Maid

by Stephanie Land

  On those long weekends without Mia and surrounded by homework, sitting at our round kitchen table, long periods of staring out the windows seemed inevitable. They each had a thin layer of moisture on them that I wiped off several times a day when we were home, feeling like the only difference between “outside” and “inside” was a few degrees and an old pane of glass.

  With the misty weather, I’d entered a persistent battle with the black mold that made Mia and me sick. Mia seemed to have constant gobs of snot dripping from her nose. I coughed like I worked in a coal mine, sometimes until I threw up. Once, in a panic after I’d tried to diagnose myself from looking up symptoms online, I drove to Urgent Care. My glands were so swollen I couldn’t move my head, and I thought I had meningitis. Two weeks later, I got a $200 bill for the few minutes I’d spent talking to a doctor. I called the hospital’s billing department in a wave of rage, prepared to not pay the bill at all, not caring what it might do to my credit. By filling out several forms, I finally convinced them to lower my bill through a program they offered for low-income patients. All I had to do was call and ask. It always struck me that programs like that were never mentioned. Billing offices only said to call for payment options, not to lower your bill by 80 percent.

  Weather that forces you indoors also forces you to take a long look at the space you call home. I thought of my clients who lived alone. I imagined them walking through empty rooms, the vacuum cleaner lines still visible in the carpet. I didn’t want to end up living like them. My clients’ lives, the homes they worked so hard to afford, were no longer my dream. Even though I had long since let that dream go, I still, in my most honest moments, while dusting rooms covered in pink, flowers, and dolls, admitted that I desperately wanted the same for my kid. I couldn’t help but wonder if the families who lived in the houses I cleaned somehow lost one another in the rooms full of video games, computers, and televisions.

  This studio apartment we lived in, despite all its downsides, was our home. I didn’t need two-point-five baths and a garage. Anyway, I saw how hard it was to keep them clean. Despite our surroundings, I woke up in the morning encased in love. I was there. In that small room. I was present, witnessing Mia’s dance routines and silly faces, fiercely loving every second. Our space was a home because we loved each other in it.

  22

  STILL LIFE WITH MIA

  As temperatures dropped, I lay in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, chewing on my lips in worry every time I heard the creak of the baseboard heaters coming on. Mia and I slept together for warmth in my narrow twin bed. I hung blankets and sheets on the windows to keep out the creeping cold. When frost persistently covered the ground and our windows, I closed the French doors to our sleeping area and we lived in the small room that was our living room and kitchen, and about the size of most of the guest bedrooms or offices I dusted. I folded out the love seat at night for us to sleep on. Mia jumped on it in excitement, again calling it a sleepover. It was a bigger space for us to sleep, but she still slept curled up against my back, an arm over my neck, with her breath warming the skin between my shoulder blades. In the mornings, when my alarm started buzzing and beeping in the darkness, I’d roll onto my back to stretch. Mia hugged my neck, then put a hand on my cheek.

  One night after Christmas, winter rain turned to snowflakes the size of quarters, covering the ground, piling inches deep. Mia and I stayed up well past her bedtime, knowing we wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere the next day, to watch the snow. Mia put on her snowsuit and, by the light of a streetlamp, made snow angels in the yard, while I measured the snow on Pearl’s hood—fourteen inches. I hadn’t seen a snowstorm like that since I lived in Alaska.

  The next morning Pam called to tell me to stay home. She didn’t want to risk me getting stuck on the road between clients’ houses. Most everything shut down in the Northwest when it snowed only a few inches. Even the freeway below our apartment was silent, with a few parked cars, abandoned by their drivers, scattered along the shoulders.

  Mia bundled up immediately, not complaining that her snow pants were still damp from the night before, asking when we could go outside. A former teacher of mine who lived in the neighborhood sent me a message on Facebook, asking if I needed a sled. He said he had a great one, with a rope and everything, that he’d leave for me on the porch. When I told Mia about it, she started jumping up and down, asking, “Now? Can we go now?” I hesitated. Every fiber in my body wanted a couch to sink into, endless mugs of tea, wool socks, and if I really let myself dream, a roaring fire with books to read and a dog curled up at my feet.

