Disappointingly, Oprah fails to respond but still, these are the years when, for the most part, whatever Sandra wants to do or be is limited only by her own energy—and that feels boundless, only increased by everything she takes on. You can see it happening in the pages of the Sandringham-Brighton Advertiser and the Bayside Times and the Bayside Shopper and the Moorabbin Standard, among the ads for private schools and custom-built wardrobes.
From this local news archive Sandra emerges gradually and then fully as from a chrysalis. Sandra is Small Business Owner, then Leader of the Small Business Owners. She is Chairperson, Spokeswoman, Hostess, President, Politician, Philanthropist. She is interviewed, photographed, quoted. She is. She tells people that owning the hardware store is teaching her about the technical side of things, ‘how things work and how they fit together’. But what she is really learning is how well she fits into the Order of Things.
It is always hot in December but this year the heat is unbearable. Still, she smacks open the screen door to leave the air-conditioned house and sit alone on the burning bricks of the back steps, pumping her damp silk blouse to cool herself down. Convinced, these last weeks, that she must be going through ‘an early change of life’, she is overwhelmed with heat and dizziness and her growing resentment about the fact that no one ever helps her cook or clean.
She has always tried to make sure that Christmas each year is ‘like Disneyland’ for George and his children and their children, who rush in from the car calling out to her, ‘Nana!’ She invites his friends and his cousins. For the first few years, she spent days planning and shopping and cooking a meal for thirty people.
But this year, something is different; a switch has been tripped. She’s having trouble keeping her mouth shut about the disrespect shown by Neil and Anita towards her and their father, who now pokes his head through the door.
‘You all right, love?’ George asks, perspiration glistening on his upper lip.
She turns and gives him a hard look. Closing the door behind him, he smooths down a cowlick that no longer exists, waits for her to explain.
‘They live the life of Riley,’ she hisses, whipping her head back to stare straight ahead. They let themselves into the house and take paintings off the walls, take whatever they want, and the way in which George handles this has become a point of tension in their marriage. She turns around again and looks at him in warning. ‘George, respect begets respect. These kids do not respect you. You can’t keep trying to please them all the time. I’m your wife, you put me first.’
‘You know what?’ George says. ‘We’re not going to celebrate Christmas in this house anymore. You go to so much trouble and they won’t even lift up a plate and put it on the sink. We’re not doing it anymore.’ Shrieks from the grandchildren playing with their new toys in the living room float outside.
From then on, they go away each year to somewhere new, starting with Lake Como. This solves the immediate tension around the holidays but does little to promote family accord.
George is many things to her: husband, friend, lover, business partner, drinking partner, father, child, teacher, companion, consultant, co-worker, supporter and, truly, a love of her life, though it cannot be said that he is the love of her life, because Craig is. So while she has no plans to leave George, she does tell him with some regularity that an emergency committee meeting has been called, what a bother, but to eat the leftovers in the fridge and no need to wait up, it’s no use both of them being tired, OK? Then she drives over to Craig’s place. Other times, Craig rides over on his motorbike when George is at the hardware store.
They are lying on the couch early one afternoon when she hears George’s car pull up outside.
‘Shit,’ she spits, twisting off the couch and grabbing Craig’s shoes. ‘Hide! Hide!’ she urges, as though the force of her voice could pick him up and deposit him in the closet with the vacuum and the winter coats.
‘I’m fuckin’ not hiding for anybody,’ Craig says, sitting up on the couch and crossing his arms over his bare chest with exaggerated insouciance. Down the hall, a key crunches in the lock and the front door opens. George pads heavily towards them on his way to the kitchen. Instantly, Sandra fills the living room doorway, arms reaching upward, bottom poking to the side for maximum coverage.
‘Ah, you’re home early, love,’ she yawns to George standing in front of her and directly facing, though he can’t see it, the back of Craig’s head resting against his formal sofa. ‘I was just having a little nap before I do the shopping.’ She takes his arm and gently leads him towards the kitchen where he locates the papers he forgot to take to the shop that morning. ‘Now what would you like for dinner? I was thinking a nice beef bourguignon to go with that red you bought…’ She keeps his eyes focused on her as they retrace his steps down the hallway. She gives him a kiss goodbye for the first time in months, waves, shuts the door and returns to the living room.
