The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10

by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)

  I had been raised in an upper-middle class suburb of Washington, D.C., collecting piles of clean, folded clothes from the dedicated Edis. House cleaning had always been an invisible process to me, something that happened while I was at school. My sense of duty to household chores was more theoretical than practical, and meeting Eulis had provided a convenient out. “Look, it could at least save us some time,” I argued, and Maureen had to agree. Just doing our personal loads of laundry was a three-hour project every weekend, and sweeping and dusting the house could easily take up a whole day. In the end, we agreed that she would at least meet Eulis, and I offered to pay her full salary for the first few weeks until we decided if the arrangement would be permanent. “I think you’re going to like her,” I said optimistically. “Really.”

  Eulis arrived at precisely 6:55 A.M. the next Monday, jangling the rusty gate at the end of our walkway. “HELLO! HELLO!” she called as she walked toward our apartment, the “bottom house” of a two-story duplex. “GOOD MAWRNING GIRLS! Ya tired, Miss Katrin!” she cackled, “Like ya stay up late last night! I had to go on the road and catch minibus early fuh meet y’all here! I was worried I couldn’t find the house, but look, I found y’all easy! Is nice house for the two y’all, nuff, nuff rooms. . . .” she went on talking, as Maureen emerged from her room, rubbing her eyes. “Hello, hello, you must be Miss Mawreen!” Eulis said, pumping her hand up and down. “Y’all is pretty white women, but ya must protect your skin!” she said, looking at Maureen’s freckles. “Eh, eh, look de cyats. . . .” she said, as our three kittens scampered through the middle of the apartment. “I didn’t know y’all had cyats?” she said, laughing, looking at me.

  “Oh, we just got them . . . they’re just kittens,” I said, reaching down to pick up one and kiss him on the head. Eulis wrinkled her nose and made a clicking noise with her tongue.

  “Oh, Miss Katrin! Animal is a dirty ting! Ya must not treat dem as children!” she scolded me, laughing again. Maureen shot me a look.

  “Maybe we should take a look around the apartment,” I offered.

  It was a quick tour. We walked her through the three bedrooms, one empty for guests; the pipe jutting out from the wall that served as a shower; the tiny closet that housed our toilet without a lid. Then there was the dim kitchen area with its gas stove and metal sink, the small living room with a wicker sofa and low table. Finally we showed her our cleaning supplies, a small collection of worn out sponges and soaps provided by our landlord.

  Eulis nodded at everything she saw, commenting on the quality of the furniture, and the lacquered wood floor. “I am very happy to work for y’all, but dere are a few tings me just not able with. . . .” she said as we finished the tour. Maureen and I sat back on the couch as she began her ground rules. Eulis did not do laundry and she did not cook and she did not clean windows. She did not do dishes, and she did not do stovetops. She made it clear that she had no love for cats and planned to kick them out while she cleaned. Our traditional pointy broom, made up of the spines of palm leaves, would not be suitable; she would need a “push broom” with a handle. She needed Vim for the bathrooms, Bayclin for the floors, and Baygon for the cockroaches. Maureen and I listened and nodded as she went on and on. Again, Eulis’ sheer force of character won out, and we agreed to pay her to come once a week.

  And so it began, each Monday Eulis opening the gate at 6:55 A.M., calling, “MAWRNING MISS KATRIN! MAWRNING MISS MAWREEN! MAWRNING GYALS!” Her worn, brown rubber sandals slapping the concrete, plastic bags rustling against her housedress and then three strong raps, as her calloused knuckles met the wood door with a crack. I would pull myself from bed, opening the door to: “HELLO MISS KATRIN! HOW YA DO?” and Eulis would amble in and drop her bags on the kitchen table. “Ya hear da news last night, terrible fire on the East Coast, nuff, nuff people dead and da big cricket match this week coming. . . .” Still talking, she wandered into the back room for the cleaning supplies. “All de lawless young people gon’ be parytin’, like I won’t go on the streets for the weekend, such madness dis country come to. . . .”

