The Carsons leave for the summer this Monday. They are eager to begin the long journey across the country; on the way they will visit many family and friends. The big excitement this year is that they are going a little by sea, but mostly by car, to Alaska. I am looking forward to post cards from the trip.
Their departure lightens my load and gives me a chance to catch up. That’s 3 hours a week that can go to something else or another customer. Work hours are money. There are no vacation-hours, or days or weeks. My son wants to go to the beach, and I am calculating, "how many days can I afford to be spending money instead of working for it?" And then there is sickness. Whether we give in or not, sickness controls us. If the affected person can’t think creatively and come up with innovative solutions, they could be squeezed doubly in the fist of disease; unless of course it is a disease that gives energy and optimism, and has the victim walking the streets at night singing and reciting poetry. Is that a disease to want to get rid of?
Not until the muscles begin to shrivel and the heart won’t stop racing, or it is hard to get out of bed in the morning and every day spent cleaning means the following day must be scheduled for bed rest. I guess that’s what they mean when they talk about lost productivity; but lost work hours are gained reading time. Literacy is free, but for the person whose sole source of income is a job, time is not. So sickness is an opportunity to read and transcend money worries. If you can’t afford to take time off for vacations, sickness, especially if there is no pain, is an unlikely angel. It creates slack where slack is needed.
My life has been a straddling of the poverty line, elected, I thought, on a platform of political values. The less I made, the less I paid to Caesar.
I really liked the quote in the Clandestino video about your country being an accident of birth, like your color. It is something we have no control over, our own birth. We like to think we choose our career, or path in life. I always clung to the idea that I chose to be with a man or woman, that I chose to be a housecleaner and that I chose to have a child with out marrying the father. Now, I question whether many of these actions were really chosen consciously, as a result of knowing intent. I wonder how many of my behaviors were just the scratching of a synaptic itch.
Thyroid is supposed to mean shield shaped like a door. It makes me think of a butterfly or moth. Thyroid. Sheeit. I never in my life thought about thyroids. Why would I? Like why would a white person think about color? We think about our toes when they get cold, or when the nails grow, but the thyroid?
Some prolific molecule, getting into the thyroid, is being mistaken for a messenger from the pituitary gland. My brain is being reprogrammed by a molecule made not just in the USA, but in my own body. Homegrown subversive elements are literally running the show.
As a result of thousands of people devoting themselves over the centuries and across cultures to scientific research, it was my extremely good fortune that my retired pathologist customer, Paul Carson, was able to recognize and identify what was happening. He had taken an interest in the thyroid during his years of practice and I was lucky enough to be in his house once a week complaining of the heat. Thanks to Paul, I had a very good idea of what would happen before I even got past the poverty guards to the doctor. I would be taking this 'pill.'
It proved very difficult to get, that radioactive pill, but it did the trick and put me back on the 21st century highway of productivity.
Ya me gritaron mil veces que me regrese a mi tierra,
They've already told me a thousand times, get back to my country
Porque aqui no quepo yo
Because here is not where I belong
Quiero recordarle al gringo: Yo no cruce la frontera, la frontera me
I want to remind the gringo: I didn't cross the border, the border
cruzo.
crossed me.
America nacio libre, el hombre la dividio. Ellos pintaron la raya, para America was born free, it was man that divided it. They painted the line, so
que yo la brincara y me llaman imbasor es un error bien marcado I would jump it and they could call me invader, it's a mistake well marked
nos quitaron ocho estados quien es aqui el imbasor. Soy extranjero en they took eight states, who here is the invader? I am a stranger in
mi tierra, y no vengo a darles guerra, soy hombre trabajador.
my land, and I don't come to make war, I am a working man.
Y si no miente la historia, aqui se asento en la gloria la poderosa nacion And if history doesn't lie, here was established in its glory, a powerful nation
entre guerreros valientes, indios de dos continentes, mezclados between brave fighters, indians of two continents, mixed
con espanol. Y si a los siglos nos vamos: somos mas americanos, with Spanish. And if we go through the centuries: we are more American,
somos mas americanos que el hijo del anglo-saxon.
we are more American than the son of the Anglo-Saxon.
Nos compraron sin dinero las aguas del rio bravo. Y nos quitaron a Without money, they bought our Rio Bravo. And they took
Texas, Nuevo Mexico, Arizona y Colorado. Tambien volo California y Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado. California and
Nevada con Utah no se llenaron, el estado de Wyoming, tambien Nevada were gone too and Utah did not satisfy them, the state of Wyoming,
nos lo arrebataronYo soy la sangre del indio Soy latino soy mestizo they also got away with. I am the blood of indian. I am latino I am mestizo
Somos de todos colores Y de todos los oficios Y si contamos los siglos We are of all colors. And of all offices. And if we count the centuries
Aunque le duela al vecino Somos mas americanos Que todititos los Although it hurts the neighbor We are more American Than all those
gringos. gringos.
