But they were back, in much smaller numbers, in the evening, and in larger quantities in the morning. Marg again lugged the heavy vacuum cleaner up the stairs. The machine was unwieldy, the coiled tube bumping on each step. Sylvia had finally helped, lifting it as if it were a bride’s train. Marg, her erotic energy somehow enhanced as she maneuvered the machine, wore jeans that hugged her hips and a maroon turtleneck sweater.
She set the vacuum down with a grunt in Sylvia’s tiny bedroom with its one narrow bed and its pictures of cars on the walls and moved Sylvia’s suitcase to plug it in.
“You get used to it,” Marg said, smiling grimly. “Each death gets a little easier.”
“Spoken like an executioner.”
“It was awful yesterday. I didn’t want to do it. But now I just want them gone.”
When she thinks of that weekend now, Sylvia remembers the flies. And it is the buzz of the flies that she remembers hearing when she walked into the wrong bedroom on the second floor. She didn’t see Marg at first, only a woman’s hands on Roger’s back, pressing so hard that his t-shirt bunched, his head bent down, the cleft in the back of his neck beneath the hairline. One of his legs was slightly forward, the other straight and firm, keeping his balance, their balance, flies dotting the window pane to the left of his shoulder, flies tangled in the curtain, the vacuum cleaner still humming as if it had only recently been turned off. Marg must have heard her come in, for she moved just at the moment that the picture composed itself for Sylvia and Sylvia said “Sorry,” and backed away, closing the door before Marg’s face was fully visible.
She had gone straight downstairs and out the back door to the porch where Hugh sat reading one of the Agatha Christies. She’d pulled one of the canvas chairs closer and, without saying a word, everything between them changed. Later, Hugh told her that it was that action of hers that somehow let him know that Marg was sleeping with Roger. “Sleeping together?” Sylvia had said. She hadn’t imagined things had gone that far. Hugh had been amused at her surprise. Still, as Marg was quick to say a half-year later, it hadn’t been a license to steal her husband. She hadn’t guessed about Sylvia and Hugh. Later she said to Sylvia, “I never would have thought...I always thought you were too, too...” she paused and then her eyes lit up, “too fastidious.”