I started cleaning houses shortly after I got off the bus and decided I wanted to stay. Out here the sun stained the sand, a red beach with no shore that slid over smooth, wide rocks that rose out of the ground and produced a fickle, shifting shade. Joshua trees erupted in small gatherings or in huge crowds, spread across plains, twisting like barbed contortionists. Here the sun beat down on the earth like a fist, demanding and relentless. I had only intended to pass through, I thought it was best not to stay in one place, but when I stepped off the bus the heat wrapped me up. It was like the warmth of a lover’s neck, that safe space between her jaw and shoulder. Once I knew I wanted to stay, it didn’t take me long to find Arlene. She had put up a sign in a grocery store: ROOM FOR RENT, three housemates, no pets. She wasn’t impressed that I didn’t have a job and she nearly kicked me out, but when I told her I could pay first and last upfront in cash, she settled down.
People like Arlene always shut up for cash. I didn’t like Arlene right away but she grew on me. She smoked thin cigarettes and her eyes were both sad and sultry. Her hair was dyed a deep red. It was too rich to be natural and she was too old to pull it off. She talked a lot, mostly about herself, which was fine. After a few days I knew most of her ex-lovers by name. I knew which hotels she had frequented in her twenties with her married coworker, where she had gone on her honeymoon with her first husband, how her second husband had broke his back laying sheet metal on a roof in thirty mph wind. Arlene got me the job cleaning houses. She had a couple girls like me. Most days I was in a rich area of town. Actually most of the areas in this town are rich, just like most of the people are old. Typically the owners were leaving just as I arrived. Stepping out the front door, men adjusted the collars of their pastel shirts, while their wives applied a boring shade of lipstick in the passenger seat of a slick, airconditioned car.
My maid’s outfit was suffocating, starched, stubborn, from my neck to my knees. The women never seemed to notice me but occasionally I got a wave from the husbands. I assumed those men were friendly, because it couldn’t have been the uniform. The houses were all pretty much the same, lots of white and pastel, accent walls made of mirrors and light fixtures that made you
feel like you were on stage. Depending on the house, I would maybe put on some music. It was pretty easy to tell the difference between the kind of person who knew if you breathed on their things, and the type who would take a week to realize if a chair was missing. Every house had its own specifics – special cleaners, trophies I was supposed to polish, trophies I wasn’t to touch, dogs I had to let outside – but mostly the routine stayed the same. Master bedrooms were my favourite and I saved them for last. I started in the closet, most of them bigger than the room I rented in Arlene’s house. Whole walls of clothes, panels of shoes and doors adorned with belts.
Men’s closets always felt cold to me, rows of stiff materials, beige, brown, black. A strange clone wardrobe, all so neatly arranged. A women’s side of the closet was less predictable, which is funny because out in the city you would swear every woman was wearing the same thing. But in their closets it was silk and satin and beads and sequins. If you pulled out drawers you’d find all sorts of straps and lace, intimate stitching that would make you reach out unconsciously. The bedside tables were always entertaining. Vibrators, dildos, clamps and harness and crops, Viagra. All that stuff used to make me smile but it got kind of repetitive after a while and I started hoping I’d find a diary. People kept photographs of kids and women who weren’t in the family pictures but no one ever wrote anything down. I found that pretty disappointing, but I kept my fingers crossed. Master bathrooms had the best drugs. Valium, Percocet, Ambien, Xanax, Desoxyn, OxyCotin, and laudanum, which I had to ask Arlene about before I realized I hit the jackpot. We realized the laudanum was too hard to take discretely though.
The rest I could take a few here or there unnoticed. That’s Arlene’s side business. She gave me five dollars a pill. It wasn’t the lottery, but it was nice cash on the side, like an allowance. It was worth it considering all I had to do was wander around strange, silent houses, preserving the tranquilizing whiteness. I used to clean house for this woman named Hester. She was the tallest woman I had ever seen, with hair that streamed like strands of verse, long and black with flecks of grey. She had thin fingers and wrists that looked like they would write secrets in calligraphy and seal the envelopes with wax stamps. She was usually home when I came to clean on Friday mornings. Hester slept later than my average clients. She didn’t schedule early morning rounds of golf to avoid me. There were no blenders to clean or crumbs to sweep off the counter and into the sink.
More common were wine glasses with tiny red stains where the stem met the bowl and sticky crystal tumblers that smelled like scotch. I wondered what she talked to her friends about, over so many drinks. On mornings when the counter was crowded with glasses she slept late, emerging when the sun was high in a burgundy robe tied with a drooping bow, a loose heart just above her hips. Its large loops made me wonder how many times the tie could wrap around her waist, if it was wide enough to cover her eyes, strong enough to bind her wrists. One morning she asked me to make coffee and then I just kept doing it. She always told me she would stay out of my way and took her coffee outside by the pool. She was a good tipper, which was lucky because I wasn’t earning an allowance from her bathroom. She told me just to vacuum the carpet in the master bedroom and clean the toilet and the shower in bathroom. It was too short a time to read a label or open a bottle with a child lock, and she was always home. I did her laundry in the room by the garage.
Hester had two cars; one was a sleek grey, the other a flexing red. They were always resting in the cool garage, as if they’d never been used. Most of her laundry was too delicate for the machine, mostly underwear and blouses. None of her clothes ever really seemed dirty. There were no stains or spills or splatters. Even the armpits of her shirts smelled clean. Her perfume lingered on everything. When I hung her clothes to dry, their hems dripped into the draining sink, popping little bubbles and dissolving the lavender scented foam. One morning I got there late. The bus was behind schedule and a woman had spilled coffee on me when it stopped abruptly. It was lukewarm so it didn’t burn but it left a brown stain right above my knee. I had a cigarette at the bus stop just to calm down before I walked to Hester’s. When I got there her bedroom door was ajar. I knocked lightly and pushed the door open with my knuckles.
