Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America

  Or maybe the cleaning fluids are at fault, except that then the rash should have begun on my hands. After two days of minor irritation, a full-scale epidermal breakdown is under way. I cover myself with anti-itch cream from Rite Aid but can manage to sleep only for an hour and a half at a time before the torment resumes. I wake up realizing I can work but probably shouldn’t, if only because I look like a leper. Ted doesn’t have much sympathy for illness, though; one of our morning meetings was on the subject of “working through it.” Somebody, and he wasn’t going to name names, he told us, was out with a migraine. “Now if I get a migraine I just pop two Excedrins and get on with my life. That’s what you have to do—work through it.” So it’s in the spirit of a scientific experiment that I present myself at the office, wondering if my speckled and inflamed appearance will be enough to get me sent home. Certainly I wouldn’t want anyone who looks like me handling my children’s toys or bars of bathroom soap. But no problem. Must be a latex allergy, is Ted’s diagnosis. Just stay out of the latex gloves we use for particularly nasty work; he’ll give me another kind to wear.

  I should, if I were going to stay in character, find an emergency room after work and try to cop a little charitable care. But it’s too much. The itching gets so bad at night that I have mini-tantrums, waving my arms and stamping my feet to keep from scratching or bawling. So I fall back on the support networks of my real-life social class, call the dermatologist I know in Key West, and bludgeon him into prescribing something sight unseen. The whole episode—including anti-itch cream, prednisone, prednisone cream, and Benadryl to get through the nights—eats up $30. It’s still unseasonably hot, and I often get to look out on someone’s azure pool while I vacuum or scrub, frantic with suppressed itching. Even the rash-free are affected by the juxtaposition of terrible heat and cool, inaccessible water. In the car on one of the hottest days, after cleaning a place with pool, pool house, and gazebo, Rosalie and Maddy and I obsess about immersion in all imaginable forms—salt water versus fresh, lakes versus pools, surf versus smooth, glasslike surfaces. We can’t even wash our hands in the houses, at least not after the sinks have been dried and buffed, and when I do manage to get a wash in before the sinks are off-limits, there’s always some filthy last-minute job like squeezing out the rags used on floors once we get out of a house. Maybe I picked up some bug at a house or maybe it’s the disinfectant I squirt on my hands, straight from the bottle, in an attempt at cleanliness. Three days into the rash, I make another trip to Old Orchard Beach and wade into the water with my clothes on (I didn’t think to bring a bathing suit from Key West to Maine), trying to pretend that it’s an accident when a wave washes over me and that I’m not just some pathetic street person using the beach as a bathtub.

  There’s something else working against my mood of muscular elation. I had been gloating internally about my ability to keep up with, and sometimes outwork, women twenty or thirty years younger than myself, but it turns out this comparative advantage says less about me than it does about them. Ours is a physical bond, to the extent that we bond at all. One person’s infirmity can be a teammate’s extra burden; there’s a constant traffic in herbal and over-the-counter solutions to pain. If I don’t know how my coworkers survive on their wages or what they make of our hellish condition, I do know about their back pains and cramps and arthritic attacks. Lori and Pauline are excused from vacuuming on account of their backs, which means you dread being assigned to a team with them. Helen has a bum foot, which Ted, in explaining her absence one day, blames on the cheap, ill-fitting shoes that, he implies, she perversely chooses to wear. Marge’s arthritis makes scrubbing a torture; another woman has to see a physical therapist for her rotator cuff. When Rosalie tells me that she got her shoulder problem picking blueberries as a “kid”—she still is one in my eyes, of course—I flash on a scene from my own childhood, of wandering through fields on an intense July day, grabbing berries by the handful as I go. But when Rosalie was a kid she worked in the blueberry fields of northern Maine, and the damage to her shoulder is an occupational injury.

