I have a strange living situation.
It started out when I couldn't find a place to live near my school campus. I refused to move back home and wanted to stay in my area. But I happen to live in a very popular location, meaning prices are impossibly high and completely unfeasible for someone who makes minimum wage working 20 hours a week in a cafeteria.
I was just about desperate when my friend Rebecca let me know that her parents were trying to figure out what to do with her grandmother's house, and they were thinking about renting it out. I asked her to let them know I was interested and they came back with a ridiculously cheap price that I was more than willing to pay. I moved in the night after graduation.
The house is old and creaks at night. There's probably a poltergeist or two: things go missing and then turn up again in random places. The dishwasher doesn't do a very good job, but I don't generate that many dirty dishes anyway.
It's three bedroom, two bath, with a decent sized kitchen, already furnished, has a piano, a fabulous back yard, back porch, and a huuuuge basement.
The neighborhood is quiet, there's a grocery store two blocks from my house, and I live no more than fifteen minutes away from anything except for my job, which is 35 to 40 minutes away, depending on traffic.
The catch is that the family I rent from uses my kitchen daily because they don't have one. I've heard the long story of how theirs is being renovated but the contractor stopped working or they ran out of money or the stove is possessed and the fridge eats souls but I've forgotten. All I know is that they use mine.
Every afternoon, Rebecca's mother comes to my house, fixes herself lunch, putters around the house doing I don't even know what, and then occasionally fixes dinner. Her husband comes, and so does Rebecca, so I have this gathering of people in my house just about every night. It's like having my own family around, except I'm the child who doesn't like anybody and hides in the bedroom and hisses at people.
On Sundays, they invite family over for a Sunday dinner and sit around talking all afternoon. They usually all head out around 7 or so after spending all day monopolizing the kitchen and food source. They've offered to feed me, but I usually hide in my room because there's only so much socializing I can take, and being social with older Southern country people is extremely taxing. They talk about family, about who's got what disease, and what medication they're taking, and who's died, and who's had kids and how this new recipe is really good except it needs more salt and I just can't handle it. I'd rather hide in my room and starve.
Last week, Rebecca moved in with me, so though I'm technically the resident, I have my friend in here with me, and I can't say much because she's the daughter of the people I'm renting from. This is her grandmother's house so all I can do is smile politely when she gushes about how excited she is that we get to live together and how fun this summer is going to be.
All of this I don't mind. My friend is quiet and leaves me alone for the most part, and on the days I work, I just leave, come back, hide in my room and then crash.
What I can't stand is that this family is a horde of pack-rats that never learned how to clean. They cook and wash dishes but somehow they fail to realize that in the process the counters, stovetop, and floor get dirty. It's like they ascribe to some Neanderthal philosophy that dirt is healthy and absence of dirt brings on the plague. Sometimes I imagine that they're genetically blind to dirt and fail to notice these things because they're handicapped in some way. That makes me feel a little bit better because it causes me to pity them because they can't help their shortcomings.
They also can't throw anything away. This I understand. The grandmother, who used to own this house, grew up during the Depression, so naturally she would keep everything and teach her daughter the same thing. But there are some things that I simply cannot comprehend why it would make sense to keep for any reason.
Food in the refrigerator, for example. In the house that I grew up in, we cleaned out the fridge once a week, and the shelves were kept meticulously clean.
In this house, food is kept in the fridge until it fossilizes and archaeologists dig it up two hundred years from now and wonder at the horrible living conditions their ancestors had. Their conversation would go something like this:
"It seems that this bowl of pudding was kept and venerated even after it molded over and fermented."
"Bit strange...Perhaps it was a special dish?"
"Maybe so, maybe so. The conclusion I've drawn is that they were blind and unable to smell and so did not notice when it went bad."
"What? That's ridiculous! Any fool can tell when pudding goes bad. I tell you, they kept it on purpose. Maybe as a delicacy, or an offering to their gods."
"What, those mechanical devices they call 'phones' and 'computers'?"
"Yes, exactly!"
"Oh maybe you're right. I may write my next dissertation on this."
In a desperate effort to make room for my food in the fridge and rid myself of all the outdated Tupperware, I took it upon myself to clean out the fridge one day while Rebecca's mother was around and she kept hovering and informing me that "that's still good yet" when it was clearly out of date and shriveled and slimy and half covered in mold. I waited until she was out of the room and then threw it away anyhow.
So after that I learned my lesson. Don't clean while the lady is around. Instead, since I'm a night owl anyway and don't have to be at work until 5, I wait until everybody has left and Rebecca is asleep to creep out of my room and clean things.
I throw things out and then take out the trash to hide the evidence. Last night I decided to mop the floor, which hasn't been cleaned since I was in elementary school, so I pulled out a bucket and mopping detergent (which I bought because there wasn't such a thing in the house) and went in search of a mop. The cabinet of cleaning things hasn't been updated since the 70's at least and the logic of its contents escapes me. There is a mop about as old as my mother (one of those mop types that's gray and stringy and has to be wrung out by hand), and five dust mops that have probably never been used. There are various other cleaning things like gloves and sponges and things I don't recognize, so I leave them alone.
The water coming off of the mop when I rinsed it reminded me of a mud puddle, so today I'm going to buy a new mop and mop again tonight. I may also buy a mask for myself. Perhaps even a cape. I'm doing good work as a cleaner in the night and I deserve some recognition as The Cleaning Lady. Lock up your doors, people of the world. Otherwise Cleaning Lady will sneak into your kitchens, wipe off your counters, and scrub your floors.
And if you're incredibly unobservant, you may not even know that I was there.
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