One Halloween I dressed as a cleaning lady. I wore an apron, tied my hair in a babushka type kerchief and carried a bucket full of cleaning supplies. It wasn’t a great costume, but since it was thrown together about 2 minutes before we went trick or treating, it wasn’t bad, either. At one door the lady asked me if I was for hire! “Sure,” I said, and thus landed a job, not housecleaning but raking leaves.
Inspired, I went to the A&P, to Certified and other places with bulletin boards and put up a little notice saying that “Nora” was available for housecleaning. My family didn’t seem too worried when I told them calls might be arriving for Nora and it didn’t take long before I was cleaning an apartment a couple blocks away. There I got a first-hand look at how other people lived, which I found sort of disgusting, especially after I found the pile of smutty magazines while cleaning under the bed. I wondered if they just didn’t expect that region to be cleaned. Vacuuming barefoot one day, I caught my toe in the beaters of the vacuum cleaner, which led to the most excruciating pain of my entire life. After I screamed all night, my father took me to the emergency room (in a cab since he didn’t drive), where they took an x-ray, interrogated me on exactly what model the vacuum cleaner had been (??!!), and sent me home with codeine, which did precisely nothing. In the morning my mother called the pediatrician, who shook his head over the incompetence of modern medical training. He lit a little wad of cotton on fire in a metal tray, heated up the end of an unbent paperclip, and melted a tiny hole in my toenail. A small geyser of blood erupted, bringing instant relief. I’ve not yet had a call to use this hard-earned knowledge elsewhere, but am at the ready to provide anyone with that instant relief.
I had several other kinds of jobs in between, but when I went off to college in Boston, I saw an ad on the college job board for housecleaning. The requester turned out to be an ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman with six children and she liked my work enough to recommend me. Soon the Lubavitcher women of Brookline were passing me around as needed. I was an awesome cleaner and, after a while they even trusted me in their kitchens with the separate sinks and multiple sets of dishes. I learned a lot about keeping kosher. Once, when I made a mistake with a spoon, Mrs. H. told me “don’t worry, we’ll just bury it in the yard.” I don’t remember how long it had to stay buried until it could re-emerge for use. My favorite family usually set a plate out for me to eat with them, so I learned a lot about central European cooking as well. To this day I cook that family’s soups and other delicacies. When hoardes of relatives came up from New York for Bar Mitzvahs or other events, I occasionally served as a Shabbos goy. In addition to helping out, I could perform forbidden tasks such as ripping off a twisty to tie a garbage bag or turning on a light.
You just don’t know where anything will lead you. But I wish someone would pay me by the hour to clean my own house.
Wonderful story, I worked as a cook housekeeper on a shooting estate for almost forty years. Cooking and cleaning for up to 24 people. When we retired I got the smallest house I could and purchased a pair of spectacles which do not recognise dust! I believe it was Quentin Arips who pronounced that dust not disturbed for 20 days would grow no worse, I agree.