  So ours is a world of pain—managed by Excedrin and Advil, compensated for with cigarettes and, in one or two cases and then only on weekends, with booze. Do the owners have any idea of the misery that goes into rendering their homes motel-perfect? Would they be bothered if they did know, or would they take a sadistic pride in what they have purchased—boasting to dinner guests, for example, that their floors are cleaned only with the purest of fresh human tears? In one of my few exchanges with an owner, a pert muscular woman whose desk reveals that she works part-time as a personal trainer, I am vacuuming and she notices the sweat. “That’s a real workout, isn’t it?” she observes, not unkindly, and actually offers me a glass of water, the only such offer I ever encounter. Flouting the rule against the ingestion of anything while inside a house, I take it, leaving an inch undrunk to avoid the awkwardness of a possible refill offer. “I tell all my clients,” the trainer informs me, “‘If you want to be fit, just fire your cleaning lady and do it yourself.’” “Ho ho,” is all I say, since we’re not just chatting in the gym together and I can’t explain that this form of exercise is totally asymmetrical, brutally repetitive, and as likely to destroy the musculoskeletal structure as to strengthen it.

  Self-restraint becomes more of a challenge when the owner of a million-dollar condo (that’s my guess anyway, because it has three floors and a wide-angle view of the fabled rockbound coast) who is (according to a framed photograph on the wall) an acquaintance of the real Barbara Bush takes me into the master bathroom to explain the difficulties she’s been having with the shower stall. Seems its marble walls have been “bleeding” onto the brass fixtures, and can I scrub the grouting extra hard? That’s not your marble bleeding, I want to tell her, it’s the worldwide working class—the people who quarried the marble, wove your Persian rugs until they went blind, harvested the apples in your lovely fall-themed dining room centerpiece, smelted the steel for the nails, drove the trucks, put up this building, and now bend and squat and sweat to clean it.

  Not that I, even in my more histrionic moments, imagine that I am a member of that oppressed working class. My very ability to work tirelessly hour after hour is a product of decades of better-than-average medical care, a high-protein diet, and workouts in gyms that charge $400 or $500 a year. If I am now a productive fake member of the working class, it’s because I haven’t been working, in any hard physical sense, long enough to have ruined my body. But I will say this for myself: I have never employed a cleaning person or service (except, on two occasions, to prepare my house for a short-term tenant) even though various partners and husbands have badgered me over the years to do so. When I could have used one, when the kids were little, I couldn’t afford it; and later, when I could afford it, I still found the idea repugnant. Partly this comes from having a mother who believed that a self-cleaned house was the hallmark of womanly virtue. Partly it’s because my own normal work is sedentary, so that the housework I do—in dabs of fifteen minutes here and thirty minutes there—functions as a break. But mostly I rejected the idea, even after all my upper-middle-class friends had, guiltily and as covertly as possible, hired help for themselves, because this is just not the kind of relationship I want to have with another human being.11

  Let’s talk about shit, for example. It happens, as the bumper sticker says, and it happens to a cleaning person every day. The first time I encountered a shit-stained toilet as a maid, I was shocked by the sense of unwanted intimacy. A few hours ago, some well-fed butt was straining away on this toilet seat, and now here I am wiping up after it. For those who have never cleaned a really dirty toilet, I should explain that there are three kinds of shit stains. There are remnants of landslides running down the inside of toilet bowls. There are the splash-back remains on the underside of toilet seats. And, perhaps most repulsively, there’s sometimes a crust of brown on the rim of a toilet seat, where a turd happened to collide on its dive to the wa
ter. You don’t want to know this? Well, it’s not something I would have chosen to dwell on myself, but the different kinds of stains require different cleaning approaches. One prefers those that are interior to the toilet bowl, since they can be attacked by brush, which is a kind of action-at-a-distance weapon. And one dreads the crusts on the seats, especially when they require the intervention of a Dobie as well as a rag.

