THEN
I became a house cleaner after Xander was born, mostly because I could make my own schedule. Nearly all my clients’ houses were big, with high windows that let in waterfalls of light, and furniture with price tags that exceeded what I earned in a month. I would find expensive clothes crumpled on bedroom floors, fancy pots and pans grimed with food on kitchen counters and kids’ crayon marks streaking white walls and I would think, How can you abuse a beautiful house like this?
And yet there was something about bringing order to chaos that I liked: replacing stale and wrinkled sheets with ones that were clean and freshly ironed, turning full trash cans into empty ones and making fingerprints disappear from mirrors and stainless steel appliances.
I scrubbed farmhouse sinks, polished marble countertops, swept miles of hardwood floors and washed pyramids of towels and bedding. My clients gave me keys; they let me in and most of them hardly knew anything about me. Only my name (Liv), rank (house cleaner) and phone number. Like a prisoner of class war.
But I knew a lot about them.
I knew, for instance, that Juliette Monroe was a lawyer who traveled a lot, loved handbags and had a closet full of Prada and Chanel in size zero. She also had boxes of laxatives and a bottle of ipecac syrup hidden behind the toilet bowl cleaner under her bathroom sink.
I knew that Andy and Clare Iverson ate takeout nearly every night and liked gin martinis (a lot) and that their ten-year-old son still wet the bed. I knew when the Chens were fighting—his pajamas would be on the floor next to a rumpled bed in the guest room—and that Mr. Chen kept a pair of size eleven, red high heels behind an old set of golf clubs in his walk-in closet.
I might have known more intimate things about them than their friends did, and yet it was lonely work. Only white-haired Mr. Martin, who survived on a pension and the insurance money after his wife died, would be around to talk with me. Otherwise, the only personal interactions I’d have with my clients were scrawled notes asking me to also sweep their massive decks, or checks with my name scribbled on them. I was the ghost that floated into their homes and left gleaming floors and tautly made beds behind. If I didn’t show up, they might wonder why the laundry was still on the floor and the beds unmade but they wouldn’t worry about me. They’d just get angry that I hadn’t been there to do my job and didn’t answer my phone when they called to complain.
Sometimes I would sit on the couch in a client’s living room after I’d cleaned it, stare at all the beautiful things and pretend the house was mine.
It only made me feel worse.