Walking stories

Dirty work and dirty pictures

May 24, 2023

It’s late afternoon, and as we trudge up the Baker Street hill, I see the women outside a house in the middle of the block.   

I know it’s a building with a couple of apartments, and I think some of them are occupied by roommates sharing them.  So I often see a variety of people outside there, and we  nod at each other and say profound things like hi and how are you doing, which is more a statement of amiability than an inquiry. 

The women I see today are unfamiliar to me, and they are hovering around a car that’s parked in the driveway that slants down from the sidewalk to the garage.  Actually, one of the women is in the car, kind of in the driver’s seat, and I can see a rag in her hand, moving along the dashboard as she dusts.  The passenger door is open, and the other woman has her head half-inside, talking to the woman in the car.  I can’t hear what she’s saying.  She’s also got her hands lifted up to the side window, and at first I can’t see why.

Oh, this is a housekeeping crew, I think, and they’ve come to clean the interior of someone’s apartment and also been asked to clean the interior of the car.  A few weeks ago, other neighbors preparing for a big party had their garden redone, their deck power-washed and their cars, parked outside, detailed.  I didn’t imagine that any of the party guests would borrow one of these cars to take a ride, but I sure understood the impulse to have everything in order before the guests arrived.

Anyway, the cleaners working on the car this afternoon seem to fit in with the majority of women I see around town who work as traveling housekeepers.  Usually, they arrive in pairs, one toting a bucket of rags and a bottle of 409, the other bent sideways with the weight of a vacuum cleaner, its hose encircling her body like a boa constrictor. I always wonder if they like to work with their own tools and supplies or the dwellers for whom they work just don’t consider it a valuable use of their time to lay in their own supplies of paper towels and steel wool.  Or maybe these workers are hired on a regular basis by owners of places they rent out as air-bnbs.

The army of women and men who do this job often drive their own cars; just as often, though, with two-hour parking limits in so many   parts of the city, I notice that they are picked up by husbands.  Or perhaps they work for agencies, and they are  being picked up by the agency-owners who have dispatched them.

In any case, fairly or not, I always think that someone –  either the bosses who dispatch them or the apartment- and house-dwellers who hire them – is taking advantage of these house cleaners.  How is it that some unlucky person gets to spend her professional life wiping strands of some lucky person’s hair out of the bathroom sink? At the sight of these two ladies, I can’t help thinking that they have been ordered  to clean the car as well as the house,  and that the extra work is a  burden.  So I feel sympathy. 

As I approach the car in the driveway, I think, looking through the window on the driver’s side, that  I can make out a rag pressed against the dashboard, brandished by a woman sitting in the front seat.  The woman outside the car,  however,  has her hand raised to the surface of the window on the passenger side, and a look of concentration on her face. As I make my way  past, I can see that the long rays of the late afternoon sun are hitting the window and illuminating gray speckles on the glass, and that she is using her index finger with great precision, working on the creation of a  drawing in the dust. She says something to the woman in the car, which I can’t hear, but the tone of their conversation sounds merry. 

Curious, I pause for a moment for closer examination of the image she’s created.    I can see she’s just finishing up on the second of two matching images.   

 Each one could be said to be a silo with two bales of hay at its base. But that wouldn’t be accurate.  What she’s really drawn are two side-by-side penises, each erect with a set of balls at its base. 

When she looks up, she sees that  I am awestruck by the results of her endeavor.  We grin at each other in shared amusement. She laughs, I giggle.

 A half-hour later, by the time we’re on the way home from our walk, the car is gone from the driveway. I see a few other similar-looking cars on the block, but their windows are clean. 

 I’m assuming the artist erased her masterpiece with a flick of a paper towel. 

 But just in case, I’ll keep my eyes open, on the lookout for a gray sedan.