  Or we might talk about that other great nemesis of the bathroom cleaner—pubic hair. I don’t know what it is about the American upper class, but they seem to be shedding their pubic hair at an alarming rate. You find it in quantity in shower stalls, bathtubs, Jacuzzis, drains, and even, unaccountably, in sinks. Once I spent fifteen minutes crouching in a huge four-person Jacuzzi, maddened by the effort of finding the dark little coils camouflaged against the eggplant-colored ceramic background but fascinated by the image of the pubes of the economic elite, which must by this time be completely bald.

  There are worse things that owners can do, of course, than shit or shed. They can spy on us, for example. When I ask a teammate why the rule against cursing in houses, she says that owners have been known to leave tape recorders going while we work. Video cameras are another part of the lore, positioned near valuables to catch a cleaner in an act of theft. Whether any of this is true or not, Ted encourages us to imagine that we are under surveillance at all times in each house.12

  Other owners set traps for us. In one house, I am reprimanded by the team leader for failing to vacuum far enough under the Persian rugs scattered around on the hardwood floors, because this owner likes to leave little mounds of dirt there just so she can see if they’re still there when we’re done. More commonly, owners will arrange to be home when we come so they can check up on us while we work. I am vacuuming the home of a retired couple and happen to look into a room I’ve completed, where I see the female owner’s enormous purple-encased butt staring up at me from the floor. I wouldn’t have thought she was agile enough, but she’s climbed under a desk to search out particles of overlooked dust.

  I would say more about the houses themselves, but I lack the vocabulary for all the forms of wall finishings, flooring materials, light fixtures, fireplace equipment, porches, and statuary we encounter. On the subject of interior decorating, my general feeling has long been that it’s too bad we’re fur-less and have to live indoors. The various consequences of this infirmity—as manifested in architecture, furniture, etc.—have never managed to engage my attention. Far more useful to me, for understanding the tics, pretensions, and insecurities of the owner class, are books and other print-related artifacts. I learn that one of our owners is a Scientologist; another proudly claims descent from one of the same Scottish clans my own ancestors belonged to. Still another has framed a certificate announcing that she is listed in the Who’s Who of American Women. As for books, at the low end of the literacy spectrum, which is where most of our clients dwell, I find Grisham and Limbaugh; at the high end, there’s a lot of Amy Tan and I once even spotted an Ondaatje. Mostly, though, books are for show, and real life—judging from the quantity of food stains and tossed items of clothing—goes on in the room that houses the large-screen TV. The only books that seriously offend me are the antique ones, no doubt purchased in bulk, that are sometimes deployed on end tables for purposes of quaintness and “authenticity”—as if the owners actually spent their spare moments reading a 1920 title like Bobsledding in Vermont: One Boy’s Adventure. But time pressures inevitably curtail my literary investigations. The real issue for a maid is the number of books per shelf: if that number is greater than twelve, we can treat them as a single mass and dust around them; otherwise each one must be removed and dusted separately.

  Not all of our owners are rich. Maybe a quarter to a third of the houses look to be merely middle-class and some of these—probably because they lack interim help to do the light cleaning between our visits every week or two—are seriously dirty. But class is a relative thing. Once, after polishing up two houses in which the number of occupants clearly exceeded the number of bathrooms—an unmistakable sign of financial impairment, along with the presence of teddy bears in decorative roles—I asked Holly, my team leader of the day, whether the next house on our list was “wealthy.” Her answer: “If we’re cleaning their house, they’re wealthy.”

