Tool & Die

by Sarah Graves

  “Here,” I called from the kitchen, a room that in my house had an air of comfortable dishevelment at the best of times.

  This wasn’t one of them. The housekeeper appeared in the doorway. “Good morning,” she began, and then her jaw dropped.

  On Bella it wasn’t a pretty sight. “What’s gone on in here?” she demanded, her tone turned high and breathy as if she’d just witnessed a bad highway accident.

  Except for the lack of blood it was what that kitchen most resembled. “Bella,” I faltered, “it’s not really as bad as . . .”

  But it was no use. “Oh,” she moaned, stricken.

  A short, stout woman with dyed red hair skinned back into a tight ponytail, she wore as usual a pair of old jeans and a faded sweatshirt over beat-up penny loafers. Protruding blue eyes, big teeth, and a grayish complexion completed the picture. As Sam said when he first met her, she was no oil painting, and although of course I’d forbidden him to repeat this I had to agree.

  “Well!” she huffed, making a beeline for the broom closet.

  “Bella,” I said again, hopelessness rising in me. “Listen, this can all wait. Bella, I want you to sit down here and . . .”

  A clatter of scrub brushes, mops, and buckets came from the closet, along with a wheezing sound that I was pretty sure was Bella, hyperventilating.

  She emerged looking even more agitated than before. “Wait? But it can’t wait. How can you . . . I’ve got to . . . oh! Where’s that bottle of Lysol?”

  She dove for the cabinet under the sink where I kept all the bottles of cleaning solutions, along with many of the household tools that belonged in the toolbox but never got there.

  “Heat some water, Missus,” she gasped. “It’s an emergency. Get that big kettle, the one for the lobsters, and—”

  “Bella!” My fist slammed onto the kitchen table. This was ridiculous; in the old days I’d brazenly faced down Wall Street pirates of commerce so black-hearted, their private Lear jets all should’ve been emblazoned with skulls and crossbones.

  “Bella,” I repeated, “you stop it right now!”

  She paused, blue eyes bulging. “But . . . but I can’t!”

  “Sit!” I commanded.

  Abruptly, both dogs dropped their rumps to the floor as if by involuntary reflex. Startled, Bella sat too, every muscle in her body still visibly twitching to leap on the task at hand and wrestle it into germ-free submission.

  “I’m sorry you had to walk in on this, Bella,” I said. “I agree, it’s a terrible mess. But you and I need to have a talk.”

  Her expression turned cautious. “You work for me,” I went on, pressing my advantage while I still had even the most tenuous grasp on it. “You can’t clean this kitchen unless I want you to. And right now I don’t want you to. Understood?”

  Bella blinked slowly. “Yes, ma’am,” she answered.

  “And stop calling me ma’am. It annoys the hell out of me. My name is Jacobia Tiptree, most people call me Jake, and that’s what you’ll call me from now on. We’re going to have rules around here and that’s the first one. Are you with me so far?”

  She nodded, eyes wide, which on Bella was saying something. When she looked straight at you it was as if any minute those big blue peepers of hers might decide to pop right out on stalks.

  But there was something oddly appealing about her, too; the uncamouflaged honesty of her rough appearance for one thing, and the way she held her head up so high in spite of it, for another.

  I poured her a cup of coffee and set it in front of her; she recoiled as if it were poison. Someone had apparently instructed her at some time or another that household employees do not have refreshments with employers, and the warning had stuck.

  “Oh, drink that,” I snapped at her. “And have a sweet roll.”

  I put one on a plate before her. “This isn’t the White House and you’re not going to get arrested for breaking protocol.”

  Hesitantly, she nibbled the roll, then bit into it. With a pang I realized she was hungry.

  “I’m having some fruit and I can’t eat all of it,” I told her. “So do me a favor, eat half an orange or it’ll just go to waste.”

  I spoke sternly. Bella nodded obediently and began peeling the orange I got out, then dividing it into sections. Her hands were shaking, whether from hunger or nerves I couldn’t tell.