‘Remind me never to trust you,’ Craig grins, lying back down again. ‘You’re too convincing a liar.’ Her hands are still shaking as she pours herself a Scotch.
Marilyn
The roses growing around Marilyn’s small house are long untended, growing wild and heavy in a neighbourhood of weekend-washed cars and tidy front lawns. This is the first and only hint you get from outside: a visual dissonance so slight as to be, maybe, nothing; one string out of tune on one instrument in an orchestra. And while many of the houses that need Sandra proclaim their problems—the rusted bathtub full of bowling balls in the front yard, the door hanging off its hinges, the solid smell of cigarettes that hits you like a falling brick—there are, equally, many other houses where the signs are more subtle. The permanently drawn blinds, the uncollected mail, the car that never moves; look, now, and you will start to notice them everywhere. But sometimes all you get is a couple of overgrown rose bushes, waggling their long, thorny fingers in the breeze as if to say: you may come this close, but no closer.
After calling Sandra to request a house clean, Marilyn neither answered her phone for a few weeks nor returned Sandra’s numerous messages. But they finally managed to connect and Sandra arrived today with three of her cleaners.
Sandra is in high spirits this morning. Lately she has been concerned with a vitamin C skin serum, whether her contract for police work will be renewed, the trouble a friend is having with her teenage son, whether she might have sleep apnoea, how—if she does have sleep apnoea—the required breathing equipment would ruin the look of her bedroom, missing the early-bird registration for the annual Hoarding and Squalor Conference, how bloody infuriating it is to deal with VicRoads who threatened to hang up on her if she continued swearing, a lovely thank-you card she received from a client and what kind of psychopath laid the carpet in her new office inasmuch as it’s clearly three shades darker than the room it was supposed to blend in with. She is meticulous in this regard, as she is in her work, where the prospect of not perfectly completing a task horrifies her more than anything she could ever encounter as part of a trauma job.
‘I’m a high achiever,’ Sandra explained to me once. ‘I have to get a high result and if I don’t, that’s more damaging to me than having to deal with this crap all day.’
One time, I asked Sandra about the most disturbing job she ever did. ‘There are a few jobs that stick in your mind,’ she conceded. ‘Like, there was a guy, for example, after a Melbourne Cup a few years ago. What took him over the edge I don’t know, but it was more the way he went about killing himself. It was with tree loppers and bricks. So the pain threshold that he went through was quite mind-blowing. And you look at the slash of blood all over the room—has he cut his toes off? Has he cut his cock off? What’s he done? And he’s walked around the house as well. Then when you get to the stairwell, even though there’s no blood, there’s this sense that something isn’t right. And I didn’t know what it was. So we started to lift the carpet, and it’s full of maggots underneath. I went, ‘Oh my godfather!’ It just blew me away,
the amount of maggots down the stairwell. That played on my mind. ’Cause if I didn’t have that sixth sense of something, what else would I have left to chance? And that would’ve gone badly against my name.’
Sandra likes to show me her ‘before and afters’, photos on her phone from jobs recently completed. ‘This is in Caulfield. Mould,’ she explains as we stand outside Marilyn’s house. ‘This is the stovetop; the rats and mice.’ She swipes through more photos. ‘Look at the mould. It’s pretty unreal, isn’t it?’ Swipe, swipe. ‘Ah, that’s a suicide, sorry.’ She hurriedly swipes past two photos of a black puddle. ‘That’s the end product.’ Proud swipe. ‘That’s the end product.’ Proud swipe. ‘End product, end product, end product.’ Each room is meticulously clean, shiny to the point of caricature. ‘That’s two days of work. I think that’s pretty good. Oh, I’ve gotta show you this, just so you can have a laugh,’ she says. ‘This is a little dog in a teddy bear outfit.’
