Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA (13 page)

I don't know and I don't intend to find out, but I can guess that one of the symptoms is a bad case of tunnel vision. Work fills the landscape; coworkers swell to the size of family members or serious foes. Slights loom large, and a reprimand can reverberate into the night. If I make some vacuuming error, which I do often enough, I can expect to spend part of my evening reviewing it and rebutting the reprimand: “But the tape didn't say go halfway under the throw rugs,” and so on, not that I remember the tape. The Sunday night after my solo performance at the Woodcrest, I wake up at three in the morning gripped by the theory that Pete had deliberately set me up. He should have been there with me loading plates, but he must have gotten pissed because I hadn't been showing up for cigarette dates and decided to try to derail me. As it turns out, the theory is groundless; on the next Saturday, Pete even brings me a homemade Egg McMuffin as a treat. But the fact that I could have used up precious sleep time imagining I'd been stabbed in the back is alarming enough. Whoa, girl, time to get a grip!

The goal for my third week at The Maids is to achieve a state of transcendent detachment. Anger is toxic, as the New Agers say, and there is no evidence anyway that my coworkers share my outrage on their behalf, at least not in any overt form. There are only two forms of rebellion I have seen any evidence of and neither of them challenges the vaulting social hierarchy above us. One is theft. I never observe anyone stealing, but the possibility is a persistent subtext of The Maids' discipline and lore. Our garish uniforms and bright green-and-yellow cars, for example, are probably designed to distinguish us from the average crew of burglars, and I suspect that the reason there are no back pockets in our slacks is to discourage us from filling them with jewelry and coins. Some owners leave out rolls of coins or even stacks of loose bills, perhaps with a video camera trained on them to catch some light-fingered or especially hungry maid in the act. At one morning meeting, Ted gravely informs us that there has just been “an incident” and that the perpetrator is no longer with us. This kind of thing hardly ever happens, he says, because the Accutrac test is almost 100 percent reliable in weeding out dishonest people (with the exception of myself, of course).

The other form of rebellion consists of public violations of The Maids' code of decorum. A couple of my coworkers team leaders, in fact—delight in putting the pedal to the metal, and terrorizing the elegant neighborhoods we serve. I wouldn't be surprised if complaints have gotten back to Ted about one particular joyride where the driver (who will not even be identified by her made-up name, lest some other characteristic give her away) decided to go screeching around a neighborhood containing several of our houses, blaring out a rap tape consisting largely of the words “FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE” and kinky permutations thereof, while an owner type pushing a stroller cringed on the sidewalk. We laughed ourselves silly in the backseat, clutching our armrests and trying not to get sick. But this kind of rebellion threatens only the rare pedestrian member of the owning class. For the most part, my coworkers seem content to occupy their little niche on the sheer cliff face of class inequality. After all, if there weren't people who have far too much money and floor space and stuff, there could hardly be maids.

So bit by bit, while scrubbing and Windexing and buffing, I cobble together a philosophy of glorious nonattachment. I draw on the Jesus who was barred from the tent revival, the one who said that the last shall be first and that, if someone asks for your cloak, give him your robe as well. I throw in a dab of secondhand Buddhism remembered from a friend's account of a monastery in northern California where rich people pay to spend their weekends meditating and doing various menial chores, housework included. When I first heard of this monastery I laughed out loud, but now the image of dot-com moguls scrubbing for the good of their souls presents itself as a psychic flotation device. Then there is the fact, offered to me by my son in a phone conversation, that Simone Weil once worked in a factory for some metaphysical purpose I could not entirely comprehend, so I add a little of that to the blend. In the beautiful fantasy that results, I am not working for a maid service; rather, I have joined a mystic order dedicated to performing the most despised of tasks, cheerfully and virtually for free—grateful, in fact, for this chance to earn grace through submission and toil. Holly can bleed to death in my presence if she likes, and I will just consider her to be specially favored by an inscrutable God, more or less as Jesus was. I decide not even to complain about having my first paycheck withheld or the ways we're shortchanged every day. We're told to get to work at 7:30, but the meter doesn't start running until about 8:00, when we take off in the cars, and there's no pay for the half hour or so we spend in the office at the end of the day, sorting out the dirty rags before they're washed and refilling our cleaning fluid bottles. But why complain about not being paid, when those people at the Buddhist monastery pay with their own money to do the same kind of work?

