* * *
I drove with all the windows down on my way to the Cigarette Lady’s House. It must have been in the eighties outside, meaning our bedroom would be close to ninety degrees by the time we got home. Sweat gathered in the creases of my skin. Most of the windows of her house faced north, so it would be cooler in there, but they’d all be closed, and the stuffiness combined with a mix of stale smoke and scented candles would make me nauseated. When I walked in, I went to place my binder on the counter, where she had the cordless phone next to her datebook that only contained appointments for facials and massages at a spa, and I saw she’d left a note. Thought you might like a good-smelling candle for your home! it read. I picked up the little silver tin and opened it to see bright orange wax, smelling of a perfectly ripe peach. My favorite scent. I smiled, inhaled the candle again, and tucked it away in my purse before calling to clock in.
The Cigarette Lady was a mystery to me. Our one brief encounter came after I barged into her kitchen two hours earlier than she expected me to arrive. She rushed out quickly, before we could have any sort of verbal exchange, but long enough for me to see that her hair and makeup were impeccably done, satisfying one of my curiosities. There were always new bags of makeup or anti-wrinkle cream or some tiny container in her bathroom. Each new product had receipts for at least $50, but I never saw evidence of empty bottles or others being completely used. Every other week, she’d get a massage, a facial, and a manicure and pedicure, and I had often wondered if they were products someone had talked her into buying but weren’t ones she was necessarily interested in using. Her appearance proved otherwise. She looked flawless, even on a random Thursday afternoon.
Her house sat right next to a golf course, and golf seemed like a hobby she put a lot of time into. In the downstairs closet above the washer and dryer were framed scorecards and a photo of the Cigarette Lady standing next to Tiger Woods. She wore a white shirt to match her pressed white shorts, and her hair was piled on top of her head, separated from her face by a visor. The downstairs of the house felt stuck in time. When I walked down with my vacuum, rags, and cleaning tray, it felt like I was walking into the late eighties or early nineties, with outdated furniture on top of a thick white carpet. The guest bedroom had decorations of Canadian geese that I swore were the same ones I’d grown up with. In the office was a particle-board desk and an ancient-looking treadmill, which faced an old TV/VCR combo, like the one I had at home.
Upstairs, she’d done several updates—hardwood floors, new countertops, and a stainless-steel fridge that, from what I could tell, mainly held bottled water and lettuce.
The furniture was sleek and modern, and from the amount of dust that settled on it, untouched. In her closet, I coveted a tan cashmere cardigan so much, every time I vacuumed in there, I’d pause, unzip the front, and put it on, placing its hood over my head, wearing it so the sleeves covered my hands, and rubbed my face with its softness.
It was hard to tell the house was used at all, except for the small bathroom off the master bedroom and the guest toilet across from the kitchen. I always grimaced when I lifted those toilet seats to scrub the bowl. Under the rim was almost always splattered with vomit.
After a few visits, I began to get a vision of her time at home. Her husband owned and operated a construction company at least an hour outside of town. It was 2010, and building operations still seemed to be at a standstill. They were probably anxious about their security, wondering if they might be next. Their house always seemed to be set up for a dinner party, with fake candles lit and placemats set, but I could tell by the dust on the tables and chairs that nights with guests and fancy meals rarely happened. Most of her time at home she seemed to spend sitting on a bar stool across from the stovetop that was built into the bar. The stovetop had an air intake for the fan at the back, closest to her, and it was usually peppered with cigarette ashes. Next to her sat a tiny television, her datebook, and a cordless phone, with a few stray crumbs on the floor.
On a shelf, next to the dining room table, were several electric wax warmer air fresheners. Their combined smell gave me headaches. Once she left a lighter by her datebook, but other than the cleaned ashtray I found beneath the sink, there was no other evidence of cigarettes. Then, one day, on my way out through the garage, I noticed a freezer. I opened it to reveal stacked cartons of Virginia Slims. I stared at them, then smiled with satisfaction. Mystery solved.
I could picture her, with her chin resting in her hand, stamping out a cigarette, letting out a breath full of smoke carefully into the stovetop fan, then getting up, tossing her hair a little, and emptying out the ashtray in the garage before carefully rinsing it and wiping it clean. I wondered if she carried the cigarettes in her purse or if it was something she only did at home in that one spot in the kitchen. It wasn’t about the smoking. I smoked off and on. I couldn’t have cared less if she smoked. It was the secrecy that fascinated me, the amount of energy she put into appearing perfect and clean.
16
DONNA’S HOUSE
Over the summer, the idea of drug tests for welfare recipients had some new life breathed into it. Since the recession, millions had turned to the government for help. More struggling middle-class taxpayers voicing their anger over the injustice of others getting a handout caused tension between folks already on government assistance, using their food stamps, and those who didn’t qualify. Demanding drug tests perpetuated a new layer of judgment for those of us receiving the assistance, creating a new narrative for how we took advantage, took money from the government in our laziness and now possibly addiction. Memes online compared people on food stamps to wild animals. One meme showed a bear sitting at a picnic table and read:
Today’s lesson in irony: The food stamp program, a part of the Department of Agriculture, is pleased to be distributing the greatest amounts of food stamps ever. Meanwhile, the Park Service, which is also part of the Department of Agriculture, asks us to PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS because the animals may grow dependent and not learn to take care of themselves.
