The exalted mood lasts for about a day, and there is back-sliding even within that—for example, when, in a huge, gorgeous country house with hand-painted walls, I encounter a shelf full of arrogant and, under the circumstances, personally insulting neoconservative encomiums to the status quo and consider using germ warfare against the owners, the weapons for which are within my apron pockets. All I would have to do is take one of the E. coli–rich rags that’s been used on the toilets and use it to “clean” the kitchen counters—a plan that entertains me for an hour or more. But it is, weirdly enough, the home of an actual Buddhist that shatters the sanctified mood. We encounter many signs of “spirituality” among the owners—books like Ten Things I Learned about Life in My Garden and inspirational wall hangings urging centeredness. But this is the home of a genuine Buddhist—a Caucasian convert, of course—complete with Zen paperbacks and a three-foot-high statue of the Buddha in the living room, with a note affixed to his serene and creaseless forehead warning that we are not to touch him, not even to dust.
As we leave, in our usual rush to get the buckets to the car, Holly trips in a hole in the ground and falls down and screams. I whirl around and she’s crying, her face gone from dead-white to crimson. “Something snapped,” she sobs, “I heard it snap.” I help her up, ordering Marge, who’s been standing there with her mouth hanging open, to take her other arm. “We’ve got to get you to an emergency room,” I say, “get it X-rayed right away.” But no, all she’ll consent to is calling Ted from the next house, although Denise is going to have to do the driving. I keep trying in the car, blabbing about fractures and sprains as if I actually knew something, but Holly just keeps crying and talking about how she’s already missed so many days of work in the last few weeks, and the others don’t seem to be listening to either of us.
When we get to the house, Holly lets me look at the ankle, and while I’m bent over it—not that there’s anything to see—she whispers that the pain is really wicked now. “You can’t work,” I say. “You hear me, Holly? You can’t work on this ankle.” Still, all she’ll agree to do is call Ted from the phone in the kitchen, and I stand there listening to her apologize weepily to him, throwing in a bit about how Barbara is making a fuss, and I feel the beautiful Zen detachment drain out of me with the sweat on my face. I reach out and insist that she give me the phone, and the first words I hear, almost before I can say, “Listen,” are “Now let’s just calm down, Barbara,” although he’s old enough to know that “calm down” generally functions as an incitement to rage.
I blow. I can’t remember the exact words, but I tell him he can’t keep putting money above his employees’ health and I don’t want to hear about “working through it,” because this girl is in really bad shape. But he just goes on about “calm down,” and meanwhile Holly is hopping around the bathroom, wiping up pubic hairs.
I hang up on him and follow Holly into the bathroom to take my stand. Should I say, “Look, I’m actually a highly educated person, a Ph.D., in fact, and I can’t just stand by and . . .”? But it would sound crazy and what would Holly care? For all I know, her husband beats her for missing work. So I do the only other thing I can think of. I say, “I’m not working if you don’t get help. Or at least sit down with your foot up while we do your work.” I look to Denise, who is peering into the bathroom after us, for support. “This is a work stoppage. Ever hear of that? This is a strike.” Denise just goes back to work, crinkling her face up in embarrassment or maybe disgust.
“I’m just doing bathrooms,” Holly says, to appease me.
“What, on one foot?”
“I come from a stubborn family.”
“Well, so the hell do I.”
But Holly’s ancestors win out over mine. The team leader in her prevails over the mother in me. If I walk out, where am I going to walk to, anyway? Outside, horses graze in a meadow, migrating birds dip and rise in perfect formation. I don’t have any idea where I am—north of Portland, west? I could call a cab but I don’t have enough cash for the trip home or any cash waiting for me there. I could get on one of those horses, if I knew how to ride a horse, and gallop from meadow to meadow, through backyards and highways, all the way out to the sea. But the only thing I’d accomplish by leaving, assuming there was a way to leave, would be to increase the workload on the other three, Holly included, because she’s going to keep going until you pry the last cleaning rag from her cold, dead hands, she’s made that clear enough.