  “It’s a long way to walk,” I told Mia, knowing it wouldn’t matter. I could have told her we’d be walking all day, and her excitement wouldn’t wane. It was quite a trek for a three-year-old to walk uphill for a mile in snow that came up to her thighs. I had to carry her on my back most of the way. Halfway to the porch where we’d find our new sled sitting on it like a trophy, I had to stop walking. I looked out behind us, over the entire city, draped in thick snow and silence.

  Mia and I spent most of the morning outside, with me dragging her home through the neighborhood on the sled, where she lay on her stomach, eating handfuls of snow. I kept seeing signs of snowplows on the main streets and started to wonder if they’d get to ours. The house we lived in sat on the corner of an alley at its lowest point. Each way out was uphill. Pearl, being the teeny car she was, had wheels about the same size as the Red Rider wagon I sometimes pulled Mia around in. I didn’t have snow tires, or even chains, and couldn’t afford them anyway.

  After the sun warmed the snow for most of the day, the temperatures dropped below freezing that night, not getting any warmer the next day. Our street was a thick sheet of ice. I watched my upstairs neighbors attempt to get their car up the alley and fail. Another day of work gone. Maybe I could skip a credit card payment that month or take money from the available credit, deposit it into my bank account, and make a payment with that. It was halfway through the month, so most of my bills were already paid, but my current paycheck wouldn’t come for two more weeks when they’d all be due again. And with the weather, it would now be about $100 lower.

  We spent most of those snow days in the living room and kitchen. In the bedroom area, it was so cold that we could see frost on the windows through the French doors, and Mia put on her coat before going to grab a toy. Our television got only local stations, so she played her favorite DVDs over and over again. The one about the Hello Kitty fairy-tale ballerina, with the high-pitched voices, made my head hurt. Eventually we turned it off and got out the watercolors instead.

  Mia painted pictures while I nodded in approval or read stories to her. I didn’t get time off with Mia very often—usually just every other weekend when she wasn’t at her dad’s. With the absence of money to spend, I had to get creative in keeping her jumpy body and active mind entertained. If it rained, we couldn’t afford to go to the Children’s Museum or even the McDonald’s Playland so she could burn off energy. We didn’t enjoy sunny days at the zoo or waterparks.

  Sometimes just walking behind a two-parent family on a sidewalk could trigger feelings of shame from being alone. I zeroed in on them—dressed in clothes I could never afford, diaper bag carefully packed into an expensive jogging stroller. Those moms could say things that I never could: “Honey, could you take this?” or “Here, can you hold her for a second?” The child could go from one parent’s arms to the other’s. There were countless times I told Mia she had to walk, because my arms were tired and I couldn’t hold her anymore.

  During the first snow day, I tried to hush my inner voices of guilt and shame that wondered if Mia would have had a better life with someone else, if my decision to bring her into the world was the wrong one. I put my chin in my hand and watched her carefully paint another smiling face. We both wore sweatshirts and two pairs of socks. The air smelled like frost.

  My heart ached for my daughter more than it usually did in those months as I watched he
r struggle through transitions between her dad’s house and mine. The Sundays I drove the three-hour round trip to pick up Mia had become an afternoon of jaw-clenching stress and terror for us both. For most of the previous year, when I picked Mia up on those afternoons, she’d sleep most of the way home, exhausted from a weekend of her dad parading her around his friends to show what a good father he was. Other times she’d cry for Jamie, which tore and stabbed me with anger at the same time. I had never regretted my decision to stay in Washington as much as I did on those afternoons. Poverty was like a stagnant pond of mud that pulled at our feet and refused to let go.

  On the recent Sunday before the storm, Mia screamed at me the whole way home, for the entire ninety-minute drive from the ferry terminal to our apartment. I could never know what had happened, what he’d said to her to make her so angry. That afternoon, she yelled in almost the same primal, animalistic voice she’d used after her surgery.

