Sprung At Last

After The Departed left, I got to know The Cleaning Lady. I started to come downstairs and chat with her when she came – just for a while – and she would ask after The Child, and offered me support in a hundred different ways, starting with testifying, if it came to that. She was understanding when I reduced her hours, due to my decreased budget, and I was glad to have one less thing I had to do.

 

Our needs changed, with the new household configuration, and so although she’d originally been requested to do the laundry, I asked her to please stop, and focus her efforts elsewhere. I could see dust in the formal dining room, at times, but more importantly, she wasn’t any good at laundry. I didn’t mind losing a couple of sweaters to the dryer – they were cashmere, but they were also gifts from The Departed in sizes much too large – but I did mind seeing white items gradually turn grayish blue from being washed together with jeans. The Child begins to get interested in clothes, and I show her how to wash her new sweaters on the gentle cycle and lay them flat to dry – and then I would have to stop the Cleaning Lady from picking up the sweater and the towel and tossing both into the dryer.

 

You don’t dry them, I explained. They’re wool.

 

Okay, she’d say, and then hang them, damp, in the closet.

 

I gave up the repeated discussion and told the Child to dry her sweaters in the guest room, and shut the door so the Cleaning Lady wouldn’t see them. Every so often, I reminded the Cleaning Lady that we really didn’t need our laundry done for us anymore, but unless I reminded her on a specific visit, it got done anyway. I found it was easier to simply do the laundry before she visited, although it didn’t always work with my schedule and sometimes resulted in me having to rush before she visited.

 

The dishes sometimes don’t seem clean, and I discover why after one of her visits: She has no idea how to load a dishwasher, placing tall items so that they are perfectly positioned to prevent the sprayer arm from moving, but always being sure to use the heated dry cycle I’ve requested she never use, so that everything that wasn’t washed off is securely baked on. I avoid addressing this – I’m a little sensitive about giving lectures on how to load dishwashers, having been the recipient of so many. The Child decides to talk about it with the Cleaning Lady, and tells me later, She argued with me and then said she’d teach me the right way, but I was trying to show her.

 

I know I need to do something about it, but I feel guilty: she’s a war refugee, putting daughters through college. Her grandson has leukemia.

 

My father says, Stop feeling guilty.

 

I point out that it’s his fault I’m genetically inclined to nonstop feelings of guilt.

 

She should probably get a different kind of job, says The Child.

 

I am sure this is true, but her English isn’t the best, and I feel bad all over again, until I start my spring cleaning early, and locate the other one of my two nice, fluffy, white, post-divorce towels, buried at the back of my linen closet. I hang it in my bathroom, next to the matching towel, the one that doesn’t match any more, since it has acquired the same grey pallor of every other piece of white fabric in our house.

 

It’s a Target towel, hardly expensive, but the thought of replacing these two nearly-new towels rankles me as much as the thought of having to look at the two of them hanging together, not matching, and neither of these things bothers me as much as the irritation I feel about having raced around trying to avoid just this sort of thing, in vain. Cleaning before the cleaner gets there, out of necessity rather than vanity.

 

And suddenly it’s not about feelings, it’s about math: what it is costing me annually to have my whites turned grey and my food baked on my dishes and things put back not where they belong and furniture chipped along the floor from where she slams into it with the vacuum despite my repeated requests to please, please be careful not to hit things.

 

So The Child and I make a deal: She will help with the cleaning, and this year – for the first time in several years – we will take a vacation somewhere special with the savings.

When we bought our house, The Departed and I both worked, and had commutes, and agreed that household chores should be divided. What this meant, in practice, was that I cooked and he cleaned up the kitchen afterward – except that afterward didn’t seem to mean immediately afterward, but rather, sometime before the next meal, and often then only if I asked and explicitly said I needed it to be done so that I could prepare the meal in question. Many times, I didn’t bother to ask, but simply cleaned up myself, which would sometimes prompt him to rush into the kitchen and start doing cleaning it himself, saying I didn’t know how to load the dishwasher correctly – an odd statement for someone who refused to believe that some items should only be loaded in the top rack, and that porcelain plates will chip when jammed in next to metal pans. He would do the cleanup, but making dinner – and hungry children – would have to wait an hour while he did so.

