Even after opening her front door to me the woman was suspicious, because I wasn’t wearing my uniform. I wore the Bing cherry red baseball cap with ten thousand glitter bits spelling Sparkle on the brim, so who needs the jumpsuit? It didn’t fit me anyway. She only opened the door a stitch.
— Sparkle ma’am. I’m here to make your home shine.
If I didn’t say the motto then, according to our rules, she didn’t have to tip me. Not that she was going to anyway. Blacks and old Jews were cheaper than Chinese food when it came to gratuities. I don’t want to complain. The money could be better, but I liked the work.
The woman at the front door of this Rochdale Village home finally let me inside and I followed her down the hall. She wore the dark slacks, jacket and belly of a bus driver. There were no photos on the walls, but prayer plaques.
She said, — My husband is going to stay here today, he’s sick. I wrote a list for you so leave him alone. He’s going to be in bed.
There were four gold rings on three fat fingers of her right hand.
She took me around, but her house was weak; it could barely hold me up. The tiled floor dipped in the middle of the kitchen, moaned when I walked across it.
— Under the sink we keep the cleaners, and this closet has mops. Do you need gloves?
I tapped my coat pocket. — I’ve got.
Outside, in one of the company’s K cars, I had my own vacuum, towels, cleaning chemicals, sponges. But homeowners took issue with the equipment. This was true at nearly every cleaning job I had. And Sparkle’s was as raggedy as the rest; the vacuum only worked if run for twenty minutes first.
Her list was under a magnet shaped like a fridge that was stuck to their fridge.
— This is what needs doing on one floor and the rest on the second.
— No basement?
She grabbed my arm. — We couldn’t pay you enough to fix that place up.
That made me like her because few of the homes I’d cleaned had owners with any objective sense. This lady was the first in a while to admit her family had made too big a mess to ask for help. I considered going down there and doing the job for free.
She called upstairs before leaving.
No answer, so I thought he was still asleep. I hoped I wouldn’t have to wash out bedpans.
The front door shut then maybe eleven seconds passed and I heard the husband’s feet on the stairs. They were faint footsteps pattering above my head. Then this skinny guy comes down dressed sharp enough to cut. Wearing a gray, thin suit as cheap as one of my own. The lapels looked about as thick as wax paper. He was breathing heavy from running.
— You’re not no girl, he pointed out.
He stood in the living room watching me at the kitchen sink. I’d been planning to sit a moment, but washed dishes to seem busy.
— No I’m not.
— I thought they was going to send some girl.
The man was crestfallen; he was dressed for a funeral and now he had the proper face. He came into the kitchen and poured a drink while I finished the breakfast dishes.
— You got to do the laundry.
— That’s not on her list, I said.
— Well it’s on mine.
— Yes.
— We got machines in the basement. You can turn them on and go back to the rest.
I walked into the living room and he followed me. He sat on the couch because I was about to move it. Instead I pulled their big round table to a corner after I unplugged a lamp.
Finished with the orange juice, the master of the house put his cup down on the carpet.
— You could put that in the kitchen now. He pointed below him.
He retied his dress shoes by pulling the black laces hard. A young boy ready for chapel.
I took up the cup into the kitchen where the floor announced its weakness for me with another moan. — Oh shut up, I muttered.
This house would have been silent if not for the oven clock, light bulbs. The rechargeable battery case worked constantly. Three hundred years earlier the background noise would have been wind through the crops, Jameco Indians in the dirt. I lifted the blind from one kitchen window where Englishmen in frock coats and breeches once walked. In the back slaves collected salt hay to feed the animals. Three centuries and now I stood in a kitchen filling a bucket with hot water. It was hard to imagine I was even the same species as any of them. Their lives must have been so difficult and now mine was easy. I know some people long for bygone days, but not me.
— Well then, the bus driver’s husband said from the threshold of the living room. Guess I’m going out.
I untangled the phone cord wrapped around a chair leg in the kitchen. Kept to busy work around him so he’d believe I knew my profession. If he even suspected I was an amateur he’d lecture me about how to sweep to his specifications. Everyone thinks they’ve invented the best way to wipe down a fridge. With this guy, just looking at him, I’d have had an embolism if he took a professorial tone while mispronouncing words like ‘ammonia’ and ‘broom.’
— How long you’ll need? he asked when I didn’t answer.
— Seven hours?
— Seven hours?! He yelled it. How much you think we got to do here? Shit. She didn’t tell you to do the basement too, did she?
— No.
— Then what you talking all this seven hours mess? I’ll be back in four and that’s what I’m paying you.
He made for the door then turned back. — And what the hell you wearing a suit for?
To appear professional.
When the man got gone I ran back to the kitchen to call Ledric. He didn’t pick up for twenty-three rings.
— Who’s this? He breathed heavily through his mouth.
— How’s your disease coming? I asked.
— Tapeworm’s not a disease, it’s an infestation.
— How’s your infestation coming?
— I lost weight already.
— It’s only been eleven days!
— So? I bet I lost eight pounds by now.
— You told your family about all this?
— It’s only my mother and father out in Chicago. But my long-distance got shut off.
— When’s the last time you spoke?
— I sent them some bootleg videos for Christmas.
— Last year?
— Why are you bothering me about all that?
— I’m not trying to down you, I told him. You’re not feeling sick?
— Of course not, he said.
I was committed to Ledric because, well, wouldn’t you be? Also, what if it worked?
After seeing him so desperate to lose a few hundred inches that he’d actually ingest bugs, refraining from my usual three — Big Mac snack-attack seemed hardly a sacrifice at all. And what if it worked?
— It’s not bugs, he said on the phone.
— Bugs, worms, insects, whatever. I don’t think the fish had to be rotten to get tapeworms.
His faith would not be shaken. — I didn’t want to take any chances about that.
After hanging up I set the two dirtiest pots in soapy hot water to let them soak last night’s meat loose. I went to the car for my tools.
In the living room I ran the vacuum. I lifted the couch on its side and left it there.
People don’t want to return to a neat house. They want to enter fifteen minutes before the finish, when the rooms are still a little disarrayed. If they see no proof that work’s been done they quibble about hours, swear that the appliances were that shiny before I got there. They cut even cheaper with the tip and I’m not talking about generous clientele to begin with. It’s necessary to let people think they’re seeing backstage at the theater minutes before the show. They want to be the producers, not the audience.