“The surgery will help her,” he said. “I’m trying to help.”
I nodded. Frustrated, I tried not to cry, ignoring my overwhelming urge to drop down and sob into my arms, to give up and surrender to how hard it was to have a child this sick while fighting like a warrior to pay rent with a job that had absolutely no benefits at all, a job where if I didn’t show up, it might not be there when I finally could. Not that I expected any of those things. A lack of benefits simply came with the territory for jobs that paid close to minimum wage; it just seemed like an exception should be made for those who had people to care for. “I trust you,” I said, looking at Mia, my arm around her shoulders, knowing I’d have to let her go with him.
A different nurse came to take Mia into the surgery. Another came in the room with some paperwork for me: instructions on how to care for Mia over the next couple of weeks.
“You’re Dan and Karen’s daughter, aren’t you?” she asked. I nodded. “I thought I recognized you. Boy, Mia is your spitting image! She looks exactly like you did when you were little.” My confused expression prompted her to introduce herself fully. She was the wife of the lawyer who’d handled my lawsuit for a car wreck I’d been in at sixteen. “But I’ve known your parents since they started going to Bethany Covenant when you were still in diapers!”
“Still in diapers” made me think about the story my mom always told about the time they’d rushed to church one Sunday morning, getting there after the sermon started. Dad passed me to Mom, and her hand brushed past my bare butt. I was barely two years old, and they were only twenty-one. They’d forgotten to put a diaper on me in their hurry to get out the door and didn’t have any with them. I wondered if this nurse had seen them. I wondered if she’d helped them, too.
Her small talk passed the time that Mia was in surgery. I’d read a lot of articles online about what to expect from little children waking up from anesthesia, but I still wasn’t prepared for it emotionally. It was nice to have the distraction, someone to keep me company, to keep me breathing. Losing my child, her not coming out of anesthesia, something going horribly wrong, were all thoughts I had to keep at bay in order to stay strong, if not for me, then for her. Neither of us needed the added stress.
Mia came into the room at nine a.m., wheeled in on a gurney with gauze stuffed in her mouth. Her face was soaked in tears, red with anger, and her eyes looked around, wide with terror, like she couldn’t see. They pushed the gurney she was on over to the fixed bed in the room so she could crawl from one to the next. I leaned over to her, placed my hand on her back, and started whispering into her ear, not knowing how well she could hear me, wondering if her ears were sore, what they’d done to her in there; what fear she must have felt without me there to hold her hand. “It’s okay, sweet girl. It’s okay.”
Mia flexed her whole body, lying on her side, completely rigid, then started writhing, growling, and pulling at the tape holding needles in her arms. A nurse and I intervened as best we could. Mia went up on her hands and knees, spitting the gauze out of her mouth, then sat up on her knees. She reached for me, her arms lifting the tubes attached to them. I looked at the nurse and she nodded, allowing me to wrap my arms around my daughter, picking her up enough to put her in my lap so I could cradle her, rocking from side to side, repeating my promise that everything would be all right.
“I want some juice,” she growled at me, collapsing into me at the effort and possibly the pain it took to form words and voice them. I heard her whimper. The nurse handed her a sippy cup. Mia sat up to drink half of it, then tucked herself back into my arms again.
Within an hour, I stood in the parking lot with Mia dressed but still wrapped around me, not ready to put her in the car seat to drive the few blocks to get home. They’d rushed us out, loaning us a humidifier that was shaped like Mickey Mouse. “Yup, we do things quick around here,” the nurse said after placing it on the hood of my car. I stood there like that in the parking lot for another fifteen minutes, holding my daughter, staring at the building, feeling more alone than I’d ever felt before. We’d made it through that morning, Mia had survived the surgery, but in that moment a sort of cloak fell over me. This wasn’t a moment of empowerment or a celebration that we’d done it; this was a saturation into a new depth of loneliness that I now had to learn how to breathe in and out in. It was a new existence. Where I’d wake up and go to sleep.
