Clean Sweep

by Jane Heller

  Melanie appeared to be considering my logic.

  “I still don’t like the idea,” she said. “You don’t have any experience taking care of someone else’s house. How do I know you can really clean?”

  There was only one way to prove to Melanie that I knew my way around a tidy toilet bowl. “If I had a good reference, you’d hire me, wouldn’t you?”

  “Probably. The other people I interviewed for this job acted like they’d never seen a nice house, let alone cleaned one. At least you didn’t faint when I showed you around.”

  “I didn’t faint when I saw your house because I live in a big house myself, a house I also clean myself. I promise you, I’ll treat your beautiful things as if they were my own.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Do you have twenty minutes?” I asked Melanie as I played my last hand.

  “Why?”

  “So I can give you that reference you wanted.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t have one.”

  “I do. It’s my house. Come with me.”

  After a few minutes of arm-twisting, I managed to persuade Melanie to take a ride over to Maplebark Manor.

  “How do I know you don’t have a housekeeper to do all this?” she asked after inspecting the place.

  “Now that’s a reference I can give you. Here’s the number of the Peruvian housekeeper who used to work for me.” I wrote Maria’s phone number on a piece of paper and handed it to Melanie. “She’ll confirm that I had to let her go and that I’ve been cleaning my own house ever since.”

  “This Maria’s had professional cleaning experience. Maybe I should hire her instead of you,” Melanie said.

  “I thought you wanted someone who could speak English.”

  Melanie pursed her lips and tapped her tiny foot on the floor. “I’ll try it,” she said finally.

  “You mean I’m hired?”

  “You’ll start next week,” she said. “Tuesday through Friday, eight-thirty to four-thirty. I’ll have the guard at the gatehouse issue you a pass.”

  “You won’t be sorry,” I said, grabbing Melanie’s little hand and pumping it enthusiastically as I walked her to the door. I could see it now: Alison Koff and Melanie Moloney, interviewing the world’s most illustrious celebrities, collaborating on bestseller after bestseller, fielding offers from television networks and movie studios…

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Melanie said, stopping at my front door. “What size are you?”

  “What size what?”

  “What size dress. I’ll need to order your maid’s uniform.”

  “My maid’s uniform?” The ad never said anything about a maid’s uniform. I was mortified.

  “Is there a problem?” Melanie said, her top lip curling into a nasty smile. No doubt about it: this woman had a sadistic streak. I had a feeling she was going to love making me bow and scrape.

  “No problem at all,” I managed, trying so hard to be a good sport. Up to that point, I’d been one. I’d stood outside Melanie’s front door, nearly freezing to death while she took her sweet time letting me in. I’d used the service entrance, just as she’d insisted. I’d invited her over to my spanking clean house so she could see for herself that I was qualified for the job. But all of a sudden, the idea of my being a housekeeper—no, maid—seemed totally implausible. What was I trying to prove anyway? That I could succeed at being somebody’s servant? Hell, I’d already proven that. I’d been my mother’s little doormat for years. Wait a minute: this wasn’t about being somebody’s servant, I reminded myself. This was about supporting myself instead of living off a man’s money. This was about solving my own problems, pulling myself out of my own messes. This was about surviving. “I’m a size six,” I told Melanie as I walked her out my front door.

  My mood wavered as I spent the weekend preparing for my new job as Melanie Moloney’s maid. On one hand, I was excited about having a place to go every day, after eleven years of working at home. On the other hand, I couldn’t stop obsessing about having to wear a maid’s uniform. That little piece of cloth seemed to symbolize how dramatically my life had plunged from the glory days of the eighties. I kept having nightmares about being “found out”—dreams in which I’d be out shopping when suddenly all the people I used to know would start pointing at me and laughing; then I’d look down to find that I wasn’t wearing the black gabardine Versace dress I’d put on that morning—I was wearing a black polyester maid’s uniform with nothing underneath! Not a bra, not panties, nothing! No matter how often I told myself I didn’t care what people thought of me, I couldn’t get past the fear that somebody might find out I was Melanie Moloney’s maid.