  Eulis liked to talk most of the time she was cleaning, whether we were fully awake, or even in the room with her. Despite the running monologue, though, she was a hard worker, trundling through our small apartment with her bottles of brightly colored cleaning products. She soon earned a reputation among our Guyanese neighbors, who were also treated to her morning serenades. “Small woman got a big mouth!” one of them laughed to me, “How y’all take it?” Other American volunteers who stumbled out of the guest room on Monday mornings got the full Eulis treatment: an interrogation about their lives in the States, a passionate analysis of the Guyanese political situation, and a strong encouragement to marry young. In her weekly lectures, she would drop aphorisms for us to digest, about hard work and “how people stay,” the challenges of grappling with the limitations of human nature. Most of her thoughts were prefaced with “Ole people say . . . ,” a local version of “Confucius says,” that connected her opinions to a lineage of wise and weathered Guyanese.

  Unexpectedly, Eulis’ hire ended up making me feel better about my life in Guyana. My job was still vague, and I was starting to doubt that it would ever change. Eulis’ arrival each Monday was something that I had set into motion, a routine I could count on. I was so hungry for a sense of accomplishment that I began to think that hiring a maid somehow counted in the equation of my service to Guyana. This blind appreciation led me to be oblivious to her actual work, which, similar to Edis’ efforts throughout my childhood, I simply took for granted.

  As the months passed, we came to realize that as strong as Eulis’ opinions were about what she would not clean, she had even stronger convictions about what was absolutely necessary to clean. She insisted on dusting under our beds every week. “Ole people say . . .” she would begin, followed by a discourse about regular under-bed cleaning, usually involving premature disease and death. Before she could slide under the wooden frame into my bed’s nether regions, she had to remove duffel bags, rusted umbrellas, cracked sandals, broken flashlights, and my standard-issue medical kit. She worked herself into the corners on her stomach, only her stubby legs and the hem of her floral housedress sticking out and rocking up and down with the movement of her torso. When she finally emerged, she wiped the sweat from her forehead, dusted off her housedress and re-stored everything to its place. The whole process took about twenty minutes.

  Eulis’ second, non-negotiable Herculean task was to clean the shower curtain top to bottom, on both sides. Any question about the significance of this task would put a wrinkle in her brow. “Miss Katrin, ya must realize dat mold is growing! Ya cyan’t see it yet, but it is dangerous mold, and soon it black up da ting!” Unable to reach the curtain, Eulis had to drag a chair into the little shower area, and remove it ring by ring from the stall. Then she would lay it flat on the kitchen floor, sprinkle it with soap powder and water, and scrub it with a hard brush. She writhed, her arm and leg muscles torturing the thin plastic into the rough cement floor. Ten or fifteen minutes later she would rise again, damp, soapy and dripping with sweat, to rinse the curtain and hang it back up.

  Eulis’ personality would have seemed to predict a flashy, big-picture cleaner: a waxer of floors, a scrubber of tiles, everything sparkling at the end of the day. But in truth her aesthetic of clean was concerned with nascent filth in obscure places, and little else. And there was no arguing that she didn’t work hard. By her general dishevelment and the strong smells off her body after a few hours of cleaning in the tropical heat, it was clear that she had purged our apartment of all sorts of imperceptible scum.

  The problem was, the house didn’t look all that different after she had cleaned it. Eulis had a disdain for the dirt you could actually see, as if it were simply too obvious to be worth her time. After a combined hour of arduous toil under our beds and the guest bed (regardless of it if had been slept in), she would leave crumbs on the table or a thick layer of dust on the bookshe
lf. This drove Maureen crazy. “Did she clean the shower curtain again?” she would ask when she got home from work. “These tiles are disgusting!” She started to take on some of the tasks that Eulis refused, which made her even angrier. When we raised our suggestions to Eulis she would puff up her chest defensively. “I been cleaning houses for twenty years, and de ladies ’ave always been very happy with my work!” Maureen’s dissatisfaction, Eulis’ stubbornness, and my apathy made her salary more and more contentious as the weeks wore on.

