by Edeet Ravel
I love how no one is gross on your planet, Xanoth, and you don’t even have a word for disgusting because you don’t know what it is. Here on Earth it’s very different.
For one thing, no one in that house flushes the toilet. I don’t understand that part. I don’t get how they don’t mind going to the toilet and being forced to see other people’s dumps. They have four bathrooms and it’s the same in all of them.
But that’s just a small detail. The whole house is a lunatic asylum, dark, filthy, with a million old appliances and tools and probably torture instruments lying all over the place. Just piles of strange things on the floor, which you have to step over as you walk. There’s a TV screen the size of a whole wall in the living room and flat screen TVs in every room. They have locks on the outside of all the kids’ doors, so the kids can get locked in when they’re bad, and their rooms are full of skulls and pet snakes and scorpions in jars and posters from every horror movie ever made, including some they drew themselves.
On top of all that, the place is teeming with cockroaches, and it’s a new house. It’s new and enormous and probably cost three million dollars, but it’s even more wrecked than our building. The whole house smells because of the weird snakes and rotting food, and because of their chihuahua, who sometimes goes in the corner and no one bothers cleaning it up. When no one’s home the chihuahua goes to a daycare for dogs, so at least he has a break from the family.
The only time I cleaned this house before was on Saturday, when most of them were home. I won’t even try to describe what that was like, with the chihuahua going completely crazy, and every single TV on a different station, plus they put on music, plus they shouted nonstop.
There’s three boys and a girl. One of the boys and the girl are twins, I think, around ten, and the other two boys are older. They were all fighting with each other and with their parents. None of their arguments made sense. It’s like they were all talking about different things, but they acted as if they were on the same topic.
I spent the whole day hiding in the laundry room. Even the laundry room had this big poster of a giant stuffing the arm of a small man inside his mouth. He’s already bitten off the head and there’s blood everywhere. The poster was from an exhibition of an artist called Goya. The one art poster they have, and it has to be of a cannibal eating a human head. I had to concentrate the whole day on not looking at it.
I did a million loads of laundry, filling the machine, then the dryer, then folding everything. In between, I cleaned the laundry room. That kept me busy until it was time to go. They didn’t care what I did. I think they all have ADD.
After that Saturday, I didn’t want to go back, so when Mom was sick I just called and said she wasn’t coming. I wouldn’t have gone today either if it was a Saturday, but on Thursdays the kids are at school and the parents are at work and the dog’s at daycare.
It’s hard to get to their house. They live in TMR, which is a rich people’s area, and the bus doesn’t run on most of the streets, probably because everyone in TMR has cars. It’s nine blocks from the bus stop to the Dixlers. By the time I got there, I could barely move my fingers to unlock the door. They keep the key under a fake rock next to a fake plant. Obviously they could never keep a real plant alive.
There isn’t much you can do in a place like that, and there’s no point anyhow, because they wouldn’t notice. All you can do is fill the sink with soap and water and collect the dishes and ashtrays from all over the house and let them soak in batches and then wash them.
When the dish rack was full, I took a towel out of the closet to put more dishes on. The towel was covered with dog hair and gross stains, like dried mud only yellow, and it smelled like barf from hell. I used it anyhow. It’s not my problem if that’s how they want to live. I’m not the one who has to eat off those dishes. I didn’t even touch them. I brought Mom’s rubber gloves with me and believe me I kept them on.
After the dishes were done, I went around the house and collected apple cores and food containers and other garbage in a big garbage bag. I couldn’t even look at the things I was throwing out. I knew there was a lot more under the beds, but probably even they’re scared to look there. As far as cleaning, it’s impossible. You’d have to get rid of all the junk first.
For lunch I ate a bag of cookies I found. It was safe, because it was still sealed from the store, so the cockroaches couldn’t get inside. They have cases of bottled water and the bottles are also sealed, so that was safe too.