  I especially couldn’t stop thinking about my mother and what she would say if she knew I was going to work as a housekeeper. I felt as if I were betraying her, as if I were no longer the good daughter I had painstakingly tried to be. My guilt was so oppressive I could hardly breathe.

  By the time Tuesday morning rolled around, I was exhausted from all the worrying. Bleary-eyed, I drove over to Bluefish Cove at eight-ten, hoping to make it to Melanie’s service entrance at exactly eight-thirty.

  The security guard at the gatehouse remembered me from the previous week and said, “Hello, Alison. Here’s the pass Miss Moloney asked me to give you.” At least Melanie hadn’t changed her mind.

  I arrived at 7 Bluefish Cove right on time and knocked on the back door of the house. Melanie let me in, wearing the same black-and-mauve outfit she’d worn the week before and the same nauseating perfume.

  “Here’s your uniform,” she said before I’d even greeted her or taken off my hat and coat. “You can change in there,” she added, pointing to the maid’s room off the kitchen.

  My uniform turned out to be the very one from my nightmares—a black polyester number over which I was to wear a starched white apron. I was also given a pair of orthopedic-looking black shoes and a pair of white pantyhose. “I took a guess on your shoe size,” Melanie said.

  When I’d finished changing into my housekeeper’s costume, I took a good look at myself in the narrow full-length mirror that hung on the back of the maid’s room door. You look like Hazel, I thought glumly, reminding myself of the Shirley Booth character from the popular sixties’ sitcom. God, don’t let anyone find out about this, I prayed.

  During my first half-hour on the job, Melanie (“Ms. Moloney,” she said to call her) showed me where the cleaning supplies were and explained the order in which she expected me to clean the rooms. I was to begin upstairs in the master bedroom and bath, then do the guest rooms and baths, regardless of whether there had been any guests. Then I was to clean the kitchen, dining room, living room, and exercise room. At that point, Melanie would break for lunch and I was to clean her office. After that, I was to clean the kitchen and dining room all over again, whether she made a mess of them or not. Along the way, I was to take care of any laundry that had found its way into the laundry chute. I was to change the sheets on Melanie’s bed every Tuesday morning. I was instructed not to answer the phone unless Melanie specifically asked me to, nor was I permitted to use the phone except for emergencies. I was to be paid in cash at the end of each workday. And I would not be given either my own key to the premises or the code to the burglar alarm. “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” Melanie said without apology. “It’s just that there’s a very confidential manuscript in this house. Very confidential and very valuable.”

  Right, but what I really wanted to know was would I get a lunch break at this job? My stomach was growling and it was only eight forty-five.

  “If you think you’ll have time,” Melanie responded when I posed the question. “My previous girls didn’t have a minute to eat. They barely finished their work by four-thirty.”

  Swell. Maybe I’d lose so much weight working for Melanie that I’d no longer fit into my uniform and she’d have to let me wear something else.

  Before I started my chores, Melanie took me into her office, whic
h, she explained, was kept locked when she wasn’t using it. It was a large, impeccably organized room containing basic office furniture—desk, chairs, files, etc.—plus a long table on which sat dozens of boxes of index cards, cards I assumed contained every bit of dirt that could possibly be dug up on Alistair P. Downs. Conspicuously absent from the room was a computer; Melanie, as everyone who followed her career knew, was computer-phobic and produced all her manuscripts on a good old-fashioned Smith Corona.

  There was a short, pudgy, middle-aged man sitting at the long table in the room, but Melanie didn’t bother to introduce him. How rude, I thought. Then I remembered I was The Help, and nobody talked to The Help, at least not in Layton.

  “You’re the new maid,” said the man finally, as I was turning to leave Melanie’s office.

  No shit, Sherlock. “Yes, I am,” I smiled. “My name is Alison.”

  “This is Todd Bennett,” Melanie explained. “He’s my research associate and he’ll be here most days.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said to Todd, who had pockmarked skin and curly brown hair and weighed close to 250 pounds. I’ll bet old Todd gets a lunch break, I thought enviously.

