47 NICKEL AND DIMED
say, 900 or so. I get pushy with Rosalie, who is new like me and fresh from high school
in a rural northern part of the state, about the meagerness of her lunches, which consist
solely of Doritos-a half bag from the day before or a freshly purchased small-sized bag.
She just didn't have anything in the house, she says (though she lives with her boyfriend
and his mother), and she certainly doesn't have any money to buy lunch, as I find out
when I offer to fetch her a soda from a Quik Mart and she has to admit she doesn't have
eighty-nine cents. I treat her to the soda, wishing I could force her, mommylike, to take
milk instead. So how does she hold up for an eight- or even nine-hour day? "Well," she
concedes, "I get dizzy sometimes."
How poor are they, my coworkers? The fact that anyone is working this job at all can be
taken as prima facie evidence of some kind of desperation or at least a history of mistakes
and disappointments, but it's not for me to ask. In the prison movies that provide me with
a mental guide to comportment, the new guy doesn't go around shaking hands and asking,
"Hi there, what are you in for?" So I listen, in the cars and when we're assembled in the
office, and learn, first, that no one seems to be homeless. Almost everyone is embedded
in extended families or families artificially extended with housemates. People talk about
visiting grandparents in the hospital or sending birthday cards to a niece's husband; single
mothers live with their own mothers or share apartments with a coworker or boyfriend.
Pauline, the oldest of us, owns her own home, but she sleeps on the living room sofa,
while her four grown children and three grandchildren fill up the bedrooms.
15
But although no one, apparently, is sleeping in a car, there are signs, even at the
beginning, of real difficulty if not actual misery. Half-smoked cigarettes are returned to
the pack. There are discussions about who will come up with fifty cents for a toll and
whether Ted can be counted on for prompt reimbursement. One of my teammates gets
frantic about a painfully impacted wisdom tooth and keeps making calls from our houses
to try to locate a source of free dental care. When my or, I should say, Liza's - team
discovers there is not a single Dobie in our buckets, I suggest that we stop at a
convenience store and buy one rather than drive all the way back to the office. But it
15
The women I worked with were all white and, with one exception, Anglo, as are the plurality of
housecleaners in America, or at least those known to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of the "private
household cleaners and servants" it managed to locate in 1998, the BLS reports that 36.8 percent were
Hispanic, 15.8 percent black, and 2.7 percent "other." However, the association between housecleaning and
minority status is well established in the psyches of the white employing class. When my daughter, Rosa,
was introduced to the father of a wealthy Harvard classmate, he ventured that she must have been named
for a favorite maid. And Audre Lorde reported an experience she had in 1967: "I wheel my two-year-old
daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket ... and a little white girl riding past in her mother's cart
calls out excitedly, `Oh look, Mommy, a baby maid"' (quoted in Mary Romero, Maid in the U.S.A.:
Perspectives on Gender [New York: Routledge, 1992], p. 72). But the composition of the household
workforce is hardly fixed and has changed with the life chances of the different ethnic groups. In the late
nineteenth century, Irish and German immigrants served the urban upper and middle classes, then left for
the factories as soon as they could. Black women replaced them, accounting for 60 percent of all domestics
in the 1940s, and dominated the field until other occupations began to open up to them. Similarly, West
Coast maids were disproportionately Japanese American until that group too found more congenial options
(see Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-
1945 [Temple University Press, 1989], pp. 12-13). Today, the color of the hand that pushes the sponge
varies from region to region: Chicanas in the Southwest, Caribbeans in New York, native Hawaiians in
Hawaii, native whites, many of recent rural extraction, in the Midwest and, of course, Maine.