So there’s nothing to do but swallow it. Shaking with anger (at Ted), betrayal (in the cases of Marge and Denise), and most of all at my own total, abject helplessness, I shoulder the vacuum and strap myself in. It’s not easy focusing on throw rugs when all I can see is this grass fire raging in the back of my eyes, white-hot and devouring house after house as it burns. I screw up big-time, as Denise points out with what is now obvious malice, and have to do the downstairs all over again. In the car there is silence for a little while and nobody except Marge, who as usual has moved right along, will look at me. Then Holly starts up one of those pornographic late-afternoon food conversations she enjoys so much. “What are you making for dinner tonight, Marge? . . . Oh yeah, with tomato sauce?”
I sit in the car on the long ride back trying to keep rage alive by rehearsing what I’ll say when Ted fires me for insubordination. “Look,” I’ll say, “I can put up with shit and snot and every other gross substance I encounter in this line of work. The only thing I’m squeamish about is human pain. I’m sorry, I tried to ignore it, but it undermines my efficiency when I have to work alongside people who are crying, fainting, starving, or otherwise visibly suffering, so yes, you better find someone tougher than me.” Or some similar stiff little speech. When we’re within a couple of blocks of the office, Marge turns to me with what looks like compassion. I know Marge doesn’t come out looking too good in this story, but we’ve had some long, intimate talks about hormones and antidepressants and other middle-aged things. There was a day, too, when we teased each other for sweating so much, then, when the house was finished, ran out together in the rain, held our heads back and our arms out, laughing like pagans, and I loved her for that. Now she says, “You look tired, Barbara.” The word is defeated, but I just say—loud enough to be heard by Holly and Denise in the front too—“I’m bracing for a confrontation with Ted.”
“He’s not going to fire you,” Marge says brightly. “Don’t worry about that.”
“Oh, I’m not worried about it. There’re millions of jobs out there. Look at the want ads.” Denise turns partway around to regard me blankly from the side of her face. Don’t they look at the want ads? Don’t they realize that the sheer abundance of them means they’ve got Ted by the short hairs and could ask for almost anything—like, say, $7.50 an hour, reckoned from the moment they show up in the morning to the moment they finish processing rags at the end of the day?
“But we need you,” Marge says. And then, as if that was too affectionate sounding: “You can’t just leave Ted in the lurch.”
“What’s all this worrying about Ted? He’ll find someone else. He’ll take anyone who can manage to show up sober at 7:30 in the morning. Sober and standing upright.”
“No,” Holly finally interjects. “That’s not true. Not everyone can get this job. You have to pass the test.”
The test? The Accutrac test? “The test,” I practically yell, “is BULLSHIT! Anyone can pass that test!”
It’s an inexcusable outburst. First, because it’s insulting, especially to Holly and the brittle sense of professionalism that keeps her going through sickness and injury. For all I know the test was a challenge to her at the level of basic literacy. Everyone here can read, but Holly has sometimes asked me how to spell words like carry and weighed that she needs to report any “incidents” that occur. Second, of course, because it’s against the rules to use “bad words” in a company car. Where’s my professionalism, anyway, the journalistic detachment that was supposed to guide and sustain me
every inch of the way?
But misdirected rage is not an easy thing to hold on to; the last sparks of it get snuffed out, as they deserve to be, in the icy waters of humiliation and defeat. Holly will hate me forever, I can tell, both because I defied her authority as team leader and because I’ve had a chance, more than once now, to see her all tearful and scared. Denise will hate me, of course, for making a scene that made her uncomfortable or maybe just for slowing down the work. Marge will forget all about it. But even now, months later, I’m damned if I know how I should have handled the situation. By keeping my mouth shut in the first place, when Holly took her fall? Or by sticking to my one-person strike until—who knows?—she eventually relented and let us drive her to the nearest ER or at least sat down? The only thing I know for sure is that this is as low as I can get in my life as a maid, and probably in most other lives as well.
