Clean Sweep

by Jane Heller

  One of the ways I kept my spirits up during my days at Bluefish Cove was to fantasize about murdering Melanie. Bizarre as it must sound, my homicidal daydreams helped me perform even the most menial tasks with gusto. For example, I’d be making Melanie’s bed and suddenly picture myself suffocating her with a pillow. Or I’d be scrubbing the bathroom sink and imagine holding her head under a sink full of water. I wasn’t proud of these thoughts, believe me. But they did help me pass the time.

  The other way I kept my spirits up was even more shameful: I fantasized about making love to Cullie Harrington. There I’d be, folding Melanie’s laundry, when all of a sudden I’d see Cullie’s face close to mine, his beard and mustache tickling my cheek, his lips murmuring, “My sweet Mrs. Koff. I’m sorry I acted like a jerk the last time I saw you. I don’t know what came over me. And I don’t love Hadley Kittredge. I love you. Marry me.” Pathetic, huh? I was so middle class, even my romantic fantasies were middle class: they always ended in marriage.

  What are you doing thinking about Cullie Harrington? I’d berate myself. You hate him and he hates you. I was much more comfortable fantasizing about murdering Melanie than lusting after Cullie. But I couldn’t control my thoughts any more than I could control the number of glass doors in Melanie’s house.

  Other distractions from my housekeeping job were the periodic newspaper assignments I got from Bethany. I’d been able to do my interviews for the paper on Mondays, my day off. One Monday I did a story on a professional surrogate mother who had come to Layton to speak to the women’s rights group that Julia had organized. Two weeks later, I interviewed a local woman who’d won a trip to Italy by entering a contest sponsored by the Ragu spaghetti sauce people. When I went to the newspaper to hand in my copy, Julia remarked how poorly I looked. “You lose weight, Koff?” she asked. “A little,” I said. “Let me take you to McGavin’s some night this week,” she offered. I thanked her but said I was busy. Go out for dinner? By the time I got home from a day of cleaning Melanie Moloney’s house, I had about as much energy as a dish rag. Besides, I’d managed to keep my secret from Julia, Bethany, and everyone else at the newspaper and didn’t want to blow it. I’d also managed to keep my work at the paper a secret from Melanie and I certainly didn’t want to blow that.

  I did have a close call, though. One morning Melanie informed me that she was having a small buffet luncheon for some media types from Manhattan. “You’ll serve,” she said, indicating that I’d be standing behind the buffet table and dishing out whatever was on the menu. At first, I welcomed the assignment; it meant a break from my normal routine of dusting, scrubbing, and vacuuming. It also meant I’d be interacting with some real, honest-to-goodness New York media types, maybe even the editor-in-chief of People magazine! But when Melanie told me the name of the catering company that was doing the luncheon, I nearly died. It was Soozie’s Delectable Edibles! Yes, Sandy’s first-and-soon-to-be-third-wife, Soozie the caterer-whore, was on her way over to Melanie’s house with her infamous Life ’n’ Healthy Chicken Salad!

  I broke out in a sweat. What if Soozie found out I was a housekeeper? She’d tell everybody in Layton. Hell, everybody in the whole world. “You’ll never guess who’s working as a maid,” she’d say. “Alison, Sandy’s second wife. Isn’t that a trip?” That’s how Soozie talked—in Sixties-Speak. She had never gotten over the fact that her parents didn’t let her go to Woodstock, so to compensate she often used words like “trip” and “far out.”

  I had to do something to avert this catastrophe. But what? I couldn’t let Soozie see me in my Hazel costume, I just couldn’t. Think of something! Think!

  “Alison, stop daydreaming. The caterer will be here any minute,” Melanie snapped. “Dust the furniture in the dining room and get the buffet table ready.”

  “I dusted the dining room furniture this morning,” I said.

  “Dust it again.”

  “Yes, Ms. Moloney.”

  I was spraying the dining room table with lemon Pledge when the back doorbell rang.

  “What are you waiting for, Alison. Get the door!” Melanie said.

  How could I get the door? Soozie would see me. “But Ms. Moloney. I have to finish dusting in here before your guests arrive,” I said.

  “Oh, all right,” Melanie said, obviously disgusted with my inability to perform two tasks at once.