I added all the money my most generous customer gave me in
the last year and divided that by the number of hours I worked to justify charging
Doctor Leo 25 whopping dollars an hour.
It was good to have a place to publicly declare my intended fee (Thanks
Blogspot) thereby making it awkward to back down from placing such a high value
on my services. Now that I have spent
several hours in the house and dealt once again with this customer that I had
dropped all those years ago, and now that I’m actually receiving more money for
the work, I feel much better about setting such a high rate.
I still find Leo very disappointing as a customer, and the
house is floating in dust like the magical blanket on the front lawn after a
few hours of newly fallen snow. There
are; correction, were, cobwebs woven and long since abandoned under the seats
of every dining room chair, and all the exposed wood around the oriental
carpets was dotted with generations of dead bugs and their lifetime of dried up
drips of body fluids. This kind of stuff
doesn’t happen over night, it takes a long time to accumulate. Every time I start to feel angry or righteous
about the level of funk to which the house has sunk, I think of how fortunate I
am to have so much work and at such a rewarding rate of return. Leo’s personality and Carolyn’s illness are
however another intractably depressing story.
The Doctor is highly skilled at maneuvering conversations to suit his
purposes and shows no motivation to allow real friendship to develop, or in the
case of Carolyn and me, to resume where we left off.
Carolyn has faded markedly since I last saw her maybe 3
years ago. Her memory is drastically
curtailed and this impairment robs her and others of her once sharp
personality. Though Carolyn was always
the most gracious woman I have ever known, there was a purposeful angularity to
her that outlined her strong identity.
Now she is left with her generous grace, but little of the direction
that once made her such an inspiring example for me as a younger woman. It is still a pleasure to be around her, but
the following day I find myself overcome by nebulous sadness, that settles in
beside a really maddening irritation with her husband.
The pattern was immediately reestablished as soon as Leo
called the Carson’s to ask for my
phone number; cluck about what the rooster said. Anne was offended at the beginning of the
call when he felt he had to remind her who he was. “I know who you are, Leo.” He really showed his lack of awareness though,
when he asked if her mother was still alive; the Carsons,
like his wife are in their eighties. Anne
gave him my new number and dismissed him summarily, which is
the way he deals with me.
Carolyn is one of my inspirations, but Anne is my hero. When I showed signs of waffling on the rate
she said, “If he doesn’t like it you just walk away,” in a tone that left no
room for negotiation. You have to
understand, I’ve been cleaning for the Carson’s
for over 25 years, and Anne really is like a mother to me. She is consistently generous with over the top
praise and support for all of my endeavors, since I became a mother she
constantly finds reasons to give me money, and she is impatiently dismissive of
anyone who would diminish me; she is a 21st century Guadalupana telling
younger women that not only are they appreciated but they better damn well
appreciate themselves and not let some fool take advantage of them.
“That MAN!” It was
the same day I had cleaned for the Mansoor’s.
Dr. Mansoor wanted to change from Fridays because they are
often out of town for long weekends and he didn’t want to miss a cleaning. He wanted to know if Wednesday would be
reasonable. I suggested Monday. OK, he would take Monday. This exchange took place in the middle of the
day’s work; I had come downstairs for a scrubbing pad and was passing the
computer on the way to the kitchen. After
his new day was settled I retrieved the pad and hauled my butt upstairs to
scrub the film off the chrome fixtures in the bathroom.
In the early years of my career, I thought I had chosen
housecleaning because it was a job that did not require me to direct my mind to
achieve someone else’s objectives. I was
selling my time and labor and reserving my mind for myself. After considering which task is best
completed first, and how to disassemble and reassemble storm windows or
appliances to get at the crumbs and scum, my mind can wander and I have the
pleasure of working with the company of my unfettered thoughts.
I am happily removing the film from the chrome, letting my
thoughts wander. Like my son who goes out on the street and brings home friends, they return with new ideas. So, what if I did two houses on Wednesday,
would that be logistically possible?
Possibilities are offering themselves for my consideration and I am
turning them over in my mind as I spray Clorox on the tile wall to see if I can
get some of the light mildew stains to fade.
They are not very dark, or noticeable, I’ll just spray a little and see
what happens. It’s always good to go for
any improvement. Sometimes it is best to
just concentrate in one very limited area and see how much you can improve till
it looks like there’s nothing more that you can reasonably do, then move on to
a new area.
