by Don Lee
Cleaning the bathroom was equally challenging, but for Jeanette, the bed felt more important. It was the first thing guests saw when they entered a room, and she wanted it to be exquisite, flawless. In this way, she was both perfect and ill-suited to be a housekeeper in a luxury hotel. She was unrelenting about the details, she would never let anything slide, she truly cared about the hotel’s commitment to unparalleled customer service. On the other hand, she often found herself behind schedule, trying to completely eradicate a stain or pluck up every single hair.
The normal workload was twelve rooms per eight-hour shift, an average of forty minutes apiece. The time required for individual rooms varied wildly, however. The COs (Checked Outs) were nominally the easiest, but it was unpredictable how guests would leave things. (Guests with children were the worst. Food ground into the carpet. Spills. Soiled diapers.) The OCCs (Occupieds), contrary to expectations, took longer. At other hotels, they might just make the beds with the same sheets for stay-overs, but not at the Centurion. There was no pretense about protecting the environment, no cards that promoted going green and reusing linens and towels. Everything, without exception, was changed every day.
The real problem, though, was with the OCC guests’ possessions. The housekeepers were instructed to tidy up, put things in stacks at right angles, pick up clothes and fold them, hang them in the closet when appropriate. But it was sometimes hard to discern what should be moved, left undisturbed, or discarded. It entailed judgment calls, and Jeanette hated judgment calls, the possibility of doing something wrong and having a guest complain.
In many ways, being a housekeeper at the Centurion Resort called for clairvoyance (or outright spying), trying to anticipate the “unexpressed desires and needs” of guests, as corporate phrased it. This meant observing and reporting that someone liked to sleep on, say, the left side of the bed, so the turndown attendant would know which side of the sheet and duvet to fold down in the evening and where to put the two squares of chocolate, water bottle and glass, slippers, and robe. It meant observing and reporting that someone had eaten all the cubes of melons but none of the pineapple on a fruit plate, so room service could be told to put extra melons with the next order.
The housekeepers’ aprons were stitched with a pocket to hold a pad and a pencil to record their observations, which were then entered into the Charisma database. The housekeepers had a quota of generating at least two Charisma slips by the end of each shift—filling out more would accrue extra points for them in another database, the employee recognition system named Empower—but if a guest had an impromptu request, they were told to break away from whatever they were doing and take care of it right away.
If a guest inquired where the spa was located, they were to escort the person every step of the way to the spa, not just give directions or point. If a guest had a loose button and asked for a needle and thread, they were to take the garment promptly to the tailor downstairs in the laundry room. If a guest was stepping outside for a jog, they were to go to the fitness center and fetch a cold sports drink and one of the towels that had been moistened and refrigerated for cool-downs and have them waiting in the guest room. (And they were trained to say, during each encounter, “You are very welcome,” never “No problem”; “It would be my pleasure,” never “Okay”; “Please accept my apologies,” never “Sorry”; “Good morning” or “Good afternoon” or “Good evening,” never “Hi” or “Hey” or “How you doing?”)
All of this took time—time that Jeanette did not have. Although the staff could indulge in a free lunch buffet every day in the employee cafeteria, she hardly ever took advantage of it; she would often realize when her shift ended that she had not eaten at all. Her usual assignment these days was ten rooms, two being suites, in which she could spend an hour and twenty minutes—leisurely-sounding, but the suites featured a large main room with a sofa and a dining table, a private terrace with a fire pit, a separate bedroom, and an additional half bath.
Every day, when Jeanette punched out at four-thirty, she was utterly drained, her body aching. She wasn’t the only one. This afternoon in the locker room, women were slumped over in fatigue, rubbing their shoulders and calves, applying heat patches to their backs, swallowing ibuprofen, wrapping band-aids around fingertips and Ace bandages around ankles and knees.
Anna Goines, who had a locker near Jeanette’s, was kneading her thigh and sniffling, sneezing.
Jeanette gave her a packet of Kleenex. “Coming down with something?”
