One of the steps AA asks of recovering alcoholics is to make “a searching and fearless moral inventory” of themselves, and now, alone in my motel room, I find myself fairly obsessed with my stuff: how much of it there is and how long it will last. I have my laptop and a suitcase containing T-shirts, jeans, and khakis, three long-sleeved shirts, one pair of shorts, vitamins, and an assortment of toiletries. I have a tote bag stuffed with books, which will, along with the hiking boots I have brought for weekends, turn out to be the most useless items in my inventory. I have $1,000, plus some small bills crumpled in pockets. And now, for an alarming $59 a night, I have a bed, a TV, a phone, and a nearly unobstructed view of Route 25. There are two kinds of low-rent motel rooms in America: the Hampton Inn type, which are clearly calibrated, rather than decorated, to produce an atmosphere of menacing sterility — and the other kind, in which history has been allowed to accumulate in the form of carpet stains, lingering deposits of cigarette smoke, and Cheeto crumbs deep under the bed. This Motel 6 is in the latter category, which makes it homier, you might say, or maybe only more haunted. Walking out from the main entrance, through the VIP Auto Parts parking lot, you reach the Texaco station with a Clipper Mart attached. Crossing the turnpike from the Texaco — a feat that, performed on foot, demands both speed and nerve — brings you to more substantial sources of sustenance, including a Pizza Hut and a Shop-n-Save. I bring pizza and salad back to my room for dinner, telling myself that anything tastes better when acquired at some risk to life and limb, like venison fresh from the hunt.
How many people, other than fugitives and refugees, ever get to do something like this — blow off all past relationships and routines, say bye-bye to those mounds of unanswered mail and voice-mail messages, and start all over again, with not much more than a driver’s license and a Social Security card to provide a thread of continuity to the past? This should be exhilarating, I tell myself, like a dive into the frigid New England Atlantic, followed by a slow, easy swim beyond the surf. But in those first few days in Portland, Maine, the anxieties of my actual social class take over. Educated middle-class professionals never go careening half-cocked into the future, vulnerable to any surprise that might leap out at them. We always have a plan, or at least a to-do list; we like to know that everything has been anticipated, that our lives are, in a sense, pre-lived. So what am I doing here, and in what order should I be doing it? I need a job and an apartment, but to get a job I need an address and a phone number, and to get an apartment it helps to have evidence of stable employment. The only plan I can come up with is to do everything at once and hope that the teenagers at the Motel 6 switchboard can be trusted to serve as my answering machine.
The newspaper I pick up at the Clipper Mart bears the unexpected news that there are no apartments in Portland. Actually, there are plenty of condos and “executive apartments” for $1,000 a month or more, but the only low-rent options seem to be clustered in an area about a thirty-minute drive south, in the soothingly named town of Old Orchard Beach. Even there, though, the rents are well over $500 for an efficiency. A few calls confirm my impression that winter housing for the poor consists of motel rooms that the more affluent fill up in the summer. You get the low rates after Labor Day, and your lease expires in June.
What about a share, then? Glenwood Apartments (not its real name) in Old Orchard Beach is advertising a room at “$65 a week, share bath and kit” with a woman described to me on the phone as “a character, but clean” — and I think, Hey, that could be me, or at least my new best friend. Navigating with my Clipper Mart map, I reach the declining, and evidently orchardless, beach town at about ten and am shown around Glenwood by Earl. He repeats the “character, but clean” part about my potential housemate, adding that they are “giving her a chance.” I ask if she has a job, and, yes, she does cleaning. But I’ll never meet her because the place is so disturbing, to the point of probably being illegal. We go into the basement of this ramshackle combination-motel-and-boardinghouse, where Earl indicates a closed door — the kitchen, he says, but we can’t go in now, because a guy is sleeping there. Earl chuckles, as if people sleeping in kitchens is just another one of the eccentricities you have to put up with in the landlord business. So how do you cook? I want to know. Well, he isn’t in there all the time. The room itself, just down the hall from the “kitchen,” is half the size of my little outpost in Motel 6 and contains two unmade twin beds, a two-drawer chest, a couple of light bulbs on the ceiling, and nothing else. There is no window. Well, there is a window-like structure near the ceiling, but it offers a view only of compacted dirt, such as one might see when looking up from the grave.
