Clean Dreams

I was 5 when Lupita started work in our home. Though we lived only an hour from the Mexican border in San Clemente, she was the first Mexican I had ever been physically close to. Every Tuesday, before entering our glaringly new three-bedroom ranch house, Lupita left her black vinyl purse and a paper bag of torpedo-like green chile peppers outside the back door. She carried a transistor radio from room to room; a steady drone of mariachi music accompanied the buzz of the Electrolux. Lupita made her own lunch, roasting her chiles over the gas flame until their skins turned black and blistered off. She stuffed the chiles with cheese, dipped them in egg whites and spun them into a pan of hot oil. I enjoyed this torture of the chiles, and Lupita always brought extra for me, though as I got older I became embarrassed by this. I began to suspect that she might want to eat by herself.

Each week she changed a household of sheets, emptied and washed down the fridge and dusted and vacuumed everything in three bedrooms, two baths, kitchen, unlived-in living room, game room and TV room. She dredged beach sand from the tub and showers. She cleaned under the hamster cage but refused to go near my desert tortoises--she thought they looked like snakes. After finishing our house, Lupita went up the hill to the Medichis’ house, miraculously ridding a four-bedroom home of the mess of kids, dogs, cats and various birds by the time Mr. Medichi returned at 6 p.m. and drove her home. (The fathers were always in charge of transporting Lupita.) On Mondays I saw Lupita at the Dressers, and on Thursdays she cleaned several houses across the canyon. I can only now imagine what Lupita’s body felt at the end of each day. Housecleaning is bad on the knees and back, deadly to the hands. I never saw Lupita use rubber gloves.

A few years ago, I joined the ranks of housecleaners. With my head in a toilet, I’d suddenly retrieve a memory of Lupita, the way she actually washed our hairbrushes. Quoting an extra $15 for a fridge cleaning, I would recall Lupita facing our icebox. Did she really take everything out each week, replacing the bottles with the labels facing the same direction?

She worked for my family for 15 years. By the late ‘70s, when she stopped working for us, she earned $35 or $40 per shift.

*

Lupita adored my brother--a good-looking teenage surfer who was already selling pot by the time I was 10. Bucky, whom Lupita called “Bo-okey,” spoke more Spanish than any of us, a bonus from his dealings south of the border. Lupita enjoyed chitchatting with him. Whenever he was in trouble, she would mutter his name in this curious chant while cleaning his untouched room. “Bo-okey, Bo-okey,” she said, moving each item on the desk as if he would be back the next day to administer the white-glove treatment.

The day before Bucky got married, I discovered that no one had invited Lupita. I was appalled. I called her immediately and, in stumbling Spanish, explained. The next day, I picked her up in my mother’s BMW. It was hot, really hot, and my pantyhose stuck to the leather upholstery. I ditched them before the service. I noticed that Lupita had forsworn pantyhose altogether and that her pale blue dress made her hair look more gray than I had remembered.

In the car, I attempted to make conversation, but by this time the familial stress had put me in a foul mood. Lupita didn’t notice, and was pleasant. “Kat-y,” she said, “Kat-y,” and I didn’t correct her, even though everyone was now calling me Louise (my middle name).

“Kat-y,” Lupita muttered and clutched the most recent incarnation of the black vinyl purse. I suspected a transistor inside.

I cried at the wedding, possibly because I knew the coupling wouldn’t last (it didn’t) but probably because I felt like an alien. Lupita sat with me at the service, in the row behind the immediate family. Later she sat next to me after we filled our plates at the buffet. We both ate sparsely but had no hesitation about taking advantage of the free cocktails. I have problems remembering much of the afternoon. I lost my peach-colored heels and danced with the best man, whom I began to referring to at some point as my old boyfriend. I made it a point of introducing Lupita to the bride’s father and telling him she had been our housecleaner.

*

I decided to visit Lupita some years later. On the phone, I explained that I was writing about housecleaners, and that I myself was now cleaning. Could I come talk with her?

Lupita said only “Kat-y, Kat-y” and put her nephew on the line, who translated, and after some confusion an appointment was made.