  As tensions rose, Eulis became representative of a larger societal scorn for North Americans. Though respected for our education, we were generally considered doltish when it came to household management. We stained our clothes, hung them so they took twice as long to dry, left the house with noticeable wrinkles in our slacks. We didn’t even know you needed to wash your curtains and walls at Christmas to remove cockroach eggs, or beat your rugs outside every few months so they wouldn’t stink with mold. We swept around furniture, rather than moving it, our roti did not bubble and flake, and souse and black pudding were entirely out of our league. Yes, we might be able to read or do calculations, but any Guyanese woman could outperform us when it came to the things that mattered, the things that meant clean or dirty, rich or poor, and, in some cases, life or death. We knew that our neighbors laughed behind our backs at our unconventional cleaning and laundering techniques. By refusing even our most basic suggestions, Eulis was laughing in our faces.

  By this time Eulis had been working for us for seven months, and both Maureen and I had established ourselves at our jobs and become friends with young, hip, Guyanese who mocked us for putting up with such a difficult maid. The initial charm was outweighed by our annoyance with being woken up every Monday morning by a woman who refused to do the work we were paying her to do. The cross-cultural luster had worn off our times with Eulis, and we were losing patience.

  As relations deteriorated we became less careful, less kind. I forgot to buy more cleaning solution when Eulis ran out, causing her to grumble for an entire morning that “ting worth doing is only worth doing right.” We let the cats run freely in the house while she cleaned, so that every five minutes we heard her shoo them away, even if they were across the room. Over the Easter holiday, we forgot to tell her we would both be leaving for the week. After pounding on our door for ten minutes and getting no response, she assumed we had died, though the neighbors assured her we were just on vacation. “YOU ’AVE DONE ME A GREAT INJUSTICE! YOU ’AVE DONE ME A GREAT INJUSTICE!” she sang the next Monday morning, waving her pocketbook over her head as she stormed up our walkway. Only after a long explanation, profuse apologies and a round trip bus fare refund were we able to quiet her.

  A few weeks later we moved to a smaller apartment in a more upscale, safer area of town. We decided this was good opportunity to try to talk to Eulis about our ideas for cleaning the new space. The next Monday she arrived on schedule. “Good mawrning, Miss Katrin!” she said, stepping into the apartment. “Like ya get nice sunlight in da place! Ya shouldn’t keep the back door open, too much of dust flyin’ in. . . .” She paused, noticing Maureen sitting on the couch already dressed for work.

  “Eulis, we just wanted to talk to you for a minute about some things,” I said. She hesitated at the front door, her face tense, and then came to perch on the edge of the red velvet couch looking at us both warily.

  “We wanted to discuss how this space might have some different cleaning needs than our old apartment,” I said, trying to be gentle.

  Her face tightened as she looked first at me, then Maureen. “Y’all aren’t happy with how I been cleaning?” she asked.

  “No, no, you’ve been doing a great job,” I said. “We just thought that now that we’re in a new apartment it might be time to think about other things that might need cleaning too.” She glared at me. I looked down at the rug.

  Maureen spoke up. “These are things we’ve talked about before, but now that we’ve moved we thought you might be more . . . flexible.” Eulis’ eyes were narrowing, her lips thinning in a look of suppressed outrage. Maureen went on. “You know about the shower tiles, well we just want you to scrub them a little, so the soap scum doesn’t build up. And the stovetop could always use. . . .” she continued listing the most common battlegrounds in our cleaning standoff.

  “But don’t I always mek da sink shine?” Eulis burst out, sputtering with anger. “Like y’all too busy tinking of stovetop to see anyting else!” she yelled.

  “Of course, of course,” Maureen said backing down a little. “The bathroom sink looks great. Now maybe you could just do the same with the kitchen sink?”

  It dawned on me that our disagreement with Eulis would never be resolved in a pleasant conversation on the couch. She would always believe she knew better than we did how to clean our home: this was her country and her career. Of course she didn’t want to compromise the only part of her life that gave her any feeling of power to two American girls young enough to be her granddaughters. As far as we were concerned, so much of our lives in Guyana was about accepting limited options that we couldn’t bear to relinquish our last bastion of control: our own home.

  “Like y’all believe since ya move here ya gon’ up!” Eulis said under her breath.