Then I opened some cans of corn and peas and baked beans and I ate them straight from the can after scrubbing a spoon with an SOS pad. Everything in the fridge was past the due date. Even the ice cream in the freezer tasted like it had gone bad. I took one bite and had to spit it out in the sink. It tasted like slimy dust.
They left me a note on the counter asking me to do laundry. It was strange, because the wrong words were underlined. It said COULD YOU PLEASE DO THE LAUNDRY IF YOU HAVE TIME? THANKS!
What weirdos. Even their notes are weird.
So anyhow, after doing all the dishes and collecting the garbage I went to the laundry room, but when I picked up a bunch of laundry to put it in the machine, all these horrible slimy bugs began slithering out, and suddenly I thought why for the love of Jesus should I do this? It’s completely insane to ask someone to clean a house like this, unless you pay them about a hundred times the regular price.
So I took the $60 on the table and I left a note saying SORRY, MY MOTHER CAN’T COME ANYMORE. I should have underlined my. Or any. Good luck to them finding some other sucker.
When I got home I took a really long shower and shampooed my hair and then I soaked my jeans and shirt in the tub with detergent. I was glad I didn’t smash the faucets with a hammer. The shower was working a bit better this time. At least the water didn’t keep going cold on me.
Beauty wanted to dip her paw in the water where my clothes were soaking, but I took her out of the bathroom because I didn’t want her to get contaminated. Whenever I’m having a bath, or anything’s soaking in the tub, she gets on the ledge and dips her paw in the soapy water and licks the water off her paw. That’s also how she drinks from her bowl. She dips her paw in the water and licks it. She can do it very fast when she’s thirsty.
What she most likes is to lick water right off my legs or feet. It’s so cute. So like if I’m in the bath, she hops on the ledge and I take my foot out for her to lick off all the water with her rough tickly tongue, and then I dip it in again and put it out for her again. I love when she does that. She can do it for a whole hour.
After my shower, I put on a clean shirt and sweat-pants. I have about 30 shirts, all of which I bought in the men’s section at Value Village. They have thousands of shirts coming in all the time, and you can find really nice ones if you go regularly. I like denim, corduroy, flannel or plain cotton if it isn’t too thin. I like plaid if they’re purple and olive or blue and gray. The important thing is that they’re 100% cotton. I have six pairs of jeans for depending on my weight, also from VV, but they were harder to find. Three are duplicates, because jeans take forever to dry. While one pair is drying, I can wear the duplicate.
I don’t know what I’m going to do, Xanoth. I have to come up with something, but I can’t think right now. I have to empty my brain of that house first. I’ll see if anything’s on TV.
Yours forever,
Fern
Friday
November 23
Hi Xanoth,
Today was an incredibly messed-up day.
I did the Friday place. It’s three doors down from the Dixler house. That’s how Mom got the job. The Dixlers recommended her, or else this family recommended her to the Dixlers. I forget which one came first.
This family is the opposite of the Dixlers. Their house is like a palace. I rang the bell, because sometimes the mom is home and sometimes she isn’t. No one answered, so I let myself in. They have a special lock that you can only open with a code. The code is
0000. Spooky.
The house is clean but messy. They have three teenage girls, and those kids have everything. They have half a shopping mall in their rooms, except for the youngest. Her room is mostly empty, but it’s still beautiful, with Japanese paintings on the wall and a four-poster bed and her collection of carved boxes and tiny glass animals. The other two girls probably don’t even know what they have. There are laptops all over the house, and all sorts of other computer-type machines that look like they’re from the future. The father makes them or invents them or something.
The parents have money to burn. There’s even a bowl of loonies and toonies on the hall table, in case they run out of change.
The furniture is the kind you see in ads for fancy hotels, all shiny and curvy, with gold along the edges. You have to take your shoes off before you go in.
The oldest sister, Debbie, left a million instructions on the kitchen table about cleaning the furniture and all the different floors and carpets. She put the bottles and things on the table, and she explained what to use on what, in very neat handwriting, with words underlined, as if Mom was stupid and hadn’t been cleaning their house for years.
