by Sarah Dessen
The office of Calvander’s, in the opposite direction, was the other center of activity. All morning long, people had been coming and going: Mimi, of course, even though she was supposed to be off her feet. Oxford, wiping down the glass door with Windex and weeding the sparse garden. I even glimpsed both Taylor and April popping in before they walked off down the street, out of sight. Between the constant activity of both the beach and the office, I felt even more frozen where I sat on the steps.
Getting used to this place, I finally wrote back to Bridget.
What’s the boy situation?
Immediately, I had a flash of Roo the day before, shirtless, holding out a hand to me at the raft. That gap in his teeth. Which was ridiculous, I knew.
All related to me. Or might as well be.
Seriously?
Just then, I saw Mimi coming down the motel sidewalk, pushing a cleaning cart. She now wore a Velcro brace on one knee and had the office phone between her ear and shoulder as she stopped by a door marked 7 and pulled a ring of keys from her pocket. She let herself in, and a moment later the front blinds were rising, revealing a streaky window.
I thought of how I’d offered help to Trinity earlier and the way she’d so easily grouped me with the guests now out on the beach. She’d said it was Mimi who made this clear, and possibly she had. But maybe sometimes you had to ask twice. I walked over.
“No kidding,” I heard her saying as I approached the door to room seven. “In a perfect world, my body wouldn’t be breaking down. But this is the world we’re in.”
The room was dim, and it took my eyes a second to adjust. Once they did, I saw the walls were made of cinder block painted white, the carpet a dated flat orange. There were two double beds, both stripped, a rattan bedside table between them. The TV was one of those ancient kinds, huge and mounted up high on the wall, a bunch of cords snaking out of the back. Against the far wall was a small fridge and stovetop, a microwave and a sink, three skinny cabinets above. The only other furniture was two faded canvas chairs, and between them a low table with a flyswatter and an ashtray on it. Who even smoked inside anymore?
“. . . okay, well, keep me posted,” Mimi said as she stepped out of what had to be the bathroom. Her arms were full of towels, which she dumped onto a pile of sheets already under the TV. “I’d better run. We’ve got two check-ins today plus housekeeping. Okay. Bye.”
She sighed as she hung up, still not seeing me. I didn’t want to startle her, so I knocked on the door lightly. When she didn’t hear me, I did it again.
“Oh, hey,” she said, breaking into a smile. “You need something?”
“No,” I replied. “I just . . . I heard you could use some help.”
“I always need help,” she said, starting toward the door. Her brace creaked with each step. “It’s an ongoing condition in a resort town. But nothing you can do, I’m afraid.”
I stepped aside as she came out to the cart, grabbing a stack of paper bath mats and a handful of individually wrapped soaps. “I can clean. I’m actually pretty good at it.”
She looked at me. “Oh, honey. You don’t want to do that. Motel work is gross.”
As if to emphasize this point, Trinity emerged from room six, carrying a plunger. “Got out the clog, not that it was pretty. There’s a damn sign saying not to flush anything other than toilet paper. Can’t people read?”
“Shhh,” Mimi told her.
“Nobody’s listening to us.” She leaned the plunger against the cart. “You have linens yet?”
“Nope,” Mimi replied. “Grab some, would you? Get them for six too, we’ll do all the beds at once.”
Trinity nodded, then turned, walking to a nearby door that said STAFF ONLY and pushing it open. As she did, the smell of chlorine bleach filled the air, along with the banging of what sounded like a dryer.
Mimi turned back to me. “Why don’t you walk down to the Station, see what’s going on there? There’s usually a group at the arcade or the snack bar.”
She turned me down so easily; it was frustrating. “I can help you,” I said, emphasizing the words this time. “Really.”
“Honey, I don’t want you to,” she replied. I felt unexpectedly hurt, hearing this. Which must have shown on my face, because she added, quickly, “Saylor, you haven’t been here in over ten years. I want you to enjoy it. That’s what your mom would have wanted, too.”
