Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA (12 page)

Very tentatively and mindful of the deep reserve of rural Mainers, as explained to me by a sociologist acquaintance, I touch her arm and tell her she shouldn't be doing this. Even if she were feeling OK she probably shouldn't be around the chemicals we use. She should go home. But all I can talk her into is taking the Pure Protein sports bar I always carry in my bag in case my sandwich lets me down. At first she refuses it. Then, when I repeat the offer, she says, “Really?” and finally takes it, picking off little chunks with trembling fingertips and cramming them into her mouth. Also, would I mind doing the driving for the rest of the day because she doesn't trust herself on account of the dizziness?

For the first time in my life as a maid I have a purpose more compelling than trying to meet the aesthetic standards of the New England bourgeoisie. I will do the work of two people, if necessary three. The next house belongs to a woman known to Holly and Marge as a “friggin' bitch,” who turns out to be Martha Stewart or at least a very dedicated acolyte thereof. Everything about it enrages me, and some of it would be irritating even if I were just dropping by for cocktails and not toiling alongside this pale, undernourished child: the brass plaque on the door announcing the date of construction (mid-eighteenth century), the wet bar with its ostentatious alignment of single-malt Scotches, the four-poster king-sized bed with canopy, the Jacuzzi so big you have to climb stairs to get into it and probably safe for diving when filled. I whiz through the bathrooms and even manage to complete the kitchen while the others are still on their initial tasks. Then Marge shows up in the kitchen and points out the row of copper pots and pans hanging from a rack near the ceiling. According to our instructions, she informs me, every one of them has to be taken down and polished with the owner's special polish.

OK. The only way to get to them is to climb up on the kitchen counter, kneel there, and reach up for them from that position. These are not pots for cooking, I should point out, just decorative pots deployed to catch stray beams of sunlight or reflect the owners' no doubt expensively buffed and peeled faces. The final pot is unexpectedly heavy—they are arranged in size order—and as I grasp it from my crouching position on the countertop, it slips from my hand and comes crashing down into a fishbowl cunningly furnished with marbles. Fish fly, marbles skitter all over the floor, and water—which in our work is regarded as a dangerous contaminant—soaks everything, including a stack of cookbooks containing Cucina Simpatica, a number of works set in Provence, and, yes, Martha Stewart herself. No one gets mad at me, not even Ted, back in the office, who is bonded for this sort of thing. My punishment is seeing Holly's face, when she rushes into the kitchen to see what the crash was, completely polarized with fear.

After the accident, Holly decides we can take a convenience store break. I buy myself a pack of cigarettes and sit out in the rain to puff (I haven't inhaled for years but it helps anyway) while the others drink their Cokes in the car. Have to get over this savior complex, I instruct myself, no one wants to be rescued by a klutz. Even my motives seem murky at the moment. Yes, I want to help Holly and everyone else in need, on a worldwide basis if possible. I am a “good person,” as my demented charges at the nursing home agree, but maybe I'm also just sick of my suddenly acquired insignificance. Maybe I want to “be somebody,” as Jesse Jackson likes to say, somebody generous, competent, brave, and perhaps, above all, noticeable.

Maids, as an occupational group, are not visible, and when we are seen we are
often sorry for it.“
[20]
On the way to the
Martha Stewart-ish place, when Holly and Marge were complaining about her haughtiness
in a past encounter, I had ventured to ask why so many of the owners seem hostile
or contemptuous toward us. “They think we're stupid,” was Holly's answer. “They
think we have nothing better to do with our time.” Marge too looked suddenly
sober. “We're nothing to these people,” she said. “We're just maids.” Nor are
we much of anything to anyone else. Even convenience store clerks, who are $6-an-hour
gals themselves, seem to look down on us. In Key West, my waitress's polo shirt
was always a conversation starter: “You at Jerry's?” a clerk might ask. “I used
to work at the waffle place just up the boulevard from there.” But a maid's
uniform has the opposite effect. At one place where we stopped for refreshments,
an actual diner with a counter, I tried to order iced tea to take out, but the
waitress just kept standing there chatting with a coworker, ignoring my “Excuse
me's.” Then there's the supermarket. I used to stop on my way home from work,
but I couldn't take the stares, which are easily translatable into: What are
you doing here? And, No wonder she's poor, she's got a beer in her shopping
cart! True, I don't look so good by the end of the day and probably smell like
eau de toilet and sweat, but it's the brilliant green-and-yellow uniform that
gives me away, like prison clothes on a fugitive. Maybe, it occurs to me, I'm
getting a tiny glimpse of what it would be like to be black.