The exalted mood lasts for about a day, and there is backsliding even within that—for example, when, in a huge, gorgeous country house with hand-painted walls, I encounter a shelf full of arrogant and, under the circumstances, personally insulting neoconservative encomiums to the status quo and consider using germ warfare against the owners, the weapons for which are within my apron pockets. All I would have to do is take one of the E.coli-rich rags that's been used on the toilets and use it to “clean” the kitchen counters—a plan that entertains me for an hour or more. But it is, weirdly enough, the home of an actual Buddhist that shatters the sanctified mood. We encounter many signs of “spirituality” among the owners—books like Ten Things I Learned about Life in My Garden and inspirational wall hangings urging centeredness. But this is the home of a genuine Buddhist—a Caucasian convert, of course—complete with Zen paperbacks and a threefoot-high statue of the Buddha in the living room, with a note affixed to his serene and creaseless forehead warning that we are not to touch him, not even to dust.

As we leave, in our usual rush to get the buckets to the car, Holly trips in a hole in the ground and falls down and screams. I whirl around and she's crying, her face gone from dead-white to crimson. “Something snapped,” she sobs, “I heard it snap.” I help her up, ordering Marge, who's been standing there with her mouth hanging open, to take her other arm. “We've got to get you to an emergency room,” I say, “get it X-rayed right away.” But no, all she'll consent to is calling Ted from the next house, although Denise is going to have to do the driving. I keep trying in the car, blabbing about fractures and sprains as if I actually knew something, but Holly just keeps crying and talking about how she's already missed so many days of work in the last few weeks, and the others don't seem to be listening to either of us.

When we get to the house, Holly lets me look at the ankle, and while I'm bent over it—not that there's anything to see—she whispers that the pain is really wicked now. “You can't work,” I say. “You hear me, Holly? You can't work on this ankle.” Still, all she'll agree to do is call Ted from the phone in the kitchen, and I stand there listening to her apologize weepily to him, throwing in a bit about how Barbara is making a fuss, and I feel the beautiful Zen detachment drain out of me with the sweat on my face. I reach out and insist that she give me the phone, and the first words I hear, almost before I can say, “Listen,” are “Now let's just calm down, Barbara,” although he's old enough to know that “calm down” generally functions as an incitement to rage.

I blow. I can't remember the exact words, but I tell him he can't keep putting money above his employees' health and I don't want to hear about “working through it,” because this girl is in really bad shape. But he just goes on about “calm down,” and meanwhile Holly is hopping around the bathroom, wiping up pubic hairs.

I hang up on him and follow Holly into the bathroom to take my stand. Should I say, “Look, I'm actually a highly educated person, a Ph.D., in fact, and I can't just stand by and. . . ”? But it would sound crazy and what would Holly care? For all I know, her husband beats her for missing work. So I do the only other thing I can think of. I say, “I'm not working if you don't get help. Or at least sit down with your foot up while we do your work.” I look to Denise, who is peering into the bathroom after us, for support. “This is a work stoppage. Ever hear of that? This is a strike.” Denise just goes back to work, crinkling her face up in embarrassment or maybe disgust.

“I'm just doing bathrooms,” Holly says, to appease me.

“What, on one foot?”

“I come from a stubborn family.”

“Well, so the hell do I.”

But Holly's ancestors win out over mine. The team leader in her prevails over the mother in me. If I walk out, where am I going to walk to, anyway? Outside, horses graze in a meadow, migrating birds dip and rise in perfect formation. I don't have any idea where I am—north of Portland, west? I could call a cab but I don't have enough cash for the trip home or any cash waiting for me there. I could get on one of those horses, if I knew how to ride a horse, and gallop from meadow to meadow, through backyards and highways, all the way out to the sea. But the only thing I'd accomplish by leaving, assuming there was a way to leave, would be to increase the workload on the other three. Holly included, because she's going to keep going until you pry the last cleaning rag from her cold, dead hands, she's made that clear enough.

