my dirty house

Since the first time I experienced the delirious joy of having someone clean my house, perhaps a decade ago, I have had a cleaning lady. I would rather go without food than go without someone to come in every two weeks and turn my house shiny and fragrant. I can do daily maintenance but without that cleaning lady-clean starting point, things get ugly fast.

I feel a little guilty hiring someone to clean when it’s just Tom and Jack and me. And I work at home. Theoretically, Tom and I should be able to keep our little house clean.

I resisted the whole idea at first. It seemed so bourgeois. I was squeamish about it in a class-conscious liberal way. But after spending yet another weekend doing something I don’t enjoy, poorly, I finally succumbed. The first time you hire someone to scrub your toilet because you’re just too lazy to do it is humbling. But not that too humbling to have them back two weeks later.

Not only do I enjoy having others clean for me, they do it a thousand times better than me. They know what they’re doing. They’re Professionals.

My parents always had someone clean. They both worked full time, they had three kids and they had an enormous apartment. Something had to give. Our first house cleaner was a guy named Warren. He taught my older brother to play the drums when Nick was maybe 7 or 8 or years old. Warren suggested my parents buy a rubber practice pad and drumsticks and launched Nick’s career as a musician, which continues today.

A few of my parents’ cleaning ladies were Haitian. My parents tried to speak French to them, but their Haitian French was too different from my parents’ Continental French and so they muddled through with no common language. One broke the Tiffany lamp shade that hung above our kitchen table. I don’t think she came back.

Irma was my first house cleaner. She cleaned my house for a long time. She was obsessive-compulsive, which is not a bad thing in a cleaning lady, if you know what I mean. Once she decided she could no longer bear our filthy porch walls, so she dragged out the garden hose and scrubbed them down. (Never occurred to me. Now I do it regularly.) Irma also would arrange the coasters and remote controls into strange and haunting little shrines on the coffee table.

But Irma often broke things—including a beloved marble and bronze Art Deco figurine—plus we weren’t allowed to call her directly because her husband didn’t know she was working for us. Irma had a lot of demons, I think. We had to let her go.

The woman who has been cleaning for us the past few years, Maria, has suddenly become unreliable. I’m completely flexible about days if she wants to call and change them, but she hasn’t even called the past couple of times she couldn’t make it, so screw it. Last time she showed up a day later, this time I haven’t heard a peep out of her.

I’m actually relieved. I’ve been trying to work up the balls to fire her for a long time. She doesn’t clean that well, she puts things away wherever she feels like it and we could never find things after she left, and she often blew through here in two hours, which made her hourly rate pretty high.

But all that liberal guilt … For months now, I’ve been vowing to fire her but I just haven’t had it in me. But since she now seems to have quit, I am spared the effort.

Tom and I have been cleaning the house today, so it doesn’t get unbearable before we find someone new. We’re finding some very nasty surfaces and corners. It seems Maria only cleaned what she could see. I guess I’m not a very good employer, she might have taken advantage of me. Maybe I should have offered her more money. She never asked for a raise, she just sort of gave herself one by blowing through faster and faster. And we were paying the going rate.

Of course, I wouldn’t clean my house for the money I was paying her. But then again, you couldn’t pay me enough money to clean someone else’s house. You couldn’t pay me enough money to clean my own house. I’d much rather pay someone else. A Professional.