by Caitlin Macy
IT WAS FOUR months since she’d met the girl—four months since Beth and John had been transferred to London. “London calling!” the invitations had said, and the apartment on East Ninety-third had been mostly packed into boxes. People stood around drinking Dom Perignon out of plastic cups amid garbage bags of clothes and other things to give away, making bids on the Upshaws’ IKEA couch and console. Early on in the evening, Beth came out of the kitchen with a tray of bacon-wrapped scallops and said, “Hey, does anyone need a great cleaning lady?” but there were no takers. Everyone seemed to have someone already. Perched on the chunky arm of the sofa, Trish had listened, smiling from time to time, as Karen and Kelly and Meg and Christine—some colleagues of John’s, some, like her, wives of colleagues—griped on insufferably about their inadequate help: Lupe, who shrank a $250 cashmere sweater and refused to clean the oven; Sancha, who called from São Paulo the night before a dinner party to say she’d be back in six months; Liubov, who eschewed the organic products purchased online by her employer and instead cleaned the whole apartment with industrial-strength bleach that made even the cat’s eyes water. Trish laughed with the others and clutched her champagne, seething. Perching there on the arm of the sofa, pretending to commiserate with Meg Tedeschi for her inability to get rid of a particularly careless cleaner on account of the exigencies of the woman’s personal life (single mom, dangerous ex), Trish became more and more incensed. It was as if she had been duped, as if she had played the stooge. Perhaps there was a whole host of things she was ignorant of, that she would discover by accident, in some unsympathetic public forum. “Why don’t you just fire the bitch?” she said finally, relieved when she got a laugh.
TRISH MEEHAN, NéE Moore, had come to New York in the late eighties with a degree in business affairs. The once-industrial town she’d grown up in, in southern New Hampshire, was a former mill city, with all that the phrase implies: the rows of abandoned factory buildings lining a polluted river; the deserted downtown with the barely subsisting, family-owned department store displaying corsets and fedoras and other dusty anachronistic goods in its windows. For several years after moving to New York, Trish’s emotional sustenance had derived almost entirely from that: the achievement of the move itself.
There were days, well into the mid-nineties even, when she could hardly believe she had done it. She had squeezed some money out of her mother, but by the end of that first summer of endless résumé-photocopying and Thai takeout, she had found a real job crunching numbers at a midtown consulting firm. She had rented herself a studio apartment on York Avenue; later on she put up a wall and advertised for a roommate so she could afford the rent hike. When she took the Greyhound bus to Lowell and then on up to New Hampshire at the holidays, she would tell people she lived in “Manhattan” and she vowed never to leave, no matter how poor she was, for an outer borough. Though her own apartment building was a former tenement, a site of bare bulbs in porcelain sockets, archeological layers of peeling kitchen linoleum, and knotted plastic grocery bags of trash left on landings, at least her phone number had the 212 area code—that was very important, Trish knew.
The city had been different when she arrived. The gaunt, unshaven men who wore undershirts in the middle of the day had not been driven out of the East Village, there were no national-chain coffee franchises to kill time in without arousing suspicion, and in certain neighborhoods, where trash cans were chained outside of buildings, the door frames and stoops of which had been splashed over in mud-brown paint, you could still catch the grotty scent of the 1970s as it fought its way up from the subway grates—a stimulating aroma for some, suggestive of funkier, more authentic times; alarming, merely, for someone like Trish.
She had, from those first few years in the city, a half-dozen unsavory memories. One involved answering a roommate ad in the Voice and realizing, when the man offered her a glass of sweet wine before showing her around the apartment, that she had been complicit in something sleazy. Another time she had taken a cab home from a bar downtown when she knew she didn’t have the fare. She had the driver stop at a cash machine, and went through the motions of trying to extract money; she knew her card would be rejected, but she figured that as a pretty girl she could charm her way out of it this once. She emerged from the bank with a goofy smile, saying, “I just can’t believe this …” and was about to launch into a highly nuanced apology for why she could not, at that particular moment, access her checking account, when the cabbie demanded, “How much you got?” And when Trish said, “A dollar-fifty?” he said, “Ah, fuck you!” The tone of the man’s voice just gutted Trish—the disgust, yes, but what was even more painful was his utter lack of surprise. It was as if, the cabbie seemed to imply, she did this kind of thing all the time.
