Tue, 28 Jan 2003 09:58:35 GMT

Maid Guy

Pity me, the conflicted. Somewhere in California, an illegal immigrant arises at 4:00 a.m. for another fourteen-hour day of harvesting fruit at $2.00 an hour. In West Virginia, an eighteen-year-old girl debates whether to spend $5.00 on food for her three-year-old or get cough syrup for her six-month-old. In New York, a junkie shivers outside the methadone clinic, wondering if he can hold out until it opens at noon. Me, I can’t decide what to call the help.

This is all new to me, this having a maid business. I’m a books-on-the-kitchen-counter kind of guy, an socks-on-the-floor kind of guy, a beer-bottles-on-the-windowsill kind of guy--in short, the kind of guy Lili Taylor was probably talking about when she told John Cusack in the movie Say Anything: "don’t be a guy…be a man." The fact that the prospect of not being a John Cusack kind of man does not fill me with shame is, I’m sure, still more evidence of my failings.

But the point is, despite not being an out-and-out slob (the critical component of which, it seems to me, is the presence of unwashed dishes), when left to my own devices I tend to reach a certain level of comfortable déshabillé. And if for lo these many years such a state has been entirely appropriate to my bachelor existence, why shouldn’t it be? If the olive oil is under a sweatshirt, the linguini behind a can of motor oil, and the tomatoes scattered amongst a collection of souvenir baseballs, do they not still make a fine meal? If the toilet paper is on top of a stack of old "Wired" magazines, does it matter as long as you can still find it? And have you noticed that rhetorical questions always come in threes?

So what (and how, and why) changed?

A woman. Duh.

Kim craftily undercut my usual cleaning schedule of once-per-girlfriend by convincing me to live in her house, where, no matter how I move the milk around, I still can’t find where she’s hidden the WD-40. Kim’s idea of a clean, organized house involves a lack of dirt and a systematic arrangement of the contents of said house, to which I’ve taken with a sort of bemused surrender: if I spend an extra hour or so per week putting clothes away or throwing away old magazines, I suppose that’s an hour I would have spent dating, and at this point in my life I would rather spend eternity folding clean white ankle-highs than hear another overly made-up woman order the second most expensive thing on the menu. No, the change in environment isn’t much of a problem. But part of the package involves hiring someone to come in once a week and clean, and that’s so far out of my realm of experience that when she shows up every Thursday she might as well be the Queen of the Ahsanti, come to challenge me to a game of Crazy Eights.

For starters, I have no idea how to refer to her. "Maid" sounds like someone on your full-time payroll, and I understand some people find it demeaning. I know a lot of people with "cleaning ladies," but to me that sounds like the name of a villainous group in a Stephen King novel. "Domestic servant?" Sorry, pal, not until I’m lighting cigars with $100 bills.

What’s that? Why don’t I just call her "Susan?" Well, for starters, her name’s not Susan, and while she may be in my employ, I at least took the time to learn her name. For another, I hate glib, sanctimonious answers like that. For a third, it would lead to this kind of conversational exchange with my co-workers:

"I couldn’t find the remote control, but then I remembered that Susan always puts it in the drawer in the coffee table."

"Who’s Susan?"

"She’s my…um…our…"

…and I hate spending Monday mornings answering people who want to know how I spent my weekend already.

I’m also pretty this way/that way about the entire concept of giving someone money to clean up your messes. I suppose that’s a strong dose of American self-reliance mixed with…well, I was going to say the Protestant work ethic, but if I had that I wouldn’t’ve been able to write all that stuff about how messy I am in the first place. Also, I was raised Catholic. So it must be the self-reliance thing. Plus, let it be said, a small measure of "Here I am, making someone else clean up after me, giving a great big fat lie to my egalitarian principles and perpetuating the oppressive class system in our ‘classless’ society! I suck!" I don’t know why I should think that, though - I certainly don’t when I’m forking over to a cab driver for hauling me home after six beers and a shot of Jamesons, or to the guy who brings food to my door. And there’s also a little bit of "Look at me, helping make the great steam engine of commerce go by giving someone a job!", too, so it all balances out.

Still, it’s undeniably odd having someone you know but aren’t friends with inside your house, poking around with a duster and a vacuum in all the odd corners, turning up all the stuff that makes no sense out of context. I have to imagine it’s like opening a party game you haven’t played in six years and finding slips of paper with random words on them: "condom - mouse - capsule - flugelhorn." Kim ameliorates this by cleaning on Wednesday night.

"What are you doing?" I asked her, the first time I saw this.

"Cleaning," she answered. "Susan’s here tomorrow."

"You’re cleaning…"

"Yes. You have to pick things up so she can clean the floors and the counters. You could help, you know. Or at least sort the tomatoes out from the baseballs."

Which I’m happy to do, of course. A guy’s gotta pitch in.

At the end of the day (especially Thursdays), there’s probably something unseemly about wrestling with this kind of thing in public. "Dim yuppie wonders what to call his maid" ain’t a headline that will sell a lot of papers, and doesn’t reflect especially well on me. But then again, that’s my life. And if there are any migrant farm workers, dirt-poor Appalachian teen mothers, or folks going through withdrawal who’d like to punch me in the nose for being a self-obsessed moron, give me a call and we’ll set something up.

On second thought, make it the gut. Blood’s hell to clean.

Jim Haefele: Hyperbole Submissions