That note got me so mad I wanted to write something sarcastic on the paper and just walk out. Like, SORRY, BUT THESE INSTRUCTIONS WERE TOO COMPLICATED FOR ME. GOTTA GET BACK TO MY FINGER-PAINTING.
But I was already there and I need the money, so I decided to ignore the note. At least she underlined the right words.
I started in the kitchen. When the mom’s home I have to watch what I eat, but when she’s out, like today, I can dive right in. They have a whole room off the kitchen where they store food, and they have like an entire supermarket there, including a freezer the size of a fridge. A lot of the stuff is organic. That means no pesticides, which I know you don’t have on your planet, Xanoth, but here they put pesticides on everything, unless you pay double and then you can buy without.
I heated up a pesto pizza and part of a BBQ chicken, and then I sampled some salads from the fridge. They had six different salads, the kind you get at bakeries or delis. For dessert I had some tiny pastries and a big bar of chocolate with almonds and a few slices of a mixed berry pie. They didn’t have chocolate milk, but they had chocolate powder from Switzerland, which I had with milk.
Finally I got to work. I started off with the kitchen, mostly doing dishes and wiping the counter. Everything wipes clean in that house. Then I did the bathrooms. There’s always a lot of dirt behind toilets, for some reason. Then I emptied the garbage pails in all the rooms.
I was bringing back the pail to one of the bedrooms when suddenly I couldn’t do a thing. I couldn’t move. I was going to make the bed, but I sat down instead, on the soft aqua duvet, and I looked around.
The bedroom was the middle girl’s. She’s really pretty, with dark hair and a big happy smile, and she has all these photos over the bed of her and all her friends hugging and laughing. A lot of the photos are from some kind of horse place, probably a horse camp. She looks around 15 or maybe 16. On top of having parents and a huge house and everything money can buy, she has a million friends.
Her name’s Linden. We actually met once. It was in June, right before school ended, and she came home just as I was leaving. She didn’t act like a rich person or a snob or anything. Maybe she felt sorry for me, or maybe she’s one of those freak nice kids.
She said, “Hi, are you Felicity’s daughter?” and I mumbled, yeah, thinking she would continue past me, but she stood there and went on talking. She said, “Is your mom OK?” and I said, “Just a migraine,” and she said, “Hold on, hold on.”
She ran upstairs and came back with pills. She said, “These are great for migraines. They really work. They’re prescription but anyone can take them.”
I looked up at her and I saw how pretty she was, shorter than me but skinny, with this friendly smile and big greenish eyes and black eyebrows. Her mom’s from New York and she’s famous. She writes all these books, like Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover, Fifty Ways to Stay in Shape, Fifty Ways to Lose Weight, even though everyone knows there’s only one way to lose weight, which is eat less. She’s very hyper and she travels a lot. She doesn’t have the same last name as her husband. He’s Fernández and she’s Catchlove. Maybe it’s a pen name.
I took the pills and said thanks. She was watching me put on my shoes, so I made some joke about my size 10 feet. She laughed and said, “You remind me of our canoeing instructor at this camp I went to. Annie. Everyone liked her.”
I couldn’t think what to say. I still couldn’t tell if she was nice or just feeling sorry for me, or both. She said, “I hope Felicity feels better,” and I said thanks and started to go, but she asked, “What school do you go to?” I said I went to Sunnyview and she said, “I go to Royal Vale but I hate it. I might switch to Sunnyview.”
I looked at her like she was crazy, because no one rich goes to Sunnyview. It’s totally ghetto. I said, “If you don’t mind being mugged on the back stairs,” and she laughed again.
Then I said bye and got out of there before she changed her mind about being nice. You never know when a kid might switch from nice to mean, so I figured end on a high note or whatever.
Those pills really worked, by the way. Mom took them until they ran out. I told her to ask for more, but she didn’t. She never asked for anything.