Another popular one had an illustrated work boot that read, “If I have to take a drug test to work, you should have to take one for welfare.” Another one read, “If you can afford drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes, then you don’t need food stamps.” One of my friends on Facebook worked at a grocery store, and she had started to post what people bought on food stamps to make fun of them: “Funyuns? On food stamps? With soda?” She encouraged her friends to make fun of what poor people could barely afford to eat.
Around forty-seven million families were signed up for government assistance along with me that year. EBT cards, distributed by the Department of Health and Human Services to utilize as food stamps or cash assistance, were a common sight at cash registers. Take-and-bake pizza shops now accepted EBT cards, but I rarely used my allotment of food stamps for that. Mount Vernon, Skagit County’s largest city at thirty-three thousand people, became home to a large population of migrant workers through the growing season, and many of those families decided to stay year-round. But as the migrant population increased, the conservatism of the area was exposed.
Donna seemed to have a lot of grievances about this. I’d come to depend heavily on the $20 an hour with a ten-dollar tip she always left for me, but driving back and forth to her house would steal an hour from my workday. About half of the time, she was there when I arrived. One day she was on her way to the store to purchase ingredients for smoothies, since she’d just bought a special blender. “It’s for a new me!” she cried. “But I’m going to the co-op this time. I don’t like the big grocery stores anymore.”
“Oh, really?” I asked, feigning interest. Donna enjoyed Mary Kay oils, which left a film that stuck to the side of the bathtub like Velcro, collecting every hair, every dead skin cell that came off her. It was hard to have conversations with her without seeing flashes of it. I never knew if she expected me to stop and talk or continue cleaning while having a conversation with the pers
on whose pubic hairs and leg hair stubble I’d have to scrub from the ring of her jetted tub.
“Last time I went to the big store, I got in line behind a Mexican family,” she said. “They used food stamps to pay for their food. And those kids were dressed to the nines!”
I continued to dust a windowsill in her front sitting room full of little angel statues with their hands together in prayer. Her words were sharp. I bit down on the tip of my tongue. I thought of how much Mia loved her fancy dresses and shiny shoes, which I purchased with credit from the consignment store. Maybe Donna didn’t realize I was on food stamps, too.
I wanted to tell Donna that it wasn’t her business what that family bought or ate or wore and that I hated when cashiers at the supermarket said, “On your EBT?” loud enough for people in line behind me to hear. I wanted to tell her that undocumented people couldn’t receive food benefits or tax refunds, even though they paid taxes. They couldn’t receive any government benefits at all. Those were available only for people who were born here or who had obtained the documents to stay. So those children, whose parents had risked so much to give them a good life, were citizens who deserved every bit as much government help as my daughter did. I knew this because I’d sat beside them in countless government offices. I overheard their conversations with caseworkers sitting behind glass, failing to communicate through a language barrier. But these attitudes that immigrants came here to steal our resources were spreading, and the stigmas resembled those facing anyone who relied on government assistance to survive. Anyone who used food stamps didn’t work hard enough or made bad decisions to put them in that lower-class place. It was like people thought it was on purpose and that we cheated the system, stealing the money they paid toward taxes to rob the government of funds. More than ever, it seemed, taxpayers—including my client—thought their money subsidized food for lazy poor people.
Donna left for the grocery store, oblivious to my emotional reaction to her words. Grocery shopping made me feel twice as vulnerable after that. With the added posts on social media, I was certain that people watched my every move. I worried about buying items that were either too nice or too frivolous. In the chance I would ever need to get Easter candy or chocolates for Mia’s stocking at Christmas with food stamp money, I’d go late at night, using the self-checkout. Even though I really needed it, I stopped using WIC checks for milk, cheese, eggs, and peanut butter—I never seemed to get the right size, brand, or color of eggs, the correct type of juice, or the specific number of ounces of cereal anyway. Each coupon had such specific requirements in what it could be used for, and I held my breath when the cashier rang them up. I always screwed up in some way and caused a holdup in the line. Maybe others did the same, since cashiers grew visibly annoyed whenever they saw one of those large WIC coupons on the conveyor belt. Once, after massive amounts of miscommunication with the cashier, an older couple started huffing and shaking their heads behind me.
My caseworker at the WIC office even prepared me for it. The program had recently downgraded their qualifying milk from organic to non-organic, leaving me with a missing chunk in my food budget I couldn’t afford to make up. If at all possible, I tried to give Mia only organic whole milk. Non-organic, 2 percent milk might as well have been white-colored water to me, packed with sugar, salt, antibiotics, and hormones. These coupons were my last chance for a while to offer her the one organic food she ingested (besides her boxes of Annie’s macaroni and cheese).
When I’d scoffed at losing the benefit to purchase organic whole milk, my caseworker nodded and sighed. “We just don’t have the funding for it anymore,” she’d told me. I somewhat understood, since a half gallon had a price tag of nearly four dollars. “The obesity rates are going up in children,” she added, “and this is a program focused on providing the best nutrition.”
