It's Not Easy Getting Clean

I have been waging a passive aggressive battle with the woman who cleans my house.  Pathologically non-confrontational, I cannot seem to communicate my wishes to this woman in a way that alters her behavior.  It is, after all, my house; I should be able to dictate what goes on in it without feeling guilty.  But when this woman is in attendance all I can do is tuck tail and run, leaving behind a hastily-scrawled check for her services.

She came to me about ten years ago.  There was a tumultuous thunderstorm of biblical proportions when suddenly headlights appeared in my driveway followed by an excited knock on the door.  I opened the door and asked her in, as much to offer shelter as anything else.  She explained in broken English that she was looking for an address and was lost.  She had an interview with a woman up the street to clean her house.  Looking around my foyer, she asked if I might need a cleaning service.

As it happened, I had been considering hiring someone.  My kids were reaching an age where they were creating clutter and mess faster than I could clean it.  Their activities (figure skating, hockey) kept them so busy that they were barely able to keep on top of their own messes let alone contribute to helping around the house.  I was becoming tired of schlepping the vacuum and cleaning supplies upstairs and down.  And besides, this poor soaked soul looked like she needed help more than I needed to be scrubbing toilets and floors.  Thus I agreed to pay her to come every other week to lend a hand.

I had only one condition:  she must eradicate the dust.  Dust is my pet peeve.  I cannot stand to see dust; but even more, I cannot stand the dust I cannot see.  Cobwebs inside lamp shades.  Deposits along the baseboards.  Dust on top of cabinets.  Residue on tops of picture frames.  Even if it is high up and out of sight, I will know it is there.  Moreover, I have a dust detector in the form of an allergic nose.  You cannot scam me with a shabby cleaning job.  I showed her where to find my array of dusting gadgets including a puffy brush on a long stick, a feather duster, and a fuzzy hand mitt. 

But she just doesn’t get it.  I reached behind the baker’s rack that stands in my kitchen to pick up a fallen object and found it caked with cobwebs and dusty grime.  I sat down in my sunroom to read a book; when I extended my hand to turn on a lamp I found a matrix of cobwebs inside.  I was most embarrassed at a dinner party when I turned on the chandelier and found it impossibly strung with dust and cobwebs.  Each time she returns I remind her, “Please get the dust!” and walk out, obediently leaving my check behind. 

Then, the weirdest thing started happening.  While her brother—her cleaning partner—was recovering from an illness, she brought along a friend to help her clean.  That is when everything in my house started to move.  Where I had nicely aligned pictures of my kids on a shelf, I came home to find them all turned at 45 degree angles.  Where I had a vignette of art glass and artifacts, they were rearranged in precisely reverse order—left to right now standing right to left.  Even the shampoo bottles on the shelf in the shower were facing backward and reversed.  It did not stop there.  Everything in my house, it seemed, was slightly off from where it had been.  The legs of the coffee table ottoman were all next to—not in--the carpet grooves that defined their place in the middle of the room.  The throw pillows that I had placed just so on the sofas were now in a cluster to one side.  Towels were refolded; they no longer fit the standard drummed into me from years in my mother’s house.

What is this nonsense?  Is there a course in Housecleaning College that instructs the cleaner to move every object, thus proving that it had not been overlooked?  Is this her response to my constant harping about the dusting?  Exasperated, I walked through my home replacing all my decorative objects in their original positions.  Two weeks later, she returned to find everything in its place, but then I returned after her “cleaning” to find everything disturbed. Remarkably, the chandelier is still plagued by cobwebs, the glass display shelves still layered with a dull film of dust.  And thus, the battle of wills continues.

I know I should either take her to task or replace her--I just do not have the heart to terminate her.  I have watched her young son grow from grade school to high school.  I have lived through her surprise pregnancy and birth of her daughter, even allowing her to bring the tiny newborn to my house while she watched her cleaning partner—sometimes her husband, sometimes her brother, sometimes a friend—do the lion’s share of the work.  She and her flaws are as much a part of this family as my husband and my children and all of our collective faults.  In the end, whatever she does manage to accomplish is something I would rather not have done myself.