Trish had been raised Catholic, and for years, when she woke up hungover and full of recriminations, she would revisit a laundry list of these moments of mortal shame in an attempt to marshal the sins stacking up against her. Once in a while, when she was at her lowest, Trish would go to church on Sunday and pray, the way she had as a girl, with her eyes squeezed tight, picturing a bearded man in long white robes. But most Sundays she lay in bed till noon and then rose and cleaned the apartment from top to bottom, scouring the bathtub, scrubbing the patch of kitchen floor on her hands and knees, washing all of her lingerie by hand and hanging it to dry, and finally taking a shower and combing out her hair to let it dry naturally.
All those first years, too, Trish feared that until she changed her ways and stopped waking up hungover she would be punished. She figured the punishment would manifest itself in the thwarting of her most obvious goal: marriage.
But life did not seem to play the retributive role Trish had cast it in. Life was altogether more charitable—it was almost Christian in its forgiveness. At the midtown firm where she’d worked her way up to managing a research team, she met Tim, fresh from business school in the Midwest following a stint in the Army. Trish got drunk and slept with him on the first date—he was not deterred. She floated the subject of matrimony two weeks into their relationship—he married her anyway. She had not changed her ways, yet she had been rewarded.
AS SOON AS she got the ring, Trish quarreled recklessly with her boss. Trish gave the woman an ultimatum, which meant that when she lost, she had to give up the job; she had already given up her apartment and moved into Tim’s studio. It was an upgrade for Trish, in that, though the studio was small, it was in a luxury building, with a health club and parking in the basement. It was a given between the two of them (Trish had waited vainly for an opening at Beth and John’s party to make this clear) that because she was not working, she would of course do the cooking and cleaning. And Trish honestly didn’t mind housework. Mopping the floors and feeling her muscles begin to tire from running the German vacuum over the carpet were among the times that Trish felt most robustly connected to the promise of her and Tim’s union.
“It’s not like we were rolling in dough,” Tim liked to say, of his childhood outside of Detroit, “and yet my mother never worked.”
“Of course not!” There would be a scornful edge to Trish’s voice when she agreed. “It’s so much better for the family,” she would say, as if she, too, could remember family dinners of chicken and mashed potatoes rather than the broiler fish sticks or macaroni and cheese out-of-a-box that she and her older sister, Jan, had made the nights neither her mother—an ICU nurse in the town hospital—nor her father—a tax advisor, who faced yearly crunches—could make it home to prepare a meal. In public and in private, too, Trish and Tim would agree on this one issue with that avid, defensive posturing that had lately become characteristic of all kinds of traditionalists in Manhattan. Tim’s theretofore unarticulated hope for a stay-at-home wife, teased out by Trish on their second date, had become their sustaining vanity as a couple.
Just two months after their wedding had come Beth and John’s going-away party. Trish waited until the end of the night, when only the stragglers remained. Then
she caught Beth alone in the kitchen tying up the garbage and asked for the cleaning woman’s number.
“You’re gonna love her,” Beth had said. “Real self-starter. I’ve had her over a year and I don’t have a single complaint.”
“Just ‘Evgenia,’ huh?” Trish asked, eyeing the Post-it.
“I don’t know her last name, can you believe it?” Beth said. She gave a pleased self-indulgent laugh. “Here she scrubs the crotch of my underwear by hand, and I just put ‘Cash’ on the check.”