  But suddenly I realized I hadn’t been doing her any favors, either, letting her walk all over me. Sam had said Bella was so hygienic he thought she must have Clorox running in her veins; as I watched her now, though, it struck me that something more was going on here besides extreme cleanliness.

  Something like fear. I’d been so fixed on her hyperactivity, I’d missed it, but now I noticed the darting glances, her anxious breathing, and her hands, so sweaty that they left a puckery spot on her paper napkin.

  Along with this new insight though, I got the strong feeling that if I asked her straight out what the trouble was, she might flee. So instead I returned to the subject of her employment.

  “You and I never did talk precisely about your duties,” I began gently. “And so I think it’s possible we might’ve gotten off on the wrong foot.”

  “I’m sure I’ve tried to keep things clean.” She bridled as if insulted. “If there’s anything I’ve neglected I’m sure you only need to—”

  “No,” I interrupted. “It’s not that. You’re not neglecting anything, Bella. It’s the opposite. You’re doing too much.”

  Confused, she frowned down at the crumbs of her sweet roll as if they might spell out an answer. “The girls at the agency told me to do my best, and I have.”

  Oh, dear. The whole idea of having household help had never come easily to me. In fact if the Gopher Baroque home employment agency hadn’t contributed Bella’s services as the grand prize at the church raffle, I’d never have hired anyone.

  “I know you have,” I assured her. “Of course you’ve done your best, and I appreciate it. But you’re overcompensating.”

  She looked blank. Clearly the psychological approach wasn’t going to work either. I tried another tack. “Bella, have you ever heard the phrase ‘too much of a good thing’?”

  “No,” she said flatly. “You eating the rest of that orange?”

  I pushed it across the table at her. “Here. And thank you, you’ve just come up with rule number two. A person can’t work on an empty stomach, so the first thing you’re going to do when you get here every morning is eat breakfast.”

  Black coffee, I figured from the way her hands trembled, was probably the only thing she’d swallowed recently.

  “I’m the boss, Bella,” I added firmly when she made as if to protest. “And from now on the morning meal is a condition of your continued employment.”

  She looked down again. The orange sections had vanished, but I was perilously close to patronizing her and that would’ve been a disaster, too.

  “It’s not what I want to talk to you about, however,” I went on, putting a note of steel back into my voice.

  It struck me now also that there was a reason why the home-help agency had sent Bella. As opposed, I mean, to someone else. And because at the moment she wasn’t driving me crazy, I was able to think it out.

  Gopher Baroque had wanted to donate something to the church raffle. Doing so was just good public relations. But unless you were biblically good, you didn’t give your most valuable products or services away. You gave what you could afford.

  Or even better, what you couldn’t use. So the Gopher Baroque housekeeping agency had packaged up the services of somebody they couldn’t employ any other way, and called it a prize.

  Silently, Bella ate the sweet-roll crumbs off her plate one by one. I resisted the urge to make her a sandwich, and went on with my lecture.

  “Rule three is that from now on,” I told her, “you are not to work so hard. We have several weeks of your assignment still to go, you know, and that’s plenty of time to do all the things you think s
hould be done.”

  Or that I think should be, I added silently. “They needn’t be done all at once, though, and I don’t want them to be.”

  Bella nodded, head bowed.

  “And just to make sure there isn’t any confusion, as of today you are to do only the tasks I ask of you, in the order I ask you to do them. Is that clear, too?”

  Another nod, less emphatic than the first.

  “Mr. Sorenson’s workshop is entirely off-limits,” I added sternly.

  “I uh-understand,” Bella said. Her shoulders made convulsive little hitching movements. “Whatever you say, Missus—um, I mean Jake. Because . . . because . . .”

  Oh, good heavens, she was weeping. “Bella, please don’t. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you or hurt your feelings . . .”

  She looked up, her eyes streaming. “It’s not that! I ain’t offended. I knew this had to be coming soon. And anyway, if your boss can’t yell at you, well then, I don’t know who can.”

