Housekeeper Wanted
In need of a housekeeper to do cleaning, cooking and maybe at a later date when you have accepted position and can't get out of it,caring for animals that include feeding, bathing, cleaning up immense amounts of feces followed by a dabble into working in my office where I will send you to open the door 30 times a day, light filing in no sensical order and replacing my daughter as the shylock when I go to collect payments from my clients.
Any skills are a deterrent to taking position especially any skills at cleaning, cooking or anything mentioned above.
English speakers need not apply.
I should state that growing up we were not wealthy by any means. But my mom left Cuba where she was accustomed to having not only a cleaning staff but each of my siblings had their own manejadora or nanny and I feel that in Miami you could always be guaranteed to find some recently arrived immigrant who needed work no matter how crazy it would seem. You could say that my mom is almost a human drama detector when it came to picking the help. But it wasn't always that way.
The first maid I remember was Sandra. I remember her well because my mother said that I killed her. Not just me personally but my seven brothers and sister helped. What I recall is that Sandra was a nice, soft spoken, and competent woman. The problem was that Sandra was all of those things. Can you imagine trying to clean a house with at least eight people under the age of eighteen messing up everything you did almost immediately? Not to mention the array of animals we had around. There were the two German shepards, the multiple crippled sea gulls (all named Bert) with broken wings that walked freely through my brother's room crapping up the floor, there were rabbits and even a chimpanzee. Yes, as in monkey but it wore diapers and a dress and it sat across from me eating breakfast so that wasn't crazy. We helped push her closer to the Savior when we took her boating with us.
Let me set the scene: Twenty foot boat, about twelve people on the boat, and high seas causing water to pour in leaving a little over two inches of water on the floor. Did I mention Sandra couldn't swim? Why she agreed to go is still a mystery but I never knew a rosary could take five hours to say. Or maybe she just kept praying until we hit dry land again. Yes, Sandra had a massive coronary later on in life but my mother swears it was us and from what my kid's mind recalls about the whole thing leaves me with little to argue against.
Later, when we became upper lower class (or lower middle class) we moved into a cookie cutter neighborhood and that is where Clara came to work for us. I really have fond memories of her. She had dark caramel skin that was always smooth and lotioned. Except for her hands which were rough as sandpaper from hard labor. I thought she must have been beautiful when she was young. At first, she wore a white maids uniform, not because we demanded it but because she worked for another woman in the neighborhood who had even more antiquated beliefs then my mother. I remember my horror when we were driving home one day and I saw Clara walking towards our home carrying a pile of my clothes on top of her head. Teetering on the tippy top were all of my delicates flapping in the wind for all to see. Clara didn't seem at all concerned. She was just walking and singing a hymn which you could always catch her doing throughout the day. She sang a lot and loud. The only time she wasn't singing was when she was busy burning our kitchen down, crying, or falling onto her knees and raising her hands up in the air praising God. It would usually go as follows:
Clara starts a fire in the kitchen, supposedly by accident.
There would be tension filled minutes trying to rescue the miriad of animals from the house which now consisted of dogs, parrots and macaws. When the last soot covered animal would be pulled out of the house a crying Clara would drop to the floor and praise God.
She didn't save her praising for burning the house alone; if you lost your shirt and found it, she would kneel and pray. If you couldn't find your keys and found them, kneel and pray. If a dog got loose and I went outside and called him home, kneel and pray. I think you get the idea. In my opinion, I am all for praying but thought she had the order all wrong. I was hoping she might pray before burning the kitchen down because the insurance adjuster was starting to doubt that one person could be so forgetful. She was great at telling stories. When I came home one day she told me that my dog Duke was weak. When I asked her to explain she dropped to the floor and began to drag her legs behind her. I laughed so hard that I told her I didn't see what she was doing and asked her to do it again which she did. We both were laughing hard after that. She would act out conversations, animal activity, sounds in the house. She was better than cable. I miss her.
But with all that, Clara made me sure of two things growing up. I didn't want anyone cleaning my stuff but me and when I grew up, I wouldn't let anyone but me near my stove. If my mother's life was made easier by the maids, I didn't see it but we kept Clara until her children finally let her retire. And if you can believe it, these two were the good maids.
There were so many maids after Clara that I didn't even bother learning their names. I called them "Not the Clara" or "Clara" for short. You might think this rude but if you ever saw Murphy Brown and her slew of temporary assistants you would know that after awhile you just have to survive. My mother said "your fired!" more frequently than Donald Trump on The Apprentice. The show may have even been inspired by her.
