Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,40

visualizations or hypotheses I made about clients were what got me through days of personal dread, fatigue, and loneliness. The imagined occupants of these houses walked around with me. I saw them sitting up in bed at the dawn of a workday, using a wet washcloth in the shower—the one balled up on the floor, which I gingerly handled, even with gloves. They also left traces of themselves and their actions. I could see them standing at the kitchen window, drinking their morning coffee, while I wiped away the ring their cup had left behind.

When I was sixteen, I worked at a pet shop cleaning out animal cages—rats, mice, gerbils, hedgehogs, ferrets, and birds. The owner spoke in a voice that dripped with passive aggression, a tone high enough to make me wince. One morning, I showed up at work already stretched thin from the duties I endured at the job, knowing I could not make it through another day of sticking my hands into bird cages, the birds’ wings frantically flapping, triggering every flight response in my body.

“The job is just too stressful,” I said after marching into my boss’s office. “I have to quit.”

“Well,” she said sarcastically from her desk, which sat next to cages for male breeder rodents, “I better let you get out of here before you get too stressed out!”

It took weeks to get my final paycheck in the mail. I had never walked out on a job since, but the master bathroom of the Trailer nearly broke me.

On the second day, I came back to the Trailer alone. I parked in the driveway, stopped to lock my car doors, then locked myself inside the house. I avoided peering out the windows, afraid that I might see the Barefoot Bandit walking by. That morning, I’d left Mia at day care after dosing her with Tylenol for a slight fever. The day before had proved there was absolutely no cell phone reception at the Trailer. If Mia became sicker, I wouldn’t be able to be reached, period. My uneasiness in being left alone, locked in the Trailer, without a phone, crawled over me, and I couldn’t shake it off. It was compounded with the stress of disappearing into some kind of void for the duration of the workday. As a parent, I always wanted to be, at the very least, on call in case something happened.

We’d finished most of the house the previous day, but I had to go over Sheila’s work. The drawers from the fridge were still soaking in the sink. The linoleum floor in the kitchen—a well-worn brown path that connected the sink, stove, and fridge in a triangle—still needed to be scrubbed. But most of my day would be spent in the master bathroom.

The day before, Pam told me to pace myself between spraying and scrubbing. She suggested doing small doses of the bathroom and then moving to another part of the house, then returning to do another section of the bathroom. My left-to-right, top-to-bottom method didn’t feel like a good enough strategy for the mess in front of me. Black mold covered a lot of the ceiling and the upper walls of the stand-up shower. I went through two bottles of mold-remover spray, soaking it and then scrubbing it off, wearing goggles and a facemask to avoid breathing it in.

Inside the shower, the corners and crevices were pink with mildew. The cleaner dripped in streams at my feet, brown and black rivers of dirt and mold. I’d make clean spots and then regret it, as it meant I would have to scrub as hard over every inch of the tiny shower. I kept my nose covered with the collar of my shirt instead of wearing the mask and I stepped out several times into the dark master bedroom to breathe in the clear air.

When I kneeled at the toilet and saw up close the condition it was in, I abruptly got up and went outside. I had had enough. I sat out on that porch, in the drizzling rain, for at least fifteen minutes. I almost wished I had a cigarette, or even a proper lunch to eat, or something to drink other than water. The coffee and peanut butter sandwich that I’d brought that morning were long gone.

On the porch, I went through a slew of emotions. There was anger, of course, over getting paid near minimum wage to hand-scrub shit off toilets. Triple the pay still wouldn’t be enough