The winter weather hung with a dampness that filled my lungs. A few weeks into the job, I came down with a horrible chest cold; I tried my best to hide it with cough drops and cold medicine, but it kept getting worse. One morning, as Angela and I turned down a gravel driveway to a navy-blue house neatly nestled in the woods, I had a horrible coughing fit. It was so bad it felt like I couldn’t catch my breath.
“Oooh,” Angela said with a morbid sort of interest. “You’re sick, too?” I tried to take in a deep breath, but I might as well have been doing it through a wet washcloth. I looked at her, annoyed, obviously sick. “Maybe we should call Jenny,” she said. “These people inside are old. I don’t think we should clean their house.” Angela pulled out her phone and started looking for Jenny’s number.
She turned her back to me and walked a few paces away. Before I could stop her, she’d already dialed. I waved my hands at her and shook my head and mouthed, “No,” but she continued to talk to Jenny.
“Stephanie’s really sick,” Angela said in a lowered, raspy voice, similar to what a kid does to get out of school. “And I think I might have caught it, too.” She held the phone to her shoulder and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket, frowning when she saw it was empty, and threw it into her cleaning supply tray.
I didn’t want to lose a day’s pay or call in sick as a new hire. I needed this job and didn’t want Jenny to think I was a slacker. Angela ignored me as I got out of the car and stubbornly started to unload my supplies. “Thursday afternoon would work great for me,” Angela said, looking at me with a huge smile, giving me a thumbs-up, happy to have the rest of the day off. “Great,” she said into the phone, still smiling, forgetting to change her voice so she sounded sick. “Okay, we’ll talk to you then.”
“I told you not to do that,” I said when she came over to join me at the back of the car. My head started pounding. I’d explain this to Travis, knowing he’d be upset to find me home early. But I felt the sting of a lesser paycheck even more. “I can’t miss work. Do you not understand that?”
“It’s okay, girl,” she said, lifting her near-empty tray of supplies back into my car. “There will be more work tomorrow.”
We drove the rest of the way to her house without speaking, and I reached over to turn up the radio to keep it that way. Angela moved her head to the music, drumming the tops of her legs a little. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t stressed about missing out on those wages. There were questions I wanted to ask her about her kids and living situation, to get a better picture of what it was like for her, since I’d also walked the path of being a single mom, homeless, and in poverty. It was part of the reason I was with Travis, though I’d never admit it to anyone. Angela’s house, which turned out to be right around the corner from ours, had been condemned, and though she’d been evicted, she refused to leave. She lived without running water or electricity.
But my compassion or curiosity had faded in losing twenty bucks in wages that day. When I stopped in front of Angela’s house, I kept my head down, trying not to stare at the several notices taped to the door, deeming it uninhabitable.
She paused before getting out. “Can you lend me money for a pack of smokes?”
“That’s an hour’s pay,” I said, wincing a little, knowing she’d try to pressure me to give it to her anyway.
She nodded instead, possibly understanding how upset I was. Maybe even understanding I didn’t really have all that much money, either.
I waited for her to grab her tray of cleaning supplies and tried to not look over toward her house. I didn’t want her to feel embarrassed, remembering what it was like when I lived at the shelter just the previous year. Some of the other cleaners whispered that she’d lost custody of her kids by that point. I didn’t know for sure, but they weren’t around much anymore when I dropped her off.
“I’m good,” she yelled over to me after closing the trunk door. I nodded, trying not to wonder what the rest of her day might be like. I just hoped she’d be ready when I came to pick her up the next morning.
When we returned to clean the old couple’s house later that week, I saw two people who’d built a life together, surrounded by photos of family, who were now ending their time with each other. The husband laughed and joked with Angela while I watched him pick up his wife’s cereal bowl, fetching her favorite blanket before she could sit down on the couch, and ached at the image of one of them being gone. It was hard not to be struck by the role I’d taken on in my clients’ lives.
