Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,31

to be incredibly useful: every space, every room, every floor, took on a gridlike map laid over it. Merry Maids instructed their cleaners to work in one direction: from left to right, top to bottom. Whenever I cleaned anything from then on, I could never get the video out of my mind, starting in the upper left corner, working my way across and down until the job was complete.

Almost instinctively, I did the same to Lonnie’s bathroom, starting directly to the left of the bathroom door, the left part of the top of the mirror, and went from there. Any spray that didn’t quite make it to the mirror landed on a surface that would be cleaned anyway. It also made it hard to miss spots. A maid’s job is, essentially, to touch every square inch of a house’s surface. With some homes having four bedrooms; two full bathrooms; two half baths; a kitchen; and dining, living, and family rooms, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by how many inches there are, and how to make sure they’re all clean.

When I told Lonnie I’d finished with her bathroom, she pursed her lips as she prepared to inspect my work. Just a few seconds after she’d disappeared into the bathroom, she shouted, “Stephanie!”

I ran in after her. Facing the mirror, she bent over to a pike position, then stood up quickly, then bent over again, then asked me to do the same. Her finger pointed at spots on the mirror I’d missed that could only be seen from a lower viewpoint. She then ran a hand over her countertop. “You need to redo everything,” she said, shaking her head. “Soak the hairspray on the counter and the wall.”

My eyes widened. I’d forgotten the wall.

She had me run my hand over the counter to feel the sticky surface and told me to feel for that all over the bathroom. The hairspray film was indeed everywhere, even on the back of the toilet, another spot I’d missed.

“The bathtub and shower look great, though,” she said, patting my shoulder again before leaving me to it.

As I stood in the empty bathroom, staring at my image in the mirror, I thought of my mom bragging to her friends. “Stephanie sure can make a tub shine,” she’d told them. My reflection now showed someone humiliated, hunched over, wanting to run from not only cleaning another woman’s toilet while she sat in another room looking at a catalogue, but that she’d told me to do it again.

Just when a decent amount of work hours started to light up on the horizon, Jenny fired me. Through text, of course, sent at eight p.m., after I’d turned down a house she’d scheduled me for the next day. I had a different house to clean for Classic Clean, which she knew and had forgotten, but she used it against me anyway.

“I got this client just for you because you said you needed more hours,” she wrote. “This isn’t going to work out. I need someone who’s a team player.”

I didn’t defend myself, knowing Lonnie would be pleased to have me all to herself. The pay at Classic Clean was lower, but their organized, businesslike nature made up for it. For now, at least. It needed to. They were all we had.

8

THE PORN HOUSE

For the first couple of weeks, I shadowed Catherine, the girl I’d replace. She was tall and older than me but drove a newer-model Jeep Cherokee. She said she was going to start working full-time as a bookkeeper for her husband’s construction business instead. This had been an additional job for her while business was slow. She seemed tired but happy to be visiting her clients’ houses for the last time.

I followed Catherine’s Jeep to different houses for two weeks, trying to mimic her in the easy, calm way she approached them. In the days before Christmas, I noticed that she often got a little card from clients with $10 or so inside. They had no idea there were two cleaners or that she’d be replaced by me. Every time a client left one, she acted like it was a pleasant surprise, and I got the feeling that it was her Christmas bonus and not a regular thing. I’d have to work an entire year, scrub each toilet out by hand two dozen times, to get a $10 tip.

We were instructed to enter most often through back doors or through a side door off the kitchen. We’d walk in