I walk back to the main street of town and set up my “office” at the pay phone near the pier, from which I secure invitations to view a few more apartments, forget the shares. At the Sea Breeze, I’m shown around by a large, contemptuous guy who tells me there are no problems here because he’s a retired cop and his son-in-law is a cop, too, and everyone knows this. I can’t tell whether I’m supposed to feel reassured or warned. Another putative plus: he keeps down the number of children in the place, and the ones that he gets don’t make any trouble; you can take his word for that. But the rent is $150 a week, so it’s on to the Biarritz, where a jolly gal shows me the ground-floor efficiency for $110 a week — no TV, no linens, no dishware. What I don’t like is the ground-floor part, right on a well-traveled commercial street, meaning you have a choice between privacy and light. Well, that’s not all I don’t like, but it’s enough. I’m heading back to Portland in defeat when I notice that the Blue Haven Motel on Route 1 has apartments to rent, and the place looks so cute, in an Alpine sort of way, with its rows of tiny white cottages set against deep blue pines, that I stop. For $120 a week I can have a bedroom/living area with a kitchen growing off it, linens included, and a TV that will have cable until the cable company notices that the former occupant is no longer paying the bill. Better yet, the security deposit is only $100, which I produce on the spot.
Given a few days or weeks more to look, maybe I could have done better. But the meter is running at the rate of $59 a day for my digs at the Motel 6. On the afternoon of my third day there, I return to my room to find that the door no longer responds to my key. As it turns out, this is just management’s way of drawing my attention to the fact that more money is due. It’s a bad moment, though, lasting long enough for me to glimpse a future without toothbrush or change of clothes.
Now to find a job. I know from experience to apply for as many as possible, since a help-wanted ad may not mean that any help is wanted just now. Waitressing jobs aren’t plentiful with the tourist season ending. Clerical work is ruled out by wardrobe limitations. I don’t have in my suitcase — or even in my closet back at home — enough office-type outfits to get me through a week. So I call about cleaning (both office and homes), warehouse and nursing-home work, manufacturing, and a position called “general helper,” which sounds friendly and altruistic.
It’s humbling, this business of applying for low-wage jobs, consisting as it does of offering yourself — your energy, your smile, your real or faked lifetime of experience — to a series of people for whom this is just not a very interesting package. At a tortilla factory, where my job would be to load dough balls onto a conveyor belt, the “interview” is completed by a bored secretary without so much as a “Hi, how are you?” I go to Goodwill, which I am curious about since I know from past research it has been positioning itself nationwide as the ideal employer for the postwelfare poor, as well as the handicapped. I fill out the application and am told that the pay is $7 an hour and that someone will get back to me in about two weeks. During the entire transaction, which takes place in a warehouse where perhaps thirty people of both sexes are sorting through bins of used clothing, no one makes eye contact with me. Well, actually one person does. As I search for the exit, I notice a skinny, misshapen fellow standing on one foot with the other tucked behind his knee, staring at me balefully, his hands making swimming motions above his head, either for balance or to ward me off.
Not every place is so nonchalant. At a suburban Wal-Mart that is advertising a “job fair,” I am seated at a table with some balloons attached to it (this is the “fair” part) to wait for Julie. She is flustered when she shows up, after about a ten-minute wait, because, as she explains, she just works on the floor and has never interviewed anyone before. Fortunately for her, the interview consists almost entirely of a four-page “opinion survey,” with “no right or wrong answers,” Julie assures me, just my own personal opinion in ten degrees from “totally agree” to “totally disagree.” There are the usual questions about whether a co-worker observed stealing should be forgiven or denounced, whether management is to blame if things go wrong, and if it’s all right to be late when you have a “good excuse.” The only thing that distinguishes this test is its obsession with marijuana, suggesting that it was authored by a serious stoner struggling to adjust to the corporate way of life. Among the propositions I am asked to opine about are “Some people work better when they’re a little bit high,” “Everyone tries marijuana,” and, bafflingly, “Marijuana is the same as a drink.” Hmm, what kind of drink? I want to ask. “The same” in what way — chemically or morally? Or should I write in something flippant like, “I wouldn’t know because I don’t drink”? The pay is $6.50, Julie tells me, but can shoot up to $7 pretty fast. She thinks I would be great in the ladies’ department, and I tell her I think so, too.
