Wit and Wisdom

by Beth Broderick

“She’s coming today. Pray for me.”

“Oh, boy. Did you hide your laptop?”

“Shoot! No, I forgot. Thanks for the reminder.”

Jeremy, Jeff, and I all employ M.E., a housekeeper who came highly recommended by my old pal Don.

He was absolutely right about how thorough she is. Cleans the place down to the nubs, but he left out the part about her being a one-woman wrecking ball. The most accident-prone person I have ever known, a title previously held, in my wide swath of a circle, by yours truly. I once dove off a diving board and missed the pool.

Okay, so maybe she is the second most spatially challenged gal among us, but boy howdy, is her track record is impressive.

Between our three homes, she has killed two computers and sent an insanely heavy ceramic bowl crashing to the floor of Jeff’s place. He had to have the hardwood in that room re-sanded and stained. She has busted my ballerina statue to smithereens and once positioned a large bottle of dish soap in such a way that it emptied itself into my broom closet when I opened the door. A sudsy mess that was a clean-up as endless as you are thinking it might have been.

She has been coming to my place of residence for two years now, in two different spaces. She was hard on the one in Beverly Hills, but here in Beachwood, she is setting new records for mayhem. Every single time she cleans, she renders both sets of sliding glass doors in the bathroom shower inoperable. I am not strong enough to lift them back onto their tracks, so I have to wait until someone with adequate hands comes to visit to have them set them right again, only to have her return and yank them off-kilter. If she cannot figure out how to open something, she will attack it with such brute force that the mechanism is completely shot, unusable. She will break a faucet handle right off.

None of us has the heart to let her go. She is a sweet gal and works hard, and all of our dogs like and trust her (which is a big deal for canine parents). When she is due for a visit, we all make sure that we can be out of the house or at least earshot of the banging and clanging, the whacking and wringing. My nervous system is not cut out for it. I would rather come home to the very clean and likely shambles that my apartment has become. I prefer to deal with her visits after the fact.

Two weeks ago, I welcomed M.E. and handed her two treats to feed the dog, a ritual that they both enjoy. It is almost impossible for me to concentrate when she is around, so I hightailed it to the gym, ran errands, and even allowed myself to eat a yummy late breakfast out at “Swingers,” the cafe that was central to the movie of the same name. Still bohemian, still run-down, still one of my favorites. Not all that clean, but darned cozy.

I headed home, hoping that I had given M.E. sufficient time to accomplish her mission.

Upon arrival, I was disappointed to see that she was still in the middle of her routine. She does not clean one room at a time, but rather does bits and pieces of all of them at once. This leaves everything in complete disarray for several hours. I have tried to suggest that she finish one room before starting another, but I have not gotten that message across. I speak Spanish well enough to communicate with most folks, but she is reluctant to have a conversation in her native tongue and prefers halted pidgin English, which is very hard for me to understand, because she has a peculiar way with it.

“I go DASH. Is good? Dog he eats?”

She also mimes things for me when there is a tool that she wants or a cleaning product she would prefer to use. We manage.

I was heading to the kitchen when I heard loud banging on the sliding glass doors that lead to the outside. There is a lock, of course, but also a long piece of wood that my sister had cut to prop into the grooves at the base to prevent entry by unwanted guests, human or otherwise. When my sisters came to visit after I first moved in, they were impressed by the size of my place and the evident, though spotty, old-world charm of the building, but Laura was quick to note the vulnerabilities:

“Not safe. Not secure. We need deadbolts and jamming rods. That balcony can be easily breached,” She said, peering over the side to the pavement two stories below.

The girls measured every door and window and went to Lowe’s, where they had rods custom-cut to fit in the sills and prevent anyone from being able to open them from the outside.

How did M.E. get out there? What was the chain of events that led to my housekeeper being stranded on the veranda for hours? She preferred not to say. Just flew past me when I unblocked the sliding glass door and went straight back to work. I barricaded myself in my bedroom and caught up on some reading.

After she left that afternoon, I studied the scene. The window screen had been hastily replaced and needed to be refit. So, she must have been cleaning the large window in the dining room and decided she needed to polish the outside of the glass. She could have opened the nearby sliding doors and walked out onto the patio, but instead she climbed out of the window and stepped onto the bench below. She then removed the screen and shut the window so that she could reach every part of the pane. Once it was shiny and streak-free, she attempted to re-open it to climb back in, only to find the latch had fastened. I shudder to think of the force she used in attempting to free it up, and the assault on the sliding doors, which she no doubt delivered with muscularity, but my sisters would be happy to learn that their safety precautions held strong. M.E. proved without a doubt that they are effective.

She is over seventy and has recently been let go by a client of 25 years.

“She say me no come more. No me quiere. Veinte directoras.” (She doesn’t want me. Over twenty years.) She shook her head.

I empathize with her former employer and can understand why that happened. I am sure that I could find someone a bit easier to communicate with, a little less hard on things, and it is tempting to try, but no.

Jeremy, Jeff, and I are holding steady, hiding the valuables and hoping for the best. Jeremy has given up asking her what she would like for lunch, because she just looks at him funny when he does. He picks up something new for her to try every two weeks. Jeff offers leftovers. I leave out fresh fruit and snacks. We all give her bonuses at Christmas time. She wears the same size shoe as me, which is very uncommon. My feet are weirdly small for my size. 6 to 6-1/2. Hers are a match, which is some serious luck of the draw, because I am always finding a new pair uncomfortable or an old one that has gone unused and needs to be given away.

POLISHED BY PERSISTENCE.

When I relocated from Beverly Hills to Beachwood, she insisted on showing up to help me meet the moving van. She had to navigate two new bus routes to get to the place, and she was late, but she managed. It was a cold winter, and the apartment was freezing. I gave her my sweater and wrapped a travel blanket around my shoulders. I had her start in the bedroom, because I knew if she put away my kitchen equipment, there was a good chance I would never find it again. She tackled box after box, breaking each down expertly as it was emptied. My friend Gail came and brought chicken sandwiches and salads. M.E. took hers with her into the next room and kept right on working between bites. Gail figured out how to make the heater work, and slowly but surely, the three of us put the place together enough so that the dog and I could sleep in a bed and wake to a coffee pot and cup, a water bowl, and chow.

It was late, nearly eleven o’clock, when her husband came to pick her up that night. I pressed several bills into her hand. She accepted it without looking to see what I had offered. I paid her more than double her regular fee, hoping she would be pleased when she got in the car and counted it. She deserved it.

M.E. has worked hard all of her life. She loves her family, absolutely dotes on her granddaughter, and has never once complained to any one of us about anything. Her visits are disruptive and chaotic, but cleaning this place is a hard job, one that I am loath to do. I have learned to enjoy the game of trying to figure out where she has put a prized utensil or stacked a favorite mixing bowl. I manage now to squeeze through into the back of the shower because the doors won’t open. I am nonplussed when I find Windex in the laundry hamper or furniture polish in the fridge.

The place is clean, the dog is happy, and most, if not all, of the damage can be undone. I have learned to be patient with my wildly impulsive and impatient housekeeper. She is a quirky little gal, but if a place needs cleaning, by God, she is going to clean it … come hell and hot water, M. E. is going to make it shine.

On we go …

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