  “Nyth to meet you, too,” Todd lisped, but he didn’t go out of his way to be friendly. Oh well, who needed new friends? I did, but that was beside the point.

  I carried my bucket of cleaning supplies upstairs and set it down on the floor of the master bedroom. Then I walked over to Melanie’s king-size bed and began to strip off the mauve-and-gray bed linens. I was about to pull off the bottom sheet when I noticed several crusty yellow spots on the sheet. I thought a minute until it dawned on me: Melanie’s got a boyfriend. It had been so long since I’d been with a man, let alone had sex with one, that I’d almost forgotten what semen-stained sheets looked like. Was Melanie getting it on with Todd? She was so frail and he was so chubby that I couldn’t picture them Doing It for the life of me. But you never could tell what attracted people to each other. She did say he was in the house a lot.

  While I finished stripping the bed I had to laugh at myself. Was this what maids did? Examine people’s bed linens and speculate about their sex lives? Was that what Maria did when she worked for me and Sandy? If so, she must have been disappointed; Sandy and I were way too busy acquiring antiques, clothes, and cars to have anything so purposeless as sex.

  I rolled up the sheets and tossed them down the laundry chute. Then I picked up the bucket of cleaning supplies and began to clean the room. Every few minutes Melanie would stick her platinum-blonde head in. “Don’t use wax on the dresser.” “Don’t use that abrasive on the sink.” “Don’t leave streaks on the mirror.” She was making me a nervous wreck. If she kept interrupting my work every five minutes I’d never get out of there by four-thirty.

  As it turned out, I didn’t finish cleaning Melanie’s house until seven-thirty that night, and she refused to pay me for the extra three hours of work. “You’ll be paid for the work you do, not for the amount of time you do it in. If you want to be out of here earlier, you’ll just have to work faster,” she said.

  I fell asleep the minute I got home. No eating dinner. No watching TV. No returning my mother’s three messages. The first one said: “Hello, Alison. This is your mother. It’s one-thirty in the afternoon. You haven’t called me in a week.” The second one said: “Hello, Alison. This is your mother. It’s two-thirty in the afternoon and my friends at the club say their daughters call them every day.” The third one said: “Hello, Alison. This is your mother. It’s three-thirty in the afternoon and your lack of attentiveness is something about which I am very angry.” So my mother was angry. What else was new? I couldn’t remember ever being so tired, physically and mentally. But before I drifted off to unconsciousness, I took one more look at the crisp green bills that rested on my night table—all $200 of them. Sweet dreams, I wished myself as I turned out the light.

  Chapter 7

  If I thought life as Melanie Moloney’s housekeeper would get easier as the weeks went by, I was wrong. Melanie turned out to be more than just an exacting boss: she was The Boss from Hell. If I cleaned the toilet bowl in the master bathroom first thing in the morning, she’d tell me to clean it again before I left in the afternoon. If she wanted me to polish her silver, she’d wait until I was just about to leave for the day and then tell me. She’d make me get on my hands and knees to scrub the kitchen floor, instead of letting me use a sponge mop; then she’d eat lunch at the kitchen table, leave a stack of dirty dishes in the sink, and make me scrub the kitchen floor yet again. Worst of all was what I came to call her “Carpet Torture.” After I’d finish dusting the furniture in every room, I’d vacuum the white wall-to-wall carpeting that covered the floors throughout most of the house. I’d just be putting the vacuum cleaner away when she’d tap me on the shoulder, point to some invisible spot on the carpet, and say, “It’s going the wrong way.” “What do you mean?” I asked when the problem arose for the first time. “The nap of the carpet should go in one direction. I don’t like it to look crisscrossed,” she explained.

  You’d think, with such a “hands-on” approach to running her household, Melanie wouldn’t have time to write and research her books. Well, let me tell you a dirty little secret: Melanie Moloney didn’t have time to write and research her books—Todd Bennett did. One of the first revelations I uncovered during my stint as Melanie’s housekeeper was that Todd Bennett did most of the work on the books—and got none of the credit. He was the one who toiled away at 7 Bluefish Cove, while Melanie basked in the literary spotlight.