  No one, I thought firmly. But that was an argument for some other time.

  “Now, Bella, I wasn’t yelling at you, I was only—”

  “Oh, yes, you were!” Another flood of sobs burst from her. I hurried for a tissue and she grabbed it, pressing it to her face. “And my god, who wouldn’t be?” she demanded. “I deserve it!”

  A long, honking blow; then: “It’s got to be more’n a person can fairly stand, getting cleaned around as if the place was full of plague germs.” She drew a shuddery breath. “I swear your husband must’ve wanted to smack me the other morning when I asked him to pick up his feet so I could sweep while he was reading the newspaper.”

  Indeed, he certainly must have. I gave a moment of thanks for the Zenlike calm with which Wade approached the world in general, and fussbudgets like Bella in particular.

  “But Bella, if you know this . . .”

  “And then there’s the dogs,” she went on. “I bathed ’em both while you were out one day, and now neither one of ’em ’ll come near me, even for a biscuit.”

  Which solved one mystery, anyway. The day before, I’d taken my own bath, but when I went to let the water out of the tub I found the drain so clogged, I practically needed nitroglycerine to get it running again.

  Dog hair, of course. The other mystery was how Bella had gotten Prill into the bathtub at all. But I decided to leave that question alone, too.

  “Bella, if you understand how uncomfortable your efforts were making everyone, why did you continue?”

  “I told you, I can’t help it!” she wailed. Her huge eyes brimmed with despair. “And it’s getting worse. The agency sent me to two families before you, and you are the only ones as managed to keep me on for more than a day.”

  Noticing her distress, the dogs began whining. Bella glanced down at them; Monday was relatively paint-free but still might have a fair amount of moose cud ready for sneezing, while Prill was more white than red.

  At the sight Bella gasped, then caught herself. “You ain’t told me to clean them dogs up, have you?” she inquired cannily.

  “No, Bella, I haven’t. And I’m so pleased you thought to ask before taking the job upon yourself.”

  I got up. “But now that you have asked, why don’t we do it together, and while we work you can tell me how this compulsion for cleaning happened to develop.”

  “It didn’t develop,” she replied. “It came upon me. Month ago, all of a sudden, like. Here, doggy, now I ain’t going to hurt you,” she added, crouching near Monday.

  The black Lab eyed Bella for signs of scrub brushes or dog shampoo. Noticing none, she romped up happily and favored Bella with a big wet doggy kiss.

  “Argh!” Bella said, reeling back with distaste. But then she thought better of it.

  “Well,” she allowed to the animal, “I guess you probably got no worse bugs than I have, when you get right down to it.”

  Which I thought was progress. “So one day you were being as tidy as anyone else and the next day you couldn’t stop cleaning?”

  She nodded, examining Monday carefully for latent moose cud. “Yup. Got up at home, stripped the bed, boiled the sheets. Steam-cleaned the carpets. Next I peeled off the wallpaper, and sanded the walls smooth.”

  “My goodness.” The paint on Prill had dried, but it hadn’t cured so it came off with a brush. She stood patiently submitting to the process; for a breed with such a ferocious reputation, this particular Doberman pinscher was a milquetoast.

  “So then,” I guessed, “you eventually decided to earn some money with your compulsion?”

  “Yup. Figured I might’s well make use of it. Got hired on by the help agency. But it didn’t turn out like I expected at all.”

  She peered into one of Monday’s ears, found a white glob, and removed it. “See, you can sell cleanliness,” she added ruefully, “but you can’t sell craziness. And at this point I might as well call a spade a spade.”

  She patted Monday and released her. “Because craziness,” she finished bluntly, “is what I’ve got.”

  Right. And among other things, that meant one lecture from me wasn’t going to turn it off like a faucet. Even if she stayed I would still have to keep her away from Wade, away from Sam’s belongings, and especially away from my father.

  But a few more weeks of Bella’s services, assuming I could prevent her turning back into the white tornado, would allow me to accomplish some other tasks that had been getting short shrift for quite a while around here.

