Relating to Chapter 3: Scanning, Skimming, Skipping
Below is the complete essay referenced in this chapter.
Imagining Cleaners’ Work, and Cleaners’ Lives
If you’re looking to enter imaginatively into the life of someone who works as a cleaner or as a house-servant, what do you focus on? Their social status? Their economic circumstances? The physical reality of their daily life? Their emotions and their personal life?
To even contemplate such questions is to have come a long way from the world of a Jane Austen novel, where the very existence of servants is barely acknowledged, and where those whose existence is touched on usually remain nameless; that’s the starting point of Jo Baker’s marvelous 2013 novel Longbourn, which goes over much of the same ground as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice but is told from the point of view of Sarah, the Bennet’s housemaid. Extraordinarily engaging and often quite moving, Longbourn is utterly persuasive in its presentation of the realities of a life largely spent in cleaning other people’s dishes and other people’s clothes—the intellectual and emotional realities of such a life quite as much as the physical and economic ones.
A more recent example, Nita Prose’s The Maid, sets its sights much lower. The protagonist, Molly, is a good-hearted, enormously conscientious, neurodivergent employee of the luxurious Regency Hotel. Molly inadvertently becomes deeply involved with a criminal network operating within the hotel, and is herself accused of a murder. The story line works well enough, and Molly is an engaging character; in short, it’s a breezy read of a murder mystery.
As a former cleaner myself, though (albeit for only a brief time), I couldn’t help but feel The Maid to be rather disappointing as a portrayal of this sort of working life. There is a good deal of description of the sorts of work that Molly and her fellow workers do, but almost nothing about the toll such work inevitably takes on the human body.
In reading of Sarah’s life at Longbourn, one is frequently told of such things as “the calluses on her hands, or the swellings that pained her legs”; in reading of Molly’s life in The Maid, we get little or no physical detail of that sort. We are reminded again and again of Molly’s determination to return each hotel room “to a state of perfection,” but told little of the physical toll that must take. Nor, it seems to me, are the economic realities confronted as they deserve to be. Prose effectively conveys the financial hardship Molly suffers after her grandmother (a cleaner of houses, who Molly has shared an apartment with) dies, leaving Molly both grieving and falling behind on the rent. But Prose never connects the dots in any way that might suggest a systemic or collective problem rather than an individual financial predicament.
A much more vivid portrayal of the physical stresses and strains of life as a cleaner can be found in the 4,000 words of Sherman Alexie’s* superb short story “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest” (originally published in the 29 May 2017 issue of The New Yorker), the story of Marie, who works for decades as part of the housekeeping staff at a motel. Here is part of the description of what the work does to Marie physically:
Marie’s knees and ankles hurt because she had so often squatted and kneeled to clean the floors.
Her feet hurt because she stood for most of the day. And she’d never owned a good pair of work shoes. She’d always promised herself that she would buy a better pair of shoes with the next paycheck.
But “with the next paycheck” was like saying “Dear Big Bang.”
Her lower back hurt because of all the times she had carried the vacuum and heavy bags of clean and dirty towels, and had thrown garbage and recycling and compost into the dumpsters in the alley behind the motel.
One day, she’d twisted her back so severely that she’d collapsed in pain on the sidewalk. At the free clinic, she learned that “back spasms” was the fancy way to say “torn muscles.” Once or twice a year since then, she’d torn her back again. But she’d missed only a few days of work because of her bad back. She’d spend one day in bed, recovering, and then she’d force herself back to cleaning, because she’d read that an injured back heals best during activity.…
Her hands hurt. Arthritis. Carpal-tunnel syndrome. And the recurring rashes caused by the soaps and disinfectants and window cleaners. Her skin itched and burned. She tried wearing gloves at work, but that only made her rashes migrate from her hands to her wrists, forearms, and elbows. Some mornings, she woke with hands so stiff that she could not make fists. She could not hold her coffee cup or toothbrush. She’d submerge her hands in hot water and flex and flex and flex until her fingers worked properly again.
“It’s hard work,” she’d said to Father James. “But it’s not like working in a coal mine.”
“Maybe it is,” he’d said.
Alexie’s story is clear-eyed too about the broader reality of a cleaner’s working life: low pay, poor working conditions, and lack of government protection. In “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest” there is no $10,000 windfall for Marie; her gift on her last day of work is that she is paid for a full day while being asked to clean only a single room. Then, her retirement send-off:
The owner gave Marie her last paycheck in cash. Two weeks’ worth of money. Six hundred dollars.
Then she got into her car. It started on the fourth try.
She drove home to her husband. He was sitting on their couch watching the midday news. He’d retired from his job at the hardware store a few months earlier.
With Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare and good luck, Marie and her husband would survive.
There’s only so much you can say in a 4,000-word story to say much of the collective issues relating to the sort of work that Alexie describes—the urgent need for better wages and benefits for all workers in such jobs—though something of their importance can I think be inferred from a careful reading of “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest.” As Tony Keller pointed out in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, the reality today is that those “with the least bargaining power—in low-education and low-wage jobs, with limited benefits or job security—tend to have the fewest protections. If anyone needs some old-fashioned union representation, it’s them.”
It is of course extraordinarily difficult for such workers to unionize, not least of all because unpleasant, low-paying jobs will almost inevitably have an extremely high turnover rate. (That’s another reality that is brought home vividly to readers of “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest.”) But a high turnover rate is not the only obstacle; in many jurisdictions, governments have since the 1980s made it far more difficult for workers to act collectively.
There are many reasons, then, why we should sympathize with those who work as cleaners, and why we should support those who are working to get them a fairer deal from their employers, and also from government. Imaginative fiction can help give us a real sense of what such workers’ lives are like, and of what’s needed to make them better (as Alexie’s story does). But—as Nina Prose’s The Maid demonstrates—writers of imaginative fiction can also choose to shy away from the unpleasantness and hardship of such work, and offer readers a false but heartwarming image of a world in which everything is more-or-less fine as-is.
*Anyone nowadays who praises any aspect of the work of Sherman Alexie has to accept that some readers may respond with surprise and with disapproval. Given that background, I should make clear that praising “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest” as an extraordinarily accomplished and richly evocative work of fiction should in no way be construed as a defense of its author against the series of accusations of sexual harassment that surfaced in 2018—any more than praising Le Morte Darthur should be construed as a defense of Sir Thomas Malory against accusations of rape, or than praising Four Quartets should be construed as a defense of T.S. Eliot against charges of misogyny and antisemitism.