Cleaning women do steal. Not the things the people we work for are so nervous about. It is the superfluity that finally gets to you. We don’t want the change in the little ashtrays.
Some lady at a bridge party somewhere started the rumor that to test the honesty of a cleaning woman you leave little rosebud ashtrays around with loose change in them, here and there. My solution to this is to always add a few pennies, even a dime.
The minute I get to work I first check out where the watches are, the rings, the gold lamé evening purses. Later when they come running in all puffy and red-faced I just coolly say, “Under your pillow, behind the avocado toilet.” All I really steal is sleeping pills, saving up for a rainy day.
Today I stole a bottle of Spice Islands sesame seeds. Mrs. Jessel rarely cooks. When she does she makes Sesame Chicken. The recipe is pasted inside the spice cupboard. Another copy is in the stamp and string drawer and another in her address book. Whenever she orders chicken, soy sauce, and sherry she orders another bottle of sesame seeds. She has fifteen bottles of sesame seeds. Fourteen now.
At the bus stop I sat on the curb. Three other maids, black in white uniforms, stood above me. They are old friends, have worked on Country Club Road for years. At first we were all mad … the bus was two minutes early and we missed it. Damn. He knows the maids are always there, that the 42–PIEDMONT only runs once an hour.
I smoked while they compared booty. Things they took … nail polish, perfume, toilet paper. Things they were given … one-earrings, twenty hangers, torn bras.
(Advice to cleaning women: Take everything that your lady gives you and say Thank you. You can leave it on the bus, in the crack.)
To get into the conversation I showed them my bottle of sesame seeds. They roared with laughter. “Oh, child! Sesame seeds?” They asked me how come I’ve worked for Mrs. Jessel so long. Most women can’t handle her for more than three times. They asked if it is true she has one hundred and forty pairs of shoes. Yes, but the bad part is that most of them are identical.
The hour passed pleasantly. We talked about all the ladies we each work for. We laughed, not without bitterness.
I’m not easily accepted by most old-time cleaning women. Hard to get cleaning jobs too, because I’m “educated.” Sure as hell can’t find any other jobs right now. Learned to tell the ladies right away that my alcoholic husband just died, leaving me and the four kids. I had never worked before, raising the children and all.
43–SHATTUCK — BERKELEY. The benches that say SATURATION ADVERTISING are soaking wet every morning. I asked a man for a match and he gave me the pack. SUICIDE PREVENTION. They were the dumb kind with the striker on the back. Better safe than sorry.
Across the street the woman at SPOTLESS CLEANERS was sweeping her sidewalk. The sidewalks on either side of her fluttered with litter and leaves. It is autumn now, in Oakland.
Later that afternoon, back from cleaning at Horwitz’s, the SPOTLESS sidewalk was covered with leaves and garbage again. I dropped my transfer on it. I always get a transfer. Sometimes I give them away, usually I just hold them.
Ter used to tease me about how I was always holding things all the time.
“Say, Maggie May, ain’t nothing in this world you can hang on to. ’Cept me, maybe.”
One night on Telegraph I woke up to feel him closing a Coors fliptop into my palm. He was smiling down at me. Terry was a young cowboy, from Nebraska. He wouldn’t go to foreign movies. I just realized it’s because he couldn’t read fast enough.
Whenever Ter read a book, rarely — he would rip each page off and throw it away. I would come home, to where the windows were always open or broken and the whole room would be swirling with pages, like Safeway lot pigeons.
33–BERKELEY EXPRESS. The 33 got lost! The driver overshot the turn at SEARS for the freeway. Everybody was ringing the bell as, blushing, he made a left on Twenty-seventh. We ended up stuck in a dead end. People came to their windows to see the bus. Four men got out to help him back out between the parked cars on the narrow street. Once on the freeway he drove about eighty. It was scary. We all talked together, pleased by the event.
Linda’s today.
(Cleaning women: As a rule, never work for friends. Sooner or later they resent you because you know so much about them. Or else you’ll no longer like them, because you do.)
But Linda and Bob are good, old friends. I feel their warmth even though they aren’t there. Come and blueberry jelly on the sheets. Racing forms and cigarette butts in the bathroom. Notes from Bob to Linda: “Buy some smokes and take the car … dooh-dah dooh-dah.” Drawings by Andrea with Love to Mom. Pizza crusts. I clean their coke mirror with Windex.
It is the only place I work that isn’t spotless to begin with. It’s filthy in fact. Every Wednesday I climb the stairs like Sisyphus into their living room where it always looks like they are in the middle of moving.
I don’t make much money with them because I don’t charge by the hour, no carfare. No lunch for sure. I really work hard. But I sit around a lot, stay very late. I smoke and read The New York Times, porno books, How to Build a Patio Roof. Mostly I just look out the window at the house next door, where we used to live. 2129½ Russell Street. I look at the tree that grows wooden pears Ter used to shoot at. The wooden fence glistens with BBs. The BEKINS sign that lit our bed at night. I miss Ter and I smoke. You can’t hear the trains during the day.
40–TELEGRAPH. MILLHAVEN CONVALESCENT HOME. Four old women in wheelchairs staring filmily out into the street. Behind them, at the nurses’ station, a beautiful black girl dances to “I Shot the Sheriff.” The music is loud, even to me, but the old women can’t hear it at all. Beneath them, on the sidewalk, is a crude sign: TUMOR INSTITUTE 1:30.
The bus is late. Cars drive by. Rich people in cars never look at people on the street, at all. Poor ones always do … in fact it sometimes seems they’re just driving around, looking at people on the street. I’ve done that. Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc.
As everyone waited for the 40 we looked into the window of MILL AND ADDIE’S LAUNDRY. Mill was born in a mill in Georgia. He was lying down across five washing machines, installing a huge TV set above them. Addie made silly pantomimes for us, how the TV would never hold up. Passersby stopped to join us watching Mill. All of us were reflected in the television, like a Man on the Street show.
Down the street is a big black funeral at FOUCHÉ’S. I used to think the neon sign said “Touché,” and would always imagine death in a mask, his point at my heart.
I have thirty pills now, from Jessel, Burns, Mcintyre, Horwitz, and Blum. These people I work for each have enough uppers or downers to put a Hell’s Angel away for twenty years.
18–PARK — MONTCLAIR. Downtown Oakland. A drunken Indian knows me by now, always says, “That’s the way the ball bounces, sugar.”
At Park Boulevard a blue County Sheriff’s bus with the windows boarded up. Inside are about twenty prisoners on their way to arraignment. The men, chained together, move sort of like a crew team in their orange jumpsuits. With the same camaraderie, actually. It is dark inside the bus. Reflected in the window is the traffic light. Yellow WAIT WAIT. Red STOP STOP.
A long sleepy hour up into the affluent foggy Montclair hills. Just maids on the bus. Beneath Zion Lutheran church is a big black-and-white sign that says WATCH OUT FOR FALLING ROCKS. Every time I see it I laugh out loud. The other maids and the driver turn around and stare at me. It is a ritual by now. There was a time when I used to automatically cross myself when I passed a Catholic church. Maybe I stopped because people in buses always turned around and stared. I still automatically say a Hail Mary, silently, whenever I hear a siren. This is a nuisance because I live on Pill Hill in Oakland, next to three hospitals.