And look at me now, sitting on a curb at a gas station, puffing into the endless slow rain, so sweat-soaked already that it doesn't matter. Things don't get any more squalid than this, is my thought. But they can—they can!--and they do. At the next house, I am getting my toilet brush out of its Ziploc bag when the liquid that's been accumulating in the bag all day spills on my foot—100 percent pure toilet juice leaking through the laces and onto my sock. In ordinary life, if someone were to, say, piss on your foot, you'd probably strip off the shoe and the sock and throw them away. But these are the only shoes I have. There's nothing to do but try to ignore the nasty stuff soaking my foot and, as Ted exhorts us, work through it.

Message to me from my former self: slow down and, above all, detach. If you can't stand being around suffering people, then you have no business in the low-wage work world, as a journalist or anything else. Besides, I have problems of my own to attend to, most urgently money. My initial calculations suggested that I would do very well with my two jobs—in the long run, that is, and if nothing untoward occurred. But there was no check for me my first Friday at The Maids since, I am informed, a new employee's first paycheck is withheld until she eventually leaves or quits, apparently to keep her from rushing off on a spending spree and failing to show up for the second week. In addition to rash-related expenses, I am unpleasantly surprised to discover that the rent for my first week at the Blue Haven is $200, not $120, because the tourist season was not yet deemed completely over. Plus, since my apartment, though rented as “furnished,” contained almost no kitchen items when I moved in, I was forced to acquire my own inventory of spatula, can opener, “utility knife,” broom, etc., at Wal-Mart. I will be fine once the paychecks start rolling in from both places of work, but now, late in my second week of employment, I foresee a lean weekend, even taking into account free lunches at the Woodcrest.

Is there help for the hardworking poor? Yes, but it takes a determined and not too terribly poor person to find it. On a Thursday after work, I drive to the Mobil station across the street from The Maids and call the Prebles Street Resource Center, which is listed in the phone book as a source of free meals and all-around help. I get a recorded message saying that Prebles Street closes at 3:00 P.M.—so much for the working poor!--but to try 774-HELP after that. There I wait on hold for four minutes before someone picks up. I tell him I am new to the area and employed but need some immediate food aid or cash assistance. Why do I need money if I'm employed, he wants to know—didn't I bring any money with me? It got used up on housing, I tell him, which was more expensive than I'd expected. Well, why didn't I check out the rents before I moved here, then? I had thought of telling him about the rash too, as a mitigating circumstance, but decide that our relationship is not at a point where I want to be discussing my body. Finally, he yields and gives me another number. A sequence of four more calls ensues before I reach a helpful human, Gloria, who says I should go to the food pantry in Biddeford tomorrow between nine and five. What is this assumption that the hungry are free all day to drive around visiting “community action centers” and charitable agencies? So Gloria sends me to Karen at another number, another voluntary agency, where I am told I am in the wrong county. Very slowly, and trying to adopt the same businesslike tone I would use if I were calling to inquire' about a credit card statement, I run through my time and geography constraints once again, underscoring that I work seven days a week, at least eight hours a day, and that I happen to be in her geographical jurisdiction at the moment. Bingo! Karen relents. I can't have cash, but she'll make a call and I can pick up a food voucher at a South Portland Shop-n-Save. What would I like for dinner?

The question seems frivolous or mocking. What do I want for dinner? How about polenta-crusted salmon filet with pesto sauce and a nice glass of J. Lohr Chardonnay? But Karen is serious. I can't have cash, which, God forbid, I would blow at a liquor store, but neither can I have any old food item that might appeal. My dinner choices, she explains, are limited to any two of the following: one-box spaghetti noodles, one jar spaghetti sauce, one can of vegetables, one can of baked beans, one pound of hamburger, a box of Hamburger Helper, or a box of Tuna Helper. No fresh fruit or vegetables, no chicken or cheese, and, oddly, no tuna to help out with. For breakfast I can have cereal and milk or juice. Good enough. I drive to the Shop-n-Save, pick up my voucher (which again lists my meager options) at Customer Service, and commence to shop and certainly save. I get a quart of milk, a box of cereal, a pound of chopped meat, and a can of kidney beans, figuring that the latter two will make a sort of chili or at least refried beans con carne, and fortunately the checkout woman doesn't challenge my substitution of kidney beans for baked ones. I attempt to thank her, but she is looking the other way at nothing in particular. Bottom line: $7.02 worth of food acquired in seventy minutes of calling and driving, minus $2.80 for the phone calls—which ends up being equivalent to a wage of $3.63 an hour.

