Free Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman

wooden slats, which collapse against the window with a clatter. The wedge of light disappears. Romaine, he has learned, likes to sit alone in the dark.
    He treads lightly across the floor. Noise, like motorbikes, or a woman singing one house over, can trigger Romaine’s rage, and if he isn’t careful she’ll spend the afternoon bedridden with a pillow overher head, then complain about him to the night nurse, claiming, That boy exposes me to torture. She’ll go on about how an artist must protect her senses, and no one likes her to go on about anything.
    I will work today, she tells Mario, but when he returns with her canvas and paints, Romaine is asleep, body curled like a prawn, her head lolled to the side, large eyes closed, breathing heavily. She wears her usual outfit, a white silk blouse, loose bow tie, faded brocade jacket with dander on the shoulders. He hates the way gravity sucks at her chin, the crescent-shaped pillows of skin underneath her eyes. Her hair, occasionally dyed black, is short and unwashed, primarily because it is an act of great courage to wash her. The first time he tried, she slapped him with the washcloth.
    You brute! The water is frigid, she complained, her body stiff in the cloudy tub, breasts drooping below the waterline. I’ll die of cold.
    She tells him to wake her if she sleeps during the day, that she does not like to sleep, that she has nightmares from childhood. But he never wakes her. One time he did and she accused him of touching her inappropriately.
    You put your hands underneath my blouse, she said, snarling. Her right eye floated slightly away from the intended line of her gaze, as it always had.
    Cristo! I would never , he exclaimed, backing away, his hands up in protest. His disgust was evident to Romaine and enraged her even more.
    I’ll have you arrested! she said, but her voice was hoarse and raspy and came out as a whisper. I was a beautiful woman, she said, lip curling. I had many lovers.
    She’s feeble but threatening, and he has to take her seriously;he needs this job, and she knows it. He made the mistake of telling her. No one ever works for Romaine longer than six months. She’s too demanding, too proud, too suspicious. Last year she fired everyone and a nurse found her shivering in bed, weak from having not eaten for four days. What the nurse told him his first day of work: Romaine would rather die than compromise.
    Mario tells his mother, who is eighty-six, that Romaine is ninety-three and has a closet full of silk opera capes. She doesn’t wear glasses, he says.
    She’s paid for new eyes?
    No, Mario says. She’s more stubborn than blindness itself.
    Mario lives with his Spanish mother in a one-room flat in Fiesole; she had envisioned it as a paradise, but it did not feel this way. She takes on laundry and mending, and he often finds her hunched over the tub, swirling someone else’s pants in the dull water. He’d grown up in Haro, Spain, and hoped to become a literature student, maybe a teacher, but his father died and his brothers were off working in the vineyards of Serralunga d’Alba. Someone had to stay home and care for Mama, even if she was tiresome, full of outdated gossip and complaints about the arthritis in her worn knuckles.
    How did I come to spend all my time with two old women? Mario wonders, hating his life, hating his conscience for keeping him home when he’d been the studious one in the family. He’d stayed up many nights, chewing licorice and drinking weak coffee, poring over the old encyclopedias his aunt had given him. He was supposed to escape, not his brothers. He was supposed to fall in love, grab happiness by the throat.
    I wish she would die, Mario thinks, looking at Romaine’s limp body, the silver hairs on her upper lip, but he knows he’d haveto go back to busing tables, bleaching napkins, cutting the mold off cheese rinds. Because Romaine sleeps so much Mario can read