THE CURLY KIND
I WAS carrying out the Rosenblatt’s garbage this afternoon when the maid from the next apartment closed the door behind her, straightened her white uniform, and pushed the button for the elevator. This is the twelfth floor, four apartments per level and only one elevator, so it usually takes a while. I watched as the maid was joined by two young children accompanied by an Irish nanny. As they waited, the nanny reached into her canvas bag and handed the boy a bag of Cheetos, which he opened and immediately emptied onto the floor, screaming, “I wanted the CURLY kind. Don’t you know ANYTHING?”
The nanny lowered her head while the maid and I locked eyes and shrugged our shoulders as if to say, “What can you do?” The elevator arrived and they boarded, leaving behind an orange mat of uncurly Cheetos, which will be crushed by the twelfth-floor tenants until a janitor is dispatched to sweep them up.
I have seen this next-door maid three or four times before. She is a refrigerator-sized dark-skinned woman wearing loafers with the backs cut away to make them more comfortable. I see her and think of Lena Payne.
My mother was never much of a housekeeper and it drove me to distraction, the chaos of our home. Five years after moving to Raleigh we still had Mayflower boxes in the living room. I would return home from school, place my coat and books neatly in my bedroom, activate the vacuum cleaner and set to work gathering my sisters’ clothing, their half-empty glasses, and the bowls of potato chip crumbs left before the television set, washing dishes, polishing furniture, and thinking that it wasn’t fair. I had been switched at birth and carried back to the wrong household. Somewhere my natural family spent their days observing strict laboratory conditions, wondering what had become of me. My own bedroom was immaculate, a shrine. I cleaned it every day. My sisters were not allowed to cross the threshold. They stood in the hallway, observing me as if I were an exotic zoo animal displayed in his natural habitat.
While my mother was pregnant with her sixth child, my father finally gave in and allowed her to hire a housekeeper one day a week. When Lena was introduced I thought that finally we were getting somewhere. I left for school as my mother turned on the portable TV and handed her a cup of coffee. I returned from school seven hours later to find an ironing board in the kitchen, Mom and Lena in roughly the same position — watching TV and drinking coffee.
It struck me as the perfect union: the two laziest people on the face of the earth coming together to watch “Mike Douglas” and “General Hospital.” I ran to touch the vacuum cleaner and found it stone cold. It wasn’t fair.
Normally Mom would drive Lena to the shopping center, where she caught a ride home with a friend, but one day there was something good on TV so Lena stayed late. My mother offered to take her home, and I went along for the ride. We drove past the Raleigh I knew, beyond the paved streets and onto narrow dirt roads lined with shacks — actual shacks, the type I had seen in Life magazine. When our station wagon pulled up, Lena’s shack emptied and seven children gathered on the porch, shielding their eyes with their hands. The yard was bald and dusty, populated with chickens. I had never before seen a live chicken and decided I would like to have one as a pet. Lena said that I could have one if I could catch it. Identifying the chicken of my choice I immediately pictured her living in my own grassy yard, prancing for grain. Her name would be Penny, and every day she would kneel down and thank God that she lived with me and not with Lena. I thought that this chicken might come to me if I spoke to her in a comforting voice. I thought you could convince a chicken with the promise of a better life. When that didn’t work I decided I might tackle a chicken and I tried, again and again. I dove for her, soiling my school clothes in clouds of dirt and dust. Finally I gave up. Standing to wipe the clay off my face I turned to see everyone laughing at me: Lena, her seven children, even my own mother doubled over in the front seat of the car. I remember turning toward the shack yelling, “I don’t need your filthy chickens. We buy our own — from the store.”
In the car on the way home my mother tried in vain to convey the shame I had brought against her but I wasn’t listening. My only response was to swear off chicken for the next few weeks. Whenever one was served I pictured the steaming carcass raising a cartoon head and laughing at me. It was years before I thought of things differently.