Sandra’s mode is no-nonsense kindness when she walks through Marilyn’s cream-coloured front door. Marilyn does not look her age. Though she walks slowly, with the aid of a gliding walker on which is balanced a gin and tonic effervescing in the early morning light, her face is smooth and her tone is archly playful. But then you look closer and you see, before you register that she is in her mid-seventies, that she is simply not well. Her skin is as light as the white hair that shoots out in short bristles above her face. With her stomach swollen round and her pale lips and her finger left quivering in the air while she pursues a forgotten word, Marilyn looks like a dandelion whose seeds are about to blow away. But she directs Sandra and the cleaners around her kitchen with the clipped commands of someone used to being in charge. When she tells me she was a schoolteacher, I am not surprised.
‘I had to go into respite care, in the retirement village, when I was really sick,’ Marilyn explains as Sandra pats her shoulder reassuringly. ‘I basically became one of the staff,’ Marilyn snorts, raising one eyebrow, ‘the old dears didn’t know whether they were Arthur or Martha…’ Marilyn waves her hand dismissively; her nails—like Sandra’s—are artificial and supremely long. They have been recently painted a dazzling shade of purple.
Thirty years ago, Marilyn bought this house for herself and the two young children she raised on her own. She was a working single mother then, is a self-funded retiree now, and, despite being shot through with cancer and arthritis, has no plans to leave. I look around at the spacious living room and the kitchen where the fridge door is propped open. I ask whether it is broken.
‘No,’ Sandra answers breezily on Marilyn’s behalf. ‘It was too full and she didn’t have the strength to open it, so things have gone a little bit tacky in there.’
‘How long have you had the trouble with the fridge?’ I ask.
‘It must be about three weeks, perhaps longer,’ Marilyn answers vaguely.
Starting at the front door, the foyer is thickly planted with white plastic bags full of groceries in various states of decomposition. For at least a few weeks, Marilyn has had the physical and mental energy to drive to the supermarket, to select from the shelves, to make small talk with the cashier who arranges someone to help load the bags into her car, to drive home and to schlep the bags from her car through her front door. But Marilyn has not had the energy to make the final transfer of the groceries from the foyer to the kitchen. And even if she could have summoned this strength, she wouldn’t have been able to fit anything new into the fridge because it was already full of rotting food which she didn’t have the energy to clear out. So Sandra’s crew are now cleaning the fridge and the kitchen, swiftly, efficiently and to the arrhythmic percussion of cutlery and crockery. Every few minutes, one of ‘the girls’ hauls a huge black plastic rubbish bag out the front door and over the lawn, where she hefts it into the trailer attached to the back of the STC van parked on the street.
Life here looks to be less in crisis than surreally interrupted. You get the feeling that someone simply pressed the pause button with the shopping just waiting to be put away and the kettle mid-boil in a house with nobody home. The problem here, then, is subtler than many Sandra normally handles. Milk has curdled and plants have died in these tastefully appointed rooms with their carefully framed photos. Though the house appears generally tidy, three cleaners are working frenetically in the kitchen, hauling bag after bag after bag of rubbish outside. This house, like Marilyn with her beautifully manicured hands, is not its surfaces.
Sandra suggests that Marilyn and I chat in the formal living room, which will let the cleaners move freely through the hallway. Marilyn rejects this suggestion, citing a problem with the height of the sofa, and leads me instead down a dim hallway to her bedroom. She snails along, chanting, ‘The more I walk, the better I’ll walk.’
Marilyn’s bedroom floor is streaked with dirt and strewn with junk mail. There are plastic laundry baskets overflowing with paper and clothes and food and random household items that you must negotiate in order to cross the room. The smell is bad but not overpowering and in this respect it is better than nearly all of the houses Sandra works in; there are top notes of dirty skin, rotting fruit, dust, industrial cleaning products, shit. Marilyn’s bed lies beneath different strata of paper (magazines, TV guides, flyers, legal documents, unopened mail) in which various items have become lodged: a Tupperware container of yellow liquid that she later explains is from a can of peaches, a milk carton standing upright, a box of crackers, a can of insect repellent, and a jumble of other stuff including a plastic bottle of cream, five boxes of paracetamol, bags of chocolate and an unopened soap and lotion gift pack. Her many pillows have no cases, and both they and the bedspread are yellow with dirt or age.
