By the end of the Netflix series “Maid,” Alex Russell (Margaret Qualley) is an expert at having the rug pulled out from under her. (And an expert at cleaning it neatly as she’s thrown to the floor.) A single mom who left an abusive relationship with the father of her toddler, Maddy (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet), Alex dreams of going to college in Missoula, Montana and becoming a writer. Instead she’s cleaning houses for Value Maids, scrubbing stovetops and toilets and baseboards for rock-bottom wages while her bank account balance constantly hovers near zero.

Alex, a bright, pretty, white woman who had gotten a scholarship to college before getting pregnant with her daughter, navigates the bureaucratic obstacle course of accessing government benefits (SNAP, daycare grants, subsidized housing) as ably and comfortably as anyone is likely to. She has work. She’s doing her best. And still, at every turn, she’s thwarted by the merciless realities of American capitalism and our moth-eaten social safety net.

She has little choice but to supplement her own income and government aid with assistance from her community — what little of it there is. She has to ask a friend for shelter when she flees her ex, Sean (Nick Robinson), in the middle of the night. She has to ask her eccentric mom, Paula (Andie McDowell) for babysitting so she can do a trial shift with Value Maids. She has to accept more and more help from a well-off former coworker, Nate (Raymond Ablack): a hot breakfast for her and Maddy after he finds them sleeping on the floor of the ferry terminal, an old car he no longer drives, a place to stay when she’s left homeless yet again. She also has to accept a place to stay from her estranged father and stepmother, and eventually from Sean.

And each time, she’s eventually left twisting in the breeze. Her friend won’t hide her from her furious ex, who is her own boyfriend’s best friend. Her mom can’t handle the responsibility of babysitting for more than a couple hours. Nate wants to be kind to her, but he also wants to date her, and when he’s tired of being rejected, he also gets tired of helping. Both her estranged father and Sean, she painfully remembers when she stays with each of them, are abusive.

Throughout “Maid,” Alex desperately tries to erect boundaries to keep her and Maddy safe and stable. She resists taking help from her unreliable parents, her ex, from Nate. She resists accepting additional favors, like the offer of her new landladies to have Maddy’s third birthday party in their gazebo. Letting these boundaries down means introducing risk into a life already so fragile, so close to falling apart. Allowing someone to help her or do her a casual kindness means allowing them leverage over her. It gives them space to develop expectations of her gratitude, her obligation to them. It might even involve them in the mess of her life, a mess they will likely regret touching.

But drawing a healthy boundary is a luxury Alex doesn’t often have. Her existence is so precarious, so dependent on the goodwill of those with power over her, that she can neither afford to let her boundaries down nor to keep them up. Sometimes she needs what they can offer her too desperately — an address where Maddy will be eligible for a good preschool, childcare or transportation for a crucial work shift. Sometimes she simply needs not to offend them by rejecting their kindness too emphatically. She navigates their moods, their whims, their shifting levels of generosity.

This morning I (Claire) was reading Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter about living in community, which touched on another that really spoke to me this week, Kathryn Jezer-Morton on the cozy aesthetic. Both essays are engaged with something that I’ve been wrestling with over recent months: how desperately we need the comfort of a community, and how desperately many of us try to fill that hole with our earning and spending power. If we buy something (a throw blanket, a candle, a day of childcare, a latté), it belongs to us. We can have it when we want it, on our terms. Its inertness is why we cling to it (it can’t resist us, it will always comply) and also why it will always disappoint.

This is, of course, a very middle-to-upper-class experience of being socially alienated by capitalism. Paying for things is easier and more straightforward than being in community, so we choose that path and then, perhaps, feel empty among our bought-and-paid-for things. For Alex, there is no easier or more straightforward option; she has to accept help, and she has no control. In one scene, Alex tries to explain to Nate that she can’t date him because things aren’t equal between them. He disagrees, saying that he doesn’t care about the economic differences. But she’s right. He can walk away from their friendship on a whim, whereas she needs the shelter he’s providing to survive.

Left in such dire straits, doing hard labor for hourly wages that nearly disappear after paying for gas and cleaning supplies while keeping her paperwork updated to receive meager government benefits, Alex is thrown back on a community that’s mostly unable or unwilling to be a true community for her. For her wealthier friends and acquaintances, she has little to offer in exchange that they can’t easily buy once they’re tired of dealing with the complications of her life; other poor people she knows have little emotional or financial bandwidth to truly help her. The financial stratification, commodification, and grinding need of American life has blasted her social fabric to hell.

In this week’s podcast, we talked a lot about this, and much more, including the depiction of Alex and Sean’s relationship, the endless labor of being poor, the cruelty of means-testing, and the fantastical touches that bring Alex’s personal experience to life.

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