This afternoon I went to G.L.’s apartment to clean his venetian blinds, which had been soiled during a fire. I first met this man last week when I was sent to unpack his books and arrange them on the shelves in alphabetical order. He’s got quite a library: leather-bound editions of Jane Austen and émile Zola sandwiching several cookbooks and countless manuals devoted to the study of sadomasochistic sex. This morning G.L. answered the door in his bathrobe, drinking black coffee from a mug shaped to resemble a boot. He is not a pleasant man but seems to get along fine in the world as long as he has his way. He led me to the nearest window and suggested I use Formula 409 and paper towel, but that would have taken me weeks. Having experience with blinds I thought it might be quicker and more productive if I took them down and washed them in the tub. I thought he would argue with me but instead he took off his bathrobe saying, “Sure, whatever.” He stood for a moment in his underpants before walking into the bathroom, where he ran water into the sink, preparing to shave something. G.L.’s bathroom is tiny and I thought he might need some privacy, so I just sort of stood around the living room until he called out, “Hey, are you going to clean those blinds or not? I’m not made of money.”
I took down one of the blinds, slowly and carefully as if I were removing a tumor from a sensitive area of the brain. I stood with the blinds in my hands and counted to twenty. Then to thirty. He called out again and I had no choice but to press against him as I entered the bathroom. I passed him at the sink and made my way to the tub, where I knelt down and commenced to bathe the venetian blinds in water and ammonia. G.L. had a television propped beside the sink, a portable TV the size of a car battery, which he would constantly curse and rechannel. I couldn’t see the screen but listened as he groused his way from one Saturday-afternoon program to another before settling on an infomercial devoted to something called “The Oxygen Cocktail.” From what I could hear I gathered that The Oxygen Cocktail is some sort of a pick-me-up made from clarified air. The commercial suggested that early cavemen enjoyed a highly satisfying oxygen content, which afforded them the stamina to produce magnificent cave paintings and still find the energy to hunt mastadons. Participants in the recent Olympic Games testified to the virtues of The Oxygen Cocktail, and I listened while bending over the bathtub, scrubbing a sadist’s blinds with ammonia. I wanted to part the shower curtain, curious to see this Oxygen Cocktail. Does it come in a can, a bottle, a nasal spray? Were the Olympians in swimsuits or street clothes?
The blinds weren’t coming clean the way I’d hoped so I added some Clorox to the mixture, a stupid thing to do. The combination of ammonia and chloride can be lethal but I’ve discovered it can work miracles as long as you keep telling yourself, “I want to live, I want to live. …” I tried reminding myself of that fact. I pictured myself finishing the job and returning home to a refreshing Oxygen Cocktail. My throat began to burn and I heard G.L. begin to buckle and cough. When he parted the curtain asking, “Are you trying to kill me?” I had to think hard for the answer.
Bart and I cleaned the apartment of another “Sesame Street” writer — that’s the third one this month. I’ve never met any of these people but each of them has a little shrine where they display plush models of Grover and Big Bird along with eight Emmy Awards won for children’s television. Eight of them. I had never seen an Emmy in person and noticed how the styles have changed over the years. This afternoon’s writer had her awards marching in a neat row along the window ledge. It made me sad to see how a few of the earlier models had corroded. I had always imagined them to be made of pure gold but they’re plated. Still, though, they have a satisfying weight, a heaviness that suggests achievement. I lifted each award in order to clean the window ledge and, as long as I had it in my hands, I posed before the full-length mirror, looking humble.
“I really wasn’t prepared for this,” I said, hoping the audience might believe me. I have spent the better part of my life planning my awards speeches and always begin with that line. It is tiresome to listen as winners thank people most of us have never heard of, but in my award fantasies I like to mention everyone from my twelfth-grade English teacher to the Korean market where I buy my cigarettes and cat food. And that’s what’s nice about eight Emmys. Lifting each one I addressed the mirror, saying, “But most of all I’d like to thank Amy, Lisa, Gretchen, Paul, Sharon, Lou, and Tiffany for their support.” Then I picked up the next, moving on to Hugh, Evelyne, Ira, Susan, Jim, Ronnie, Marge, and Steve. By my eighth Emmy I was groping for names. I was standing there, trying to remember the name of a counselor from Camp Cheerio when Bart entered the room and I realized with shame that I had forgotten to thank him.