The bed was made, the cream comforter smoothed and spread evenly over the mattress. The door to the patio was locked. I cupped my hand over the glass and peered out at the terrace and the pool. I called out to the silent house. I started in the kitchen. There were no glasses so I sprayed and wiped the counters but the granite was already clean. The coffee was dripping into the pot before I remembered I didn’t need to make it. It saturated the kitchen with the smells of tobacco and leather and chocolate. There was no laundry in the room by the garage. The grey car was gone. In the kitchen I looked for a note, but then remembered that she had no reason to tell me anything. I poured myself a cup of coffee, wiped up the loose grounds that had spilled when I emptied the grinder and walked back to the bedroom.
The walls were a rich vanilla and the way the sun poured in made the room feel like a bowl of melting ice cream. By the window there was a chestnut table with a vanity mirror. I sat down and sipped my coffee. On a wooden tray there were little glass bottles tinted pink and blue with plush atomizers that looked like pastel fruit, next to small tubs of creams and balms that smelled of oranges. I sprayed myself with the blue bottle of perfume, squeezing the mesh atomizer on my right side, then my left, like they did in old movies. I smoothed my hands over my lap and saw the stain at my knee. In the laundry room I unbuttoned my uniform. The stain was dry and faded, the colour of parchment. There was bleach in the cupboard with the lavender soap. I filled the sink with cold water and a capful of bleach and threw my uniform in. There was a tiny dot of coffee on one of my shoes but it was hardly noticeable.
I took off my shoes and socks and left them by the sink. My coffee was still warm on the vanity and I folded my finger around it. The smell mixed with the perfume and my skin smelled of Hester. In the bathroom I opened the drawers under the sink. The bottom one had bottles and pills but they were nothing, nothing worth anything anyway. Her robe was hanging on the backdoor of the bathroom. It was big on me but I liked drowning in it. Her dresser was the same chestnut colour as the vanity table, with matching details. The top right-hand drawer was underwear, the left was socks. I stuck my hand in and reached along the sides and to the back of both drawers but it was all smooth fabric or bunched up socks. I recognized some of the underwear from the laundry. I ran the tips of my fingers over each article, barely touching any of them, until I found my favourite pair. They were surprisingly cool from resting in the draw, smooth silk that felt refreshing as water. I was surprised how well they fit.
Three books were stacked on the nightstand beside the lamp, an unfolded pair of black glasses resting on top of them. Each book had a bookmark in it. She was nearly finished the one in the middle. The top one looked like poetry. There were little tins and jars in the nightstand. Inside one of the tins were locks of a reddish hair wrapped in stained paper. A few fell out onto the floor and I got on my knees to find them in the thick carpet. One of the jars rattled when I picked it up. Inside were several little teeth. I put the lid back on and they clattered sadly, like broken parts of a toy. There was an envelope stuffed so tightly with pictures it couldn’t close properly. I wanted to spread them out on the bed and take them in all at once, but thought that maybe they were in order. The top picture was of four girls in wicker hats at the beach. Their feet were slightly sunken into the wet sand, molded into strange patterns by the tide, pools of water collecting in the creases. Only one of them was looking at the camera. Cameron Bay ’46. Under the photos was a smooth black book, its pages were rippled and raised, as if the book had been dropped in a pool and dried in the sun.
I held the spine in my left hand and pulled the pages back with my thumb. They released in uneven groupings with a stuttering, breathless sound. I saw flashes of untidy handwriting that disregarded the lines, lists, pictures, newspaper articles. I closed it and flipped it over in my hands, ran my thumb over a deep gouge in on the back. When the doorbell rang I dug my nails into the diary and then watched as the little crescent imprints faded. The doorbell rang again and I walked out of the bedroom, down the hallway to the foyer. The figure outside the door was tall, distorted, their form perverted by a pane of glass that twisted shapes like a funhouse mirror. It was a deliveryman. He looked tired, with drooping eyes and skin like sandpaper, reddening in the midday heat. His shirt needed ironing. Behind him, his truck was parked on the curb, the engine still running.
“Hester Harper?” he said. There was a box at his feet, filled with bouquets of flowers. He held a clipboard in his hands. I was still holding the diary.
“Harper?” he said. “Hester Harper?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Right.” He exhaled a long breath and marked something on his clipboard. Then he bent down and pulled out a bouquet, birds of paradise, lilies and orchids, in a glass vase. There was no note.
“These are for you. Have a nice day Miss Harper.”
“Thank you,” I said. “You as well.”
I placed the flowers on the kitchen counter, turning them so the blooms faced the sun. I poured myself another cup of coffee and carried it to the patio door with the diary, the hem of the robe dragging on the floor like a train. Outside, the branches of citrus trees hung with ripened fists of fruit, weaving together a loose canopy that caught the sun and turned it green. Peach-coloured bougainvillea crawled up the walls and California poppies sprouted between the tiles. The sun hit the pool and a breeze rippled the water, making it look like turquoise marble. I sat down at the table where Hester usually took her coffee and rolled up the sleeves of my robe. The diary was nearly full, its pages pushing against the bonds of the cover. I flipped to the back of the book, to a clean page, and began to write.
Originally published in White Wall Review 41 (2017)