Chapter 3

Over the next few days, the relationship between Sharon and I, if we charted its progress, could be described as the incredible economic growth of the Roaring Twenties. The flower of friendship had blossomed. I didn’t mind that she called me by my name instead of the overly mellifluous “Miss.”

The rhythms of the days took on a definite rhythm since Sharon was there. Every morning she would wake me up and serve me breakfast in bed with my beloved toast with strawberry jam. She would also no longer leave the room when I needed to freshen up in the morning, but would sit in one of the chairs at my desk and chat with me. She would start cleaning while I was still in the room and although I was practically in her way I don’t remember ever seeing a single speck of dust come near me, moved by her in a careless maneuver of the lady of the house perched on her bed.

I must say that for her young age she almost equaled Agnes’ cleaning skills. In my heart, however, perfection in her work occupied less space on my list of priorities towards her. But I obviously kept that to myself, not wanting her to work less hard just because I took a liking to her. Seeing a piece of the program together had become a habit. Every day a different animal was treated. I liked this program because it often dealt with funny aspects of even the most common animals. Today they were talking about the quokka, an Australian marsupial.

Sharon’s mind was quite lively, she followed the program with me attentively and we asked each other questions about the animals. We hoped that our curiosities had been solved by the end of the program and when this didn’t happen we would ask each other questions like a sort of quiz to see who came closest to the answer given by the Internet. After this pleasant moment she would return to her work and I would take the books to study.

The rest of the day passed fairly anonymously. We didn’t have much other contact. The rhythm of my study was only broken when Sharon would bring me a juice or fruit to break my hunger. A week after our friendship began, before she left the room after bringing me a blood orange, I asked her if she would like to watch a movie with me in the evening. She accepted very willingly and we agreed on 22. At that time she had been out of work for some time and she was transformed from a waitress into a guest.

However, from what I can tell in this first week of living together, she never took too many liberties. Once dinner was over, she would lock herself in her room and do who knows what. This fact aroused my curiosity. I don’t know if this curiosity brought me an advantage or a disadvantage, reasoning with a cold mind. So once 9:45 p.m. arrived, I left my room to go get her. I arrived at her door, but didn’t open it right away. I wanted to know what she was doing in her room and if I opened the door she would have a window of time, however small, to cover her tracks and maybe leave me high and dry.

Also obviously I couldn’t open the door without knocking, which would give her an added advantage. I didn’t want to give her that, so in absolute silence I crouched by the door of her room and lurched my eye at the keyhole. I didn’t see her, I didn’t even see her room or what she was doing. I didn’t. I saw a toned, lithe leg, shod in black. It was halfway up. Suddenly I saw her hands popping out, reaching to the edge of the stocking. The keyhole in the door was very small, allowing no view of anything but that veiled leg.

“She’s taking off her stockings. I might as well stay here and watch so I don’t make any noise while I pull back,” I thought. And indeed her hands took the top flap of the stocking that was in her leg and gently slipped the stocking off, showing me her bare foot for the first time. Her complexion was fair, in fact her foot was almost white, with some parts more pinkish due to the increased pressure applied by the fabric of the stocking.

The heel was not rough, as befits someone of her caliber, who stands a lot. I thought people like that didn’t care much about body parts like that. I was wrong. The rest of the foot was also smooth and unblemished, the plantar portion that could be glimpsed had light grooves, and the toes were quite long, glazed black.

From what I could see from the hole they were very manicured feet and those low heels he was wearing didn’t do them justice. As this stream of thoughts ran through my mind I found myself thinking about why I was thinking about the feet of a woman, the feet of a woman my age, the feet of a waitress. So I turned away from the door and recomposed myself, putting my thoughts back in order and banishing the image of her feet from my mind, and made to knock, but the door handle escaped my hand and retreated to the inside of her room. She had opened the door.