Ted doesn’t fire me. The next morning I run into Holly in the parking lot, limping badly and heading back to her car. “Would you believe it?” she says, addressing Marge, who shows up at exactly that moment. “Ted sent me home!”—as if this were some arbitrary injustice. There were things I would have said if Marge weren’t there, like “I’m sorry” and “Please take care of yourself.” But the moment passes and my vindication, if that’s what this is, tastes sour. In the office Ted thanks me for my “concern” and says he’s taken my advice about Holly and sent her home. But—there has to be a “but”—you know you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. I guess it’s the mother in me, is my lame response. To which he says, testily, “Well, I’m a parent too, and that doesn’t make me less of a person.”Very calmly, I am proud to report, I tell him, “It’s supposed to make you more of a person.”
I don’t get the last word with Ted, of course. A couple of days later, I am out with the still-limping Holly, who continues to treat me like some nonhuman and slightly unreliable cleaning product—a defective Janitor in a Drum—when she gets a call via beeper from Ted that I’m to be driven back to the office and sent out to another team that’s facing a rough first-timer. Why me? I don’t know, maybe he just wants to talk to me. First thing he says as we head out, just him and me in the car, is how great I’m doing—he gets just great reports—so he’s giving me a raise to $6.75 an hour. I can’t believe this: smashing fishbowls and threatening work stoppages is doing great? But he’s moved on to how he’s not a bad guy, I should know this, and he cares a lot about his girls. See, he’s got some great gals, like Holly and Liza, but there’s a certain number of malcontents and he just wishes they’d stop their complaining. I know what he’s talking about, right? This must be my cue to name a few names, because this is how Ted operates, my coworkers claim—through snitches and by setting up one woman against another. He’s told us, for example, that if someone is absent it’s up to the rest of us to get on her case, because we’re the ones who’ll suffer if our teams are shorthanded. But I use the occasion to ask him the question that’s been bothering me since Holly’s fall: Will she be paid for the day when he sent her home, since she was, after all, injured on the job? “Oh yes, of course”—but his chuckle seems a little forced—“What do you think I am, an ogre?” Well, no, though I don’t say this, the word I am thinking of is pimp.
Why does anyone put up with this when there are so many other jobs available? In fact, one woman does leave for what she insists is a better job—working the counter at a Dunkin’ Donuts. But there are some practical reasons for sticking with The Maids: changing jobs means a week and possibly more without a paycheck; plus there’s the attraction of the so-called “mothers’ hours,” although in practice we often end up working till five. The other, less tangible factor is the lure of Ted’s approval. This, perhaps as much as the money, is what keeps Holly going through nausea and pain, and even some of the livelier, bolder women seem inordinately sensitive to how he’s feeling about them. Getting “reamed out” by Ted can ruin their whole day; a morsel of praise will be savored for weeks. I see the power of his approval most clearly on Pauline’s last day. She is sixty-seven and has been on the job longer than anyone—two years—enough to rate her a mention in the newsletter published by corporate headquarters. Her back has long since given out but she’s leaving now because she’s scheduled for knee surgery in a couple of weeks, the result, she says, of too much floor scrubbing. Still, Ted makes no mention of her departure at the morning meeting of her last day, nor does he thank her privately or wish her well at the end of the day. I know this because I offer her a ride home that day when it appears that her usual one isn’t going to show up. As we drive through the rainy streets of South Portland, she talks about the surgery and the weeks of recovery that will follow it, and then the need to go out and find another job, preferably one that doesn’t involve so much bending and lifting and crouching. But mostly she talks about Ted and her feeling of hurt. “He’s never liked me since I had to stop vacuuming because of my back,” she says. “I’ve asked him why I get paid less than anyone”—anyone at her level of seniority is, I think, what she means—“and he says, ‘Well, if you could just vacuum . . .’” There’s no bitterness in her voice, just the mortal sadness of looking ahead, toward the end of one’s life, at the gray streets and the rain.