THE WEEK BEFORE the cleaner was to start, a funny thing happened. When Trish collected the dirty dishes from the bedroom and living room and stacked them in the sink, she couldn’t just leave them there soaking for a night as she usually did—she rinsed them right away and loaded them into the dishwasher. When she put two weeks of old newspapers into the recycling box, she thought, I’m being really nice not to leave these for the cleaning lady, and yet she wondered whether, in the future, Evgenia would take over that task. On the morning itself, Trish stripped the sheets from the bed and organized the things on Tim’s bureau, and, before she could stop herself, she had wet a sponge with Comet and run it over the bathroom sink. Polishing the mirror she caught sight of her face, red from exertion.
The doorman buzzed and Trish said giddily, “Yes! Send her up, please!” In Trish’s head a narrative had begun in which the cleaning lady (heavy and saturnine, with an air of the Old World), in addition to her cleaning duties, would set out little snacks for Trish, admonish her to eat more, not to wear such high heels; would tell her she’d freeze outside, in what she was wearing. Trish, meanwhile, would indulge the woman, with unexpected bonuses and thoughtful gestures: “Do you want this Vogue? I was going to throw it out.” The picture was so compelling that she was disoriented for a minute—thinking someone had gotten the wrong apartment—when she opened the door on a young woman she might have hung out with, in her single days, on a Friday night. The cleaning lady—the phrase no longer worked in Trish’s mind—was dramatically made up, with heavy eyeliner and long streaks of blush on both cheeks. Her white-blond hair was pulled back from black roots into a devil-may-care ponytail, and she seemed to be sucking on something—a piece of hard candy or a cough drop, which clacked against her teeth when she talked. Her outfit, when she took off her coat, made Trish look away, embarrassed: The girl was wearing a ruffled blouse and a miniskirt over tights and sling-back sandals.
“You sure you want to wear that?” Trish said doubtfully. “It’s kind of a dirty job, you know.”
“I have apron.” The young woman removed one from the large zippered black satchel she had brought and put it on.
The Meehans’ apartment was new since the honeymoon and Trish liked to show it off: the wall of plate-glass windows that faced the street; the eat-in kitchen decked out with gifts they’d been given from their registry—the standing mixer and top-of-the-line cappuccino maker, the cedar knife block filled with German steel. In the console on the shelf above the television stood a silver-framed picture of Tim and her cutting the cake at the wedding. Black-tie it had been, and she’d had five attendants to Tim’s two. She half expected a compliment but the girl was silent, offering only nods, and unsmiling ones at that, with the result that Trish felt compelled to keep up the conversation.
“So, how do you spell your name, Evgenia?” she asked politely. “I hope I’m pronouncing it right.”
Evgenia was squatting down to peer into the cabinet under the kitchen sink where the cleaning products were kept. “It is complicated—Russian name.”
“Oh, I know,” Trish cut her off. “Where are you from—Moscow?”
“No, no.” Evgenia’s voice was muffled. She withdrew her head from the cabinet and turned a face up to Trish that was sardonic in the extreme. “Every American say that to me! Every American think I from Russia. I am from Ukraine,” she said. “Former Soviet Union.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Look on map! You find.” Still squatting, Evgenia held up a box of Brillo pads and rattled it at Trish. “Empty.”
“Not a problem,” Trish said. “I’ll buy more.” She asked Evgenia how long she had been in America. When Evgenia said three years, Trish asked if she had come by herself, and Evgenia, straightening up, laughed aloud and said, “Oh, my God, no! I come with my mother, my father, my two brothers, and my husband.”
“You’re married?” said Trish.
Evgenia explained that everyone married young in Ukraine. “Not like here. I was married at seventeen,” she said, and it was clear from her intonation that she expected Trish to react with surprise, that she had developed, as Trish had noticed the savvier immigrants did, a sense of what went down big here—had perhaps herself learned to be impressed with the fact of her teenaged betrothal, where once she had not been.
“Wow!” Trish said gamely. “I just got married last year and I’m thirty-one.” She led Evgenia through the bedroom and into the renovated bath. “I still beat all of my friends, though,” she added quickly, so that Evgenia wouldn’t get the wrong idea. “A lot of them don’t even have boyfriends. They’ll be lucky to find someone by the time they’re forty. It’s different in New York. Women have careers, you know? Other priorities.”