  “No, that’s not it, Eulis, we don’t mean to offend you. . . .” I added. But it was too late.

  She shook her head, for once silenced by the magnitude of her anger. “Y’all get me too vexed for work!” she said. I protested but she was already picking up her umbrella and pocketbook and walking out. “Goodbye Miss Katrin and Miss Mawreen,” she said in a low voice, then pulled the door hard behind her.

  “Me nah able,” she said, shaking her head, when she visited me at school the next day. My students looked on curiously as I tried to reason with her.

  “Eulis, we still want you to work for us, in fact we want your job to be easier. . . .” I said. She was already shaking her head.

  “Miss Katrin,” she said, her voice wavering with anger. “Twenty years I work cleaning houses and no ladies ever sit me down for ‘talk’ like yesterday.” She spit the word “talk” out like it was a bitter root. “No, me nah able with y’all.” Though she had no other work and only a meager pension from the Government, Eulis quit her job as our maid.

  Maureen was unapologetic. “She left, Katherine. If she wants to work she’ll come back, but we don’t need to go after her.” But I couldn’t forget the look of betrayal on Eulis’ face the day she visited me at the school. When I went home to the States that summer, our failed relationship was still on my mind. I ended up telling Grammy, my 80-year-old grandmother, about Eulis, omitting any mention of our recent falling out. “Oh, Katherine,” she said, her watery blue eyes growing even more watery. “How hard it must be to live alone down there!” She shook her head, “No children or grandchildren either.”

  As she did every year, Grammy sent me a care package that Christmas. Buried among parcels of flashing fairy lights, plastic trees, and tinsel, was a bag with little red-nosed reindeers on it. In her spidery, arthritic handwriting, she had printed, “For Eulis, with love from Grammy (Katherine’s grandmother).” Her letter read: “I remembered how you had told me about your dear maid, Eulis. Please pass on this little gift to her from me.”

  It had been almost half a year since our rift with Eulis, and the idea of seeing her again brought up mixed feelings. I put off giving her the gift, taking as my excuse the fact that she had no phone. For months, the bag sat behind a low table in my now dusty room. Occasionally, though, I would see the green ribbon curls poking up and feel a pang of guilt for withholding from Eulis what was rightfully hers.

  Finally, one day after work I got up the nerve to seek her out at the Catholic home for the elderly. I found her in a sitting room looking out the window, fanning herself with a magazine. She was wearing one of her familiar housedresses, her hair pinned back in little white twists on her head. “Miss Katrin!” she said, raising her
eyebrows and widening her eyes. “Me ehn’t tink I’d see you again dis lifetime!”

  “I brought you a present, from my grandmother. . . .” I began, raising the bag in the air.

  “No, Miss Katrin!” her face darkened and she waved ominously toward the two elderly women smiling and peeking around the doorframe. I followed her into her bedroom where she took the bag from me. “Dese ole people here is terrible,” she said, glancing furtively toward the door. “If dey see you give me tings, dey goin’ come after me all de time.” She looked at the wrapping paper and the note. “Long time since Christmas pass. . . .” she mumbled. But the contents pleased her; my grandmother had sent a rain poncho, a box of candy canes, and an angel figurine with wings of gold.

  I told her news of the house, the cats, and the other volunteers she had met. She mentioned our last conversation in hushed tones. “When y’all wanted to ’ave long talk, I knew dere was problem ahead.” She offered a few theories as to why our working relationship had failed: “Like y’all had to do tings you own way,” and, “It must have been dat other girl. I believe she never did tek to me.” Her anger seemed to have been mollified by the peace offering from my grandmother, though, and when I left she walked me to the gate and waved goodbye.

  A few weeks later, Eulis visited me again at the school and asked for my grandmother’s address. In her thank you note she listed each trinket that Grammy had sent, underlining it in red and explaining in detail how she would use it. Touched by her appreciation, Grammy decided to continue sending packages through me, necessitating more trips to the Catholic Home. As it turned out, Grammy’s inclination toward sentimental, religious and mass-produced gifts was a perfect match for Eulis. She wrote back about every token as if it were the most beautiful, useful item she had ever received.