“They don’t realize that skim milk is full of sugar?” I asked, allowing Mia to climb out of my lap so she could play with the toys in the corner.
“They’re also adding ten dollars for produce!” she added brightly, ignoring my grumpy attitude. “You can purchase any produce you want, except potatoes.”
“Why not potatoes?” I thought of the large batches of mashed potatoes I made to supplement my diet.
“People tend to fry them or add lots of butter,” she said, looking a little confused herself. “You can get sweet potatoes, though!” She explained I’d have to purchase exactly ten dollars’ worth or less, and wouldn’t be able to go over, or the check wouldn’t work. I wouldn’t get any change if the produce I selected rang in under ten dollars. The coupons didn’t have any real monetary value.
That day at the store, with it being the last month of organic milk, I wanted every bit I could get.
“Your milk isn’t a WIC item,” the cashier said again. “It won’t ring up that way.” She started to turn to the young man bagging our other groceries and sighed. I knew she was going to tell him to go run and get the right kind of milk. It happened to me with the eggs all the time.
My checks weren’t expired, but the store had already updated their system. Normally, I would have cowered, taken the non-organic milk, and run out, especially with two old people shaking their heads in annoyance. I glanced at them again and caught the man standing with his arms crossed and head tilted, eyeing my pants with holes in the knees. My shoes were getting holes in the toes. He loudly sighed again.
I asked to speak to the manager. The cashier’s eyebrows shot up as she shrugged her shoulders and put up her hands in front of me, like I’d pulled out a gun and ordered her to give me all her money.
“Sure,” she said, evenly and coolly; the voice of a customer service representative faced with an unruly shopper. “I’ll get the manager for you.”
As he walked over, I could see his flustered employee following behind him, red-faced and gesturing wildly, even pointing at me, to explain her side of the story. He immediately apologized and overrode the cash register. Then he rang up my organic whole milk as a WIC item, bagged it, and told me to have a wonderful day.
As I pushed my cart away, my hands still shaking, the old man nodded toward my groceries and said, “You’re welcome!”
I grew infuriated. You’re welcome for what? I wanted to yell back at him. That he’d waited so impatiently, huffing and grumbling to his wife? It couldn’t have been that. It was that I was obviously poor and shopping in the middle of the day, pointedly not at work. He didn’t know I had to take an afternoon off for the WIC appointment, missing $40 in wages, where they had to weigh both Mia and me. We left with a booklet of coupons that supplemented about the same as those lost wages, but not the disgruntled client whom I’d had to reschedule, who might, if I ever needed to reschedule again, go with a different cleaner, because my work was that disposable. But what he saw was that those coupons were paid for by government money, the money he’d personally contributed to with the taxes he’d paid. To him, he might as well have personally bought the fancy milk I insisted on, but I was obviously poor so I didn’t deserve it.
Would my clients like Donna, the ones who confided in me like a good friend, who gave me coloring books and crayons for Mia, do the same if they saw me at the grocery store? How would they view a cleaning lady on food stamps? As a hard worker or as a failure? I’d become so self-conscious about these things that I tried to hide the details as much as possible. In the middle of conversations, I’d wonder if the person’s view of me would change if they knew I was on food stamps. Would they assume I had less potential?
I found myself wondering what it would be like to have enough money to be able to hire someone to clean my house. I’d never been in that position before, and I honestly doubted I ever would be. If I ever had to, I thought, I’d give them a big tip and probably offer them food or leave them good-smelling candles, too. I’d treat them like a guest, not a ghost. An equal. Like Wendy, Henry, Donna, and the Cigarette Lady did with me.
17
IN THREE YEARS
; As far as I know, only one of my clients—the one who owned the Farm House—used hidden cameras. She told me this so matter-of-factly, it caught me off guard. I tried my hardest to nod, as though hidden cameras were totally normal. The Farm House was two stories of navy-blue carpet covered in white hair from her cats and dogs. The stairs had carpet as well, and the hair would become trapped in the corners and creases of each step. Before I had started working there, Lonnie explained that she’d gone through every cleaner at the company trying to find someone suitable for the Farm House—I was their last chance at keeping the client.
It wasn’t ever clear what I did so differently than the other cleaners, and since I rarely cleaned with them, I wasn’t able to compare our skills or work ethic. I had a fear of being caught not working. Plus, I never could shake when, in an argument with Jamie, one of the many of its kind, he had said to me, “You sit around here all day, doing nothing but taking care of the baby, and the grout is filthy in the bathroom.” I never forgot that feeling. Even though I felt like I did everything I could, I was never doing enough.
Subconsciously, I wore the social stigma of being on government assistance even more after the encounter with the old couple in the supermarket. It felt like a weighted vest I couldn’t take off, or like someone had hidden cameras on me all the time. People I talked to rarely assumed I needed food stamps to survive, and they always said “those people” in conversations. Yet “those people” were never people like me. They were immigrants, or people of color, or the white people who were often referred to as trash.
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