“Things Broken”
Lindsay Szper
“Ehh, Madame?” One of the three, big-boned construction workers spreading plaster on the ceiling stepped down from his ladder and raised a trowel to attract Hélène’s attention.
As she approached him, her left foot landed square in a goop-filled mortar pan.
“Impossible,” she said. Her fists clenched, her face stiffened, and she looked skyward with wide eyes. “Je vais craquer, moi.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard her say that; it was one of Hélène’s favorite phrases, actually. She was constantly “au bord de craquer,” “about to snap,” or so she said. That wasn’t surprising, really, given the clash between her demeanor and her work environment.
… … …
Hélène was lean and bird-like, and she came to work every day dressed in black—with a pair of sensible heels on her feet, and her gray-blond hair pulled back, ballerina-style, into a tight bun. Her movements and words were quick: machine-like and angular, and she was the kind of lady who went to the opera for fun, who cooked a five-course meal on a Thursday just because. She read the paper and the classics. Her husband of twenty-six years had died of stomach cancer less than three months ago, and already she was working two jobs and bringing him up in conversation casually. The woman was infallibly, unfalteringly, put-together.
Meanwhile, the hotel where she worked—where we worked—was being ripped apart at the seams: gutted, streamlined and stripped of all things traditional. The Hôtel Couvent du Franciscain, previously owned by an auto-mechanic-turned-hospitalier and his very large, very traditional family, used to be Alsatian to the point of kitschiness. Alsace, a small strip of land on the border between France and Germany, is filled with skinny, straw-roofed Snow-White houses sidled up against riverbanks. It’s cobblestone streets and paintings of lace-aproned milkmaids, rolling out dough for butter cookies. The old hotel had oversized pretzels hung in the windows. The bedspreads were bright-red gingham, and the front desk was gargantuan and cherrywood–a combination reception/bar stocked almost exclusively with regional wines. I never saw the old hotel in person, but Internships Abroad had sent me some photos at the end of the previous school year.
In July of 2013, unbeknownst to me, the property had fallen into the hands of Sébastien Denys, entrepreneur and military-educated Parisian divorcé. It was out with the old–immediately. Not long after acquiring the property, he had drawn up plans, begun to jackhammer, and hired Hélène as governess: female manager of day-to-day operations. The new hotel, which existed in idea and virtual blueprint only, boasted textured wallpaper, clean, white bedding, and a slate-and-burgundy color scheme inspired by Holiday Inn.
I arrived in October, to work a brief stint as a hospitality intern, to neither the new nor the old hotel. The place was a construction site: the lobby was covered in drape-cloths and swarming with workers, and the “concierge desk” was a collapsible picnic table. M. Denys had strategically failed to mention the remodel on the hotel’s website, and a whole host of baffled clients had paid full price for their unfinished guestrooms.
While M. Denys fielded phone calls and balanced the budget, Hélène held the hotel together by its threads. My job, which didn’t come with much of an official description, was to help her out.
Quite frankly, I didn’t expect to get along with the governess. I was a whole lot more like the hotel than I was like Hélène–put-togetherness is not a thing I pride myself on. But the renovations had caused no shortage of problems; Hélène had solutions, and I had two hands and three months’ worth of workdays to enact them.
A friendship sprang from the ashes of The Old Hotel.
On my first week, a family of four complained that dust from the jackhammered lobby would trigger their youngest son’s asthma.
“Je vais craquer, moi,” Helene mumbled, shaking her head.
She sent me to the supply closet for cheesecloth, and I followed her up to their room to tape the material over each of the air vents. To reach the highest one, she climbed up onto an office chair. I dropped to my knees to counteract its swivel function, and Hélène looked down at me quizzically.
“Bah…Merci,” she said, more emphatically than she needed to, and then asked if I wanted to come over for dinner later.
She made salmon and mushroom risotto, introduced me to her teenage daughter, Sarah, and sat me in her late husbands spot at the table.
“It’s a chair, that’s what its there for,” she said when I looked surprised, and Sarah agreed. I perched myself on the very edge.
… … …
On the second month of my internship, the renovations had progressed from jackhammering to painting, and I got to check-in my first round of diplomats. Strasbourg, the largest city in Alsace, is home to the European Parliament, whose monthly meetings account for a solid third of most hotels’ guests. The Sunday before the November parliament meeting, one of the diplomats emerged from her room, shouting in Romanian and waving the lower half of a skirt-suit over her head. The back of the garment was splotched with fresh, white paint.
“Mais je vais craquer,” Hélène said under her breath.
