DIED 2006
IT’S EASY TO LOOK down on men who pay women to be nice to them, but I believe I had a similar relationship with the lady who came to clean my house on Wednesdays. A big, bosomy, brown-eyed strawberry blond in a Garfield T-shirt that read DOMESTIC GODDESS, her greatest loves were Jesus and her cat, yet she had a startlingly dry wit and broad mind. And a grown daughter somewhere, an ailing, difficult mother, some bitchy neighbors in the trailer park who complained about her blow-up pool. We talked about these things, and also about how I should switch the rugs in my living room, and she convinced me to buy a dehumidifier for the basement on eBay. All for $16 an hour. When she fell out with another of “her girls,” as she called her cleaning clients, over a broken knickknack, I experienced a little moment of sibling victory.
She drove an old white Cadillac that couldn’t make it up our driveway in the winter. We begged her to park it at the end and we’d ferry her in the SUV, but driving on the icy hills was terrifying to her—she’d rather walk a quarter mile through the snow in her little white sandals. One day she told me she felt like she was part man inside. I told her I felt just the same way. Then right around Christmas last year, she suddenly started showing up with two helpers. They’d clean the house and she’d sit out in the Caddy. I begged her to come in for a cup of tea. Next time, the helpers showed up alone. Oh, didn’t you hear? No, and I could hardly believe she’d had some horrible cancer for which she’d refused treatment and that she’d died alone in that trailer. Since last goddamn week! Didn’t she know I would have come in a minute?