What these tests tell employers about potential employees is hard to imagine, since the “right” answers should be obvious to anyone who has ever encountered the principle of hierarchy and subordination. Do I work well with others? You bet, but never to the point where I would hesitate to inform on them for the slightest infraction. Am I capable of independent decision making? Oh, yes, but I know better than to let this capacity interfere with a slavish obedience to orders. At The Maids, a housecleaning service, I am given something called the “Accutrac personality test,” which warns at the beginning that “Accutrac has multiple measures which detect attempts to distort or ‘psych out’ the questionnaire.” Naturally, I “never” find it hard “to stop moods of self-pity,” nor do I imagine that others are talking about me behind my back or believe that “management and employees will always be in conflict because they have totally different sets of goals.” The real function of these tests, I decide, is to convey information not to the employer but to the potential employee, and the information being conveyed is always: You will have no secrets from us. We don’t just want your muscles and that portion of your brain that is directly connected to them; we want your innermost self.
The main thing I learn from the job-hunting process is that, despite all the help-wanted ads and job fairs, Portland is just another $6-to-$7-an-hour town. This should be as startling to economists as a burst of exotic radiation is to astronomers. If the supply (of labor) is low relative to demand, the price should rise, right? That is the “law.” At one of the maid services I apply at — Merry Maids — my potential boss keeps me for an hour and fifteen minutes, most of which I spend listening to her complain about the difficulty of finding reliable help. It’s easy enough to think of a solution, because she’s offering $200 to $250 a week for an average of forty hours’ work. “Don’t try to put that into dollars per hour,” she warns, seeing my brow furrow as I tackle the not-very-long division. “We don’t calculate it that way.” I do, however, and $5 to $6 an hour for what this woman freely admits is heavy labor with a high risk of repetitive-stress injuries seems guaranteed to repel all mathematically capable job seekers. But I am realizing that one job will never be enough. In the new version of the law of supply and demand, jobs are so cheap — as measured by the pay — that a worker is encouraged to take on as many of them as she possibly can.
After two days of sprinkling job applications throughout the greater Portland area, I force myself to sit in my room at the Motel 6, where I am marooned until the Blue Haven will let me in on Sunday, and wait for the phone to ring. This takes more effort than you might think, because the room is too small for pacing and too dingy for daydreaming, should I have been calm enough to give that a try. Fortunately, the phone rings twice before noon, and — more out of claustrophobia than any serious economic calculation — I accept the first two jobs that are offered. A nursing home wants me on weekends for $7 an hour, starting tomorrow; The Maids is pleased to announce that I “passed” the Accutrac test and can start on Monday at 7:30 a.m. This is the friendliest and best-paying maid service I have encountered — $6.65 an hour, though this will drop to $6 for two weeks as a punishment if I fail to show up for a day.
I don’t understand exactly what maid services do and how they are different from agencies, but Tammy, the office manager at The Maids, assures me that the work will be familiar and easy, since “cleaning is in our blood.” I’m not so sure about the easy part after the warnings I got at Merry Maids, but I figure my back should be able to hold out for a week. We’re supposed to be done at about 3:30 every day, which will leave plenty of time for job hunting on weekday afternoons. I have my eye on a potato-chip factory a ten-minute drive from the Blue Haven, for example, or I can always search out L.L. Bean and fill catalog orders from what I hope will be an ergonomically congenial seat. This is beginning to look like a plan: from maids’ service to something better, with the nursing home tiding me over during the transition. To celebrate, I eat dinner at Applebee’s — a burger and a glass of red wine for $11.95 plus tip, consumed at the bar while involuntarily watching ESPN.
