Maid In America

When I go in, the sink is bursting with unwashed dishes coated with moldy leftover scraps, half-filled glasses, cups that balance precariously on the counter rim, ripped open TV dinner boxes thrown on top; there isn’t room for me to set aside the cleaned dishes. The washing skills I’ve practiced back home come to good use.

“It’s real simple,” Lisa said, on my first day. “Just Windex the windows, Lysol the kitchen floor, Clorox the towels, you know, and then, Mr. Clean the toilet bowls, there’s also upstairs…”

This is not the country of brooms and pans, coconut brushes, or Pledge oil my mother used to shine our armoires. This is new territory. I’m learning that Americans can make verbs out of proper names. There are specific products with different colors for a given task.

Upstairs is a big room filled with a jumble of chairs and stools, various artwork framed in all shapes and sizes, boxes of clocks, oversized clothing, a jagged landscape of abandoned animals. I wipe bodies of deserted things with a cloth, rinse it with warm water, repeat. In the end, they still look the same. Forlorn and unclean.

Downstairs, Lisa pulls out a blue ice pop from the freezer while I have my arms soaked in a bubble bath of Palmolive detergent. I’m scrubbing a week-old worth of stuck grilled onions on dinner plates.

“Want one?” she says.

I shake my head with a smile, resist the temptation to ask why it’s blue, if it tastes like Windex in her throat, what she’d call that shade of blue.

“Where’re you from again?” she asks.

At this point in my life, I’m reluctant to speak English because I know I have a weird accent. When I tell her where I am from, her eyes grow big. I can see her mind goes in loops. “Oh, is that in Malaysia or Australia?”

I hate to disappoint her. She’s a nice lady in her thirties, long blond hair, freckles on her cheek that remind me of a cheetah. There’s a boyfriend with Oreo crumbs stuck on his T-shirt that lurks around sometimes. She doesn’t make me vacuum her bedroom. I’ve never seen her bedroom. She pays me $20 every Friday, enough to buy a nice stack of letter paper decorated with music notes and red violets to write to my parents back in Madagascar, a T-shirt with the Golden Gate Bridge, and I still have extra dollar bills saved in a Danish cookie tin. 

I explain that it’s a big island in the Indian Ocean. She says, “Oh right!” like she got it. I know. I’m confusing. I’m a dark Asian girl who speaks with a melange of accents Americans can’t put their finger on.

She sits back on her couch, licking her frozen blue ice, her eyes fixated on the screen where there’s a couple who’s yelling profanities at each other. Fuck you, go fuck yourself, piece of shit, cunt. I love saying American curse words when I’m alone in my dorm room. They don’t mean anything to me, but they are sharp, decisive bursts of sounds I imagine screaming from the open top of a Chevy on a deserted road, hair whipping air, like in the movies.