  Sometimes, when she was out being interviewed, taking a business meeting, or having her hair done, Todd and I would sit in her office and chew the fat. He wasn’t nearly as standoffish as he’d seemed that first day, just overworked and underappreciated.

  “We were both at the Chicago Thun-Times,” he explained when I asked how he came to work for Melanie. “She told me she was writing a biography of Dean Martin and asked if I’d like to help her. I’ve been her collaborator ever thince. Or should I say ghostwriter.” That last word was said with unabashed bitterness.

  “So you’re the one who actually writes the books. I’m really impressed, Todd,” I gushed. I had an idea that by flattering Todd I’d get him to tell me things. He struck me as someone who’d never been flattered as a child. He still had the look of the fat, pimply kid who was always the last one picked for the baseball team and never really got over it.

  “Yeth, I’m the one who actually writes the books and gets zero credit,” he admitted. “Anyway, everything’s going to change with the next book. I’ll be getting my due with this one.”

  “You mean the Alistair Downs book?”

  “Yeth.”

  “Your name will be on the cover along with Melanie’s?”

  “You got that right. My name will be on the cover—and up there on the bestseller list, right next to hers. She and I have a deal.”

  “Hey, that’s great,” I said, thinking of my own literary aspirations. If Todd Bennett could move from newspaper reporter to bestselling biographer, why couldn’t I? “By the way, how is the book coming along?”

  “It’s just about finished. We expect to deliver it to our publisher in a couple of weeks.”

  “Wow. That’s really exciting. Is it going to be a shocker like the last ones Melanie—sorry, you and Melanie—wrote?”

  “Let’s just say people all over the world will view Alistair P. Downs in a new light.”

  A new and not very flattering light, I was sure. “Any chance I could sneak a look at the manuscript?” I asked Todd.

  “No way,” he said.

  “Is that it over there?” I said, pointing to a carton containing what appeared to be over a thousand typewritten pages. It was sitting on the floor next to Melanie’s desk and probably weighed a ton.

  “Yeth, but don’t get any ideas. Melanie would have a fit if you went near it.”

  I stared at the manuscript longingly. “Then how ab
out giving me one little tidbit from the book, Todd? Tell me something really juicy about Alistair, please? I promise not to tell a soul.”

  “Not on your life,” he scolded me. “We’ve got a big first serial sale to People magazine. Nothing about the book breaks until they break it.”

  “Aw, come on, Todd. Just one little morsel.”

  “Well, I guess I could tell you about the time Alistair threatened to—”

  Just as Todd was about to share what I assumed was an eye-opener from the book, Melanie walked into the office. “What’s going on here?” she demanded. It was amazing how much mileage she got out of that little Betty Boop voice.

  Todd and I flinched like two little schoolchildren who’d been caught after writing dirty words on the blackboard. “We weren’t doing anything,” I said, sounding like a five-year-old.

  “You’re damn right you weren’t doing anything,” Melanie sneered. “You were supposed to be working. Both of you!”

  I gathered my bucket of cleaning supplies and scurried out of the office, leaving Todd to pacify Melanie. If they were indeed lovers, which I still hadn’t determined, he’d find a way to calm her down.

  To punish me for gossiping with Todd instead of doing my housework, Melanie made me wash all the sliding glass doors in the house, inside and out, which, on a frigid February day, was no picnic. She could be downright cruel at times. Even vicious. Yes, she was paying me very well. And yes, if I didn’t like it I could always quit. But I’d made a deal with myself: I would continue to work for Melanie, no matter how awful she was, until I’d made enough money to pay the Layton Bank & Trust Company a nice chunk of the mortgage payments I owed them, and maybe even stave off the foreclosure on Maplebark Manor. I would stick it out no matter how battered and broken I felt at the end of each day. I would hang on until something happened to change my fortunes.