Henry handed me printed-out cooking instructions and a set of shiny shell crackers.
“You know,” I said, rubbing the silver of the utensil with my thumb, “you could be saving my relationship.”
“Oh, yeah?” he asked, looking at me with a mixture of interest and amusement.
“Yeah,” I said, then shrugged, like it wasn’t a big deal. “We’ve been arguing a lot. Money and all that.”
“Well,” he said, crossing his arms, “I’m sorry to hear that.” He looked me square in the eyes, squinting a little, pointing a shell cracker at my nose. “When it stops bein’ fun, it stops bein’.”
Those words stayed in my head for the rest of the day. Travis and I didn’t have the same type of fun. He liked to drive recreational vehicles in fast circles, while I liked drinking small-batch brewed beer accompanied with conversations about politics and books. We tried compromising. He often sat outside with me at night to have a beer and gaze at the huge garden we’d built in the corner of the yard. Between our differences was Mia—bouncing, happy, wrapping her arms around both of us. In those moments, we felt like a real family, and I fought to feel the love and joy that she felt. But I knew I would never understand Travis’s lack of desire to wander, or wonder, or learn. We’d reached the point of resentment, blaming each other for our differences.
Because of Mia, I tried to cling to the dream. The farm. The horses. The tire swing in the front yard, the endless fields to run through. I had been secretly apologizing to her, whispering it since I’d watched her hold up fistfuls of carrots that she yanked from our tended soil last summer, wearing only underwear and little cowboy boots. I’m so sorry this isn’t enough for me.
When I finished Henry’s house, he helped me carry my supplies out to my car. I hugged the bag of lobsters to my chest, but I wanted to hug Henry for being so kind, for treating me less like a maid and more like a person deserving of love and laughter and the occasional lobster dinner. When I thanked him, Henry smiled broadly and puffed out his chest. “Get on home,” he said to me, though I was beginning to realize that “home” was something fleeting, a ticking time bomb, an explosion waiting to happen.
At the stop sign at the end of the street, I pulled over to the curb. I leaned forward, pressing my forehead against the steering wheel. The interaction with Henry made me miss my dad.
This had happened often in the last year. Whenever I felt the pain of the loss—my chest caving in right at the hollow spot in the center—I found it was best to stop and wait, to give the feeling a moment to pass. The pain didn’t like to be ignored. It needed to be loved, just as I needed to be loved. As I sat in my car, the bag of lobster next to me in the passenger seat, I breathed in and out, counting to five each time. I love you, I whispered to myself. I’m here for you.
Reassurance of self-love was all I had.
Mia was asleep when I picked her up from day care to drive her to Jamie’s. It was getting close to two o’clock, and the traffic would get bad if we left any later. She protested as I scooped her up, put on her coat, and strapped her into her car seat. We stopped at home, and I left the car idling in the driveway while I ran inside to drop off the lobsters and pick up Mia’s special backpack for her weekends away. I threw in some clothes, a blanket, the photo album we’d made, and her Curious George. Mia drifted off while we drove, giving me a chance to listen to a CD I’d made a while ago. This ridiculous country song about being a hay farmer came on. Travis had always played the beginning of it loud whenever Mia was in his truck because it started with a revving engine noise that rumbled your chest from the low bass. I smiled, remembering Mia asking for him to do it again, her pink boots with the brown horses kicking up and down as she laughed. When the ocean came into view, I reached back to wiggle her leg and wake her up.
It was six o’clock before I returned home. Alone in the kitchen, I salted a pot of water and set it on the stove. As it bubbled and spat, I used my body to block the lobsters’ view of it while I read the instructions for the fifth or sixth time. Travis chose to stay out on the porch with the grill, probably burning the steaks. Dropping the lobsters in the pot to their death was up to me.