  “I hate you!” she repeated, kicking her feet. “I want to kill you! I want you dead!” Her dad took advantage of every possible moment to manipulate her into thinking that I kept her from him, telling her how sad he was that she wasn’t at his house. If he really wanted her to be with him more, he would have tried. He would have, at least, made sure she had her own room. But she didn’t know that. He just liked Mia wanting that. He liked seeing her cry for him. When she was only a year old, she’d return to me inconsolable, and I’d hold her for hours, her body stiff with rage and agony, a mess of hot tears and screams until it wore her voice and energy down. It was all I could do to hold her in my arms, wishing safety for her more than anyone else.

  The afternoon of the storm, stuck in our own snow globe, I was content to drink tea and coffee and watch my daughter hum songs to herself as she dipped her paintbrush into a new color. Mia was too young to verbalize her feelings of loss, confusion, sadness, longing, or anger, but knowing this didn’t soften the afternoons when she would rage instead. My instinct was always to hold her, but she’d kick and scream even louder now. Sometimes I screamed back. I’m sure, through the thin walls of that apartment, my neighbors grew concerned. In those moments, I didn’t know what to do. I had no resources, no parents to call, no parenting coach or therapist or even a group of moms I’d connected with. I’d asked my child to be resilient and cope through a life of being tossed around from one caregiver to the next, and she screamed from underneath that weight. How would a stay-at-home mom, whose child had tantrums for normal things, understand my daughter’s anger?

  Not that I hadn’t tried to connect with people. That fall, Mia’s day care had a parents’ night or some kind of potluck, and I stuck around long enough to socialize. Most of the children Mia’s age who attended preschool had parents, as in plural. They flocked around Grandma Judy, soaking up her jovial nature. Mia had been running in and out with a group of kids, leaving me to stand on my own, and I heard a couple of women next to me complaining about their husbands. I couldn’t help but turn my head to look at them, and they couldn’t help but notice I’d heard.

  “It’s so hard on your own!” one said to me, the one who’d been listening to her friend complain. I nodded, forcing the sides of my mouth up to resemble some kind of smile.

  “So, Stephanie,” the other woman said, “you’re a single mom, right? My friend just went through a horrible divorce, and she’s in such a tough spot. Do you know of any organizations that could help her?”

  “Um, sure,” I said, my eyes darting nervously. Three women stood around the table beside us, holding tiny plates of carrot sticks and bits of broccoli with ranch. All of them now looked at me. The token single mom. I mumbled out a few programs for food and childcare.

  One of the moms, a short lady with brown, bobbed hair and a round face, sniffed and held her head high. “When Jack got laid off last winter,” she said, “all three of us had to move into my parents’ house. Remember that?” She nudged the woman next to her. “That tiny room with Jilly’s little bed scrunched up against the wall? It was like we were homeless. We were homeless!” The friend she’d elbowed nodded, making a sad face. “But thank goodness we’d saved for emergencies.”

  Another mom nodded. They all turned back to me for a response. I looked down at Mia’s long-forgotten plate of chips and a soggy hot dog I’d been holding for her. I hadn’t contributed any food, so I chose not to eat any of it. I had absolutely no idea what to say. What would they say about the room Mia and I lived in? I couldn’t provide her with a home, or food, and accepted handouts to help with the tiny space we occupied. The most frustrating part of being stuck in the system were the penalties it seemed I received for improving my life. On a couple of occasions, my income pushed me over the limit by a few dollars, I’d lose hundreds of dollars in benefits. Due to my self-employment, I had to report my income every few months. Earning $50 extra could make my co-pay at day care go up by the same amount. Sometimes it meant losing my childcare grant altogether. There was no incentive or opportunity to save money. The system kept me locked down, scraping the bottom of the barrel, without a plan to climb out of it.

  One of the moms in the group asked who it was, who got divorced, and they nestled into their comfort of gossip so I could slink away.

  Maybe they did feel a little like me. Maybe their marriages left them feeling more alone than I knew. Maybe we all wanted something we had equally lost hope that we’d ever have.

