“I’m here to clean your house? Rachel from the Facebook group connected us?”
She nodded, looked down, and opened the door enough to reveal her large, pregnant belly and a small boy clinging to her leg. I stood on the small concrete square of their front porch. From inside the house, a bird chirped. More children peered out at me from a large window to my right. When I looked at the woman again, she glanced nervously inside.
“This is my little secret,” she said before opening the door enough to let me in.
I stepped in and wobbled. The door’s path created a clear spot in the floor, the only clear spot in the entire room. My first thought was to not react. In our initial conversation, she’d mentioned needing help clearing out garbage and catching up on laundry. But this was much more than I had anticipated. Clothes, dishes, papers, backpacks, shoes, books. Everything had been left to collect hair and dust on the floor.
The family had stopped making payments on their house. She told me this while we stood in that one bare spot in the front room. I listened as attentively as I could, trying not to feel overwhelmed by the state of the house. She talked quickly and sounded exasperated. They had a rental to move into—the husband, wife, five kids, and soon, a newborn baby.
“We can’t really afford to have you help me,” she said, looking down at her hands on her belly. “But I’m losing my mind. The new house will be a fresh start. I don’t want to move all this.”
I nodded in response and looked around. Every available surface in the kitchen and dining room contained piles of dirty dishes. The corners in the living room had heaps of what looked like books and school papers, mixed with clothes, toys, and more dishes. On one wall, the shelves had fallen from a bookcase and books were strewn across the floor where they fell.
She mentioned they couldn’t pay their bills. She mentioned food stamps. I felt horrible charging her anything, but I couldn’t work for free. Though she hadn’t asked me to come down on my hourly rate, I insisted she pay me half of what I normally charged.
“And how about five bucks for each garbage bag full of laundry?” I suggested, looking for a place to set down my things. “I can bring them back to my place and do it there.” She didn’t answer immediately. Her free hand, the one that wasn’t stroking the top of the toddler’s head, moved up to wipe her cheeks. It paused under her nose for a second, and she nodded. She closed her eyes tight, trying not to cry. “I’ll get started in the kitchen,” I said.
While I began pulling supplies out of my bucket, the boy who’d been hiding behind her leg came over to help. “He’s not verbal,” the woman said. “He hasn’t spoken any words yet.” I smiled at him, taking my yellow dish gloves from the little hands he held out toward me.
That first day, I spent four hours doing dishes, my fingers turning to prunes through the dish gloves. When the hot water ran out, I started cleaning the surfaces. Clean dishes, set out to dry on towels, covered the table, the stovetop, and counters I’d cleaned. How had she cooked for seven people in this tiny room with that little boy clinging to her? I couldn’t tell what they ate. Much of the boxed and canned food in the cupboards was expired, some by as much as ten years. A peek in the fridge revealed shelves dripping with old produce.
A closet in the hallway housed a washer and dryer. Beside a small path leading to the garage, which had been converted to a master bedroom, clothes piled on the floor several inches deep. I started to bag some to bring home with me, stopping a few times to catch my breath. It must have been dust mites. They always made me cough like I was having an asthma attack, and I gasped between coughing fits. When I went for the final handful to fill the second bag, I revealed the floor underneath. And a large spider, and mouse droppings, and I swear what looked like snakeskin. Biting back a scream, I nodded and called it a day.
As I left, the woman thanked me. Tears brimmed in her eyes, and she apologized for the state of the house. “Don’t apologize,” I said,