  Melanie went into the kitchen and opened the service door for Soozie. I strained to hear them talking.

  “Hi, Miss Moloney. I’m from Delectable Edibles,” a chirpy voice said. “Where would you like me to put all the food?” Up your adulterous ass, I thought. Now what was I going to do?

  “Just leave everything here on the counter until my maid finishes up in the dining room,” I heard Melanie tell Soozie. “She should be through in a minute.”

  “Will you need me to stay for the luncheon?” Soozie asked.

  “No, my maid will serve the guests. Alison? Aren’t you done in there yet?” Melanie yelled.

  God, Melanie had used my name. I wondered if Soozie had a clue it was me. Why should she? There were probably plenty of maids named Alison, right? “Coming,” I said hoarsely, trying to disguise my voice. Soozie would know my voice. Over the years we’d seen each other at parties and run into each other at the beauty parlor and even talked to each other on the phone once or twice. Layton was a small town, after all, and you had to act like you could stand your husband’s ex-wife, even if you couldn’t.

  “May I use your bathroom?” I heard Soozie ask Melanie. “I’m pregnant and I seem to have to pee every hour on the hour.”

  Pregnant?

  “Congratulations,” Melanie said.

  “Thank you,” Soozie replied. “The child’s father and I are getting married very soon. We were just waiting for his divorce to go through before we told people about the baby. The whole thing is absolutely groovy, don’t you think?”

  I wanted to die. Sandy had never been interested in having children when he was married to me. Now he and Soozie were parents-to-be, and I was left out in the cold. Barren. Alone. Unloved. Tears sprang to my eyes. I tried to wipe them away with my dust rag, but that only made me sneeze. And sneeze. And sneeze.

  “What’s going on in there, Alison?” Melanie called out to me after six or seven of my sneezes.

  “I seem to have caught a cold,” I answered, wiping my eyes and blowing my nose.

  “Come into the kitchen anyway. I need you here,” Melanie commanded. The woman was all heart.

  What could I do? I had to go. My cover was about to be blown.

  I gathered myself up, took a deep breath, and walked into the kitchen with my head held high. When I got there, Soozie was still in the bathroom “peeing.” I was safe, for the moment.

  “Take the food and set it up in the dining room,” Melanie instructed me.

  I carried serving dishes of chicken salad and other cold entrees into the dining room. When I heard Soozie emerge from the bathroom, I froze.

  “Before I go, I just want to check on the food,” Soozie told Melanie in the kitchen.

  I heard their footsteps as they set out for the dining room together. They were coming. They were coming. They were here!

  Okay, I’m not proud of it, but here’s what I did when Melanie and Soozie entered the dining room: I hid in the china closet. Yes, as they looked over the “Delectable Edibles” on the buffet table, sampled a few forkfuls of chicken salad, and discussed the merits of potato salad made with vinaigrette as opposed to potato salad made with mayonnaise, I, Alison Waxman Koff, mistress of Maplebark Manor, squatted on the floor of the china closet and remained there, huddled under the bottom shelf in a tiny ball, wondering how my life had taken such a bizarre turn.

  “Everything looks great,” I heard Soozie say.

  “Yes, but the tortellini with pesto needs a serving spoon. I’ll have my maid bring one. Alison?” Melanie yelled. “Where is she?”

  I’m right here in the room with you, crouched and mise
rable at the bottom of this china closet, that’s where I am. I figured if I stayed in the closet long enough, eventually Soozie and Melanie would get bored with each other and go on with their day. Then I could go on with mine. All I had to do was stay perfectly still and perfectly silent.

  “Alison?” Melanie yelled again.

  “Maybe she’s upstairs,” Soozie volunteered.

  “Who knows. Good help is more than hard to find—it’s impossible to find,” said Melanie, my dear sweet employer.

  My legs were cramping and my back was in spasm, but I was almost out of the woods. Just a few seconds longer, then you can come out of the closet, I told myself. Suddenly, I had an overwhelming urge to sneeze. Oh, please. No. Not that. I pinched my nostrils. I counted to five. I prayed to God. Anything to stop the dreaded sneeze from ruining my life. Nothing worked. I sneezed—into my hands, if you must know. Fortunately, the technique muffled the sound. Unfortunately, the sheer force of the sneeze rattled the china on the shelf above my head.