In my interview at The Maids, I was promised a thirty-minute lunch break, but this turns out to be a five-minute pit stop at a convenience store, if that. I bring my own sandwich — the same turkey breast and cheese every day — as do a couple of the others; the rest eat convenience-store fare, or a bagel or doughnut salvaged from our free breakfast, or nothing at all. The two older married women I’m teamed up with eat best — sandwiches and fruit. Among the younger women, lunch consists of a slice of pizza, a “pizza pocket” (a roll of dough surrounding some pizza sauce), or a small bag of chips. Bear in mind we are not office workers, sitting around idling at the basal metabolic rate. A poster on the wall in the office cheerily displays the number of calories burned per minute at our various tasks, ranging from about 3.5 for dusting to 7 for vacuuming. If you assume an average of 5 calories per minute in a seven-hour day (eight hours minus time for travel between houses), you need to be taking in 2,100 calories in addition to the resting minimum of, say, 900 or so. I get pushy with Rosalie, who is new like me and fresh from high school in a rural northern part of the state, about the meagerness of her lunches, which consist solely of Doritos — a half bag from the day before or a freshly purchased small-sized bag. She just didn’t have anything in the house, she says (though she lives with her boyfriend and his mother), and she certainly doesn’t have any money to buy lunch, as I find out when I offer to fetch her a soda from a Quik Mart and she has to admit she doesn’t have eighty-nine cents. I treat her to the soda, wishing I could force her, mommylike, to take milk instead. So how does she hold up for an eight- or even nine-hour day? “Well,” she concedes, “I get dizzy sometimes.”
How poor are they, my co-workers? The fact that someone is working this job at all can be taken as prima facie evidence of some kind of desperation, or at least a history of mistakes and disappointments, but it’s not for me to ask. In the prison movies that provide me with a mental guide to comportment, the new guy doesn’t go around shaking hands and asking, “What are you in for?” So I listen, in the cars and when we’re assembled in the office, and learn, first, that no one seems to be homeless. Almost everyone is embedded in extended families or families artificially extended to include housemates. People talk about visiting grandparents in the hospital or sending birthday cards to a niece’s husband; single mothers live with their own mothers or share apartments with a co-worker or boyfriend. Pauline, the oldest of us, owns her own home, but she sleeps on the living-room sofa while her four grown children and three grandchildren fill up the bedrooms.
But although no one, apparently, is sleeping in a car, there are signs, even at the beginning, of real difficulty if not actual misery. Half-smoked cigarettes are returned to the pack. There are discussions about who will come up with fifty cents for a toll and whether Ted can be counted on for prompt reimbursement. One of my teammates gets frantic about a painfully impacted wisdom tooth and keeps making calls from our houses to try to locate a source of free dental care. When my team discovers there is not a single Dobie cleaning pad in our buckets, I suggest that we stop at a convenience store and buy one rather than drive all the way back to the office. But it turns out I haven’t brought any money with me, and we cannot put together $2 between the four of us.
The Friday of my first week at The Maids is unnaturally hot for Maine in early September — 95 degrees, according to the digital time-and-temperature displays offered by banks that we pass. I’m teamed up with the sad-faced Rosalie and our leader, Maddy, a single mom of maybe twenty-seven or so who has worked for only three months and broods about her child-care problems. Her boyfriend’s sister, she tells me on the drive to our first house, watches her eighteen-month-old for $50 a week, which is a stretch on The Maids’ pay, plus she doesn’t entirely trust the sister, but a real day-care center could be as much as $90 a week. After polishing off the first house, no problem, we grab “lunch” — Doritos for Rosalie and a bag of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish for Maddy — and head out into the exurbs for what our instruction sheet warns is a five-bathroom spread and a first-timer, to boot. Still, the size of the place makes us pause for a moment, buckets in hand, before searching out an appropriately humble entrance. The house sits there like a beached ocean liner, the prow cutting through swells of green turf, windows without number. “Well, well,” Maddy says, reading the owner’s name from our instruction sheet, “Mrs. W. and her big-ass house. I hope she’s going to give us lunch.”