“I hope not,” Anna said. “I’ve already had two colds this spring.”
Colds and the flu were a common occupational hazard. “Do you wear the gloves when you’re cleaning?” Jeanette asked. A box of disposable blue gloves was issued to each cart.
Anna blew her nose. “Sometimes.”
“Try to make a habit of it,” Jeanette said. “Especially when you’re doing bathrooms.”
Anna was young. Twenty-one. Eighteen years younger than Jeanette. Like everyone else, Anna had attended two days of classroom orientation, after which she’d undergone three weeks of training, a team leader shadowing her every move, and then she had had to pass a ninety-day probationary period. But since then, she hadn’t been doing very well, Jeanette knew. Little things, like getting caught cleaning a room with the TV turned on, chewing gum, talking on her cellphone in a stairwell, and violating the grooming standards, which were spelled out in explicit detail in the Policies & Procedures manual they had been given upon hire, a thick binder that delineated everything from the angle of throw pillows to the order in which magazines should be stacked to what kinds of makeup and fingernail polish were permitted.
They were each furnished with a brass-plated name tag and two burgundy uniforms with gold piping, yet they had to buy their own shoes (black, leather; no boots, sandals, thongs, open-toes, clogs, mules, moccasins, sneakers, or platforms) and panty hose (dark-tinted or neutral only), which tended to run from kneeling so much and got expensive to replace. Anna was pretty, with nice legs, which she enjoyed showing off. She had been docked for wearing heels exceeding two and a half inches and hosiery that was not only too sheer, but had seams running down the backs. She sported a banana clip in her hair one day and, on another, earrings larger than the size of a quarter.
Jeanette doubted Anna would last very long at the hotel. So when she saw Mary Wilkerson enter the locker room and head toward them, Jeanette assumed that Anna had committed another infraction of some sort and was about to be reprimanded. Instead, Mary said, “Jeanette, could you come to my office for a minute?”
“Uh-oh, the principal’s calling you,” Anna said. “What did you do?”
Jeanette asked herself the same thing. What could she have forgotten? Where could she have slipped up?
She went to Mary’s small, cramped office and sat across the desk from her. A STRIVE FOR FIVE! sign was tacked to the opposite wall, directly above Mary’s head. The signs were posted all over the lower service level of the hotel. The Centurion Group owned forty-seven properties worldwide, all known for their posh appointments and amenities, yet only a handful were rated with five stars. Most—like Rosarita Bay—were four stars. Now that the economy was rebounding, the highest priority for the Centurion Group was to start earning the coveted five stars from Mobil and the five diamonds from AAA for the majority of their hotels. To do so, corporate had been studying the Ritz-Carlton and Four Seasons’ management principles and had begun emulating—in truth, stealing—them.
Mary was looking through Jeanette’s personnel file. She was new to Rosarita Bay as the director—just two months. This was the first time Jeanette had sat down with her for a one-on-one conversation, and it made her nervous, not knowing why she had been summoned. Was she about to be laid off or, inconceivably, fired? Could it have been the VO5 comment? She couldn’t afford to lose this job.
For fourteen years, she had been the assistant records clerk at city hall. After being downsized out of the position two years ago, s
he had submitted dozens of applications for jobs in and around town, yet didn’t receive a single interview, despite her qualifications: She was familiar with computers; she had taken business classes at San Vicente Community College; she could tout all sorts of additional administrative experience from being on the board and various committees for her church, although she knew most employers would not view that work as relevant. She had been unemployed for months. Finally she had succumbed to taking a job as a housekeeper at a motel in Pacifica, half an hour north on Highway 1. As a teenager, she had worked as a maid at a Days Inn one summer, and she had cleaned rooms at a B&B in town during high school and also upon graduation, after recovering from what used to be called a nervous breakdown.
Mary fanned out several pages of printouts on her desk. “I’ve been looking at your QCs,” she told Jeanette. “Do you know what your QCs have been this year?”