She took the skirt from the woman apologetically, and assured her that she knew a dry-cleaner who’d take the stains out by tomorrow. The two of us alternated half-hour long shifts in the basement, scrubbing the soiled garment with a kitchen sponge. By then I’d been going over to Hélène’s house every Tuesday to tutor Sarah in English and watch movies with the two of them.
“You know today is my husband’s birthday,” she said matter-of-factly around midday as she scraped a paint-fleck off the skirt with her thumb-nail.
… … ….
December was Holiday Market season. (Strasbourg’s annual Christmas market brings pop-up kiosks, artisan goods, and mulled wine to each of the city’s plazas, and the holiday festivities account for another third of the region’s tourism.) By the time the first kiosk went up, the new hotel had begun to show itself. The paint had dried, and the lobby was wallpapered. And M. Denys had replaced the picnic-table reception with a glass-topped stainless-steel monolith.
Despite the updated appearance, crises continued to strike: the electricity went out for half a day, two of the three cleaning women alternated calling in sick for upwards of a week, the receptionist overbooked a peak weekend, and M. Denys got himself stuck in the ancient elevator he refused to replace. Hélène claimed she might snap countless times and never did, instead always coming up, on the spot, with a concrete plan of action.
On a mid-December Tuesday a pipe burst in room 204. Water seeped through the walls, sunk into the carpet, and left an ankle-deep puddle on the bathroom floor. Wetness oozed through the ceiling into the room below, and nothing could be done about the damage.
Hélène and I spent most of that afternoon stomping towels into the soaked carpet and ringing their contents into a plastic bucket.
“Je vais craquer,” she mouthed, incredulous, and I half believed her. Her hair was matted, her face clammy, and her hands severely water-logged.
But she didn’t.
As we washed dishes at her place that night she told me, unprompted, never to settle for something less than love. That really being in love with another person doesn’t mean making compromises for each other. It means always wanting the same thing, and it really exists.
“I had that,” she said, more with pride than with sadness.
… … …
The week following the pipe incident was a fairly calm one at work. With Christmas so close, our guest list had dwindled, and the stakes weren’t so high, anymore. A headboard fell off the wall in room 30, and we upgraded the guest to our executive suite, “pas de problème.”
Before dinner on Tuesday, Helene asked me to go with Sarah to put flowers on her dad’s grave.
“I’m getting a headache,” she said, and she pinched the bridge of her nose hard. The skin under her eyes was puffed and fragile, and her eyelids blinked heavy. “I don’t think I can go there today.”
Sarah and I raced to the graveyard on bikes, and she won by a long shot.
For the thirty or so minutes we stayed, I watched from what I hoped was an appropriate distance as the girl dusted the tombstone with both hands, then arranged the flowers on top, with the same childlike meticulousness she did the porcelain figurines atop her dresser. We had dinner that night at Hélène’s mom’s, and Sarah left the table first–to watch dubbed cartoons in her grandma’s living room.
Not long after Sarah walked out, hunched over a plate of untouched fish-sticks and still wearing the tight black dress she’d had on all day at the hotel, Helene snapped. Craqué. It wasn’t because one of the maids was late, and it wasn’t because the receptionist had made a booking error. Not because the night watchman had made a pass at one of the female clients, and not because M. Denys had changed her vacation days. It wasn’t because the washer had overheated, and it wasn’t because some Romanian diplomat had house paint on her pencil skirt.
Anyway, I wouldn’t even call it snapping, really; this wasn’t a clean break. It was more like a tearing open. It started with silence then her face melted slowly, languidly, as saltwater seeped out the corners of her eyes. Tears splattered like rain on the laminated tablecloth.
Maybe it was that her thirteen-year-old knew the way to the cemetery better than the way to the middle school, or that if true love only comes once, for her it had come and gone. Maybe it was that if she lived to be 100, she still had a lifetime left to spend alone or making compromises. Or maybe it was the nagging headache, and the fact that it was almost Christmas. I don’t know what it was at that moment that caused it…but like the pipe in room 204 that burst unexpected, like the shoddy elevator that worked most days but got stuck in the shaft on occasion, something in her broke.
“I didn’t want this life,” she whispered, looking upward at nothing.
I don’t know how long we sat like that, with me holding one of her hands and her mom holding the other–keeping the bones in her fingers in place while everything else momentarily crumbled. Her fish sticks went cold, and down the hall a francophone Bugs Bunny chomped loudly on a carrot. It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes, but felt like a frozen eternity, before Helene unclasped her hands from ours. She filled her lungs, smoothed her hair and the wrinkles in her dress, and began to gather the dinner dishes.
… … …
