8
Cold Concrete & a Furtive Hubby
Another ongoing clean I have is in a secluded area of expensive homes on expansive lots. Not a gated community like other cleans, this area is for rich people who like to keep themselves removed and very private. And they don’t trust anyone but themselves to do it. One of those large, modern, sparsely furnished homes is made of concrete, quartz, and hardwood with the only warmth residing from the dog’s bed in nearly every room. It says: this is where you’re supposed to be, dog, don’t venture off it unless you’re moving to your next sanctioned spot.
I guess I’m sentimental, but I like to see family pictures in a house. It feels homey. Not the professional photos in matching sweaters with everyone looking like they are smiling until their teeth are dry, but the silly, imperfect ones taken on a phone that they fell in love with enough to take it beyond its digital existence. Especially the ones taken with real film cameras, before every monkey had a phone with a camera.
This home has the latest school picture of each of the blond, blue-eyed boys looking rather forced to smile. There are a few small framed pictures of the couple, also blond, blue-eyed on a dresser in the master suite. Surprisingly relaxed and unpolished, they look coy and youthful. There are no other pictures of humans in the home. In most upper-crusty homes, the refrigerator is left utterly devoid of any silly pictures, magnets, favorite comics, kids’ art, coupons, stained business cards and grocery lists that never made it to the store. This fridge looks more like the 2001: Space Odyssey monolith than the keeper of sustenance and comfort.
I have no love for stainless steel appliances. The variety of finishes can make for awful fingerprint smudges and water stains that are hard to remove, and they scratch easily. There are different products to aid the annoyed cleaner, some even work. Enamel is this cleaner’s choice. Easy to make look great, no surprises, and practically indestructible. There are some lines with fresh colors, and there’s always basic white, thankfully.
The mom, Clelia, is wound tight, managing a forced smile when necessary. She is gracious and polite but with few words. This family has a sweet and relatively subdued large dog, Cairo, with long black hair that perpetually leaves his body. I’m there every single week for four hours because Clelia wants as little trace of any living thing as possible in her fortress.
This subdued dog goes into a barking fit when I, or another person, arrives. Clelia takes it as a personal affront when this happens and does her best to suppress him and then sequester him to his kennel. She forcibly closes his mouth and pulls him away. She’s not exactly a dog person. Cairo just wants to make a boisterous announcement and then lovingly greet me.
I know this because later he finds me when released on his own recognizance, looking sheepish and calm, waiting to be pet, with his tail wagging slowly. He will follow me from bathroom to bathroom, sitting or lying in the hallway so I can easily tell him how good he is and reach to pet him when I take my gloves off. He’s such a good boy.
For the first month, I couldn’t really do the entire home in four hours. It is vast, and the areas with Cairo’s hair nearly woven into the Berber carpet are very onerous to clean. This spacious, newish home has one of those bulky built-in systems that seemed like a good idea at the time. And these rich people have a broken beater bar head for it. This means I get to comb the Berber with the brush meant for smooth floors. This activity fast tracked me on my way to a frozen shoulder, according to Julie, my massage therapist in training. I was able to afford treatments through the Intern Clinic. Yes,Julie, you go right ahead and practice on my knotted shoulders!
I had never heard of a frozen shoulder. Remember that charming man in his 90’s? He had a frozen shoulder. He literally couldn’t lift his right elbow more than a few inches from its resting place. I would get severe pain running along the top of my shoulders, back when I was dealing with a business partner from hell. That was from stress, not from physical actions. Throwing the ball for Scrappy Coco added to the pain, so I tried learning to do more with my left arm during work and play. I throw like a freakin’ wimp with my left arm, even with the chuck-it. It’s so embarrassing. I hate it.
I was keenly aware of the growing ache in my shoulders from scrubbing, vacuuming, and mopping along with crunchy sounds that I’m fairly sure should not be there. Trying to get my jacket off by pulling the sleeves or unhooking the occasional back-clasping bra was getting more and more painful. Excruciating. Why do I have to deal with this and what am I going to do now?