My top pics in no specific order were: Blind Clara, Clara and child, Filing Clara, and Fainting Clara to name just a few.
I first met Blind Clara when I walked in the door from school to find my mother busy at work in the kitchen where she was making dinner and serving coffee to a woman who had glasses so thick I thought she had strapped on binoculars to her face. My mother, drenched in sweat, said, "Sylvia, I would like you to meet Blind Clara (or whatever her name was) our new maid. She has a heart condition and can't walk very far because her legs get swollen." I thought it was a joke at first because the woman was breathing heavily by simply lifting her cup to her lips. I thought it prudent to dial 911 but, sure enough, she was hired as soon as she was released from the hospital. Nothing got cleaned, cooked or fed during her tenure except my room and clothes which I did myself.
Clara with child was just a Clara at first who like all the Clara's lived in a room in our home. She did cook but unfortunately it was big pots of stew for the dogs. The food for the humans tasted like dog food. After about a week, she told my mother she had a daughter who needed to live in the house too. So, a random Spanish speaking girl came to live in the house. When I would come home from school at night I would find Clara with her child in my living room watching telenovelas at the loudest decibel possible. I would grab a bowl of cereal and go to my room to finish homework. Clara's daughter had a great time in our home. She learned English from the countless hours in front of the living room tv watching cartoons, she swam in the pool and enjoyed every outing with me and my mom. Her mom did too most days which left little time for the whole housecleaning gig. One day they were there and the next they were gone. As usual my mother would give an excuse that they wronged her, stole from her, or some other injustice but I thought that in reality she had a moment of lucidity realizing that these women were not right from the start.
Filing Clara, like most of the others, was taken to work at my mom's accounting office after a few weeks. Either they were useless at home or my mom just wanted to see what they could screw up at the office I don't know but this was the usual progression before being fired. I would work in my mom's office every day after school running errands, doing taxes, translating affidavits, collecting money from stubborn clients. One day my mom asked me to look for a file of a client of hers by the name of (for this purpose let's call him) John Smith. I looked through all the "S" and then the "J" with no file found. I turned the office upside down. Finally, I asked Filing Clara if she knew where this file could be. She looked at me like I was an idiot and said, "It's in the 'C' of course." Trying to keep my cool after spending the last two hours in hell, I asked her, "Why 'C'?"
"Because he is a come mierda or crap eater (nice version)," she said. And so began the un-filing of Filing Clara's mess. I had to sit her down and ask about each client. Some were in the "n" because they were nice, some were "f" for fat, some were in "a" because they ate the last pastelito. It was insane. And as soon as the file cabinet was sorted so was Filing Clara.
One of my favorites was Fainting Clara. I was away at college and came home to find her in my mom's employment. Also at this time my sister had dumped her Siberian husky in my mom's house to live out her days like all the other dogs in the house; barking, lying on the furniture, crapping and pissing indoors, but this dog also had the delightful habit of sprinting out the door at full speed and never looking back if you but opened the door a crack. At least once a day I would hear a loud scream which signaled the dog's escape. I and/or my mother and fainting Clara would have to get in the car and chase down the dog which would not stop for anything but would slow down a bit for her puppy. You had to drive ahead of her and throw someone out of the car while holding her puppy as bait, just close enough to be able to tackle her. This is where I first found out about Fainting Clara's special gift. When she would get overly excited she would faint. And so it went that I drove in front of the dog and Clara jumped out holding the puppy. In the side mirror I see her hold puppy in the air, and suddenly drop to the ground where now the puppy and mother were loose. I turned to my mother who had an expression of exasperation on her face like, "Oh brother, not this again." We both got out of the car and I went to go see what was wrong with Clara but my mom was just collecting the puppy and getting back into the passengers seat. Sure enough Fainting Clara just got up and dusted herself off and got back in the car where we went off to catch up to the dog again. Just like this was an everyday, no big deal, occurrence.
