When my mind is quiet, a memory surfaces:
I’ve just finished cleaning thirteen hotel rooms. I consider myself a veritable legend as I take my sweaty gloves off and cross out that final, outrageously nasty room. (Seriously—pizza in bed? I didn’t clean that miniature kitchen table for you to gaze upon it fondly while buffalo sauce dribbles off the tip of your Supremely Spicy Pie and onto my linens, Janet!)
I descend the main staircase with the majesty and grace of a profusely damp hand towel that is thrown from the second floor balcony, and my feet hit the landing with a similar type of soggy splat. Seditious baby hairs curl at absurd angles to form a manic halo around my face. Dripping and mangled, I bear a striking resemblance to Smeagol’s less popular domestic cousin. (And after cleaning thirteen showers, I wheeze like him, too.)
I enter another hallway, and although my work has been completed on paper, the most important part of my day has just begun. Susanna and Milagros are chattering in Spanglish as they knock rooms out like bloody boxers in a ring. Milagros was assigned fifteen rooms today, and though pure Red Bull flows through those veins, she’s only one housekeeper. After we complete the straggling rooms, Milagros approaches me. I hear the jingle of coins in her hand and begin to back away.
“Don’t, Milagros!” She’s attempting to give me part of the quarters, dimes, and pennies I’d found in one of her rooms.
“For the dusting, for the dusting!” she says, swatting my palm away and dropping the tip into my pocket.
“Dusting is the easiest job!” I look down and discover that she has given me all of her quarters, leaving her with scrap dimes and pennies. The quarters wink at me innocently and my chest fills with something bigger and purer than my mind can handle; an enigmatic something that surfaces only to flit away from me in a flash of silver and warmth. As I watch these women fold up their towels and pack their bags, backs sweaty, eyes bright and weary, I glimpse resilience beneath the scrub brushes, sore feet and maid services. A quiet grace arches Susanna’s back and curves along her tired smile as she tells me about her little son. It sings to me in Milagros’ scattered English and in her careful, lilting pronunciation of my name.
As the day winds down, I rest quietly in the linens closet with Hanna, whose braids sit atop her head like a crown. Her bones sit heavily on her today. Her liver has been failing, but she returned to work as soon as she left the hospital because she can not afford to rest. We talk idly as I stock her cart, and she mentions that Tiffany, whose husband died of cancer recently, will be returning to work tomorrow.
“We must do something for her,” Hanna muses quietly. “I will clean her rooms.” She rises to her tired feet, despite my protests. The You’ve Done Enoughs and You Need To Rests bounce off of her shoulders as if she is a mountain climber and the precipice is on the horizon. She brandishes her rag and begins to clean with a soft smile. She tells me stories of her village and transmogrifies our work into joy.
These moments are fragile in my mind. They shiver with a kind of unreachable, unidentifiable value. There is something so rare about these women, their raw determination and love for each other. Hanna, Susanna, Milagros—I write about my coworkers in pursuit of the undiluted humanness they possess. Being a housekeeper has stripped my life of its glamour and pretense and these women have allowed me to touch the pulsating core beneath all of it.
What is the core? Somehow, I will learn to keep it from slipping through my fingers like liquid stars.