Mrs. W. is not, in fact, happy to see us, but grimaces with exasperation when the black nanny ushers us into the family room or sunroom or den or whatever kind of specialized space she is sitting in. After all, she already has the nanny, a cooklike person, and a crew of men doing some sort of finishing touches on the construction to supervise. No, she doesn’t want to take us around the house, because she already explained everything to the office on the phone, but Maddy stands there, with Rosalie and me behind her, until she relents. We are to move everything on all surfaces, she instructs during the tour, and get underneath and be sure to do every bit of the several miles, I calculate, of baseboards. And be mindful of the baby, who’s napping and can’t have cleaning fluids of any kind near her.
Then I am let loose to dust. In a situation like this, where I don’t even know how to name the various kinds of rooms, The Maids’ special system turns out to be a lifesaver. All I have to do is keep moving from left to right, within rooms and between rooms, trying to identify landmarks so I don’t accidentally do a room or a hallway twice. Dusters get the most complete biographical overview, due to the necessity of lifting each object and tchotchke individually, and I learn that Mrs. W. is an alumna of an important women’s college, now occupying herself by monitoring her investments and the baby’s bowel movements. I find special charts for this latter purpose, with spaces for time of day, most recent fluid intake, consistency, and color. In the master bedroom, I dust a whole shelf of books on pregnancy, breast-feeding, the first six months, the first year, the first two years — and I wonder what the child-care-deprived Maddy makes of all this. Maybe there’s been some secret division of the world’s women into breeders and drones, and those at the maid level are no longer supposed to be reproducing at all. Maybe this is why our office manager, Tammy, who was once a maid herself, wears inch-long fake nails and tarty little outfits — to show she’s advanced to the breeder caste and can’t be sent out to clean anymore.
It is hotter inside than out, un-air-conditioned for the benefit of baby, I suppose, but I do all right until I encounter the banks of glass doors that line the side and back of the ground floor. Each one has to be Windexed, wiped, and buffed — inside and out, top to bottom, left to right, until it’s as streakless and invisible as a material substance can be. Outside, I can see the construction guys knocking back Gatorade, but the rule is that no fluid or food item can touch a maid’s lips when she’s inside a house.
Now, sweat, even in unseemly quantities, is nothing new to me. I live in a subtropical area where even the inactive can expect to be moist nine months out of the year. I work out, too, in my normal life, and take a certain macho pride in the Vs of sweat that form on my T-shirt after ten minutes or more on the StairMaster. But in normal life fluids lost are immediately replaced. Everyone in yuppie-land — airports, for example — looks like a nursing baby these days, inseparable from their plastic bottles of water. Here, however, I sweat without replacement or pause, not in individual drops but in continuous sheets of fluid soaking through my polo shirt, pouring down the backs of my legs. The eyeliner I put on in the morning — vain twit that I am — has long since streaked down onto my cheeks, and I could wring out my braid if I wanted to. Working my way through the living room(s), I wonder if Mrs. W. will ever have occasion to realize that every single doodad and objet through which she expresses her unique, individual self is, from another vantage point, only an obstacle between some thirsty person and a glass of water.
When I can find no more surfaces to wipe and have finally exhausted the supply of rooms, Maddy assigns me to do the kitchen floor. OK, except that Mrs. W. is in the kitchen, so I have to go down on my hands and knees practically at her feet. No, we don’t have sponge mops like the one I use in my own house; the hands-and-knees approach is a definite selling point for corporate cleaning services like The Maids. “We clean floors the old-fashioned way — on our hands and knees” (emphasis added), the brochure for a competing firm boasts. In fact, though, whatever advantages there may be to the hands-and-knees approach — you’re closer to your work, of course, and less likely to miss a grimy patch — are undermined by the artificial drought imposed by The Maids’ cleaning system. We are instructed to use less than half a small bucket of lukewarm water for a kitchen and all adjacent scrubbable floors (breakfast nooks and other dining areas), meaning that within a few minutes we are doing nothing more than redistributing the dirt evenly around the floor. There are occasional customer complaints about the cleanliness of our floors — for example, from a man who wiped up a spill on his freshly “cleaned” floor only to find the paper towel he employed for this purpose had turned gray. A mop and a full bucket of hot, soapy water would not only get a floor cleaner but would be a lot more dignified for the person who does the cleaning. But it is this primal posture of submission — and of what is ultimately anal accessibility — that seems to gratify the consumers of maid services.