I became a witness. Even odder was my invisibility and anonymity, though I spent several hours a month in their homes. My job was to wipe away dust and dirt and make lines in carpets, to remain invisible. I almost felt like I had the opportunity to get to know my clients better than any of their relatives did. I’d learn what they ate for breakfast, what shows they watched, if they’d been sick and for how long. I’d see them, even if they weren’t home, by the imprints left in their beds and tissues on the nightstand. I’d know them in a way few people did, or maybe ever would.
7
THE LAST JOB ON EARTH
After a month, Jenny’s promise of more work hadn’t come through. It didn’t seem as though she really liked me, for whatever reason. Maybe I wasn’t chatty enough, didn’t care enough about who went out on a date with whom. Maybe my grumpiness over the irregular work schedule, which made it impossible to budget and plan childcare, showed too much, or maybe I was just too grumpy in general.
Still, I took as many jobs from Jenny as possible, putting up with her poor management skills. Angela had become so unreliable, Jenny started to text me jobs in the evenings instead. I craved a normal work schedule, especially as Jenny’s original projection of twenty hours a week had turned into ten or fewer, depending on whether Angela showed up to work. But that never seemed to be addressed. I couldn’t complain about sitting outside Angela’s house for fifteen minutes in the morning, waiting for her to get dressed, making us late to our house. Jenny took complaints as not being a team player. When Angela boasted about how happy she was to get paid under the table so she could get more government money, the knuckles of my hands, already firm on the steering wheel, turned white. Her level of comfort with that bothered me. It started to feel as if we were supposed to take care of each other, but I was more concerned about caring for Mia and what was ahead.
Meanwhile, Travis treated my new job like it was a book club, something that kept me from doing the important work at home on the farm. I struggled to keep up with caring for Mia while keeping the house clean, and I grew angry whenever Travis looked at me expectantly to feed the horses. The more tumultuous my life at home grew as “the farmer’s wife,” the more uncertain and the more insecure I became over whether or not our time in Travis’s house would last. My ability to work, to earn money, was my only safety net in case the floor dropped out from under us again. And Jenny wasn’t offering enough to support us, not by a long shot.
* * *
Classic Clean, a licensed and bonded cleaning company, almost always had an ad in the local classifieds. “Cleaners Wanted!” it read in bold type. I had always planned to inquire if Jenny’s jobs didn’t work out. Now the time had come.
“Hi. Stephanie, right?” the woman who answered the door said. “Did you find the place okay? I know it can be kind of confusing with all the buildings.”
I tried to smile warmly, even though I’d just argued to the point of tears with Travis about the mud he’d tracked all over the kitchen. “Your directions were perfect,” I said, and the woman looked pleased.
“I’m Lonnie,” she said, extending her hand. “The human resources manager at Classic Clean.”
I reached out to shake her hand, then handed her my résumé. Lonnie looked surprised, like she didn’t see too many of those.
“Oh, well, look at you,” she said, seemingly pleased. It was like the last job on earth. Any money I could make kept me out of ever needing to call a list of homeless shelters again. It
unnerved me and made me angry with myself that I’d found us in that position. A regular schedule and a real job would be my ticket to independence, and ultimately our survival. Our future depended on my getting it.
Lonnie nodded to a table in the back of the rectangular office area, built into one of two large outbuildings. She had told me on the phone that the business operated from an office, on Pam’s, the owner’s, property. “Why don’t you take a seat and start filling out our application. We need you to agree to a criminal background check, too, okay?”
I nodded and did what I was told. After a while, Lonnie came to sit down next to me. “You can probably tell by the accent that I’m from Jersey,” she started. It was true. She sounded like Danny DeVito’s kid sister. Lonnie was short and squat, with curly black hair shaped in a fluffed-up mullet—the kind of person you wanted to be on the good side of. She was direct and businesslike, spoke fast, and she’d pause to give me time to process what she said, raising her eyebrows to hear my “okay” before she continued.
