By Monday morning the poster was in the window of the bakery on Camino Street, taped crookedly beside a handwritten sign for green chile croissants, and Dee Marenco stood on the sidewalk with a bag of still warm bread in her hand and looked at her own life arranged by strangers into two lines of type. She did not read the lines twice. Once was enough to know that the word janitor came before her name, and in larger letters, and that the word champion came before Blake Rennert's name in letters larger still, and that somewhere between the two sizes a whole week of other people's talking had been scheduled for her whether she wanted it or not. She walked home in the bright, thin cold of a San Tomas morning with the bread warming her forearm through the paper.
The final week had a sound, and it was not the sound of training. It was the sound of a telephone that would not leave her alone. It buzzed on the kitchen counter while she was folding laundry. It buzzed in her locker at the club while she was changing out of her cleaning clothes. It buzzed, once, at three in the morning, and a cheerful voice from a station in Albuquerque asked if she could be awake and camera ready by six, and Dee, sitting on the edge of her bed in the dark with her hair loose and her feet cold on the floor, said that she could be awake, because she was generally awake when other people were deciding to call her, but that camera ready was a phrase she intended to leave to younger women. The voice laughed as if she had made a joke she had rehearsed. She had not rehearsed it. She put the telephone face down and went and made tea she did not drink, and stood at the window watching the street stay empty, and thought about how strange it was that a thing which had taken seven seconds could take up a whole week of everybody else's time.
Simon Greer had promised her, in writing, in the agreement she had made him sign before she agreed to any of it, that there would be no humiliation in the selling of the night. No mop in the photographs. No bucket by the mat. No headline in the club's own material that called her anything she was not. Simon, to his credit, had kept the club's side of it clean. The club poster said her name properly. The club's page listed her the way the programme would list her, with the years she had competed, in small, factual type that Yusuf Adeyemi had checked twice with a ruler and a pencil, grumbling about kerning. But the club was not the world, and the world had its own editors, and by Tuesday the world had settled on its angle with the happy unanimity of people who have found a story that fits in one breath. Janitor versus champion. Mop versus title. Forty eight against twenty seven, night shift against spotlight, a woman with a grey streak and a key ring against a man with a belt and a highlight reel. Dee read one version over Rosa Delgado's shoulder in the staff room and felt the familiar, tired anger come up in her, not hot, just heavy, the anger of being summarized.
She is not a mop, Rosa said to the screen, as if the screen could be shamed. She is Dee.
The reporter from the Gazette was young, earnest, and terrified of his own recording device, and he met her in the club cafe on Tuesday afternoon because Yusuf had told her she should let one of them sit across a table from her, once, on her own ground, so that at least one account of the week would contain her actual voice. His name was Tomas, he was twenty six, and he began, reading from his notebook, with the question every one of them began with.
So, he said. The janitor who threw a champion. How does a janitor even learn to do that.
Dee wrapped both hands around her coffee to keep them still and looked at him until he understood that she was not deciding whether to answer. She was deciding how.
I have a name, she said, politely. It is Dolores Marenco. Most people here call me Dee. I clean this building at night, which is a job, not a species. And I learned judo the way everybody learns judo. I started when I was fourteen, in a hall colder than this one, and a woman named Petra Lindqvist tied my belt wrong on purpose for the first month to teach me to check it myself. I competed for my country. I have a file somewhere in a federation office with results in it, if results are what you need. The cleaning came later, the way rent comes later, and children, and the price of everything. So if your question is how a person can be two things, the answer is that most people are. They just do not usually get asked about it with a recorder running.