She didn’t hide her surprise at seeing me on her doorstep very well, but it could have been that I had arrived just then and by coincidence she had opened the door a millisecond before me. I immediately hastened to confirm this hypothesis by saying: “Hey Sharon, I was just about to knock”, I said laughing a little, to sound more natural, although perhaps I seemed even more suspicious than before. He gave me a smile, slightly forced compared to the others, perhaps because of his indecision on how to compose himself and then hastened to add: “Where do we see the movie?”

That question came to my rescue and I replied, ” Shall we do it in the living room? There’s more room and the television is bigger.”

“All right. Let’s go.”

I made to head into the living room, but she called me over and said, “Don’t you have DVDs in your room?”

I was still confused about my behavior earlier so it took me a few seconds to understand the question. She said, “Johanna are you okay? Are you ok?”

“Yeah yeah I’m fine. I’ll go get the DVDs. You take a seat in the living room in the meantime.”

“No no, you’re not going to steal my job,” she said haughtily, but playfully, as if she was envious of her waitress position in this house. I responded to this joke with a nervous giggle, I still couldn’t get over it. We went to my room and made our way to a small cabinet on the right side of the desk. I opened it and grabbed a couple of DVDs and Sharon did the same for more choices. However, when we turned to head for the exit, a clumsy movement on my part and a less than sure grip caused me to bump Sharon’s shoulder and drop the dvds right on her left foot.

“AHIAAAA” Sharon immediately dropped her end of the dvd and began hopping awkwardly on her sound foot for a few seconds, with her other leg bent. Perhaps this event awakened me and I immediately uttered waves of apologies over and over. It had all been my fault and my inattention. Better not to think about what had caused my inattention. Better not to think about the fact that the cause of my inattention had been her extremities. I invited her to sit on my bed and so she did.

She pulled her affected foot out of the slipper and brought it to her hands to examine it. This was the second contact with her foot. It was a second opportunity to see why seeing his foot through the keyhole had caused me such an inner turmoil, I had a strange courage within me and a determination that it would not happen again.

Now that I could get a better look at it, I realized that it was indeed very manicured feet. It was an Egyptian foot, with long toes in a descending fashion from the first toe. The nails were enameled in glossy black and were long enough to cross the boundary with flesh and break off, like a bird in flight, into the void. I wondered if there was dirt under the nails. All in all it was a tiny foot, I’d say a 39 at most, and the white expanse of the back was stained by my sin, by the discs that had fallen and shattered on its end, by a red stain.

“I’ll get you some ice,” I said, and went to the kitchen to get some ice and a cloth to wrap it in. When I brought it to her she thanked me. Seeing my anxious face she said, ” Don’t worry, it’s no big deal. I’m strong!”

I was actually worrying too much, it was just a slight bump. I had even brought her ice. To chase these thoughts away I suggested we go into the living room to watch the movie and she agreed. I felt slightly guilty, I was not myself. I had hurt one of my employees, what if something else serious had happened? Just from seeing a foot? I was over-thinking this because I was imagining all the catastrophic variables and hoping she hadn’t noticed anything.

We sat on the couch next to each other and started flipping through the various dvds. I was going to opt for Avatar and was already opening the disc box to put it in the dvd player, when she lifted her leg and put her left foot on the movie box and my hand. It was the foot bumped by the discs. Was she trying to make me feel guilty? After that she made a baby face and simulating an infant said, “No Avatar, sick child wants to see 500 days of summer!”

As if a switch was flipped, my facial blood vessels dilated and I got all red in the face. I could feel the texture of the foot on top of my hand, the soft plant above me, the two fingers drumming and moving the tendons of my fingers under the skin. I didn’t immediately remove my hand from under my foot, and I also had no idea what was going through Sharon’s mind.

It was all happening too fast, had she figured something out? I complied and slipped my hand out from under her foot and agreed to watch the movie she wanted. That day, however, I had made a wrong move. The gazelle in me had wandered into the wrong body of water and had been spotted by the lioness. After we settled down on the couch, with a soda and a bowl of popcorn, the lioness attacked again.

“My foot still hurts. Will you give me a massage? I know I’m your maid and if you’re not feeling it, it’s okay.”