  “What was that?” Soozie asked.

  “It sounded like it was coming from the china closet,” Melanie said.

  “Must be mice,” Soozie offered. “Everybody in Layton has a mice problem.”

  “If there are mice in that closet, I’m certainly not going in there. I’ll let my maid handle it. It’ll give that girl something to do,” said Melanie, who deserved much worse than mice.

  Soozie left. Melanie went back to her office. And I emerged from the china closet with snot on my hands and muscle cramps in my calves and thighs.

  I managed to carry on my duties as Melanie’s luncheon helper, but my hopes of networking with her high-powered media friends from New York were dashed when she never bothered to introduce me to a single one of them. The only exchanges I had with them were: “Can I get you another napkin?” Or: “Would you like another helping of chicken salad?” Not the stuff of major career opportunities.

  I was so wired when I got home that night that I couldn’t fall asleep. Instead of lying in bed, tossing and turning, I flipped on the light and decided to catch up on my magazine reading. I reached over to the night table and grabbed a handful of magazines I hadn’t had time to look at. I was about to dip into Vanity Fair when a cover blurb caught my attention: “Melanie Moloney Exposed—A Closer Look at the Queen of the Celebrity Exposé.” I found the article as fast as my fingers could turn the pages and spent the next half-hour digesting it. I couldn’t get enough. It seems I wasn’t the only one who found Melanie a trifle difficult. Every single person quoted in the gloriously mean-spirited article had a major gripe against her. Her fellow Chicago Sun-Times reporters complained that she couldn’t write worth a damn and didn’t deserve her success. Her friends from her pre-bestselling author days said she dropped them like a hot potato the minute she got famous. Her two ex-husbands reported that she was much too self-involved to make any man a good wife. A former secretary stated unequivocally that Melanie was the bitchiest woman she’d ever worked for. Among the bitterest of those named in the article was Melanie’s former agent, Mel Suskind. The president of his own small literary agency, Suskind & Associates, Mel had been with Melanie since the early days, when she was writing biographies of celebrities for five-figure advances. He recounted how, as soon as Melanie’s fourth book, Ann-Margret: Diary of a Sex Symbol, hit The New York Times hardcover bestseller list, she threw him over for a big-shot agent at ICM. “Someday she’ll get hers,” he said simply. Equally bitter was Roberta Carr, Melanie’s editor at Sachs & Singleton. One of America’s largest book publishers, Sachs & Singleton had forked over $3 million for the rights to publish Melanie’s last book, Reluctant Hero: The Unauthorized Biography of Charlton Heston, and had put another half-million dollars into promoting the book, which spent twenty-seven weeks on the Times list. Then Carr and her colleagues watched Melanie move to Davis House, a rival publisher, for a whopping $5.5 million advance for the Alistair Downs book. “There’s very little author-publisher loyalty these days,” Carr told Vanity Fair, “and Melanie Moloney is typical of the problem. It’s customary for publishers to wish departing authors well. But it’s hard to wish Melanie anything but her just deserts.”

  So I wasn’t the only person who fantasized about Melanie getting hers. She seemed to inspire vengeful thoughts in everybody.

  I was feeling relatively perky as I drove over to Bluefish Cove the next morning, probably because I was relieved that I had escaped running into Soozie and, therefore, managed to keep my life as a maid a secret.

  When I got to the house, Todd informed me that Melanie had gone into Manhattan for a meeting with her agent and wouldn’t be back until late afternoon. He also told me he was expecting a package from Federal Express and that I should bring it to him as soon as it arrived.

  I was upstairs mopping the floor in one of the guest bathrooms when I heard the doorbell ring. I put down my mop and hurried downstairs to answer the door. As I ran, I passed the hall mirror and caught a quick glimpse of myself. What a mess. My uniform was all twisted, my apron was falling down around my waist, and my hair, the ends of which had fallen into my bucket of Mr. Clean, was hanging limply in my face. Who cares, I figured. So the FedEx man sees me like this.

  I was almost at the front door when the bell rang again. “Hold your horses. I’m coming,” I yelled, a little winded. Couldn’t this guy wait two seconds?

