January 19, 2010
Keeping House
Rick told how he let the housekeeper go, and it set me to thinking. At times I’ve wondered whether for for a household to run happily, it’s best if there is someone whose primary job it is to do the bulk of the shopping and the washing-up and the home repairs and the tedious aspects of the yard maintenance and so on. You know. That stuff.
I think such people used to be called servants, and it’s no longer a popular profession. Nor is housewifery. And I have my own problems both with hiring help and helping myself.
I try to cultivate the housekeeping habit, but it never seems to stick. And I know that I would be terrible dealing with servants. Whenever there is someone at the house doing work I am paying them for (be it housecleaning, repairs, installation, or whatever), I am always trying to help or asking them if I can run errands for them and offering them drinks and fixing them things to eat. There is little aristocratic blood in my veins, I fear.
I’ve tried engaging the services of hired housekeepers, but the last time round felt especially awkward to me, as I worked from a home office. When the housekeepers (a mother-and-son team) were at their work, I could not do my work, although I did my best to pretend.
I did get to know the mother pretty well, though. Around 1962 she had moved to the States from a town near Frankfurt, Germany. Her son was an infant, and I think he may have been the son of an American GI. Her hair was a distinctly artificial shade of red, and sometimes she wore earrings made from a pair of dice.
The first day she came along with her son to clean, she noticed my large framed poster of Fassbinder’s film Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (Beware of a Holy Whore). laughed, and said, “Ooh, I’d best get back to my cleaning.”
She complained about a woman her son hired occasionally when the workload was heavy, saying, “She tried to get me to go to that Baptist church, but I wanted no part of it.” She worried that the Baptist woman might preach hellfire and brimstone to her son’s gay customers.
Right before my finances got so tight that I let her and her son go, she proposed that she and I go to Las Vegas together for a weekend.
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If I were the Oprah, say, and had houses where mostly servants lived most of the time, I wonder if you’d just get used to having someone around all the time?
Danny and I solved the problem of the awkwardness by always just being gone while she was working. (We only had her in for the “heavy hauling” bathrooms and floors mostly, maybe minor dusting, every other week. She was generally in and out in three hours.)
Did you go to Vegas?
Hmm…I’ll say that in our house the tasks with a specific owner get done most often and most effectively. For example, I do most (nearlly all) of the cooking and, as a result, the kitchen is my responsibility (this is partially because I like things a certain way) and, as a rule, the kitchen is often between cleanish and spotless.
Alicia is in charge of laundry (partially because I never learned the difference between delicates and regulars – or darks and lights for that matter) and I nearly always have clean socks and underwear.
It’s the tasks that have no owner that don’t get done or don’t get done well. Most of these tasks have a regular doer, but neither of us are willing to acknowledge them as our permenant gig (garbage, for example, is almost always handled by me, but if the can is overfull I might try and stuff one more thing in to avoid the painless process of walking the can to the bigger can in the garage).
Rick, alas, I did not go to Vegas with the housecleaner.
Michael, your household’s workings remind me of the first few years of my first marriage, many years ago.
Rick: Dusting, vacuuming, kitchen clean-up (On my own terms, we generally have a messy kitchen until the following morning. I know where things go even though I don’t cook.) Harvesting kitty-biscuits, trash. Lawn and garden (though I’ve been letting work crews handle most of it the last couple years.)
Danny: Cooking, bathrooms, making the bed most of the time.
Either/both: Laundry, he collects and washes. I fold and put away. Deeper cleaning when it happens. Refrigerators, windows, etc.
A catch: when one party to an understanding ceases to care. Are you big enough to take on the additional duties without sinking into martyrdom?
(This is not what’s happening with me currently, but it strikes me as a potentially huge problem, human nature being what it is.)
I live alone, so I can’t start listing the tasks I do and don’t do. Honestly, as the one flocker who’s been to my apartment can attest, I wipe down everything every Sunday at the least. But I will admit that about two or three times a year, I have a fantastic woman come in to really overhaul the place.* Like Sheila, I try not to relate to her as if she were my servant.
Most days I start out with making the bed and washing the night-before’s dishes and end it with taking care of the rabbit’s cage and putting away any clothes I threw around while getting dressed. When I get in one of these relationships y’all speak of, I’d be perfectly happy keeping all the tasks I do now so long as I don’t ever have to take out the trash. It’s always once I’m in my least-appropriate-for-public-consumption outfit that I notice the trash needs taking out.
* Usually, I schedule these directly after hosting a party. How parties end up sticky-ing the strangest corners and leaving broken glass in the most unexpected places is beyond me. Not to mention my girlish unfamiliarity with how men can’t pee inside the confines of a toilet bowl.
I’d cheerfully take out your trash, Kelsey. I love taking out the trash. I dump it into one of the dumpsters in The Shed, which is where I have my assignations with raccoons.
Daddy once had hand-lettered a sign he placed above the toilet years ago. “We aim to please, you aim, too, please.” In retrospect, it seems it fell to him to clean the bathrooms.
With one exception, Kelsey, the men I’ve known have been sharpshooters when it comes to pissing, so I’m perennially baffled by these male-female piss stand-offs.
The exception: It was not till the morning after that the tale was told to me. My then-husband and I were living in Madison, Wisconsin, and a couple of his friends had flown out from California to visit. They drank their way up one side of the isthmus and back again (a heap of tales there — but later) and came back late.
What my ex- told me next day is that after they collapsed, he was awoken by a gushing sound and, on investigation, spied one of the guys standing in a corner of our living room, peeing liberally all over the floor. Their exchange:
“What the fuck are you doing, man?”
“Pissin’ in the river.” (Uttered in a dreamy sleep-talky voice.)
My ex- told me that he drenched the desecrated corner with ammonia — a lot more ammonia than was strictly needed.
a puddle of piss around a urinal embarrasses me for my gender.
Well, yeah, actually, I was in the ‘men’s room’ of a semi-faincy re-sort the other night, and there was suree an awful lot of piss pooled in one of the urinals. That’s not really the same thing as a puddle of piss on the floor. But it was interesting.
I used to be almost obsessive about cleaning. Every Saturday I dusted and vacuumed, changed the sheets, cleaned the bathrooms, even mopped floors. Now I don’t do any of that shit. I cook dinner and do laundry and iron, and sometimes I kind of make the bed, and I’m pretty good about keeping the kitchen surfaces clean, but that’s it. Daryl has taken up most of the slack–he does dishes and cleans the bathrooms and vacuums, cleans the litter box and takes out the trash. We are nowhere close to splitting the chores–he does most of them. I’m not sure why or when it happened, but something just clicked off in me and I decided not to do that stuff anymore. We had a cleaning lady for a time, but Daryl felt uncomfortable giving her any kind of direction (much in the way Sheila describes), so he let her go. But we’re at the point of seeking help again. I love a clean house–in fact, something in me needs a clean house–but I have more money than I have energy, so it’s going to fall to someone else to do it.
Clean and tidy is wonderful, and I can even maintain it for a while, but once things tip past the tipping point again, it all feels hopeless to me.
Take off to Vegas is what I want to do, like the cleaning lady wanted.