I wanted to tell Fainting Clara that she picked the wrong house to work in because if there wasn't major drama in the house at any given moment it would mean that we had moved out or were all abducted by aliens. That woman fainted in every corner of that house. And I must confess that the head of the drama department in my home was and will always be my mother. She would fake a fainting spell in order to get her way ever since I was in diapers. So one day when I was headed out the door my mother stood in the hallway and began her act. "Oh, Clara, get ready to catch me I'm going to faint." My mother would then delicately slide down the wall, so as not to hurt herself and play possum. At this point I stepped over my mother to grab my purse and noticed Clara was about to pass out for real and I thought I would revive my mother the only way I knew how -through her wallet. "Oh well, I guess I will call the ambulance now which will charge my mom $200 to come out here but I guess she is worth it." Miraculously my mother awoke and stood up, saving Clara from a real fainting spell.
I often wonder where all these women are and how they recall their time in my mom's employ. None lasted very long except the only maid that wasn't a Clara or a maid. She was and is an Olga. The first time I met Olga she was teetering outside of the second story window of my house. I went in and found my mom drinking her coffee in the backyard watching Olga. "What is she doing?" I asked. "Cleaning the windows," was all my mom said. "She could fall and die. Didn't you tell her she could just clean them from the inside of the house?" I asked. "No, I wanted to see what else she could do," was what my mom replied. Olga looked like a character out of A Streetcar named Desire. Not Blanche Dubois but Stanley Kowalski. She was always in a wife beater and jeans with the button undone. She also never wore a bra and had skin like leather. But she was a workhorse in the yard and what she lacked in education she made up for in determination. She talked at a low scream, chain smoked and drank beer like it was water.When it was Olga's turn to go to the office my mom put her in a silk blouse and bra and forced her to button her pants. Watching Olga tug at her clothes reminded me of putting rain boots on a dog. She couldn't go two steps without shaking or pulling at herself. Olga has been in and out of my mom's employment for at least 25 years. Now she lives in my mom's home,helps pay the bills, accompanies her to the office and the two of them bicker like the loud, old Cubans they are. They couldn't be more different. The hispanic odd couple,and yet, Olga is sometimes the only human my mother is in contact with. I suppose that in her search for the maids she fell upon this ..friendship of sorts, and now when I call my mom I have to put up with Olga screaming commentary in the background, drowning out my mother, the dogs barking and the birds chirping. I don't know how this story ends. The two of them are old and Olga has been living on borrowed time as it is but all of these women, whether they wanted to or not, are part of the fabric that makes up my story. If I were to be a psychologist I think that my mother wanted to be the savior for all of these women. To take in and employ the unemployable so she could fill a void in her life. The problem was she never had the follow through to save them. She would eventually tire of them. She just wanted someone to say how great and wonderful she was for all she did for them. In the end, she got Olga which may not be a bad deal.
I got crazy memories and an irrational fear of kitchen fires. I think it was all a win-win.
The first maid I remember was Sandra. I remember her well because my mother said that I killed her. Not just me personally but my seven brothers and sister helped. What I recall is that Sandra was a nice, soft spoken, and competent woman. The problem was that Sandra was all of those things. Can you imagine trying to clean a house with at least eight people under the age of eighteen messing up everything you did almost immediately? Not to mention the array of animals we had around. There were the two German shepards, the multiple crippled sea gulls (all named Bert) with broken wings that walked freely through my brother's room crapping up the floor, there were rabbits and even a chimpanzee. Yes, as in monkey but it wore diapers and a dress and it sat across from me eating breakfast so that wasn't crazy. We helped push her closer to the Savior when we took her boating with us.
Let me set the scene: Twenty foot boat, about twelve people on the boat, and high seas causing water to pour in leaving a little over two inches of water on the floor. Did I mention Sandra couldn't swim? Why she agreed to go is still a mystery but I never knew a rosary could take five hours to say. Or maybe she just kept praying until we hit dry land again. Yes, Sandra had a massive coronary later on in life but my mother swears it was us and from what my kid's mind recalls about the whole thing leaves me with little to argue against.
Later, when we became upper lower class (or lower middle class) we moved into a cookie cutter neighborhood and that is where Clara came to work for us. I really have fond memories of her. She had dark caramel skin that was always smooth and lotioned. Except for her hands which were rough as sandpaper from hard labor. I thought she must have been beautiful when she was young. At first, she wore a white maids uniform, not because we demanded it but because she worked for another woman in the neighborhood who had even more antiquated beliefs then my mother. I remember my horror when we were driving home one day and I saw Clara walking towards our home carrying a pile of my clothes on top of her head. Teetering on the tippy top were all of my delicates flapping in the wind for all to see. Clara didn't seem at all concerned. She was just walking and singing a hymn which you could always catch her doing throughout the day. She sang a lot and loud. The only time she wasn't singing was when she was busy burning our kitchen down, crying, or falling onto her knees and raising her hands up in the air praising God. It would usually go as follows:
Clara starts a fire in the kitchen, supposedly by accident.