Whenever they finished a room, they would dial *93 on the phone, and a floor supervisor would soon inspect their work, going through a lengthy quality-control checklist. The highest possible score was one hundred; anything below ninety-three was unacceptable. The QCs were averaged monthly for each housekeeper and entered into the Empower database.
“They’ve been pretty good, I think,” Jeanette said, despite knowing each of her scores. In her short time here, Mary had made it clear that humility was a trait she appreciated.
“I would call ‘pretty good’ an understatement. They’ve averaged 99.1 every month except for April, when you averaged 99.9. I’ve never seen QCs like this.”
“No?”
“No. I am thoroughly impressed. You should be proud.”
“I am,” Jeanette said.
Mary laid down the QC printouts. “Are you? Are you really proud?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t think it’s a comedown? It doesn’t bother you, being a room attendant after all those years at city hall, having a college degree?”
“I only have an associate’s,” she said. “SVCC doesn’t give out bachelor’s.” It was an enduring point of shame for Jeanette that she had never obtained a four-year degree.
“It doesn’t bother you?” Mary asked.
“Not at all,” Jeanette said, although of course it often did. The worst part was explaining to people what she now did for a living. When she said she worked at the Centurion, they would invariably ask in what capacity, and when she gave them her official title, “room attendant,” they would look at her, sometimes puzzled, sometimes knowingly, until she admitted she was a housekeeper.
“I’m glad,” Mary said. “I’m glad, because I can teach people how to do the job, but I can’t teach them how to love it. You have to love what you’re doing, or else you can’t inspire others to give their best. That’s the first step to being a good manager.”
Hearing the word manager, Jeanette’s attention swelled. She had been waiting for this possibility. Being allowed to clean suites had been considered a promotion of sorts, though one without a salary bump or a new title. From the start, she had longed to move up within the Centurion Group. She had hoped she could switch at some point to another area of the hotel’s operations. She knew she wasn’t young or attractive or perky enough for front of the house, for example in desk reception, but she thought something in reservations or accounts receivable would be perfect for her. She had been disappointed to learn that such transfers were not, in practice, very realistic, yet at this point any advancement was welcome.
“I think you have great potential here,” Mary said. “I’m going to promote you to team leader as of June first, Wednesday after next, and then, you never know, maybe you could become a floor supervisor sometime in the future. Would that interest you?”
“Yes, it would. Very much,” Jeanette said, and she was embarrassed to find herself near tears.
She changed clothes in the locker room and walked to the loading dock, where Anna and several other girls were wait ing for the employee shuttle. The hotel had an underground garage, but there were barely enough slots to valet the guests’ cars. Employees parked in an outdoor lot across Highway 1 and took a shuttle back and forth.
“Did you get into trouble with Mary?” Anna asked her. She had changed out of her uniform into a miniskirt and high heels and had applied makeup to her face. Earrings, in the shape of peacock feathers, tickled her shoulders, and a Chanel tote was slung over her shoulder—a knockoff, Jeanette knew, because the logo had interlocking O’s instead of C’s. She subscribed to several style and celebrity magazines—a frivolous expenditure, yet she loved flipping through them—and had recently read an article on how to spot counterfeits.
“She just wanted to go over an incoming guest’s allergies,” Jeanette said, electing not to brag about her promotion just yet.
“Did she say anything about the fitted sheets?” Anna asked.
A bill had been recently introduced in the state legislature. It would require hotels to replace flat bottom sheets with fitted elastic to reduce worker injuries.
“No.”
“Corporate doesn’t care about us at all,” Anna said. “Like the panic buttons they’re thinking of giving us.”
“What about them?” Jeanette asked.
“They’re a crock.”
“I think it’s pretty considerate of them,” Jeanette said.
“They’re not considering us,” Anna said. “They’re considering their liability. They just want to protect themselves in case something happens and one of us decides to sue.”
“That’s pretty cynical.”
“It’s true. Don’t be naive,” Anna said.