Mrs. W.’s floor is hard — stone, I think, or at least a stonelike substance — and we have no kneepads with us today. I had thought, in my middle-class innocence, that kneepads were one of Monica Lewinsky’s prurient fantasies, but no, they actually exist, and they’re usually a standard part of our equipment. So here I am on my knees, working my way around the room like some fanatical penitent crawling through the Stations of the Cross, when I realize that Mrs. W. is staring at me fixedly — so fixedly that I am gripped for a moment by the wild possibility that I might have once given a lecture at her alma mater and she’s trying to figure out where she’s seen me before. If I were recognized, would I be fired? Would she at least be inspired to offer me a drink of water? Because I have decided that if water is actually offered, I’m taking it, rules or no rules, and if word of this infraction gets back to Ted, I’ll just say I thought it would be rude to refuse. Not to worry, though. She’s just watching that I don’t leave out some stray square inch, and when I rise painfully to my feet again, blinking through the sweat, she says, “Could you just scrub the floor in the entryway while you’re at it?”
I rush home to the Blue Haven at the end of the day, pull down the blinds for privacy, strip off my uniform in the kitchen — the bathroom being too small for both a person and her discarded clothes — and stand in the shower for a good ten minutes, thinking, All this water is mine. I have paid for it. In fact, I have earned it. I have gotten through a week at The Maids without mishap, injury, or insurrection. My back feels fine, meaning I’m not feeling it at all; even my wrists, damaged by carpal tunnel syndrome years ago, are issuing no complaints. Co-workers warned me that the first time they donned the backpack vacuum they felt faint, but not me. I am strong, and, more than that, I am good. Did I toss my bucket of filthy water onto Mrs. W.’s casual white summer outfit? No. Did I take the wand of my vacuum cleaner and smash someone’s Chinese porcelain statues or Hummel figurines? Not once. I was at all times cheerful, energetic, helpful, and as competent as a new hire can be expected to be. If I can do one week, I can do another, and might as well, since there’s never been a moment for job hunting. The 3:30 quitting time turned out to be a myth; often we don’t return to the office until 4:30 or 5:00. And what did I think? That I was going to go out to interviews in my soaked and stinky postwork condition? I decide to reward myself with a sunset walk on Old Orchard Beach.
On account of the heat, there are still a few actual bathers on the beach, but I am content to sit in shorts and T-shirt and watch the ocean pummel the sand. When the sun goes down, I walk back into town to find my car and am amazed to hear a sound I associate with cities like New York and Berlin. There are a couple of Peruvian musicians playing in the little grassy island in the street near the pier, and maybe fifty people — locals and vacationers — have gathered around, offering their bland end-of-summer faces to the sound. I edge my way through the crowd and find a seat where I can see the musicians up close — the beautiful young guitarist and the taller man playing the flute. What are they doing in this rinky-dink blue-collar resort, and what does the audience make of this surprise visit from the dark-skinned South? The melody the flute lays out over the percussion is both utterly strange and completely familiar, as if it had been imprinted in the minds of my own peasant ancestors centuries ago and forgotten until this very moment. Everyone else seems to be as transfixed as I am. The musicians wink and smile at each other as they play, and I see then that they are the secret emissaries of a worldwide lower-class conspiracy to snatch joy out of degradation and filth. When the song ends, I give them a dollar, the equivalent of about ten minutes of sweat.
Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich took low-wage jobs to find out how the working poor manage — or don’t manage — to make ends meet. “Cleaned Out” is an excerpt from Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. ©2001 by Barbara Ehrenreich. It is reprinted here by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