There would be tension filled minutes trying to rescue the miriad of animals from the house which now consisted of dogs, parrots and macaws. When the last soot covered animal would be pulled out of the house a crying Clara would drop to the floor and praise God.
She didn't save her praising for burning the house alone; if you lost your shirt and found it, she would kneel and pray. If you couldn't find your keys and found them, kneel and pray. If a dog got loose and I went outside and called him home, kneel and pray. I think you get the idea. In my opinion, I am all for praying but thought she had the order all wrong. I was hoping she might pray before burning the kitchen down because the insurance adjuster was starting to doubt that one person could be so forgetful. She was great at telling stories. When I came home one day she told me that my dog Duke was weak. When I asked her to explain she dropped to the floor and began to drag her legs behind her. I laughed so hard that I told her I didn't see what she was doing and asked her to do it again which she did. We both were laughing hard after that. She would act out conversations, animal activity, sounds in the house. She was better than cable. I miss her.
But with all that, Clara made me sure of two things growing up. I didn't want anyone cleaning my stuff but me and when I grew up, I wouldn't let anyone but me near my stove. If my mother's life was made easier by the maids, I didn't see it but we kept Clara until her children finally let her retire. And if you can believe it, these two were the good maids.
There were so many maids after Clara that I didn't even bother learning their names. I called them "Not the Clara" or "Clara" for short. You might think this rude but if you ever saw Murphy Brown and her slew of temporary assistants you would know that after awhile you just have to survive. My mother said "your fired!" more frequently than Donald Trump on The Apprentice. The show may have even been inspired by her.
My top pics in no specific order were: Blind Clara, Clara and child, Filing Clara, and Fainting Clara to name just a few.
I first met Blind Clara when I walked in the door from school to find my mother busy at work in the kitchen where she was making dinner and serving coffee to a woman who had glasses so thick I thought she had strapped on binoculars to her face. My mother, drenched in sweat, said, "Sylvia, I would like you to meet Blind Clara (or whatever her name was) our new maid. She has a heart condition and can't walk very far because her legs get swollen." I thought it was a joke at first because the woman was breathing heavily by simply lifting her cup to her lips. I thought it prudent to dial 911 but, sure enough, she was hired as soon as she was released from the hospital. Nothing got cleaned, cooked or fed during her tenure except my room and clothes which I did myself.
Clara with child was just a Clara at first who like all the Clara's lived in a room in our home. She did cook but unfortunately it was big pots of stew for the dogs. The food for the humans tasted like dog food. After about a week, she told my mother she had a daughter who needed to live in the house too. So, a random Spanish speaking girl came to live in the house. When I would come home from school at night I would find Clara with her child in my living room watching telenovelas at the loudest decibel possible. I would grab a bowl of cereal and go to my room to finish homework. Clara's daughter had a great time in our home. She learned English from the countless hours in front of the living room tv watching cartoons, she swam in the pool and enjoyed every outing with me and my mom. Her mom did too most days which left little time for the whole housecleaning gig. One day they were there and the next they were gone. As usual my mother would give an excuse that they wronged her, stole from her, or some other injustice but I thought that in reality she had a moment of lucidity realizing that these women were not right from the start.
Filing Clara, like most of the others, was taken to work at my mom's accounting office after a few weeks. Either they were useless at home or my mom just wanted to see what they could screw up at the office I don't know but this was the usual progression before being fired. I would work in my mom's office every day after school running errands, doing taxes, translating affidavits, collecting money from stubborn clients. One day my mom asked me to look for a file of a client of hers by the name of (for this purpose let's call him) John Smith. I looked through all the "S" and then the "J" with no file found. I turned the office upside down. Finally, I asked Filing Clara if she knew where this file could be. She looked at me like I was an idiot and said, "It's in the 'C' of course." Trying to keep my cool after spending the last two hours in hell, I asked her, "Why 'C'?"