  “All right. All right. I’m here,” I said, opening the door to find, not the FedEx man, but Cullie Harrington.

  I was so shocked to see him standing there—this man I’d been fantasizing about, this man whose imaginary words of love had gotten me through many a long workday—that I couldn’t do anything but gasp.

  There he was, the man I’d been desperately hoping to see again, and what was I wearing for the big reunion? A maid’s uniform. Now he would know I was a housekeeper. And once he knew, everybody would know. The whole charade would be finished, and so would my reputation in Layton.

  After an eternity of the most uncomfortable silence I’d ever endured, Cullie finally spoke. “Well, if it isn’t Mrs. Koff. Is it Halloween or are you and your friends dressing up for one of those charity affairs where the rich trade places with the poor for an evening?”

  I was still too stunned to speak. Quick! A joke! A joke! Don’t let him see how humiliated you are. Don’t let him know how much you care what he thinks of you. Quick! A joke!

  My mind searched for something witty and offhand to say, but nothing surfaced. Not a joke. Not a wisecrack. Nothing.

  “What? No snappy comeback?” Cullie teased. “Will the real Mrs. Koff please stand up, or at least step out of her little costume?”

  “It’s not a costume,” I said, looking down at my black maid’s shoes. Anything was better than meeting Cullie’s eyes.

  “Let’s see then,” he said, stroking his beard. “If it’s not a costume, it must be some new fashion statement: ‘the servant look,’ the designers are probably calling it. You people love those new fashion statements, don’t you?”

  “There you go again with that ‘you people’ stuff. What is your problem anyway?”

  “Problem? I don’t have a problem. I’m not the one who’s answering somebody’s door wearing a maid’s uniform. Are you going to tell me what you’re doing here?”

  “First, tell me what you’re doing here.”

  “I came to photograph Melanie Moloney’s house. Since she’s almost finished with her book, she’s putting the house on the market,” Cullie explained. “Okay, now it’s your turn.”

  “I didn’t know Melanie was selling the house,” I said.

  “Let’s get back to you, Mrs. Koff.”

  “My name is Alison. You can stop calling me Mrs. Koff.”

  “Right, Alison. So are you a friend of Melanie Moloney’s, Alison?”

  I thought for a second, then said with a straight face, “Yes, I am. Melanie and I go way back, ever since we went to journalism school together.” Never mind that Melanie was a g
ood twenty years older than I was.

  “You don’t say,” Cullie said skeptically.

  “Yes,” I pushed on. “Melanie and I have stayed friendly through the years, drawn as we both are to the art of reportage.”

  “I’ll bet,” Cullie said. “What made you come over to your good friend Melanie’s house and put on a maid’s uniform? Was it reportage or are you two into something kinky?”

  I rolled my eyes and gave Cullie my most disgusted look. “It just so happens I’m wearing this uniform because Melanie is giving a costume party next week, and I wanted to show her what I’d be wearing. The theme of the party is sixties sit-com characters. I’ll be coming as Hazel.” Yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket.

  “You people sure know how to have a good time,” Cullie smirked. “What’s Melanie going to dress up as? Mr. Ed?”

  “She hasn’t decided yet. We’re going to have dinner together tonight and discuss her—”

  I was just about to pile on the bullshit when Todd Bennett rolled his tubby body into the foyer and spoiled everything. “Is that my Federal Expreth package?” he interrupted us.

  “Uh, no, Todd. It’s someone to see Melanie,” I said. Now what was I going to do? My act was about to bomb.

  “Melanie’s not here,” Todd told Cullie, who didn’t want to leave his name but said he’d come back another time. “Oh, and Alithon,” Todd lisped before going back to his office, “I thpilled coffee on the rug. When you’re finished here, would you come in and clean it up?”

  That was it. I’d been found out. There was nothing more to do but be honest with Cullie. “Sure, Todd. I’ll be there in a minute,” I said.

  Todd went back to the office and Cullie and I were alone, face-to-face at Melanie’s front door.

  “What’s really going on here?” he asked.

  Just say it, Alison. Spit it out. Give somebody a straight answer for once. It’ll be a relief to tell the truth after leading a double life all these weeks.