Anyhow, I sat there on Linden’s bed and suddenly I just couldn’t go on cleaning. I stared at this ceramic sign on her door. It has her name in fancy old-type print, and on top of her name there’s a close-up of a beautiful woman with a white face and dark hair and curvy red lips and huge blue eyes. She’s holding three tiny white flowers in her long fingers and she has faded gold flowers in her hair.
I can’t even describe how jealous I was, looking at that sign, and then at everything in the room, like perfume bottles and scrapbooks and handmade stationery and a million amazing beads in little boxes and a million pens and markers and scarves and velvet purses and a white board that you write things on. On the board it said FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT, WHEREUNTO THOU ART ALSO CALLED. Kind of random, but who knows. Her closet is walk-in and it’s crammed with clothes and shoes and games and a lot of other junk.
I tried to imagine what it was like to have a normal life with a big van and parents and sisters. To have that reality.
Suddenly I wanted to steal something. I couldn’t take something they might notice, like a ring. I’d be too scared. Rich people have power. They’d call the police and the police would find out that Mom was dead and I’d have to go to a home for delinquents. But I could take something small, like a bar of rosemary and mint soap.
Mrs. Johnston said everyone has a perfect soul to start with, and your soul protects you and guides you in life. But if you steal, it’s like someone took a bite out of your soul, and the hole stays forever and can never be fixed. No matter how many good things you do after that, you’ll always walk around with a hole, even when you’re sixty. And the more holes you have, the more you’ll make bad decisions and do stupid things.
So in the end I decided I wouldn’t steal, but I realized I couldn’t ever come back to that house. I was too jealous.
I made all the beds and tidied as fast as I could but I didn’t dust or vacuum. I hate vacuuming, and the carpets looked fine to me.
I took the $60 and left a note saying the same thing I told the dirty people – that my mother couldn’t come anymore. I said she was sick.
Then I decided to take a bag of food and a box of chocolate truffles, because Debbie’s note said HELP YOURSELF TO LUNCH, so all I was doing was making my lunch bigger. I also took two toonies from the bowl for bus fare, because they always paid for Mom’s bus. I still have my pass, but they don’t know that.
I was too tired when I got home to think about anything. I had a nap for around three hours, with Beauty right against my back, purring away like crazy.
It was freezing today, for a change. It also snowed, and this time the snow
didn’t melt when it hit the ground. Winter has officially started.
Tomorrow I’ll take some videos out of the library and spend the day vegging out on the sofa.
If I lived on your planet, Xanoth, we’d have breakfast every morning on the lawn, surrounded by tulips and purple butterflies. We’d have real orange juice and fresh rolls right from the oven with butter melting all over them.
Yours forever,
Fern
Saturday
November 24
Hi Xanoth,
All night the bikers next door were having a party, and apart from the horrible music, the doors kept banging with druggies going in and out. I couldn’t sleep, so I read until like five in the morning, when they all collapsed, probably in a drug coma, and it got quiet. I slept most of the day.
I got up because Beauty was hungry. She began reaching up to my night table and playing with my pen so it would fall to the floor and make a noise, but like it wasn’t her fault. She’s so adorable.
After I filled her plate I made tea. I sat down on the sofa with the tea and chocolate cookies from Linden’s house. It was too late to get videos. During the week the library’s open late, but on Saturdays it closes at 5:00. I wasn’t really in the mood for going out anyhow. It’s still snowing, and they said on the radio it’s minus ten with the wind chill.
So I just sat there staring into space and stroking Beauty and trying to figure out what to do with my life.
I used to want to look after horses or be a detective. I think I’d be good at solving crimes. I used to imagine all the ways I’d trick people into telling the truth. But you have to go to college to be a detective. As for looking after horses, I don’t even think a job like that exists.
If I had looks, I’d try to marry someone rich, or if I was brainy I could be a lawyer or something like that, but those two are totally out, unfortunately.