My pot wouldn’t fit them both. I had to cook them one by one. My dad used to make his huge batches of chili with this pot, and for some reason I had inherited it after my parents’ divorce. It was enamel with a liner that was a strainer. In my early twenties, I lived with my then-boyfriend in a cabin in Alaska. The cabin did not have running water, and it sat on five acres of permafrost. When my dad came to stay with us for a visit, he brought a handwritten recipe for the chili. He even wrote “Dad’s Chili” on the top. I slipped the paper into a clear pocket, clipping it into a binder of recipes I’d collected.
It wasn’t a fancy recipe—hamburger, onions, pinto beans, some cumin. I’m pretty sure he copied it out of a Betty Crocker cookbook. But as a kid, I loved when he made it. We’d sit around the table with our steaming bowls, grinding saltine crackers in our hands and then dusting the crumbs on the floor to make my mom gasp. When Mia and I showed up at my dad and Charlotte’s the first time, about a month before Jamie punched the door and kicked us out, Charlotte pestered Dad until he made a batch of chili for me. I loved her for that. As I stared into the pot of rolling water, the lobsters awaiting their deaths, these memories came flooding back. I thought of Charlotte, how I couldn’t think of the last time I’d seen or even talked to her.
When I lowered the first lobster into the boiling water, it didn’t scream or move frantically like I thought it would. Its shell turned bright red almost instantly, and then a green foam formed on the surface. After it was done, I scraped the foam off before cooking the second.
The table was set—two steaks, two lobsters, two beers. I wondered how different our dinner table looked from Henry’s. They probably had dishes they used only for the occasion and large linen napkins draped over their laps. Travis and I ate in silence. I tried to smile at him, to ignore his displeasure at such a complicated meal. While he started a movie, I cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher, cleaned the larger dishes, and wiped down the table and counters. We sat next to each other on the brown leather couch he’d inherited from his parents, but we didn’t touch. Halfway through the movie, I went out to the porch and lit a cigarette, something I now did when Mia wasn’t home. I had bought the pack a few weeks before, after cleaning the Trailer. It was becoming more and more of a ritual. Travis came out to smoke half a cigarette before telling me he needed to go to bed.
“Do you want me to join you?” I asked, tapping away ash from the cigarette.
He paused. “I don’t care,” he said and went inside.
I thought maybe he wouldn’t be as mad that I wasn’t cleaning stalls with him that weekend, because I had to work. I even hoped we might make love, rather than the usual way he reached for my hips—my little spoon pressing into his big spoon—sometime in the night, our faces never touching, the darkness and silence interrupted by headlights from a passing car.
The next morning, Henry met me at his big red door. “How did it go?” he asked, smiling as I handed him back the fancy utensils.
“They were the best thing I’ve ever eaten,” I said, beaming at him, then paused, suddenly realizing what he meant. “But they didn’t save my relationship.”
“Ah,” he said, looking down at the silver utensils. “Maybe that’s for the best. You don’t seem like the type who needs a man around to save you. You’re one of the hard workers.”
While Henry offered praise, I knew that I could never work hard enough. Between school, the house, Mia, and trying to earn enough to make a living, work had become relentless and never ending. My paychecks made me feel like I didn’t work that much at all. But Henry respected me. He was the first client who I knew with certainty did.
Soon after the lobster dinner, Travis and I broke up. That evening, I came home from work to make dinner, clean up, give Mia her bath, and put her to bed. I set up my books and laptop on th
e kitchen table, put my earbuds in to drown out the television, and began to do schoolwork. And then I saw that the kitchen trash was overflowing. I got up from the table and stood in front of Travis, blocking his view of the TV.
“Can you please take out the trash?” I said, hands on my hips.
Without hesitating, he said, “I think you should move out.” Then he stood up, physically moved me out of the way, and sat back down again. I stood, stunned, looking down at him. A laugh track erupted on TV, and Travis, his face lit up from the screen, smiled. I returned to the table and sank into the chair, the weight of those words heavy, pressing me into the ground, into a hole I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to climb out of.