So there's nothing to do but swallow it. Shaking with anger (at Ted), betrayal (in the cases of Marge and Denise), and most of all at my own total, abject helplessness, I shoulder the vacuum and strap myself in. It's not easy focusing on throw rugs when all I can see is this grass fire raging in the back of my eyes, white-hot and devouring house after house as it burns. I screw up big-time, as Denise points out with what is now obvious malice, and have to do the downstairs all over again. In the car there is silence for a little while. and nobody except Marge, who as usual has moved right along, will look at me. Then Holly starts up one of those pornographic late-afternoon food conversations she enjoys so much. “What are you making for dinner tonight, Marge?. . . Oh yeah, with tomato sauce?”

I sit in the car on the long ride back trying to keep rage alive by rehearsing what I'll say when Ted fires me for insubordination. “Look,” I'll say, “I can put up with shit and snot and every other gross substance I encounter in this line of work. The only thing I'm squeamish about is human pain. I'm sorry, I tried to ignore it, but it undermines my efficiency when I have to work alongside people who are crying, fainting, starving, or otherwise visibly suffering, so yes, you better find someone tougher than me.” Or some similar stiff little speech. When we're within a couple of blocks of the office, Marge turns to me with what looks like compassion. I know Marge doesn't come out looking too good in this story, but we've had some long, intimate talks about hormones and antidepressants and other middle-aged things. There was a day, too, when we teased each other for sweating so much, then, when the house was finished, ran out together in the rain, held our heads back and our arms out, laughing like pagans, and I loved her for that. Now she says, “You look tired, Barbara.” The word is defeated, but I just say—loud enough to be heard by Holly and Denise in the front too—“I'm bracing for a confrontation with Ted.”

“He's not going to fire you,” Marge says brightly. “Don't worry about that.”

“Oh, I'm not worried about it. There're millions of jobs out there. Look at the want ads.” Denise turns partway around to regard me blankly from the side of her face. Don't they look at the want ads? Don't they realize that the sheer abundance of them means they've got Ted by the short hairs and could ask for almost anything—like, say, $7.50 an hour, reckoned from the moment they show up in the morning to the moment they finish processing rags at the end of the day?

“But we need you,” Marge says. And then, as if that was too affectionate sounding: “You can't just leave Ted in the lurch.”

“What's all this worrying about Ted? He'll find someone else. He'll take anyone who can manage to show up sober at 7:30 in the morning. Sober and standing upright.”

“No,” Holly finally interjects. “That's not true. Not everyone can get this job. You have to pass the test.”

The test? The Accutrac test? “The test,” I practically yell, “is BULLSHIT! Anyone can pass that test!”

It's an inexcusable outburst. First, because it's insulting, especially to Holly and the brittle sense of professionalism that keeps her going through sickness and injury. For all I know the test was a challenge to her at the level of basic literacy. Everyone here can read, but Holly has sometimes asked me how to spell words like carry and weighed that she needs to report any “incidents” that occur. Second, of course, because it's against the rules to use “bad words” in a company car. Where's my professionalism, anyway, the journalistic detachment that was supposed to guide and sustain me every inch of the way?

But misdirected rage is not an easy thing to hold on to; the last sparks of it get snuffed out, as they deserve to be, in the icy waters of humiliation and defeat. Holly will hate me forever, I can tell, both because I defied her authority as team leader and because I've had a chance, more than once now, to see her all tearful and scared. Denise will hate me, of course, for making a scene that made her uncomfortable or maybe just for slowing down the work. Marge will forget all about it. But even now, months later, I'm damned if I know how I should have handled the situation. By keeping my mouth shut in the first place, when Holly took her fall? Or by sticking to my one-person strike until—who knows?—she eventually relented and let us drive her to the nearest ER or at least sat down? The only thing I know for sure is that this is as low as I can get in my life as a maid, and probably in most other lives as well.

Ted doesn't fire me. The next morning I run into Holly in the parking lot, limping badly and heading back to her car. “Would you believe it?” she says, addressing Marge, who shows up at exactly that moment. “Ted sent me home! ”—as if this were some arbitrary injustice. There were things I would have said if Marge weren't there, like “I'm sorry” and “Please take care of yourself.” But the moment passes and my vindication, if that's what this is, tastes sour. In the office Ted thanks me for my “concern” and says he's taken my advice about Holly and sent her home. But—there has to be a “but”—you know you can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped. I guess it's the mother in me, is my lame response. To which he says, testily, “Well, I'm a parent too, and that doesn't make me less of a person.” Very calmly, I am proud to report, I tell him, “It's supposed to make you more of a person.”