Physical existence is limited. Our minds can conceive of physical objects
way beyond the reach of our fingers to touch, or our bodies to bump into. The fingers can only do so much, we depend on
them to communicate the vast reaches of the mind, but they themselves are
trapped on our hands, attached to beastly bodies. The fingers speak a primitive but
sophisticated language, integrating touch and sound, sight and ideas. The fingers enable touch to be
informing, and, with a minimum of physical force, extremely provocative. The fingers are magic. Only people that have done any amount of
cleaning know it is a task which requires capable hands and fingers. Of course the body must be able to make its
way with limber movements about the house, but the fingers must put all things
back in order.
There are some people in the world who never clean; have
never gotten on their hands and knees to wipe a floor. They just wear shoes or accept that the soles
of their feet will get black and sticky when they walk barefoot. Or they are distracted when someone else removes
the detritus of life with wet rag and rinse water and assume this return to the
original, unsoiled state happens by magic. House cleaners are not distracted
from dirt, they are drawn to it with rag in hand and bucket of water. They don’t put the rest of the world right;
they just take care of what’s in their corner.
They are preparing an area where inhabitants can relax and rest and be
with themselves in pleasant peace. The
fingers make real the imaginings of the mind.
“This soap dish would be a pleasure to use if it didn’t have all this
old soap caked up on it. Let’s get rid
of that.” What the fingers take so much
time to do appears to the uninitiated like mundane slight of hand.
As the trumpet shines and tosses bright notes into the air
we admire the work of its maker and the one whose trained fingers make
captivating music with it. The
musician’s breath and tongue are working together with the whole being to
delight us with an ephemeral moment. We
applaud to show our appreciation for their dedication. Housecleaners receive the same admiration from
the people they clean for. “Oh, I can
see the front walkway. What a
difference!” Housecleaners are loved by their
customers. It is the real reason we do
it.
Apparently The Doctor
is so inured to the dust around him, or so consumed by his own intellectual
endeavors, that he cannot see it filtering the light coming through the lamp shade, or
collecting under a book on the night table.
He has been paying someone to clean and so the house must be clean. I venture this is not the mentality he brings
to music. When I point out tasks that
remain to be done, he waves the remarks aside like flies at a picnic, apparently
unaware that smeared windows distort the moving image of the magnolia tree’s branches
waving in the breeze.
My day of work at his house is ending; I am putting
chemicals, brushes and the bucket away, making ready to go to the Carson’s. These days I don’t often have two customers
in one day, so I’m kind of high on the recovery, the ability to work happily
for 8 hours. Dr. Mansoor wants to write
me a check, he imagines I could use some money, and I am cool with receiving
money since there is always something to be paid for. As he hands me the check he says, “let’s say you
gradually work us to Wednesday.” It was
a statement.
The thing on my mind for weeks has been, why do I find him so irritating? As I repeated the exchange
standing over the kitchen sink at the Carson’s, Anne tossed off, “I give it 6
weeks.” I think this will be much longer
than 6 weeks, for many reasons. I can
make money at any house and certainly get more involvement from another
customer. I can’t, however, imagine a
more organized or fascinating household.
Leo and Carolyn are both interesting individuals. Their home is better than a museum; Leo has the
book his great grandfather took medical notes in. It might be older than that; I think it is
written on vellum. They have a lot of
stuff from his country of youth. I cannot
resist people with roots in different cultures; I cannot decline the privilege
of being in their house.
As much as I love the house and all the stuff, I don’t like
the way the piles of books have multiplied; they are under side tables and
stacked beside couches. They need to be
culled and it is hard to imagine that happening. Carolyn, though she seems to have forgotten
how clean she once kept closets and baseboards, does notice the improvement in
the windows and asks for tasks that she notices. I have hope that as she sees furniture moved
and the bugs exposed underneath, she will start getting her old ideas. She has asked me to do certain windows and
wondered if I will get to the upstairs bedrooms and bath. So that gives me a reason to show her the
dirt in the shadows. I called her from
the kitchen a couple of weeks ago and showed her all the bugs and their solid
waste, under the cushions of the sofa and on the floor behind it. “This is why it’s taking me so long to do
things. I don’t want you to think I’m
being slack. Once I get everything right
I can move faster.”
“I didn’t notice. I
wouldn’t have thought to look under those cushions,” she said in a tone of
vaguely curious surprise. I’m counting
on that remnant of curiosity, a thin thread to the Carolyn who could remember.
The most difficult moments are when she doesn’t even seem to
remember who she is or the things she has done.
It really becomes complete amnesia and I don’t know how she does it, but
she remains as trusting as Job. Once in a while she thrills me with a mildly
cross word, her mind flashing out seeking answers or striking at the husband
when he irritates her. Mostly, right
now, I just want to get the house clean.
It is hard to think about anything else.
It is not until the next day that I begin to think of how much I miss
her and wish she did not require so much time in the bed.
