Fat Ballet

Chapter One - Olga

Olga Dolovich had the shittiest job in the world - literally. Every morning at four-thirty, she dragged herself from beneath the blankets of her warm bed, trudged towards the subway station, and tried not to fall down dead asleep while leaning against the walls of the filthy train that would deliver her into the depths of Hell - otherwise known as the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

A dank, dimly lit cesspool of a place, the Port Authority is permanently packed with people. People waiting impatiently for loved ones; people yelling into cell phones; people eagerly anticipating the opportunity to get off the crazy little island that is Manhattan. And those are just the people who actually use the bus terminal for the mundane task of getting on a bus. Unseen by the blind eyes of the authorities in charge of the Port Authority are even more people, a myriad of miscreants who turn the terminal into a place of business. A shelter from the streets. A home.

Leaning casually against the walls of Satan's Sitting Room, hookers cast their eyes over the crowd, watching for the next potential John to step out of obscurity. Drug dealers smile shyly at their customers, then threaten to stick a knife in their throats if they don't cough up the dough. Homeless people curl up on benches under the pretense of waiting for a long-delayed relative, but with every intention of settling in for the night. People of all sorts - respectable and deviant, honest and criminal, hard-working and hardly-working-at-all - wander into the Port Authority at all hours of the day and night. And, at some point during their visit, each and every one of them uses the bathroom.

It was Olga's job to make sure that these bathrooms were clean.

Day after day, she sanitized and scoured, mopped and rinsed, rubbed and wiped. She saturated the sinks with lemon-scented cleanser; she tackled the toilets with a gallon of bleach and the world's scariest-looking scrub brush. Strands of dark blonde hair escaped from the rubber band that she used as a makeshift ponytail holder, falling into her flushed face; buckets of perspiration poured forth from her bushy brow as she busted her ass trying to banish the bacteria that came out of other people's asses.

But, sadly, the bathrooms seemed incapable of staying clean. No sooner had Olga wrung the final drops of filthy wastewater from her mop than some guy would rush into the bathroom, desperate to take a nice, long leak after spending four or five hours on a bumpy bus, and miss the urinal by a mile. Or, a woman with a baby would come in and drop a poopy diaper on Olga's freshly mopped floor. Or, some green-faced teenager would stagger into the toilet stall and upchuck about seven pints worth of some partially-digested alcoholic beverage into the previously pristine bowl. And then, with a sigh, Olga would take up her sponge and start all over again.

But her job, defeating and degrading as it might be, never got Olga down. How could it, when every time she bent her knees to wipe a toilet seat became a chance to practice her grand plié? When the task of reaching up to polish a mirror turned into the perfect opportunity to refine her relevé? For Olga, the burden of cleaning the Bathroom of Fire and Brimstone was a small price to pay for the ability to indulge in her passion without anyone passing judgment. In the bathrooms of the Port Authority, there were no critical stares, no exasperated sighs, no eye-rolls of embarrassment, and, best of all, no mention of the F-Word. Day after day, she was ignored, left to practice her passé in peace while wiping up other people's piss. No one ever questioned why a cleaning lady was dancing the ballet. Either no one noticed, or no one cared. Regardless, no one ever paid her the slightest particle of attention, because - let's face it - nobody pays attention to the person who scrubs the toilets.

Until one day, when someone did.

"Lawd Almighty, girl, whatchoo think you doin'?" A voice, clearly hailing from south of the Mason-Dixon line, boomed across the bathroom, causing Olga to freeze in the middle of a perfect pirouette. A large, rotund woman, wearing a lavender pantsuit and a floppy straw hat, stood in the doorway of the bathroom, frowning.