PART TWO
11
THE STUDIO
Travis gave us a month to leave. I didn’t tell Mia—in part because I didn’t want to upset her and in part because I didn’t have a plan. I posted ads online for a roommate or a barter arrangement or a room to rent. Nothing came to fruition. Every apartment I looked at cost more in rent than I received in wages. With my earnings, which hovered around $800 a month, there was no way to come up with a first and last month’s rent, as well as a deposit. There was no way for me to earn enough to pay for gas, utilities, and rent, even a room. Apartments ranged around $700, at the least. The thought of more than one bedroom was impossible for me. I had no savings or credit to fall back on, nor even an ability to apply for a loan. I’d never be able to pay it back. Additionally, I’d have to set up electricity and Internet to do schoolwork. I’d have to get a router. I’d have to get so many things.
After I reached out to a few friends, they encouraged me to set up a PayPal “donate” button and embed it into a blog entry with a simple explanation:
Travis has given me until the end of June to move out. Unfortunately, I don’t have the money for a deposit. I have set up a PayPal account. If you can donate even five bucks, it would help tremendously. Thank you.
I hated asking for money. I hated admitting that I’d failed again at making a relationship work. Most people didn’t know Mia and I had lived in a homeless shelter, but it still felt like history was repeating itself. Then, the messages from friends through Facebook started coming, full of encouragement and love. People sent $10 or even $100. Every donation, no matter how small, made my eyes wet. I made a wish list through Walmart that I shared through a Facebook post. Soon, boxes started showing up at Travis’s with pots, pans, clothes for Mia, and silverware. I’d sunk to a new low, but I wouldn’t let it sink me. I couldn’t go back to being homeless. After my dad told my family I’d made up stories for attention, asking for help was the hardest thing I’d ever done. It opened me up to judgment. It held me accountable for my actions, especially for involving Mia in what I felt like I should have predicted was a doomed relationship. I feared what people might think. But each friend who reached out lifted me up to a newer height. I’d rise above this.
When I’d moved into the homeless shelter, I had called Melissa, one of my oldest friends, and she listened as I went through my plans for rebuilding my life. Nearly all of those plans involved the help of some form of government assistance: food stamps, WIC checks for milk, gas vouchers, low-income housing, energy grants, and childcare.
“You’re welcome,” Melissa said pointedly.
“For what?” I asked, peeping through the shelter’s worn blue curtain at a deer walking through the backyard. Mia napped in the next room.
“My tax money’s paying for all of that,” she said, then repeated, “so you’re welcome.”
I didn’t say thank you. I hadn’t said thank you. I wasn’t sure what to say.
“Hey,” I said, with false urgency. “Mia’s crying. I should go.”
Mia’s door creaked when I opened it. I sat on the edge of the bed, watching her chest rise and fall. Melissa had, at first, sounded so happy to help, but I knew that wasn’t the case. I had heard her talk negatively about people who took advantage of welfare before. She didn’t like the mother of her stepdaughter complaining about how she had supposedly abused the system.
I wished I’d had the courage to speak up for myself, to speak up for millions of others who were struggling through the same hardships as I was: domestic workers who worked for minimal pay, single parents. Instead I hid. I silently blocked Melissa on Facebook and turned my back on any comments or media that spoke poorly of people on welfare. “Welfare is dead,” I wanted to say. There was no welfare, not in the sense they thought of it as. There was no way for me to walk into a government office and tell them I needed enough money to compensate for the meager wages I needed in order to pay for a home. If I was hungry, I could get a couple hundred bucks a month for food. I could visit a food bank. But there was no cash to buffer what I actually needed to survive.
Every little bit of donated money from friends started to add up, and I found myself with nearly $500, and Travis offered to match it. Finally, I could afford a studio apartment in Mount Vernon in an old house that had been divided into three apartments. Our studio had once been the front living room and an attached sunroom. For $550 a month, we had a bathroom with a tub, a tiny kitchen with a full-sized fridge, and a view of the whole city through a wall of windows.
