Pickpocket

A short story from my collection: Underbelly

I can read her name, Regina, in white embroidery floss on her red company-issued smock. Embroidered? What do they do with her smock if she quits or gets fired? Do they tear the embroidery off and start over with Sarah or Hazel or Mabel? Or do they hire another Regina? I imagine a whole back room of racks of red smocks, lined up alphabetically by first name waiting for new employees to slip them on.

“Can I help you?” Regina asks through the round silver slotted mouthpiece without looking up.

I take a deep breath and launch into the rigamarole about the bounced check and the bank and the deposit that didn’t quite make it on time and that I’m here to make good on it and she says, “I’m sorry; I can’t hear you.”

I shout, “I bounced a check.”

Now I’m embarrassed, feeling the disrespect of other shoppers as they turn to stare. I’m waiting for Regina to give me a sign. All the while, I’m thinking, it was an accident, you know. Bad timing. Beat the bank. OK, so not this time. But I’m no criminal. I don’t steal groceries.

Now she’s staring at me like I’m poor white trash. I probably do make quite a sight standing here: I’m still in my work clothes and I’ve got the powdery streaks of silver cleaner down the front of my apple green smock. My hands are clean though, so when I slide the Insufficient Funds notice toward her, she can see I have painted nails. I wear latex gloves when I clean houses, the disposable kind. They fit nice and tight and I always rub a little cream into my hands before I put the gloves on to keep them soft and supple. Hot water and detergents can dry them out.

I want this check thing over with, but the phone inside Regina’s cubicle is ringing. Without even excusing herself, Regina tilts her head to one side and cradles the receiver between her ear and shoulder. I look at my watch, but nothing I do is going to hurry Regina.

I polished Mrs. Moran’s silver this afternoon and I haven’t been home yet. That’s not the kind of cleaning I usually do, but the Morans, they’re good people, they’re like family, so I make an exception. The Morans were the only customers who stuck by me after my situation, but that was awhile ago. I’m over it. I have my own cleaning company now. I earn a decent living with tips and all.

Together, me and my Sal, we do alright. Sal, he’s a hard worker, never finished high school, drives a delivery truck for a water conditioning company, has his own route. We can’t afford fancy vacations and cars, but we own our own place, we have a few bucks in the bank. I guess we’re what you call comfortable. My babies have nice clothes to wear to school. I still call them my babies, but Bobby’s ten and Jill’s thirteen. Poor kids, they went through hell last year when the shit hit the fan.

I worked for South Shore Real Estate back then. Taking care of the beach cottages. Getting them ready for the summer folks. Mr. Landau, the owner, he treated me good. He treated his customers good, too. He believed rentals were the lifeblood of real estate sales. You rented someone a cottage for a week or two in the summer, they fell in love with the beaches, the ambiance, Mr. Landau called it. When the time came for them to buy their own place, Mr. Landau believed they’d remember South Shore and come back to his agency.

Not all the agents in the office shared Mr. Landau’s business philosophy. I could hear some of them talking behind Mr. Landau’s back when they didn’t know I was listening. They hated summer rentals, they hated the summer people. They hated driving them around in their fancy cars to see a dozen cottages, kids tracking beach sand all over the place. Everyone knew the big bucks, the commissions, were in sales. To them, rentals were a waste of time, a pain in the ass. If anyone asked me, I would have said, “These people are keeping you in business. They deserve respect.” No one ever asked.

Summer people would call up at all hours of the day and night every time some little thing went wrong. “Hey, it’s not my problem,” I heard an agent tell a customer one time when she called to complain there were no blankets on the beds. Mr. Landau heard it, too. He called me into his office.

“Vera,” he said, “my little ambassador,” and he sent me out to the cottage with a fruit basket and new blankets to calm the customer.

By the time I got back, the agent’s six-sided photo cube, portable clock, plastic paper clip holder, and silver Lexus were gone. The only things left were a computer terminal and one of those pop-up calendars from Tidewater Savings and Loan. Mr. Landau didn’t give the agent a second chance like he gave me. That’s how Mr. Landau was. He had a big heart, but if you couldn’t keep the customer happy, he had no use for you.

Not all the people we serviced were tourists. Some of them were regulars. They’d bought their cottages years ago from Mr. Landau and they used the places themselves, some were year-rounders. The last things people with money wanted to deal with were scooping gray dust bunnies out from under the bed, scraping gritty toothpaste off the bottom of porcelain sinks, and washing away those little curly hairs from the Italian tile in the shower. These were the customers Mr. Landau saved for me. The regulars, like the Morans, the ones who appreciated my thoroughness. The ones who treated me like family.

Some people, like Regina here, can’t walk down the street and chew bubblegum at the same time. There’s no reason why she can’t fill out the paperwork on me while she’s taking this call, but she’s an A-B-C person. She can’t move onto the B-task until she’s finished A. If you ask me, that’s not very efficient. I know about efficiency. I can load dishes into a dishwasher same time as rinsing them. One smooth movement, that’s what it takes.

I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty either, if you know what I mean. To get down and clean on my hands and knees. I learned technique from my mother. She used to say, “You can’t clean a floor with a mop, Vera. It just pushes the dirt around.” My brothers, sisters, and I, we grew up Italian. Cooking, cleaning, canning—-the three Cs—-were high on my mother’s list. If she wasn’t washing down the walls or hanging laundry, she was standing in front of the stove. She was too short to stand over the stove. I guess I got my height, or lack of it, from her. We didn’t get a lot of personal attention, but we were the cleanest, best fed kids on the block.

I wasn’t afraid to bend over either. “You can’t clean standing up,” I’d tell the other girls Mr. Landau sometimes had assist me towards the end. It didn’t bother me to move furniture either, to get behind the bigger stuff and give rugs and floors a good vacuuming. One day, Dr. Moran, he’s a chiropractor, he came in, saw me moving one of the wicker couches away from a wall.

“Vera,” he yelled. “Don’t lift that alone.” He helped me move the piece and gave me a back brace to wear.

Those were some of the reasons Mr. Landau liked my work. That and the fact that he had gone through three other cleaning women before me. People don’t appreciate the value of hard work anymore. You can’t clean with perfume bottles, jewelry boxes, bowls of potpourri, months of magazines, toasters and canisters in the way. You have to take the stuff out of the way first, set it down nearby. Then you can run your rag over the top of the glass or the wood or whatever, without stopping.

Sometimes when I put stuff back, I’d arrange it like I would if the stuff were mine. Nothing radical, just something new, a new batch of magazines on a coffee table or different pictures on a desk. Stuff like that. Rotation, I call it. That’s when the adrenaline would start pumping. That’s when I’d think, “They wouldn’t mind.” Some customers liked it, some got real uptight and complained to Mr. Landau that they couldn’t find things after I left.