Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,25
said. Tracy, I thought her name was. She pointed to a room with a large, overstuffed pink chair next to the bed and left me standing there before I could ask any questions.
When I was about halfway done, Jenny came and checked my work, for a second her face showing no expression; then she smiled and said, “Looks great!” and disappeared again. Everyone was packing up when I walked outside, and Jenny said, “Just follow us to the next one.” For my entire first week, it was the same. A whole team of us descended on a house for an hour, each of us spreading to different corners and rooms, working our way back to the front entrance. Then we’d get back in our little convoy of old cars and move on to the next.
In the center of it all was Jenny, her strawberry-blond hair pulled tightly into a ponytail. She carried herself like she’d been popular in high school and expected people to still appease her. When she instructed me on how to clean a room, whether it was a bed or bath, she’d smile and say, “Just make it shine!” I sprayed cleaning liquid and wiped it with paper towels, dusted with fluorescent-colored feathers, and sprayed rooms with air freshener as I left.
Every girl seemed to have a different preference for the part of the job they enjoyed doing most. Some liked cleaning kitchens; others seemed to prefer the vacuuming in living rooms and bedrooms. No one liked cleaning the bathrooms. That job went to the new girl.
A bathroom could seem clean or pretty, draped with pink toilet seats, rugs, and towels to match a shower curtain covered in roses, but that didn’t mean the toilet wasn’t horrific. At first, it was the stray pubic hairs that most disgusted me. But their quantity eventually dulled my shock. I figured out how to dump the small trash bags while avoiding—even with gloved hands—the tampons, condoms, tissues full of snot, and wads of hair. People left bottles of prescription medications all over the counters, by the toothpaste, or next to a glass. I was there to clean, obviously, but I kept expecting people to be a little tidier or to clean up their clutter. I spent at least five minutes picking up various objects, wiping them off, wiping underneath them, and putting them back in a neat way.
After that first week of following the group around, I eventually got paired with a woman with brown, shoulder-length, wavy hair about ten years older than me whom everyone complained about under their breath so Jenny couldn’t hear. Angela had yellowed teeth and fingernails from smoking, and I hadn’t been properly introduced to her until Jenny told me we’d go to the next house on our own.
“Angela knows the house,” Jenny said. “She’ll tell you where to go. Then you can drop her off and pick her up in the morning. Angie, I’ll text you tonight and tell you what houses you’re doing tomorrow, okay, girl?” Jenny waved and got into her car with two of the other women, and that seemed to be the end of my training period.
At the house, Angela chatted with the clients, a middle-aged couple dressed in ironed khakis, while I cleaned the kitchen and bathrooms. It didn’t seem like she was actually working until I heard her running the vacuum for a bit before I came out from the master bathroom to join her.
“You done?” she asked, turning off the vacuum and smiling.
After Jenny had paired me with Angela, another coworker waited for her to leave and whispered that I should keep an eye on her when we cleaned. “She steals sponges and paper towels from the houses,” she whispered, items we were supposed to supply ourselves with our own money. Sometimes after we finished a house, Angela would grab snacks out of the cupboards and jump into the car with a half-empty bag of chips or a sleeve of saltines. I’d watch her tear into them, knowing she didn’t have them before we went in.
“Do you want some?” she asked, pointing the bag toward me, so oblivious to my contemptuous glare I wanted to scream.
“No,” I said, waiting for the two other cleaners we’d teamed up with that day to pull out of the driveway behind me. Tracy, the driver, whose short black hair had an inch of gray roots, stopped to light up a cigarette.
“Hey, can I smoke in here?” Angela asked me for the