I recently read Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and A Mother’s Will to Survive – and it made me miss my grandma.
Let me start by saying, I never once thought of my grandma as a maid. She cleaned houses.
She cleaned houses with her best friend, Pat; and I guess I’d assumed that was just the way she and Pat chose to spend their time together. Some friends go to the movies, some go out for lunch, Grandma and Pat liked to load their cleaning supplies into the back of my grandma’s blue Ford Tempo and clean together.
Aside from the one vacant-home cleaning Stephanie Land described in her memoir, her job was undeniably similar to my grandma’s – having a rotation of houses to visit each week, always cleaning the same rooms in the same order, scrubbing shower walls, making assumptions about the homeowners based on the things they left out on their bathroom counters or the condition of their toilets…
During school breaks and summer vacations – when I was maybe six or seven or eight years old – I would tag along with my grandma and Pat. Grandma would spray a dust rag with Pledge and send me on my way to wipe down all the baseboards. When I was done with the baseboards, I vacuumed the stairs, pushing a hand-held Dirt Devil vacuum back and forth across the carpet, leaving little “W’s” on each step.
My grandma always gave me a few dollars for my efforts – money, I think it’s safe to assume, she needed more than I did.
There was one house, though, where my presence didn’t dip into Grandma’s profits. It was a house – with an indoor pool – owned by a man with a shaggy beard and two glass eyes. On the days Grandma and Pat cleaned that house, I’d pack my swimsuit and a towel. Grandma made me promise to be quiet, to stay in the shallow end, and not to splash any water onto the concrete that surrounded the pool – presumably because the guy might feel that the pavement was wet and know that I’d been there. Pat would clean the bedrooms and bathroom at the far end of the house, and Grandma would clean the kitchen, where the windows looked down into the muggy room that housed the kidney-shaped pool and a handful of plastic chairs. Because there wasn’t much swimming to be done in the shallow end without making any noise or running the risk of splashing, I pretty much just practiced my handstands.
When we were done cleaning and practicing our handstands, I’d change out of my swimsuit, and we’d pack up and head to the next house – where Grandma and Pat would visit while they scrubbed bathrooms and swept floors, and where I’d dust baseboards with wet hair and the smell of chlorine lingering on my skin.
Tara Winfield / Writer, Reader, Realtor / 4851 Tamiami Trail N. / Suite 258 / Naples, FL 34103