  The unpainted shutters, for instance, and the porch steps. That window screen, too. Also every doorknob in the house had come loose somehow over the winter; soon someone would go into a room and not be able to get out again except by bashing the door down.

  Then there was the aforementioned yard work. I could’ve let it go, but in Eastport people tend to jump to colorful conclusions from bits of evidence like unmowed lawns and unweeded gardens.

  Such as for instance that you’ve begun brewing amphetamines down in the cellar where the coal bin was, back in the days when your house had a coal bin. And being a woman with enough baggage to load a freight car—

  When I moved here to Eastport I’d brought a troublesome ex-husband, a son with a substance abuse history and a habit of romancing the local girls, and a bankroll that everyone assumed had been assembled by my being a drug dealer—

  I didn’t need any more colorful conclusions. What I needed was a housekeeper who wasn’t a crazy woman, at least for the rest of the day while I decided what to do about her.

  So I kept probing. “Was there something particular that set you off?” I asked.

  She glanced sideways at me. “Maybe,” she replied guardedly. “I always was neat-like. More so when I’m upset.”

  Well, there was a start. “Did anything happen that day or maybe the day before, that you found especially distressing?”

  But with this I’d gone too far. “You ain’t going to let up, are you? You’re going to keep poking and prying!”

  Oh, what the hell. I put the steel back into my voice.

  “Yes. Because I’ll tell you something, Bella, you’re on the edge, here. My only choices are to let you go or try to find out what’s bothering you. Otherwise you’ll never stop being such a . . . such a pestilence of cleanliness.”

  She nodded, but the look on her face said her mind was elsewhere. “That’s right,” she agreed in tones of unhappy preoccupation. “I’m a pestilence even to myself. At home, it’s all I can do to dirty up a dish long enough to eat off it.”

  At her expression a new thought struck me. “You know, don’t you? You know what the problem is. You just don’t know what to do about it.”

  Whereupon she gave up, reaching into her purse. “Yes,” she sighed. “It’s this. And more like it.”

  With a show of reluctance she withdrew a piece of yellow lined notebook paper, thrusting it at me.

  “I have,” she confessed, “been getting death threats.”

  When I first came to
Maine, I thought old houses were ones whose air-conditioning systems hadn’t been built right in along with the sauna, whirlpool bath, and indoor swimming pool. Then I discovered Eastport, where the houses were so old that even the plumbing and heating systems hadn’t originally been built in, and in some cases weren’t securely established now.

  And to make a long story short, one day when I was feeling psychotically optimistic I bought one of these houses, moved into it with my teenage son, Sam, and woke up the next morning having traded a gold mine of a career on Wall Street for a life in which just getting a nail hammered in straight was a major triumph.

  In those first days I used to confront a balky window sash with the same miserable sinking sensation that Job must’ve felt, facing his trials. The only tools I’d ever used were the software programs designed to predict which foreign nation’s currency unit might trump which other one’s on any given day, so I could earn a penny per unit by trading a gazillion of them.

  Patching a leaky two-hundred-year-old roof was a very different story, especially in December in Maine. I couldn’t do it via computer; in fact just getting to the leak at all involved going up onto the roof, which at the time was coated with a sheet of ice.

  Which is how I learned the two-step Maine method of patching a roof leak in the winter: (1) put a bucket under it and (2) wait until spring.

  The next thing I learned was that heating an old Maine house costs the equivalent of the national budget of Peru, this being where I ended up wishing I’d moved that first January while the windows shook with the force of the gale blowing in around them.

  You couldn’t set milk out on the kitchen table unless you wanted it iced, and after a couple of frightening experiences I started putting a little antifreeze in the toilet tanks. Sam and I began wearing socks to sleep in, and by February we had added hats, mufflers, and gloves; we flipped coins over who would get to have the dog on our bed—at the time we only had one—and a couple of mornings I had to thaw the ice out of my eyelashes before I could open my eyes.