* * *
Before I arrived first thing the following Monday for her monthly clean, the owner of the Plant House moved everything she could off the floor. She rolled up rugs, put stacks of magazines on chairs, and piled books, workout equipment, and shoes on the bed. Her instructions were militant, the most specific of all my clients: deep clean all floors, the kitchen and the bathroom, and inspect windowsills and frames for black mold.
The Plant House owners were empty nesters. Their son’s room hadn’t seemed to change much since he moved out. His trophies still stood on the windowsill behind his bed. They’d moved in a desk and a large keyboard where the wife gave piano lessons. I wondered if it was easier to use than the upright piano by the front door. The husband was some kind of pastor or maybe worked at a church. They had prayers written out and framed instead of pictures on the walls.
The wife had huge plants on wheels that I rolled around to sweep and mop beneath. Each window in the living room had a half dozen spider plants perched on the sill or hanging from a hook in the ceiling. Christmas cactuses sat in pots near the spider plants, and she draped philodendron vines over the curtain rods. I’d sneaked to snip off a couple of baby spider plants and took them home to put in pots. I wanted to be surrounded by green growth, by life, too. I just couldn’t afford to buy the starts from a store.
There weren’t any plants in the bathroom. But there was mold. I stood on the edge of the bathtub to clean it from the crevice where the wall met the ceiling. The wife would leave the shower curtain rolled up and folded over the rod. She removed the rugs and towels to place them in the wash. By the time I arrived, the bathroom was bare, stark, white. I turned off the humidifier that she used to filter the air so that all of my movements echoed. I liked to sing in that bathroom with my voice reverberating off the walls.
As a child, I had performed in school swing choirs, fall plays, and spring musicals. I never sang a solo, but I liked being onstage. My friends and I would break into harmonies as we walked down the street. The empty houses gave me space to sing again, without fear of anyone listening. I’d belt out Adele, Tegan and Sara, and Widespread Panic.
That Monday after Mia’s surgery, I stood in the Plant House’s bathtub and sang loud, my voice booming, until I started crying and couldn’t stop.
With the final wipe to dry the shower walls, tears brimmed in my eyes, and I immediately put my hand to my face to catch them. I pressed palms to my eyes, letting out a choking sob, lowered myself to my knees and remembered how we’d been rushed out the door from the recovery room. As soon as Mia sipped down some juice and went pee, we had to leave. I couldn’t even sit with her in the waiting room. But I wasn’t ready to stop holding her; I was unable to drive with the expectation to watch the road. I’d leaned up against the car, still warm from the morning sun, and let her body drape over mine, feeling for both of her pink flip-flop sandals, then moving my hand up to squeeze her calf, then thigh; then I wrapped both of my arms around her, burying my face in her neck. I’d been there for Mia, but I’d needed someone to hold my hand, be there for me. Sometimes mothers need to be mothered, too.
Mia rarely saw me cry. Crying meant admitting defeat. It felt like my body and mind gave up. I did everything I could to avoid that feeling. An inability to stop crying was my fear. Of gasping for air. Of the way my mind tricked me into thinking that I might die. Crying like that, in that bathtub, felt almost the same, like I had lost myself in that uncontrollable way needed for my body to release. With all the things swirling around me that I had no control over, I could, at the very least, control my reactions to t
hem. If I started crying every time something hard or horrible happened, well, I’d just be crying all the time.
As I was on the brink of feeling like I could give up, something shifted. The walls of the Plant House closed inward. I felt safety. That house had spoken to me. It had watched me go through its phone book to find churches that might donate funds to help me pay rent after I learned that the waitlist for Section 8 was five years long. That house knew me, and I knew it. I knew that the owner had constant sinus infections, that she’d stockpiled home remedies, that she worked out to old aerobics videos from the eighties in her bedroom. The house had been witness to my desperate calls to caseworkers, asking if there was any way I’d qualify for cash assistance. While cleaning its kitchen, I’d fought doggedly with Jamie. I’d cleaned the entire living room while on hold, waiting to renew my food stamps. For a few minutes, as I kneeled in the cradle of the tub, the walls of the Plant House protected me and comforted me with its stoic silence.