“This is our schedule,” Lonnie said, referring to a bulletin board behind her desk so large she needed a step stool to reach the top. “Each client’s name goes on the laminated label, and they rotate through A, B, C, and D weeks. As you can see by the arrow here, we’re on C week currently. Some clients are monthly, some weekly, but most are biweekly, so twice a month. Each cleaner gets a colored dot assigned to them, so we know what cleaner has who.” She stopped to look at me. I stood next to her with my hands clasped in front of me. “You get what I’m sayin’?” she asked, and I nodded. “So, if your background check goes through, not sayin’ I don’t think it will, but you know sometimes you’d be surprised what we find.” She stopped to chuckle to herself. “But anyway, so after that goes through, then we’ll have you come in and get your tray and vacuum and some shirts. What are you, a small or a medium? You probably don’t want a small. It’s good to have some room to breathe. I think we have some mediums. Anyway, do you have any questions?”
I had a lot, but everything I wanted to know about how much I’d make or how many hours I’d work or if they offered health insurance or sick leave seemed unimportant. All that mattered was that the person I was going to replace was a yellow dot, which meant all the yellow dots on that board were now me, which meant I’d work every other Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and once a month on Monday.
Lonnie pointed to a poster on the wall that read “$8.55 an hour,” which was Washington State’s current minimum wage. “We gotta start you there while you’re training,” she said. “But it goes up to nine after that.” That would be $18,720 dollars a year if I eventually worked full-time, which wasn’t possible to achieve. The company’s policy prevented working more than six hours a day. Any more than that and employees would risk injury from fatigue, she said. I would also not be paid for travel time. Jenny had factored in the hours I spent driving from one house to the next in my pay, giving me a buck or two extra per day. With the new job, I’d spend sometimes as much as two unpaid hours a day driving from job to job, then have to wash the rags I’d used for work at home with my own laundry detergent, along with the black Classic Clean t-shirts with a tiny red bird embroidered next to the company name.
Lonnie didn’t seem to mind my standing there, studying the calendar, while she continued to explain their system. Many houses were two- or three-hour cleans. A few took four hours. Some took six. Each house I’d be assigned to came with a printed sheet, detailing each room and the instructions for cleaning it and how long that should take. She pulled one out to show me. Most rooms had added notes to warn cleaners of loose tiles, to dust in places often missed, and where clean bed linens were if the client forgot to set them out. Everything not only expected of me but also what I needed to expect was meticulously detailed in black-and-white. There’d be no late-evening conversations, planning through text. If I wanted, I could plan ahead and know that three months from now on the second Wednesday of the month I’d be changing sheets at one house before driving three miles to the next. It hadn’t struck me how much I’d needed this sort of stability, this dependability; I almost hugged Lonnie. I had to hide the tears welling in my eyes.
Lonnie called me the next day. I’d just finished cleaning a house with Angela and sat in my car impatiently while she finished inside, trying to ignore a real possibility she was taking something that wasn’t hers.
“You checked out,” Lonnie said. “I knew ya would, but we have to check these things.”
“Oh, I know,” I said, wishing I could tell her how happy it made me to see them doing that.
“Are you available to come in this afternoon to get some things?” she asked. “Pam the owner’s not around, but I can get you all set up and ready to go. Then maybe we can head over to my place—it’s just down the street from here—and I can train you a little by cleaning my bathroom and dusting around a bit.”
I tried to absorb what she said. So that meant I was hired. And I’d start working that afternoon. I had a job; a real job with paystubs and a regular schedule. “Yes! That sounds great!” I said, suddenly breathless, almost yelling. Lonnie laughed and told me to swing by the office after noon.
Growing up, I spent Saturday mornings deep-cleaning the house. Mom wouldn’t change out of her bathrobe until it was done. I’d wake up to the smells of pancakes and bacon or sausage wafting into my bedroom, George Winston’s piano music playing. After breakfast, we’d all get to our various predetermined and reluctantly agreed-upon duties. Mine was bathrooms. For a while it had been the only one I shared with my brother, but my skill was so great and Mom praised me enough that I wanted to do the master bathroom, too. Mom would brag to her friends about how well I could clean a bathtub, so much that my chest filled with air as I stood a little taller.