Then there are weekends at the Woodcrest. I have been trying to interpret them as genuine weekends, as if, after spending the weekdays on futile and largely cosmetic labor, I had decided to volunteer to do something useful for a change. “It must be so depressing,” my sister and, of course, fellow Alzheimer's orphan writes to me, but not at all. Once you join the residents in forgetting about the functioning humans they once were, you can think of them as a band of wizened toddlers at a tea party. Then too, compared with the women at The Maids, my Woodcrest coworkers are an enthusiastic and outgoing bunch, though the faces tend to change from one weekend to the next. By carving out a little space from Pete—partly because I don't want to fall into the habit of social smoking—I get to at least the “Hi there” level with a dozen or so cooks, nurses, CNAs, and other dietary aides. Mostly, I relish the autonomy and minute-by-minute freedom of motion. Weekends are notoriously supervisor-free, and Linda, who is hardly a dictator anyway, seldom reappears after day one. I can start setting tables or sweeping from any part of the room I feel like; none of that left-to-right, top-to-bottom stuff here. I can decide whether we're going to need more ice cream for the lunch service and whether it will be chocolate ripple or strawberry. If a resident is rejecting the chicken tenders or meat balls we have on the menu, I can propose an alternative on my own: What if I just make you up a nice grilled cheese sandwich and some hot tomato soup? I launder the napkins and tablecloths entirely at my own discretion.

But there can be too much freedom and certainly far too much motion. On the Saturday after the fishbowl incident, I arrive at seven to find that my fellow dietary aide for the day has gone AWOL and that I will be the sole dietary worker on the locked Alzheimer's ward. Furthermore, neither Pete nor any of the other cooks in the main kitchen seems to be available to perform their usual breakfast function of loading up plates in the ward's little kitchen while I do the serving. The “furthermores” multiply: it turns out the upstairs dishwasher, the one convenient to the Alzheimer's ward, is broken, meaning that the dishware has to be prewashed upstairs, then hauled downstairs by cart to the working dishwasher just off the main kitchen. As a final malicious touch, the set of keys I need to get into the upstairs kitchen and, of course, out of the locked ward are missing, so that I have to track down a nurse every time I need a door opened. I have very little memory of this day, and my journal notes for it have the gasping, panicky tone of e-mails from an Everest climber who has just used up her last oxygen canister: “Scrape and rinse plates and load cart for first trip downstairs to working dishwasher. Put away unused food items (syrup, milk, etc.). Bring back first load of clean dishes and put them away in upstairs pantry. Collect tablecloths, place mats, and napkins and throw them in washer. Sweep under chairs. Vacuum around chairs.” I get through it, thanks to the nurse's aides who pitch in with serving, and thanks also to a lesson I learned while waitressing at Jerry's: Don't stop, don't think, don't even pause for an instant, because if you do, you'll be aware of the weariness taking over your legs, and then it will win.

After work I decide to visit the state park where Pete has been threatening
to take me, to appropriate a bit of this brilliant fall day for myself. Children
are climbing around on the huge black rocks that abut the ocean and normally
I would do so too, but the legs that served me so well for hours are rubbery
now, so I just sit on a rock and stare. What is this business of letting someone
in off the street to run a nursing home, or at least a vital chunk of a nursing
home, for a day?
[21]
True, this is the one
job where my references were actually checked, but what if I were one of those
angel-of-death type health workers, who decided to free my charges from their
foggy half-lives? More to the point, I am wondering what the two-job way of
life would do to a person after a few months with zero days off. In my writing
life I normally work seven days a week, but writing is ego food, totally self-supervised
and intermittently productive of praise. Here, no one will notice my heroism
on that Saturday's shift. (I will later make a point of telling Linda about
it and receive only a distracted nod.) If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plus
days a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in?