  It is undeniably fall when I find myself being assigned, day after day, to Holly’s team. There’s fog in the morning now and the farm stands are pushing pumpkins. On the radio in our company car the classic rock station notes the season by playing “Maggie May” several times a day—It’s late September and I really should be BACK at school. Other people are going out to their offices or classrooms; we stay behind, Cinderella-like, in their usually deserted homes. On the pop station, it’s Pearl Jam’s hypnotic “Last Kiss,” so beautifully sad, it makes bereavement seem like an enviable condition. Not that we ever comment on what the radio brings us or on any other part of the world outside The Maids and its string of client houses. In this, the most dutiful and serious of all the teams I have been on, the conversation, at least in the morning, is all about the houses that lie ahead. Murphy—isn’t that the one that took four hours the first time? Yeah, but it’s OK once you get past the master bath, which you’ve gotta use mold killer on . . . And so on. Or we pass around our routing sheet and study the day’s owners’ “Hot Buttons,” as sketched in by Tammy. Typical “Hot Buttons” are baseboards, windowsills, and ceiling fans—never, of course, poverty, racism, or global warming.

  But the relevant point about Holly is that she is visibly unwell—possibly whiter, on a daily basis, than anyone else in the state. We’re not just talking Caucasian here; think bridal gowns, tuberculosis, and death. All I know about her is that she is twenty-three, has been married for almost a year, and manages to feed her husband, herself, and an elderly relative on $30–$50 a week, which is only a little more than what I spend on food for myself. I’d be surprised if she weighs more than ninety-two pounds before breakfast, assuming breakfast is even on her agenda. During an eight-to-nine-hour shift, I never see her eat more than one of those tiny cracker sandwiches with peanut butter filling, and you would think she had no use for food at all if it weren’t for the fact that every afternoon at about 2:30 she starts up a food-fantasy conversation in the car. “What did you have for dinner last night, Marge?” she’ll ask, Marge being our oldest and most affluent team member, who—thanks to a working commercial fisherman husband—sometimes brings reports from such fine-dining spots as T.G.I. Friday’s. Or we’ll drive by a Dairy Queen and Holly will say, “They have great foursquares”—the local name for a sundae—“there, you know. With four kinds of sauce. You get chocolate, strawberry, butterscotch, and marshmallow and any kind of ice cream you want. I had one once and let it get a little melted and, oh my God,” etc.

  Today, though, even Marge, who normally chatters on obliviously about the events in her life (“It was the biggest spider” or “So she just puts a little mustard right in with the baked beans . . .”), notices how shaky Holly looks. “Is it just indigestion or is there nausea?” she asks. When Holly admits to nausea, Marge wants to know if she’s pregnant. No answer. Marge asks again, and again no answer. “I’m talking to you, Holly, answer me.” It’s a tense moment, with Marge prying and Holly just as rudely stonewalling, but Holly, as team leader, prevails.

  There are only the three of us—Denise is out with a migraine—and at the first house I suggest that Marge and I do all the vacuuming for the day. Marge doesn’t chime in on my offer, but it doesn’t matter since Holly says no way. I resolve to race through dusting so I can take over as much as possible from Holly. When I finish, I rush to the kitchen, only to find a scene so melodramatic that for a second I think I have walked out of Dusting, the videotape, and into an entirely different movie. Holly is in a distinctly un-team-leader-like position, standing slumped over a counter with her head on her arms. “I shouldn’t be here today,” she says, looking up wanly. “I had a big
fight with my husband. I didn’t want to go to work this morning but he said I had to.” This confidence is so completely out of character that I’m speechless. She goes on. The problem is probably that she’s pregnant. It’s been seven weeks and the nausea is out of control, which is why she can’t eat anything and gets so weak, but she wants it to be a secret until she can tell Ted herself.

  Very tentatively and mindful of the deep reserve of rural Mainers, as explained to me by a sociologist acquaintance, I touch her arm and tell her she shouldn’t be doing this. Even if she were feeling OK she probably shouldn’t be around the chemicals we use. She should go home. But all I can talk her into is taking the Pure Protein sports bar I always carry in my bag in case my sandwich lets me down. At first she refuses it. Then, when I repeat the offer, she says, “Really?” and finally takes it, picking off little chunks with trembling fingertips and cramming them into her mouth. Also, would I mind doing the driving for the rest of the day because she doesn’t trust herself on account of the dizziness?