Appearances had always been important to my mother. “You’ll just get it dirty,” she said to any clothes I wanted that were white. I wasn’t allowed to paint my nails when I was little because she said whenever she saw girls with chipped nail polish it looked trashy. One Saturday night that I spent at my grandparents’ around age five or six, I watched Grandma paint her toenails and fingernails a deep pink before she carefully painted mine, even though I told her it would make Mom mad. At church the next morning, whenever we had to fold our hands in prayer, I laced my fingers on the inside of my hands to hide them.
Classic Clean’s approach to their clients’ houses was much different than Jenny’s. I’d instead become a nameless ghost, appearing either at nine a.m. or before one p.m., depending on the clients’ schedule and whether or not they wanted to be home, but not after. It was rare that I’d ever work after three-thirty. “You know, Mom hours,” Lonnie had said. “When the kids are in school.” I had to clean the house in a specific way, the exact manner and amount of time as the person before me, to prevent any differences between cleaners being noticed. I had to be diligent and have a sharp eye. Kitchen stovetops had to be impeccably polished, pillows fluffed each visit, and toilet paper folded into a little triangle the exact same way every time.
My initial training test was to clean the kitchen and master bathrooms in Lonnie’s and Pam’s homes, which I had absolutely no worries about acing. They both had pretty nice places, two-story houses in the woods. Not huge by any means, but not small, either. I followed Lonnie’s Kia Sportage to her place with my freshly stocked cleaning supplies, which had been meticulously inventoried and logged in my employee file. Two spray bottles, one container of powdered Comet, two sponges, one pair of yellow gloves, fifty white rags, two dusters, one Oreck vacuum, two mop handles, and so on. Lonnie instructed me to only use the products given to me and to return to the office for refills when I needed them. We’d chatted a little while she found all the items I needed to get started, and I mentioned needing to drop Mia off later that day to visit her dad for the weekend.
“Oh, yeah,” Lonnie said. “I know how that is, believe me, I know.” Her daughter had been ten when she’d remarried, she
told me. “And Pam, you know, she went through the same thing. In fact, she started this business as a single mom. I bet you and her will have a lot to talk about.” Jenny had been a single mom, too. I wondered how normal it was for housecleaners to be displaced mothers, stuck in between the domestic work they did at home and seeking jobs that could pay a decent wage. The job seemed like nothing but a last resort.
Lonnie had me call the office from her home phone to officially clock in. “Hi,” I said once the outgoing message stopped and I heard a beep. “This is Stephanie Land, and I’m starting at Lonnie’s house,” I said before hanging up.
“No!” Lonnie said so earnestly I jumped. “You’re supposed to say the date and time!” Then she quickly seemed to correct herself. “Well, it tells the date and time after the message plays anyway. But you’ll need to do that every time you start and finish, and it has to be from their landline so it shows up on the caller ID. It’s just a way for us to keep track of things.” I nodded, my eyes a little wide. She’d said all of this to me before, when she’d given me my binder full of client sheets I’d been assigned to, but it had been lost with all of the other information. With all of these instructions, I got the feeling she had to repeat herself a lot normally.
Lonnie pointed me to her bathroom across the hallway from the small, box-sized kitchen. “Now the thing about this bathroom is you need to pay special attention to the countertops and the wall behind the sink.” Lonnie used a lot of hairspray, she said, as evidenced by the two cans of Aqua Net placed carefully on a mirror. “Everything else in here is pretty standard, you know, you got your toilet and bathtub and shower.” She patted me on the shoulder. “Just do your best and come get me later to check your work.”
Years before I got pregnant with Mia, I’d applied for the local branch of Merry Maids cleaning service, desperate for work outside of coffee shops. My first day was spent in the office watching four training videos; a blond woman wearing a hunter green polo shirt neatly tucked into khaki pants, who smiled as she put on knee pads while the smarmy female narrator said, “And how do we clean floors? That’s right. On our hands and knees.” I cringed, but part of the training video had proved to be incredibly useful: every space, every room, every floor, took on a gridlike map laid over it. Merry Maids instructed their cleaners to work in one direction: from left to right, top to bottom. Whenever I cleaned anything from then on, I could never get the video out of my mind, starting in the upper left corner, working my way across and down until the job was complete.
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