“You work?” said Evgenia.
“No. I mean, not now,” Trish said, annoyed that she was flustered. “I mean—not anymore.” She mumbled vaguely about trying to get pregnant, though in fact Tim was bent on their enjoying themselves for a few more years—and on their paying off their debt first. “What about you?” Trish said firmly. “Do you have any kids?”
Evgenia shook her head.
“Well, maybe you will soon.” Trish felt like dropping the subject and was about to explain how the shower worked when Evgenia said, “No, not soon.” Confused, Trish looked at her, and Evgenia said, “I cannot.”
“You can’t—not?” Trish faltered.
“No.”
“Oh, my God.” Trish pressed the hand-shower nozzle into her thigh as she tried to summon some appropriate words. “I’m so sorry,” she said, swallowing. “God, I’m sorry I even brought it up.”
Evgenia wiped a finger along the inside of the tub, holding it up to show the grime. “You have Soft Scrub?”
Trish stared at her. “I think we ran out.”
“No Soft Scrub? Okay, next time,” Evgenia said, shaking the finger reprovingly at Trish. “And Brillo. Don’t forget.”
“Look, why don’t you just make a list, okay?” Trish told her. They came out into the bedroom, and then into the living/dining area. “Well, I guess I’ll take off,” Trish said briskly. She lingered a moment for the girl to ask her where she was going.
“See you later,” Evgenia said, waving, as she donned yellow rubber gloves.
“I think I’ll head over to the Met,” Trish said. “There’s supposed to be a good exhibit right now.”
But when she got outside it was gray and threatening rain. It seemed odd to Trish to go to a museum on a weekday morning; she couldn’t recall ever having heard about anyone’s doing so. Sheepishly she walked two blocks to the Starbucks and sat down with a latte, noticing with distaste that a dusting of crumbs and a wad of used napkins had been left on the table by previous customers.
TRISH HERSELF HAD never cleaned for money, but all through her teens she’d held tedious after-school jobs—babysitting mainly, some office work (stuffing envelopes for a state rep; typing and filing for a father/son dental practice)—and she knew how irksome and debilitating it was to have the mother, or the boss, lurking around, checking up on you, so you couldn’t even use the phone to call a friend and joke around or make the kids watch TV for five minutes just to alleviate the boredom. She considered those afternoons the most hateful, wasted hours of her life. Even now she would feel her face get hot when some acquaintance of Tim’s from B-school mentioned, as if it had been onerous, having had to go to “practice” every afternoon after school. Yet at the same time it could still cheer her, fifteen year
s out, to remind herself that she would never have to take another babysitting or filing job again.
Having whiled away nearly two full hours with coffee and errands, and having dawdled all the way home, Trish could have screamed when she finally returned and heard the television on in her apartment. She was exasperated in the self-conscious way that only killing time can make one, and as she stood outside the door listening, she became more and more enraged by the noise. Was it that Evgenia had carelessly forgotten to turn it off when she left? Or was she still working—could she possibly be? in a one-bedroom? and worked with the television on? In the case of the latter, Trish decided grimly, her key in the lock, she would say something right away. But when she came in, Evgenia was sitting on the couch with the remote control in her hand. Seeing her there confused Trish, and the apartment itself, which was fantastically clean and smelled of Murphy’s Oil Soap, confused her also and touched her somehow as well, so she swallowed what she was planning to say and exclaimed instead, “Wow, the place looks great!” She knew at once that by gushing, she was exposing herself as gullible and lacking in authority, but she couldn’t help it; she couldn’t hide the grin that had stolen across her face.
“I go now,” Evgenia announced. She clicked the TV off and crossed the room. She took her coat from where it was hanging in the coat closet by the door and put it on, unhurriedly buckling the belt around her waist. It was a red coat, cut long and gathered in the back, with a stand-up collar and two rows of gold buttons down the front that gave it a smart, military appearance.