The landlord, Jay, and I emailed back and forth about the place, and he said I could drive over and look at it. I stopped by after work that day, before I had to pick up Mia, to check it out. I’d known it was small—a studio apartment implied that. But standing in there, in that room smaller than the one I’d used to watch movies with Travis for the past year, for a moment I wanted to turn away and refuse. I thought back to the apartment Mia and I had had in Port Townsend, the one by the fairgrounds with separate bedrooms, a dining room, and a washer and dryer. This place had none of that. This was a grimy room above a freeway that I would struggle to afford.
Where I stood, the floor was old, possibly the original wood, with large cracks in between the planks. Through French doors was the sunroom that looked over the city. Under the windows, there was a bench with tops that lifted up so I could store things in there, but someone had left a bunch of blinds and curtain rods. There was a dark green carpet, and I mentally tried to imagine where Mia’s bed and toys would go and wondered if my dresser would fit. In the other section, L-shaped cabinets with an electric stove, fridge, and sink served as a kitchen. I walked from one wall to the other. About thirty paces.
“It’s great,” I said to Jay on the phone. “I’m here right now. It’ll work for us, I think.”
“Your daughter’s three?” he asked. I hoped he wasn’t rethinking his offer to rent to us.
“Almost,” I said. “But I work a lot, and she goes to her dad’s on the weekends.” I walked over to the windows off the kitchen, looking down at the cars speeding by. “We probably won’t be here very much.” I involuntarily held my breath. That was only halfway true.
“Okay, that’s no problem,” he said. “Did you want to stop by to get the keys this weekend? You can drop off the rent and deposit then.”
“Can I make payments on the deposit?” I asked, surprised at my boldness. Maybe standing in that space brought on a nothing-to-lose feeling. “I can do fifty or a hundred bucks a month. I just, uh, this move is kind of sudden and I don’t have anything saved up right now.”
There was a silence. I pulled at my lower lip with my teeth. “Sure, that’s fine. A hundred bucks extra for the next five months’ rent would be fine.”
I breathed out, almost laughing. “Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.”
When I met Jay at the apartment to give him a check for the first month’s rent and get the keys, he and his wife were just beginning to paint the ceiling of my new living room and kitchen. He was a plain-faced, brown-haired guy about my age. His wife, who introduced herself as Mandy, was much smaller than me in just about every way. They looked like they were good people. Nice. Trustworthy. Probably hardworking and honest. I hoped, anyway.
“Looks like you guys
have your work set out for you,” I said, watching them piece a long pole together.
“Yeah,” Mandy said, rolling her eyes. “At least the grandparents agreed to take the kids for the day.”
“Exactly what we wanted to be doing on a sunny Saturday,” Jay added. They both looked at each other. He let out a sigh.
I smiled, waved, and thanked them for their understanding about the deposit. I imagined spending a Saturday next to my spouse, painting the walls and ceiling of an old house that we owned and rented out, while my parents watched the kids. That’s exactly how I’d want to spend a Saturday, I thought as I drove back to Travis’s. I had to start packing our stuff, had to figure out what major things we lacked—like bedding, bowls, cups, and something for me to sleep on. It would be a couple of days before the apartment was ready for me to move in, but they said I could come over in the evenings to clean it up if I wanted. Scrubbing the grime off the cupboards and floors of our new home was my version of a sage smudging ritual.
When my friend Sarah saw my posts about needing help, she sent me a message to ask if I needed anything. I brazenly listed off several items, nervous I would have to do without. She wrote back, offering her daughter’s twin bed. Travis came with me to pick it up. His face remained blank, emotionless, through all of this. He’d disappear into the barn if he walked into the house and saw me in tears, struggling to come to terms with my fate. We didn’t speak except out of necessity, but I figured any way he could help us get out of his house would be something he’d want to participate in. I’d been to Sarah’s house a couple of times to eat snacks and drink wine at her table on weekends when Mia was with Jamie. Now, standing on her porch, I couldn’t keep my head and shoulders from hanging low.
“It’s in here,” Sarah said, eyeing Travis. We followed her down a hallway, into her daughter’s room. “We’re getting her a queen-sized bed. She’s sort of grown out of this one.”
Maid Page 11