  I thought about Mia’s rages, about almost losing her in the car accident, about wearing our coats in the house because we couldn’t afford to turn up the heat. About entire weekends without Mia spent cleaning toilets and scrubbing floors.

  That winter, I made another decision and wrote in my online journal with renewed purpose. The blog I’d kept up until that point had been about whatever struggles I’d been having, unsure where else to put it. Every once in a while, I wrote about a moment of beauty, of clarity, of marvel at the life Mia and I had. I decided to make the entire focus on just that, changing the theme of our life, and called it Still Life with Mia. I wanted to capture those moments, like the one I was in now, sitting at our table, me deep in thought as I watched her paint, to keep them fresh in my memory.

  The online journal became a lifeline I’d been craving, an outlet for words and pictures, a way to cut through the stress and fear of my life and focus on what I loved most—my daughter and writing. I took a photograph of Mia’s face engaged in wonder. Those seconds of time were the ones I found made me feel as if I’d been there for her even more than I was.

  This wasn’t the life I wanted for us, but it was the one we had for now. It won’t always be this way. I had to keep telling myself that, or the guilt for calling this room a home, telling my daughter that this was all there was, whether it was space or food, would consume me. I wanted so much for her to have a house with a fenced backyard and a cement patio or sidewalk for hopscotch. Mia said she wanted a sandbox and swings like they had at school whenever I played the “imagine our dream house” game with her. Visualizing where we’d end up, where we’d live, what we’d do, seemed to be just as important for her as it was for me.

  This was the start of our journey. The beginning. Sitting at that table, I felt time pause for a moment, for as long as a stroke of her brush. For that moment, we were warm. We had each other, we had a home, and we knew the strongest, deepest kind of love. We spent so much time scrambling from one thing to the next, getting through it, getting to the end, and starting over again, that I would not forget to fully breathe in the minuscule moments of beauty and peace.

  Pam called that afternoon, and I talked to her from where I sat at the kitchen table, staring out at the snow. “Are you able to get out?” she asked with a wince or thread of hope in her voice.

  “I tried to move my car earlier,” I said, standing to walk into our closed-off bedroom to look out the window. “It rolled out of its parking spot to the street and the tires spun in place from there.” I shook my head, a former Alaskan in every sense of the word.
“My neighbor had to come out and try to get it back in the spot I had it, but we couldn’t.” I scratched at the frost on the window. I had left Pearl parked where she was, her bumper barely out of the road. The cold spell wasn’t supposed to let up for another day or two. Although most of the main roads were fine, several of my clients were tucked back in the woods or on hills. If I got stuck, I risked not being able to pick up Mia in time, and I didn’t have anyone to call in a pinch.

  I wondered for a minute if Pam would fire me for not being able to work. I’d never missed this much work before, and that history at least seemed to work in my advantage. But for a few seconds, I didn’t care. I hated the job almost as much as I hated relying on it. I hated needing it. I hated having to be grateful for it. “I’ll make it up,” I said to Pam.

  “I know you will, Steph,” she said, and we hung up.

  I scratched at the frost on the window some more. Mia had the television on again. My breath came out in little clouds. When I reached to pull a few of Mia’s stuffed animals away from the window, little bits of their fake fur stuck, frozen, to the glass.

  Dusk grew on the horizon outside. I decided to make Mia pancakes for dinner with a small spoonful of mint chocolate chip ice cream on them. For myself I chose a package of ramen with two hard-boiled eggs and the remaining frozen broccoli. Mia took a bath, and I wrote in the online journal under its new name and posted photos from our walk through the snow to get the sled. Mia’s cheeks were bright red, her hair sticking out of her hat just long enough to curl around the sides as she carefully licked snow off the tip of her pink mitten. It had been so quiet. The only sound was our feet compacting the snow.

  Along the rim of the bathtub, Mia lined up her herd of My Little Ponies, hand-me-down gifts from a friend. “I’m done with my bath, Mom,” she called out to me, and I lifted her, still covered in bubbles, her skin rosy from the warm water, onto the towel I’d laid on the toilet lid. She was getting so heavy. So much time had passed since she was a tiny infant in my arms.