"Because he is a come mierda or crap eater (nice version)," she said. And so began the un-filing of Filing Clara's mess. I had to sit her down and ask about each client. Some were in the "n" because they were nice, some were "f" for fat, some were in "a" because they ate the last pastelito. It was insane. And as soon as the file cabinet was sorted so was Filing Clara.
One of my favorites was Fainting Clara. I was away at college and came home to find her in my mom's employment. Also at this time my sister had dumped her Siberian husky in my mom's house to live out her days like all the other dogs in the house; barking, lying on the furniture, crapping and pissing indoors, but this dog also had the delightful habit of sprinting out the door at full speed and never looking back if you but opened the door a crack. At least once a day I would hear a loud scream which signaled the dog's escape. I and/or my mother and fainting Clara would have to get in the car and chase down the dog which would not stop for anything but would slow down a bit for her puppy. You had to drive ahead of her and throw someone out of the car while holding her puppy as bait, just close enough to be able to tackle her. This is where I first found out about Fainting Clara's special gift. When she would get overly excited she would faint. And so it went that I drove in front of the dog and Clara jumped out holding the puppy. In the side mirror I see her hold puppy in the air, and suddenly drop to the ground where now the puppy and mother were loose. I turned to my mother who had an expression of exasperation on her face like, "Oh brother, not this again." We both got out of the car and I went to go see what was wrong with Clara but my mom was just collecting the puppy and getting back into the passengers seat. Sure enough Fainting Clara just got up and dusted herself off and got back in the car where we went off to catch up to the dog again. Just like this was an everyday, no big deal, occurrence.
I wanted to tell Fainting Clara that she picked the wrong house to work in because if there wasn't major drama in the house at any given moment it would mean that we had moved out or were all abducted by aliens. That woman fainted in every corner of that house. And I must confess that the head of the drama department in my home was and will always be my mother. She would fake a fainting spell in order to get her way ever since I was in diapers. So one day when I was headed out the door my mother stood in the hallway and began her act. "Oh, Clara, get ready to catch me I'm going to faint." My mother would then delicately slide down the wall, so as not to hurt herself and play possum. At this point I stepped over my mother to grab my purse and noticed Clara was about to pass out for real and I thought I would revive my mother the only way I knew how -through her wallet. "Oh well, I guess I will call the ambulance now which will charge my mom $200 to come out here but I guess she is worth it." Miraculously my mother awoke and stood up, saving Clara from a real fainting spell.
I often wonder where all these women are and how they recall their time in my mom's employ. None lasted very long except the only maid that wasn't a Clara or a maid. She was and is an Olga. The first time I met Olga she was teetering outside of the second story window of my house. I went in and found my mom drinking her coffee in the backyard watching Olga. "What is she doing?" I asked. "Cleaning the windows," was all my mom said. "She could fall and die. Didn't you tell her she could just clean them from the inside of the house?" I asked. "No, I wanted to see what else she could do," was what my mom replied. Olga looked like a character out of A Streetcar named Desire. Not Blanche Dubois but Stanley Kowalski. She was always in a wife beater and jeans with the button undone. She also never wore a bra and had skin like leather. But she was a workhorse in the yard and what she lacked in education she made up for in determination. She talked at a low scream, chain smoked and drank beer like it was water.When it was Olga's turn to go to the office my mom put her in a silk blouse and bra and forced her to button her pants. Watching Olga tug at her clothes reminded me of putting rain boots on a dog. She couldn't go two steps without shaking or pulling at herself. Olga has been in and out of my mom's employment for at least 25 years. Now she lives in my mom's home,helps pay the bills, accompanies her to the office and the two of them bicker like the loud, old Cubans they are. They couldn't be more different. The hispanic odd couple,and yet, Olga is sometimes the only human my mother is in contact with. I suppose that in her search for the maids she fell upon this ..friendship of sorts, and now when I call my mom I have to put up with Olga screaming commentary in the background, drowning out my mother, the dogs barking and the birds chirping. I don't know how this story ends. The two of them are old and Olga has been living on borrowed time as it is but all of these women, whether they wanted to or not, are part of the fabric that makes up my story. If I were to be a psychologist I think that my mother wanted to be the savior for all of these women. To take in and employ the unemployable so she could fill a void in her life. The problem was she never had the follow through to save them. She would eventually tire of them. She just wanted someone to say how great and wonderful she was for all she did for them. In the end, she got Olga which may not be a bad deal.
I got crazy memories and an irrational fear of kitchen fires. I think it was all a win-win.
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