15
THE CHEF’S HOUSE
When we lived in the homeless shelter, I sat up late at night, long after Mia went to bed. As the night stretched out before me, I created a vision of a “happy” life. There would be a large yard of freshly cut green grass and a tree with a swing hanging from a branch. Our house wouldn’t be terribly big, but it’d be large enough that Mia could run around in it, maybe with a dog, and build forts beneath the rungs of furniture. Mia would not only have her own bedroom but her own bathroom, too. Maybe there’d be a proper guest room, or an office where I could write. A real couch and a matching love seat. A garage. If we only had these things, I thought, we would be happy.
Most of my clients had these things—the things I yearned for in those dark nights sitting up alone—and they did not seem to enjoy life any more than I did. Most worked long hours, away from the homes they fought so hard to pay for, with even farther commutes than mine. I began to pay attention to the items that cluttered their kitchen counters: the receipts for rugs that were as expensive as my car, the bill for the dry cleaner that could replace half my wardrobe. In contrast, I divided my hourly wages into fifteen-minute increments to add up how much of my physical work paid for my gas. Most days I spent at least an hour just making the money it took in gas to get to work in the first place. But my clients worked long hours to pay for lavish cars, boats, sofas that they kept covered with a sheet.
They worked to pay Classic Clean, who paid me just above minimum wage, to keep it all spotless, in place, acceptable. While they paid for my work like some magical cleaning fairy, I was anything but that, shuffling through their house like a ghost. My face had an ashen hue from a lack of sun, dark circles under my eyes from a lack of sleep. Usually my hair was unwashed, pulled back into a ponytail or under a kerchief or hat. I wore pairs of Carhartt cargo pants until the holes in the knees were unsightly enough that my boss told me to replace them. My job afforded me little money to spend on clothes, even for work. I worked through illnesses and brought my daughter to day care when she should have been at home. My job offered no sick pay, no vacation days, no foreseeable increase in wage, yet through it all, still I begged to work more. Wages lost from missed work hours could rarely be made up, and if I missed too many, I risked being fired. My car’s reliability was vital, since a broken hose, a faulty thermostat, or even a flat tire could throw us off, knock us backward, send us teetering, falling back, toward homelessness. We lived, we survived, in careful imbalance. This was my unwitnessed existence, as I polished another’s to make theirs appear perfect.
The Chef’s House had two wings: the guest bedroom and office on one end and the master bathroom with a hallway that led to a converted garage, where their dogs, two white Westminster terriers, always left puddles of pee. They went with either Mr. Lund or his wife to work on the days I cleaned. I hadn’t noticed one had also started pooping by the dining room table, and I’d accidentally walked through it. I groaned. Beige carpet. Light beige. Almost fucking white. There was no way I’d be able to rub out shit stains.
I’d still only met the owner of the Chef’s House one time in the six months I’d cleaned there for three hours every other Thursday. The Chef’s House had been one of Pam’s original clients. She used to clean it weekly in two hours, an ability I balked at because the house was huge. I would sweat hard, working that house, too busy to stop to text or take a call from anyone for fear I wouldn’t complete the clean on time. I certainly couldn’t pause to scrub out brown smudges of shit.
I had a second house that day—the Cigarette Lady’s House—that was another three-hour job with about a twenty-minute commute in between. A full schedule of work was normally some sort of an escape. For three, four, or even six hours, I’d be in constant movement—from the left side of the counter to the right, polishing the sink, wiping the floors, dusting, cleaning smudges left by dogs on sliding glass doors, vacuuming down halls, scrubbing toilets, wiping mirrors without pausing to look at my reflection at all, ignoring the aching muscles that grew more to a constant burn throughout the day, sometimes shooting pain or tingling sensations down my limbs. After weeks of the same movement—from start to finish, at the same time, in the same way, every other week—I stopped having to think about what to do next. Movements became routine, automatic. My muscles became tight and trained. The movement and house routines were like a much-needed mindless respite when every other aspect of my life was one difficult decision after another that had been even harder. I guess the escape had gotten a little too mindless, so that I wound up in shit.
