looked where others couldn't see.

«Get up.»

Candy stood up. Her left knee sent a sharp pain that made her jaw clench, but she remained straight, her arms at her sides, her eyes on the freshly swept floor.

Rosa reached out and took Candy's chin between her thumb and forefinger. She took it gently, but she took it, and turned her face toward the light. Candy felt the blue eyes on her like two cold fingers: her mouth, her tongue, her jaw, the spot behind her ear, all in three seconds.

«Open your mouth.»

Candy obeyed. Her tongue hurt when she moved it, and she felt the taste rising from the back of her throat, the bitter one, the one that wouldn't go away. Rosa looked inside. Her expression didn't change. Then she let go of her chin and wiped her fingers on the side of her dress, with a brief gesture, the way you wipe yourself from something you've touched out of duty.

“The toilets,” he said. “Did you do both?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

«With the tongue?»

“Yes, ma’am.”

Rosa turned toward the first toilet. She bent slightly—just her head, her back straight, her heels planted—and ran her index finger along the inside rim of the bowl, where Candy had last run her tongue. Then she looked at her finger. Then she looked at it against the light from the high window.

"Here," he said, and pointed toward Candy without moving closer. "See?"

Candy looked. On the tip of Rosa's index finger was a thin yellowish stripe, almost nothing. But it was there. The stripe Candy had licked twice, the one she thought she'd taken away, but which instead remained there, where the porcelain curves and the eye can't reach, and which Rosa had found at first touch.

“It’s not clean,” Rosa said.

"Ma'am, I—"

"I didn't ask you anything."

Candy closed her mouth. Rosa curled her finger into her palm and wiped her hand on the side of her dress, a slow gesture, watching Candy the whole time.

"Do you know what that means?" she said. "It means you stopped early. That you decided when enough was enough. And you don't decide anything, Candy. You lick until I say it's clean."

“Yes, ma’am.”

Candy's voice came out too thin. It was shaking, and she felt it, and she hated herself again, as she had hated herself in front of the mirror, as she hated herself every time her body did what her mind didn't want.

Rosa looked at her for a moment longer. Then she did something Candy hadn't expected: she smiled. A real smile, or almost, that softened her mouth and made her blue eyes seem lighter. She took Candy's collar—the red velvet, the cold metal of the tag under her fingers—and adjusted it, tugging on it with one finger, the way you adjust a dog's collar before taking it for a walk.

"You're new," he said. "I know. You all do that on your first day. You think that's enough." He let go of her collar. "It's never enough."

She turned toward the door. Her heels clicked again, three steps, four, and Candy thought it was over, that Rosa was leaving, that the rest would be just the floor and the bucket and her burning tongue.

But Rosa stopped with her hand on the doorknob. She didn't turn around.

"When you're done here," he said, "go to the veranda of bungalow seven. There's a customer who requested a sissy for the afternoon. It's his last day on the island, and he paid for two hours." The hand turned the handle. "He'll be expecting you at three. If you're a minute late, or if you show up looking like a beaten bitch, the customer will complain to Master Leroy, and Master Leroy will complain to me."

The door opened. The sun came in, white and blinding.

“And I,” said Rosa, without raising her voice, “I complain to you.”

The door closed. Silence returned, complete, with only the hum of the air conditioning and Candy's breathing coming out of her nose too quickly.

Candy remained where she was, her arms at her sides, her eyes on the peeling green door. Bungalow seven. Veranda. Three hours. A customer who had paid for two hours of her, and she didn't know who he was, didn't know what he wanted, didn't know if it would be someone like the guy at the pool, or someone like Marcus, or someone like the three on the pier. She only knew that Rosa had looked her in the eyes and told her it was never enough, and that was true, because the first toilet hadn't been enough, the second hadn't been enough, nothing had been enough since she'd arrived on the island.

He knelt down again. He picked up the brush. He dipped it in the gray bucket, wrung it out, and started again with the tiles near the door—the ones he'd already done, the ones that were still opaque under the polish because the old layer was harder than his hand, his haste, everything in him.

Her tongue burned. Her knee ached. The sun beat down on the green door, and inside the room the air was still and hot, and Candy worked, her arm moving up and down, up and down, and inside her the clock ticked—no longer the three hours of cleaning, now, but three in the afternoon, approaching with every brush stroke, every minute she spent kneeling on a floor that would never be clean.

Behind her, on the edge of the sink, the customer's badly folded towel was still there. Candy looked at it for a second. Then she went back to scrubbing the floor, because that was what she'd been told, and because if she stopped to think about bungalow seven, her hands would start shaking again, and she couldn't afford that, not now, not with Rosa coming back to check.