Trinity walked past me, carrying a stack of folded linens, and went into room seven, dropping them onto the bed closest to the door. On the cart the phone started to ring and Mimi picked it up, just as a white van that said ARTHUR AND SONS WINDOWS pulled up to the office.
“Hello? Oh, hey, Tom. Yes, it’s unit ten. Okay. Meet you there in five minutes.” She glanced at the van, then sighed again. “Lord, and there’s Artie coming for an estimate. Everything’s happening at once today.”
The man in question was climbing out of the van now, carrying a clipboard. He lifted a hand in our direction, and Mimi, looking stressed, waved back. As she started making her way to meet him, I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it. Three times might have been the charm, but it could also mean not taking a hint.
“Why do you really want to help?”
I turned around to face Trinity. “Why?”
“Come on,” she said. “You’re the spoiled rich cousin and everyone’s been told to make sure you have fun here.”
I’d been tiptoeing around her so much the flare of temper I felt, hearing this, was welcome. “Not by me,” I said, an edge to my voice.
“Who cares? Why not just kick back and enjoy yourself? I would.”
“Well, that’s you,” I told her. She raised her eyebrows. “Look, you don’t have to like me or the fact I’m here. But don’t pretend you know me. Mimi let me come stay here with zero notice. The very least I can do is help her out when she needs it.”
“Yeah, but have you ever actually held a job?”
I’m only seventeen, I wanted to say. Just as I thought this, though, I realized she’d probably been working for years. Things were different here. Out loud I said, “I can help you, if you’ll let me. It’s up to you.”
She looked at me for a second, and I leveled my gaze back at her. Finally she said, “Go by the office and tell Mimi you need the keys to room ten. Then go let Tom in. Don’t give her a choice.”
“Okay,” I said, surprised at how victorious I felt. “Then what?”
“You need something else?”
“What I need is to not feel I’m just sitting around doing nothing while she’s working on her bad knee,” I told her. “That’s something I’m pretty sure my mom wouldn’t have wanted.”
She glanced out the door, toward the office. “Okay. Come back here after. I’ll show you how to do the beds.”
I nodded, then started down the sidewalk. Of course she hadn’t denied not liking me, not that I really expected her to. But I’d take her offer. Since arriving, I’d felt like not family and not a guest, the sole inhabitant of this weird place in between. It felt good to have a job and task at hand. Like the chaos that was this trip could actually get a bit more organized, and I might just find my place in it.
Seven
“You know, it’s not exactly that I don’t like you.”
“No?” I asked Trinity, spraying down the mirror in front of me, then starting to wipe it from the center out, as she’d showed me earlier.
“Not really.” She added two folded dish towels to the dish rack, hanging them just so. “It’s more the idea of you.”
I looked over at her. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“It’s not supposed to make you feel anything,” she replied. “It’s just the truth.”
“You called me the spoiled rich cousin,” I pointed out.
“Okay, well, I can see how that might have seemed bitchy.”
Might? I thought. But I stayed quiet, taking my annoyance out on a stubborn streak.
“But look at it fr
om my point of view,” she continued. “Here I am, hugely pregnant and uncomfortable—”
“Not my fault,” I pointed out quietly.
“—and alone, because my fiancé is still deployed even though he was supposed to be back last month,” she continued. “And I’m on my feet all day doing this incredibly physical job, because no one else but my grandmother wants to hire someone almost eight months along at the beginning of summer.”
“Again, not my fault,” I told her. “Also technically not legal.”
“And then,” she went on, spraying some cleaner with jabs of the bottle, “here you come, with your hot dad in a fancy car, just to chill out for a while and take it easy. And we’re told that, specifically. That you are here to have a good time, like that’s our responsibility.”
I turned to look at her, surprised. “You think my dad’s hot?”
She shrugged. “Yeah.”
Ugh. I made a face, then turned back to the mirror. Behind me, she laughed—which also took me by surprise, as I’d hardly even seen her smile—then said, “My point is, I made up my mind about you based on the information I was given. That’s not mean. It’s science.”