 

You will not be surprised to learn that we ate out a lot.

 

We had a cleaning service, and they did a decent enough job, but there are some things that services don’t do, and these became a subject of contention in the household: Laundry, in particular. When I met The Departed, his wardrobe consisted mainly of Costco jeans, mid-brand sweaters he’d received as gifts, and shirts of the corporate freebie variety, and I set about helping him choose more flattering – and where I could, slightly more upscale – clothing. He refused to throw out any of the older things, so there was always plenty in his closet. But he only wore the more recent additions to his wardrobe, so he didn’t have a lot to choose from in a given week, and the amount dwindled as things wore out quickly through constant use.

 

Laundry couldn’t get done fast enough for him, though The Child and I seemed to manage just fine. His things would sit in the dryer too long, leaving them wrinkled, which made him mad, and after my suggestions for resolving this issue himself went ignored (“you can unload the dryer when you hear the beep” and “there’s a touch-up cycle on the dryer that will solve this”), he started doing his own laundry. That presented its own set of issues: Sometimes, the laundry basket was in use when he needed to do laundry. Other times, it was the washer, or the dryer. His laundry was always done with a lot of thumping and sighing – usually when I was watching  TV – but after a while, I learned how to tune that out, too.

 

Until the night he could find no other time to put his laundry away than midnight, startling me out of a sound sleep with the thumping of hangers against the bedroom wall. I had no idea hangers even made noise until that moment; I fully expected Joan Crawford to emerge from the closet when I shouted, angrily, at him.

 

I knew what he was doing, but I also knew he had just won the battle, so I asked around and hired the first recommendation I got: The Cleaning Lady, a Bosnian refugee with several missing teeth and a car whose bumper was held together with duct tape. Her rate seemed high to me, but then, all I had to compare it to was my Manhattan cleaner, which was a long time ago. I was very happy the first few times she cleaned, and pleased especially that – like my Manhattan cleaner – she seemed to notice things that needed to be done, so I didn’t need to point things out her. The Departed’s laundry got done, and he had nothing to complain about, so it was money well spent.

 

I hired my first cleaning lady when I was in my 20’s and lived in Manhattan. The first time I met her, she came to my apartment to give me a price quote.

 

She looked around, raised an eyebrow oh-so-slightly, and said, You cleaned before I came.

 

I fumbled a bit.

 

She smiled. It’s okay – everyone does.

 

She quoted a reasonable price,  came with the best possible references, and I liked her, so I hired her. I gave her a key, and we agreed on the day I would leave her payment on the table in the morning, and come home to a clean apartment in the evening. I told her, help yourself to anything in the fridge; being a single person in Manhattan, this was not as generous an offer as it might be from someone else. The typical contents of my fridge:  milk, cereal, and light beer. From time to time there might also be leftover Chinese food, or vodka in my freezer.

 

That first day, I came home to a delightful luxury: A completely clean apartment with no effort on my part, except opening my wallet. I thought that there was one less beer in the fridge – at least, I was pretty sure it had been a full six-pack when I left that morning. But I didn’t really care. I had an apartment with a view of the Chrysler building, and it was clean enough to invite guests. I had arrived.

 

She came back two weeks later, and on that day, my apartment was returned to a magical clean state, and I had one less can of beer in the fridge. This time, I was sure she had drunk it.

 

By now, though, she had seen what my apartment looked like when I didn’t clean it first, and she didn’t try to raise her very reasonable rate. In case you, or some economic researcher of the future, want to know, the rate to clean a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment with two cats in 1995, it was $50 and one can of beer.

 

This seemed like a good deal. I was not a beer drinker, then or now, but I made the effort to keep my fridge stocked with beer. I discovered she only liked canned varieties, and no microbrews, and made sure there was always one can there for her, nicely chilled.

 

I liked her a lot, and once I left New York, could not find another like her, so instead I used cleaning services, when I could afford them. I kept hoping to find a regular person, and eventually, when The Departed started complaining too much about the burden of doing his own laundry, I asked around and received a recommendation – friend of friend, the Cleaning Lady.