Leaving the house I grew up in and the empty streets of my mother’s neighborhood, I drove to the other end of town, where, at 4 in the afternoon, people were dog-walking, baby-strolling and porch-sitting. I stood awhile in front of Lupita’s quiet apartment before I finally knocked. When a gray-haired woman opened the door, I assumed it was her.

“Hola, Lupita!” I said, sounding like some sort of badly accented Hallmark card. I had made the mistake of confusing her with Leticia, her older sister, who looked not at all like Lupita.

Lupita, I was relieved to see, looked a lot like Lupita, though she was much older and worn. The black hair was now entirely gray, and her ample body had shrunk to a loose sack of bones. Her skin was mottled.

“Diabetes,” she said in English, sensing my surprise. She motioned me in and I hugged her as if I were touching a delicate sand dollar. I sat on the floor at her feet.

“Kat-y,” she said, then again, “Kat-y,” frowning when her nephew Miguel explained about my housecleaning. Lupita asked a barrage of questions. Hadn’t I been a good student? Gone to college? Been a teacher?

“Me gusto,” I said, trying to convince her that cleaning was something I liked doing.

“Kat-y, Kat-y.” She shook her head. It was the head shake of a person who had seen more dirt than I have and knew the inside of a toilet bowl wasn’t always pretty.

Lupita insisted that she liked all the families she worked for, yet I tried to dig for dirt anyway. My questions grazed right off, but I did learn that she still worked.

“You cleaned today?” I was incredulous.

That morning, she told me, she had cleaned the Masons’ house, as she had done for 29 years. With a body so tired and broken, I couldn’t imagine her being able to push a vacuum or bend over a tub. There was a swelling in my throat. I shook my head and then caught myself.

I had meant to get personal with Lupita, to bond as two housecleaners. I wanted to talk about yukky jobs and prissy clients and find out secrets about the people in my 1960s squeaky-clean neighborhood. I wanted to hear that my mom was a bitch to work for. But Lupita was not going to clean and tell.

We come from different branches of the housecleaning family, branches that rarely intertwine. Though Lupita and I have certainly performed identical tasks--mopping, scrubbing, refreshing toothpaste-spattered mirrors--our backgrounds color these experiences very differently. I am all too ready to analyze my clients and even write about them (though, strangely enough, they often don’t recognize themselves in print). My cleaning life gives me material for my writing, free afternoons and an often embarrassingly high hourly wage. My clients overpay me so they don’t have to face the contradictions and guilt of hiring someone like Lupita. It is easier to pay a nice, educated white girl than to engage someone who reminds them of how messy the world really is. For Lupita, cleaning was one of the few options open to a single mother in the ‘60s. What else could she have done?

On my way out the door, Lupita urged me toward her kitchen. On the fridge was a picture of a heavyset, dark and somewhat handsome man standing with an over-permed woman and three small kids. The scene was backed by snowy mountains. This was Lupita’s son, now a U.S. sheriff in, of all places, Utah. He speaks perfect English, I was told, and Lupita planned to visit him soon.

*

Several months ago i received a message from home: Lupita had lung cancer. The call came at a time when I was questioning my use of toxic cleaners. I’ve often poured straight bleach onto a nasty shower floor, and though I am somewhat careful about ammonia, there are times when I do more than wince when cleaning fumes reach my never-had-a-cigarette lungs. Like Lupita, I don’t wear rubber gloves: They hamper my style. Did her cancer come from toxic cleaners? Has anybody ever done a study on the health of longtime cleaners or domestics?

I decided to call. Once connected, neither of us could figure out what to say. It was an awkward moment, at best, in any language, and with my hemming and Spanish sputtering, nothing I said made sense. “No comprendo,” she said finally.

“Take precious care, Lupita,” I said, pathetically, in English.

“Adios.” She hung up.

The next morning I was cleaning the large, nearly spotless weekend home of a wealthy doctor. It took me just over an hour, and I charged my minimum: 50 bucks. Nothing seemed fair about anything, especially about Lupita. As I spritzed a perfectly clean counter top at a million-dollar home, an afternoon talk show droned in the background.

By the end of the month, Lupita was dead.