Eleven Months Of Being Looked At

I should explain how I came to be in that house at all, because it matters later, when people start deciding whether I planned it.

I clean and I serve. I have done since I was twenty-two. I am on the roster of an agency on the north shore that staffs eleven of the big houses along that stretch of coast, and in October of last year they put me on the Ashford rotation, and I was pleased about it, because the Ashford house pays over scale and the shifts are long, which is the only kind of shift worth having.

The first week, Mrs Ashford came into the kitchen twice while I was working. She did not speak to me either time. She stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame and looked at me for long enough that Mrs Doyle stopped what she was doing.

I assumed I had done something wrong with the service order. I asked Mrs Doyle. She said, "You haven't done anything wrong, child," in a voice that did not sound like a compliment.

After that it was small and it was constant.

I was moved off the dining room and onto glasses. Then off glasses and onto the back stairs. Twice she had me redo a room I had already done while she stood in it.

In February she told the agency I had been careless with a lamp. There was no lamp.

I want to be plain about my state of mind by August. I had begun to accept, in the way you do, that some people simply take against you and that it is your job to be smaller until they stop noticing. That is what I was doing on the night of the gala. Being smaller.