The Chef’s House was one I envied, with its view, yard, trees that dropped apples to rot in the grass before the landscapers mowed over them. I wanted their back porch with its matching polished wooden furniture and maroon cushions. I imagined the lazy afternoons they must have had on the weekends—the shrimp on the grill, the chilled rosé wine in stemmed glasses, sipped under the striped canopy that rolled out from the side of the house. It seemed like a dream; and these people, with their hallways lined with paintings of scenes from Paris, got to live it every day.
Their kitchen counters were piled with food, and the neatly arranged tins of fancy cookies made my mouth drool. At Christmas, their decorations had been impeccable. I’d stopped to inspect the Christmas tree ornaments. They had every year of this Hallmark series called “Frosty Friends,” which my mom had collected for the years my family spent in Alaska. Mom gave them all to me after the divorce, but about half of them went missing in all the moving around. When I saw the ornament from 1985, our first Christmas in Alaska, I gingerly cupped it in my palm, remembering my mom unwrapping the red kayak with the Eskimo child and dog to let me put it on the tree. Christmas was half a year away now, and I realized I wasn’t even sure we’d be able to fit or afford a tree big enough to hang ornaments on in our studio. Mia was usually with Jamie for Christmas, since I always got Thanksgiving. I wanted so much for her to have a life where the same exact ornaments went on the tree every year. Traditions so small they’d gone unnoticed when I was a child, and now they were all I wanted for mine.
A third of the time I spent at the Chef’s House went to floors. Sometimes I shuffled to my car a little bent over with one hand on the bottom muscles near my spine. I wasn’t a stranger to pain, but being hunched over for hours cleaning took its toll. My spine curved like a question mark; it had put me in the emergency room several times. I had to be careful not to upset it, and I popped 800-milligram doses of ibuprofen around the clock if I did. My latest mistake at work had been bending slightly to pick up the edge of a couch to push it closer to a wall. It felt as heavy as my car. The muscles in my back, prepared to lift something light, snapped back like a released rubber band and stuck. For days, I gritted my teeth through spasms, losing sleep from the pain. I couldn’t handle painkiller pills very well. They made me loopy and sick, like I was half drunk.
When I saw the counters of the Chef’s House starting to fill with large prescription pill bottles of hydrocodone, it was almost
tempting to pocket a few. Prescription pills littered the bathroom countertops and the medicine cabinets of most of the houses I cleaned, but this one had giant bottles in almost every room, going from full to empty in the two weeks between my visits.
Lonnie and I never spoke of the secrets the empty houses revealed. Most of my clients had sleep aids, ones for depression and anxiety, or pain. Perhaps because my clients had easier access to doctors or health insurance plans with a generous prescription medication clause built in; perhaps access to medical care created a default to prescriptions as a solution. Though I could get coverage for Mia, I made too much money for me to receive Medicaid, so I couldn’t see a doctor about chronic back pain or lingering sinus infections and coughs. Mia, thankfully, had always been covered, so I never had to worry about that, and the application process was simple, since they used the same paperwork I submitted for food stamps. It would have been impossible to afford her regular check-ups and vaccinations, let alone the surgery she’d just had, but I always wondered if doctors and nurses, after seeing the type of insurance I used, treated us differently because she had Medicaid. Even though I would have greatly benefitted from regular care, physical therapy, or even access to a gynecologist, I’d never be able to afford that for myself. I had to be careful not to hurt myself, not to get sick, and try to manage my pain on my own. But vitamins, over-the-counter cold and flu remedies, and even Tylenol or ibuprofen were a huge expense, or so low on the budget that I rationed what I had. Living with illness or pain was part of my daily life. Part of the exhaustion. But why did my clients have these problems? It seemed like access to healthy foods, gym memberships, doctors, and all of that would keep a person fit and well. Maybe the stress of keeping up a two-story house, a bad marriage, and maintaining the illusion of grandeur overwhelmed their systems in similar ways to how poverty did mine.
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