Entirely unselfconscious about the state of the room, Marilyn makes her way slowly around the bed and waves for me to open the drapes covering one wall, explaining that she always keeps them closed. I tug at the heavy orange fabric and sunlight filters over the potted gardenias sitting on the patio, through the spiderwebs layered over the dirty glass and into the room, where it washes over Marilyn stepping out of her slippers and hoisting herself back into bed. There is a large pile of slip-on shoes next to the bed: lemon yellow sandals, turquoise clogs, pristine purple sneakers. Marilyn leans over the ball of her stomach, straining to spread her lavender robe over her legs, and then settles back, Buddha-like, against her pillows. I sit, sideways, on the bed next to her.
One of the cleaners comes in and starts wiping down the walls and floor in the small en suite bathroom while Marilyn tells me about the cancer she was diagnosed with in 2014 and how the drugs she was put on exacerbated her arthritis and depleted her oestrogen, causing her to experience something like menopause for a second time, which was ‘not awful, but inconvenient and uncomfortable’. The physical sequelae of these painful and debilitating illnesses are presented as the reason why she presently requires the help of Sandra to clean her house.
‘And then, last Christmas, things started to go downhill,’ Marilyn sighs. She pulls the lavender robe up to her face where red capillaries burst across her cheeks like faint fireworks. Her eyes peer up and over the top of the fabric for a moment; they are very large and very round and for a moment they are the eyes of a child.
Marilyn has two adult children. Though quite different in personality, they are both clearly intelligent and she lists their accomplishments with pride. Equally, however, when she speaks about them it is mostly with cutting judgment and a sense of having been wounded: the warmth present when she talks about previous housecleaners is missing when she discusses her children. While Marilyn usually spends Christmas Day with her younger son and daughter-in-law and their children, they told her they would be celebrating with the wife’s family that year. This left Marilyn feeling as though she ‘didn’t really fit in’. So she arranged to go to a restaurant with her older son, who has ‘never ever married’, and who lives an hour and a half away. That son had planned to spend Christmas morning with his girlfriend, so he could
only join Marilyn for lunch. He didn’t come over until 2 p.m., at which point Marilyn was feeling ‘very discontent’. Marilyn and her son were ‘the last to arrive’ at the restaurant and despite the fact that there was still a surprisingly abundant spread of both hot and cold foods on offer, ‘the damage had been sort of done’.
To understand the nature and extent of this damage, you must also understand a number of other things. First, Marilyn devotes a room in her house to the appurtenances of Christmas and there she keeps many rolls of Christmas-themed wrapping paper, Christmas-themed rugs, strings of Christmas lights, at least one artificial Christmas tree and ‘lots of Santas’ including one who is ‘life size but with beautiful clothing’.
Second, among the various sweet treats rotting on her bed this morning is a basket fashioned out of chocolate, to which she relatively recently treated herself expressly because it was something her parents would purchase for her from Darrell Lea each Christmas of her childhood. While it still tastes the same, she laments the fact that they used to be ‘so much bigger’ and came with a tiny chick inside—inexplicably excluded from the modern iteration.
And you must understand that, aside from the two boys she raised by herself after her husband took off with his girlfriend when they were toddlers, Marilyn is alone on this rock floating in space. So the hours spent alone from, and including, Christmas Eve until 2 p.m. on Christmas Day in the year she was diagnosed with cancer felt not just long but absolutely agonising.
‘From then on I just went downhill with depression, my arthritis got worse and about three months ago I really hit rock bottom,’ Marilyn says, toying with a wooden back-scratcher she has dredged up from under a pile of magazines at her side. In Marilyn’s en suite bathroom, where the cleaner is working, there is a sloping mound of empty tonic-water bottles and cask-wine boxes that reaches from the floor to the height of the pink basin. On the bench, near Marilyn’s toothbrush and Crabtree & Evelyn talcum powder, is a jar of pickles and two cups of instant noodles with silver forks sticking out at odd angles. The cleaner is bent down, scooping rubbish into a black bag.
The Trauma Cleaner Page 19