More and more, the searing pain would wake me from my sleep, with a burning hot-lava inside my shoulder joint, triggering pain in the pit of my stomach because it hurt so bad—just something to work through. I was raised a WASP, and that’s what we do. Sure, get massages when you can, take a hot bath, but life goes on. Just keep working.
When I texted Clelia that, again, I wasn’t able to do the clean in four hours, she texted back that the other cleaner had. She wasn’t bitchy about it but did point it out. At the end of the month, I figured out what the difference was, what it had to be. The previous cleaner simply was not cleaning as deep as I had been, the way we were trained to do bathrooms and kitchens. I don’t say that to be petty or accusatory. It made sense since 95% of our cleans are biweekly. When you’re cleaning every week, there is less mess. I did not explain this to her.
She never explained what her work or business was except that it was in finance. She was home most of the time I was there. She had the occasional secretive phone call that she took downstairs in a room away from anyone who was listening. She had a big bland Mercedes SUV, grey in every way. She was a vegetarian, and her kids, by default, were too. Neutral was her color scheme for clothes, makeup, and decor, outside of the few paintings with colorful sailboats. They had another home for winter sports.
Pushing her way into her mid 40’s, she was too lean to sag much anywhere. I saw her thong underwear when I moved laundry around for her. I could never get used to those things riding up between my pink dimpled buns of glory. I’m sure she had a thigh gap to go with it. I have the opposite of a thigh gap, I have a thigh rub. They’ve rubbed against each other enough to wear through the fabric of my leggings on multiple occasions.
Now I just hope to keep my boob to belly ratio in my favor. Alexine, your belly has got to stay smaller than your boobs!
‘It’s no good, I can’t maneuver away from this camembert and sourdough bread!’
‘Stay on target.’
‘We’re too close to the sauvignon blanc!’
‘Stay on target.’
I’m no Rebel fighter, damn it.
Her husband, Geoffrey, is a pilot and is rarely home when I’m there. He has most of his clothes downstairs in the guest bedroom since he has to leave at unnaturally early hours, and she does not like to be awakened at that time. I imagine with her fairly consistent level of tension that getting back to sleep is not easy for her.
I don’t seem to get those waves of blatant horniness much while house cleaning, like I would otherwise. I have the fleeting doggy style fantasy (one of my three fav positions), but then my shoulders start to ache from scrubbing or wiping or vacuuming. Being a born-and-bred elbow grease girl is wreaking havoc with my sexual delusions.
Another affluent family, across town, in a plush, gated community impressed me with their immense amount of Halloween decor. Enough to literally fill up two rooms; I don’t think it would all fit in my basement apartment. This mom was picture perfect with high perky boobs on a thin frame, even with three kids from the ages of 8 to 14. Good on you sister. The hubby seems furtive like he expects me to not like him. They have his and hers matching white BMW’s. The teenager that I met was friendly and relaxed. That’s always a blessing.
The first time I went there, she had me pull everything out of an overstuffed linen closet and re-organize it. Many moms have a few baby blankets, cloth diapers, and nursing pillows that they keep just in case. One of the kids’ bathrooms was a jack and jill with a robust chore list for the two older kids. This home, while upscale in many ways, had a warmer feel to it with lots of family pictures and kids’ art hanging on the walls. And lots of tacky upscale decor, too much of it, in my opinion. Being rich does not mean you have good taste.
The third or fourth time I went there, I ended up sitting outside for an hour. I knocked on the door, seeing her car in the driveway. Looked for the hidden key. Texted her. Called her. Then I texted my boss/not boss/contractor. The mom was inside the house but forgot about the cleaner coming. (Marge groan) Grrr. She fumbled and stumbled over her words as she drove out of the driveway, ‘The door is open. Sorry, I forgot about today’. I billed for that hour anyway.
I would say by far that most people whose homes I clean, treat me with dignity and ease. They are entirely ok with the fact that they are in the position to hire someone to clean their toilets, shit stains and all. As well they should be as far as I’m concerned. There are a few rare ones, such as this man of the house, who seemed uncomfortable with the whole thing. His behavior, where he chose to cast his gaze, specifically not ever making eye contact with me, said a lot.