Jeanette wondered how Anna had made it through the vetting process, particularly since she had barely squeaked by herself. The Centurion looked for team players who were dedicated, respectful, and ethical. During interviews (four rounds total for housekeepers), they were asked about their personal habits, such as how often they washed their hands and if they ever threw trash out of car windows. Yet, more than cleanliness and honesty in their workers, the Centurion sought people who were cheerful and friendly, who smiled easily, none of which were Jeanette’s natural inclinations.
Without quite realizing it, she had fallen into a persistent low-grade funk over the years, which became more pronounced when she was laid off and then was being rejected for job after job. Incessantly she would interrogate the choices and decisions she had made, and had convinced herself that she was a failure, a loser. She had crimped inward, fearful that if she exposed herself, she would be ridiculed or betrayed.
She was trying to resuscitate herself by following the counsel of her church’s new minister, the Reverend Franklin Kuchenbecker. His presence, his compassion, his sermons—they were inspiring Jeanette to try, as he always exhorted, to be more positive, to bring gratitude and kindness into her heart, to actively seek out joy in her life and imbue it with beauty and light.
She was making this effort, in no small part, for Yadin. He was a sweet man. He was kind to her. Gentle. She trusted him. She felt safe with him. He would never cheat on her or lie to her. He got along with everyone in her family, particularly Joe, who had been the one to initially suggest that she date Yadin. Admittedly, he’d been much more of a reclamation project than Jeanette had ever imagined, his financial status revealed to be horrendous, but she had helped him through it. He was past all of that now—not exactly solvent, but stable.
Granted, there wasn’t a lot of passion between them, and this was chiefly her fault, she knew. Both had been in love just once in their lives, while very young, and both had been heartbroken. Neither had ever married, nor had been in a relationship of any significant length. They might have been together more out of attrition than anything resembling ardor, but they cared for each other, they helped each other, they were companions. It was enough for Jeanette, and she had hoped it would be enough for Yadin, but lately she had begun to worry that it wasn’t.
The employee shuttle arrived at the locking dock, and she and Ann
a boarded the bus. As the shuttle climbed the service road to ground level, Jeanette noticed how bright it was outside. Usually, this time of year, the marine layer would retreat only in the early afternoon, revealing blue sky for a few hours before the fog returned and swallowed them again in slaty gloom. She looked out to the ocean, the golf course, the majestic façade of porticos and Corinthian columns of the sprawling six-story hotel, which was perched atop steep sandstone bluffs. When she cleaned rooms, she never paid attention to the view anymore, but on occasion it struck her anew, the contours of light, the colors, the spectacle of the property—indeed of Rosarita Bay as a whole. She had lived here all her life, and sometimes she forgot how beautiful it was.
“Hey, what are you doing tonight?” Anna asked. “Anything?”
On the rare nights she wasn’t seeing Yadin or didn’t have church business, Jeanette always meant to do fun things, healthy things, productive things, cook a nutritious meal, go to the YMCA or for a walk, take up a new crafting project, read a book, but usually she was so tired and dehydrated and hungry, she would simply microwave something for dinner and watch TV, falling asleep before nine.
“No plans,” she told Anna.
“You want to go to the Memory Den for a drink?”
“That dive?”
“It’s kind of fun,” Anna said. “Okay, how about the Brewing Company? What do you say?”
Jeanette turned to Anna. She was chewing a wad of gum, and her breath smelled wintergreen. Most of the other girls, unlike them, were married and had children. Jeanette could see that Anna was seeking a friend, and she was unexpectedly moved that she was reaching out to her. Perhaps, she thought, Anna was salvageable. Perhaps Jeanette, when she became a team leader in twelve days, could mentor her, shepherd a future for her at the Centurion. She could use a friend herself, she thought. Half of her former coworkers from city hall, after getting laid off, had moved out of town, and the other half never seemed to call her anymore. Yet she ended up saying to Anna, “Some other night? I’m pretty wiped,” for what she really wanted to do that evening was review, one more time in depth, the Policies & Procedures manual.