The big question is why Ted’s approval means so much. As far as I can figure, my coworkers’ neediness—because that’s what it is—stems from chronic deprivation. The home owners aren’t going to thank us for a job well done, and God knows, people on the street aren’t going to hail us as heroines of proletarian labor. No one will know that the counter on which he slices the evening’s baguette only recently supported a fainting woman—and decide to reward her with a medal for bravery. No one is going to say, after I vacuum ten rooms and still have time to scrub a kitchen floor, “Goddamn, Barb, you’re good!” Work is supposed to save you from being an “outcast,” as Pete puts it, but what we do is an outcast’s work, invisible and even disgusting. Janitors, cleaning ladies, ditchdiggers, changers of adult diapers—these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste-free and democratic society. Hence the undeserved charisma of a man like Ted. He may be greedy and offhandedly cruel, but at The Maids he is the only living representative of that better world where people go to college and wear civilian clothes to work and shop on the weekends for fun. If for some reason there’s a shortage of houses to clean, he’ll keep a team busy by sending them out to clean his own home, which, I am told, is “real nice.”
Or maybe it’s low-wage work in general that has the effect of making you feel like a pariah. When I watch TV over my dinner at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I’m not just thinking of the anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it’s easy for a fast-food worker or nurse’s aide to conclude that she is an anomaly—the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn’t been invited to the party. And in a sense she would be right: the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric and intellectual endeavors as well as from its daily entertainment. Even religion seems to have little to say about the plight of the poor, if that tent revival was a fair sample. The moneylenders have finally gotten Jesus out of the temple.
On my last afternoon, I try to explain who I am and why I’ve been working here to the women on my team for the day, a much more spirited group than Holly’s usual crew. My announcement attracts so little attention that I have to repeat it: “Will you listen to me? I’m a writer and I’m going to write a book about this place.” At last Lori leans around from the front seat and hushes the others with “Hey, this is interesting,” and to me: “Are you like, investigating?”
Well, not just this place and not exactly “investigating,” but Lori has latched on to that concept. She hoots with laughter. “This place could use some investigating!” Now everyone seems to get it—not who I am or what I do—but that whatever I’m up to, the joke is on Ted.
At least no
w that I’m “out” I get to ask the question I’ve wanted to ask all this time: How do they feel, not about Ted but about the owners, who have so much while others, like themselves, barely get by? This is the answer from Lori, who at twenty-four has a serious disk problem and an $8,000 credit card debt: “All I can think of is like, wow, I’d like to have this stuff someday. It motivates me and I don’t feel the slightest resentment because, you know, it’s my goal to get to where they are.”
And this is the answer from Colleen, a single mother of two who is usually direct and vivacious but now looks at some spot straight ahead of her, where perhaps the ancestor who escaped from the Great Potato Famine is staring back at her, as intent as I am on what she will say: “I don’t mind, really, because I guess I’m a simple person, and I don’t want what they have. I mean, it’s nothing to me. But what I would like is to be able to take a day off now and then . . . if I had to . . . and still be able to buy groceries the next day.”
I work one last day at the Woodcrest and then call in sick. Sorry, Linda, Pete, and all you sweet, demented old ladies! I visit Lori on Sunday and let her have the satisfaction of returning my uniforms to Ted and explaining my departure however she wants.
1 On Cape Cod, too, rising rents for apartments and houses are driving the working class into motels, where a room might go for $880 a month in winter but climbs to $1,440 a month in the tourist season. The Cape Cod Times describes families of four living squeezed into one room, cooking in microwaves, and eating on their beds (K. C. Myers, “Of Last Resort,” Cape Cod Times, June 25, 2000).
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