“Science?” I repeated.
“What?” she replied, running some water into the sink. “Lake girls can’t be good in school?”
“Just didn’t peg you as a science nerd,” I said.
“I’m not.” She turned off the faucet. “Math is my favorite. And half my double major.”
“What’s the other?”
“Education,” she said, wiping a bit of something off the stove handle. “I want to teach middle school algebra. I mean, once the baby comes and I finish my degree.”
Hearing this, I realized she wasn’t the only one who had made assumptions. I was embarrassed—ashamed, really. “I bet you’ll make a good teacher.”
This seemed to please her. “Yeah?”
“After that cleaning tutorial you gave me earlier? You bet.”
Now, she did smile—briefly—and we both went back to work. It had been like this all day, into the late afternoon. Us working together, talking sometimes, but just as often, letting silences fall.
After our standoff by room seven—as I had a feeling I’d be remembering it—I’d done as she said, going down to the office, where I found Mimi deep in discussion with the window guy. Not surprisingly, it was freezing.
“Saylor?” she said as the wind chimes hanging from the door handle clanked behind me. “You need something?”
I took a breath. “Trinity said I should get the keys to room ten to meet the A/C repair guy?”
Mimi looked at me a moment, then walked over behind the counter, grabbing a set of keys from the board hanging there. “Here,” she said. “Tell him it’s been blowing warm since last weekend.”
I nodded, taking the keys. That was easy, I thought, as I left to help Tom access the A/C. When I returned to Trinity, she was shaking a clean sheet over one of the double beds. As it billowed out and the edges fluttered down, our eyes met across all that whiteness.
“Grab the other side and pull it tight,” she instructed me. When I did, she said, “Tighter.”
Thus began my course in motel room cleaning, which was short, harsh, and brutally to the point, much like Trinity herself. Luckily, she wasn’t the only one who was a good student.
There were two types of room cleaning at Calvander’s, she told me as we made those first beds. Housekeeping, which was for rooms with guests staying on another night, and turnover, for rooms that had been vacated and needed a full clean before being occupied again. Both included what I’d come to think of as the defaults: vacuuming, emptying trash cans, cleaning toilets and wiping down sinks, replacing towels, and so on. For turnover, you then added changing the bed linens, wiping down the kitchen, mirror, and shower, and putting away all dishes and silverware, plus cleaning out whatever was left in the small fridges provided for guests. Which, so far, had been mostly beer, soda, and, in one case, a to-go box with a piece of leftover something, coated with mold.
“Turnover is mandatory,” Trinity said as we loaded fresh towels onto the racks in the bathroom. “New guests, clean room. Housekeeping, however, is a courtesy. But people always want it, as long as they’re not inconvenienced. Like exhibit A over there.”
This referred to a woman staying in room four, who had been sleeping when we knocked, then let ourselves in. She woke up yelling, keeping it up until we beat a quick retreat, Trinity cursing back under her own breath. An hour later, she found us and said the room was ready to be serviced, and not to forget extra towels and to vacuum under the beds. As she departed, she nicked a bunch of our soaps from our cart, something Trinity clearly viewed as an insult.
“People will steal anything from a motel room,” she said, nodding at the woman retreating. “I mean, those soaps are tiny and cheap. She’s driving a Cadillac. Really?”
I didn’t say anything to this, because I’d already figured out I had two jobs here other than my actual one: listen to what my cousin said, and retain that information. The commentary—and there was lots, sprinkled throughout—was just a bonus.
“You will be disgusted, daily,” she informed me as we stood in the open doorway of our first truly dirty bathroom. Towels were everywhere, the trash can overflowing, and the toilet itself full of something I wasn’t going to look at unless I had to. “There are rubber gloves on the cart. Do not be afraid to use them.”
“Right,” I said, bending down to grab the towels as gingerly as possible. Already, it was unspoken that we’d divide and conquer, with me doing the low stuff and her reaching the higher things.