I wondered for a moment about the thing she had said: she was my maid, true, but it had been my fault and besides we had gone down the road of friendship. I still had a brake, however, but before my brain could know it, my spinal cord decided to act on its own and bypassed decades of neurophysiological studies by making a voluntary movement totally involuntary. It was as if my body and mind were disconnected. On my own initiative I got off the couch, in front of her, who was in a dominant position. The maid was on the couch, the hostess was on the floor in front of her. She let out a mini giggle and lifted her leg so that her foot was raised to torso height.

I took the foot with both hands and began to massage it. I had never given a foot massage to anyone. I had never had the opportunity or the reason. However, I instinctively began to draw small circles on the sole of the foot, starting from the part immediately below the toes and proceeding towards the body of the foot and the heel. As for the toes, I took them one by one and started to stretch and rotate them, even if the fingers were not affected by the discs at all. After 10 minutes from the beginning of the massage he told me to stop and that the pain had passed. So I replied with a smile and perched on the couch as well.

I was embarrassed. I was in a cold sweat. What if what I did affected our relationship? What if he had told my mother? She would certainly have been upset. One part of my brain was telling me this, the other part was telling me that I had only fixed a mistake I had made. A third little voice hissed between the two, a sneaky little voice coming directly from my limbic cortex: That little voice said I wanted to give her a foot massage. I decided to firmly ignore this damaging little voice. While we were watching the movie in the living room, my mother called me and called both of our attention to her.

It was like a blessing, a momentary break from that psychological tension between me and myself, which didn’t seem to interest Sharon at all.

“Sorry to have bothered you. It’s nice to see you two getting along. Anyway, I wanted to tell you that I have to leave on an impromptu business trip and will be gone 2 weeks.”

Boom.

Lightning strike.

This meant that for 2 weeks there would be an ongoing risk of her talking about this with me. I tried to stay in control. Once the movie was over, we exchanged a warm handshake and headed to our rooms. I promptly fell asleep, thankful that heaven had brought this tiring day to an end.

From Sharon’s Diary:

Dear Diary, You have no idea what has happened to me. This has been a very strange day. First of all, I had the impression that Johanna was spying on me through the keyhole of my bedroom door. I didn’t notice the shadow under the door, but when I approached it, it was incredibly close to the door. I honestly don’t know what to think.

Could it be that I opened the door just a moment before she did? It can happen, of course. You have to give people the benefit of the doubt. Because if that benefit were to fail it would mean that the house Johanna was spying on me. And what can you see through the keyhole? Not much really. Dear Diary, you may be wondering how this useless talk can go, but wait a second. Through the keyhole you could see my leg and my foot the moment I took off my socks to change.

Of course, you could see other things too, like my hands, the underside of my bedroom closet, or my ballet flats. However, I deduce that she was looking at my feet. This is still a faint certainty, but I plan to find out soon. Is it possible that Johanna is attracted to feet? I’ve never met a person attracted to feet, and I’m curious to know what this pleasure consists of and how it affects her attitudes. Do you think I’m rambling, dear diary, because I haven’t exposed a single piece of evidence to you yet? Think well.

So, I can tell you that there was a moment of indecision when I voluntarily decided to place my foot on his hand. Actually my foot didn’t hurt at all, I just wanted to confirm my theory. I can’t tell you the smile etched in my mind when I bent her to my desire we watched the movie I wanted to see, or when she massaged my feet. Unfortunately on that occasion I let a giggle escape.

I shouldn’t have. This was the final test of the evening, the mood was already heavy and I could elicit a sudden reaction from her. It was nice to get paid while the person who hired you knelt in front of you to give you a foot massage.

It was really enjoyable. She was red as she massaged my foot, this doesn’t prove anything of course, it can also mean just embarrassed. I stopped her after 10 minutes because I was afraid things would go too awkward for her. I didn’t do these things out of malice, I’m just curious. It’s a surreal situation. I plan to dig deeper, much deeper. Maybe that year of psychology wasn’t completely useless.