“Clorox, and all its forms, is your friend,” she continued, spraying an arc from her own bottle—which said TRINITY on it in pink marker—into the room ahead of us. “Ditto for the blue goo.”
“The what?”
She nodded at the toilet. “Flush that first.”
I looked at it, and the contents, reminding myself I had been warned away from this job. The spoiled city cousin wouldn’t do it. So I had to. I started to reach for the lever.
“Not with your HAND,” she bellowed, and I jumped. “Use a foot.”
“My foot?”
In response, she stepped past me, kicking out a leg so one beat-up sneaker hit the handle, flushing the contents. As it swirled away, she sprayed the Clorox again in its direction. “Blue goo,” she continued, grabbing another bottle from the counter beside her, “is this toilet cleaner. Major disinfectant. Lift the seat—”
“With my foot?”
She nodded. I did. “Good. Now, line that bowl with this stuff. Don’t be dainty, load it in there. Then we leave it to do the hard work for us before we come back with gloves on.”
I followed these instructions, the bottle squirting loudly as I did so. When I was done, she handed me the bleach again. “Now, the shower.”
And so it went, as we covered everything, from the stacking of soaps—“Two in two places, the holders built into the shower and sink”—to checking the toilet paper supply—“one on the roll, one extra if it runs out. Any more, they’ll just get stolen.”
“People steal toilet paper?”
“I told you, people steal everything,” she said. “Aren’t you paying attention?”
This continued throughout the day, with us covering the polishing of mirrors (newspaper worked best for streaks), using caution when cleaning under beds (always look before you reach for something you see, you have no idea what else is there). With turnover, it was all about being thorough but quick, as people usually showed up early, eager to begin their vacation.
Housekeeping, on the other hand, involved an added layer of conscious, careful awareness. When working around people’s possessions and luggage, you were to treat them pretty much the same as toilets: don’t touch unless you absolutely must, and then, do it quick.
“We are always the first to be accused,” she explained, delicately moving a tablet aside to retrieve an
empty box of tissues. “Something goes missing, we stole it. And God forbid it’s medication. If you go into a bathroom and there’s a bottle with pills falling out of it? Leave it as is. Even if it means missing a spot. Do you hear me?”
I nodded. “Look me in the eye,” she said. I did. “Understood?”
“Understood,” I repeated. When she kept looking at me, I added, “Never touch a pill or meds. Ever.”
“Good girl.”
Not for the first time that day, I thought of my own stays at hotels with my dad over the years. Had I left a big mess, toilet unflushed, something gross? I didn’t recall doing so, and certainly hoped not. Nevertheless, I felt a wave of shame as I realized I’d never given much thought to the people who cleaned our rooms, even after seeing them or their carts in the hallways. It was just like magic: messy became clean. Except it wasn’t.
While we cleaned, people continued to come in and out of the office, the clang of the wind chimes on the door marking each departure. But I wasn’t really paying that much attention when someone knocked on room five. I was fighting with the vacuum, which had a frayed cord and cut off every time I moved it. When I turned, there was Roo. I literally jumped, I was so startled.
“Hey,” he said. “Surprised to see you here.”
“Let me guess,” I said, sighing. “You were also told I’m the spoiled cousin who is on vacation.”
He just looked at me for a moment. “No,” he said finally. “Because Mimi asked me to clean this room, but you’re already doing it.”
Whoops. I pushed my hair out of my face, taking a breath. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just been frustrating. Nobody has wanted my help.”
“Really?” He stepped inside, picking up my spray bottle. “Weird. We always need an extra set of hands.”
“Not mine, apparently. Until I forced the issue.”
He sprayed the table by the window, then grabbed a clean rag, wiping it down. “Well, you’re in it now. Once you start, you’re one of us. No escape.”
I smiled at this, starting up the vacuum again as he dragged the smaller garbage can over to the bag I’d left by the door. For a moment we worked in silence, him emptying another can. Then I said, “Do you work here a lot?”