The third housekeeper in a row had arrived on a trial basis within a relatively short period of time and we were all a bit nervous about it.

My mother decided to re-enter the workforce after raising her three daughters. The mid-1960′s was a time when mothers were making important decisions such as whether to go back to work or stay home in the traditional manner.

On my particular street there were only two mothers out of six who worked and mine was one of them. I was proud of her for having a job and life outside of the home. But she had to find a housekeeper she could trust with her precious brood–an increasingly daunting task.

The first housekeeper had come and gone so quickly that I barely remember a thing about her except that she was the first who didn’t work out.

The second one left an enormous impression due to the hullabaloo surrounding her exit–along with a tiring penchant for making steamed rice every night for dinner. Her undoing was a result of her decision to incapacitate herself on the contents of my mother’s alcohol cabinet and to then pass out on the guest bed. I  returned home from an otherwise jubilant afternoon of playing at my friend’s to find two indignant neighborhood mothers standing on the front porch waiting for my mother to return home from work.

Housekeeper No. 2, having breached her duties, had become the second person to choose those exact bottles of booze to wage negligence over the exact same children. I was thankful for the strength shown by the two women on the porch, who remained diligent and waited like sentry, protecting the nest next door, and without whom I would have been left an utter, wondering loss that day. Housekeeper No. 2 was duly fired and never returned.

Housekeeper No. 3 laid the kindness on thick. I knew instinctively that she wasn’t that syrupy; however, she did seem like a genuinely kind person and had a superior cooking repertoire of starches. Housekeeper No. 3 became permanent.

It wasn’t long before the decks of cards appeared on the kitchen table. Soon Housekeeper No. 3 taught me Gin Rummy, Double-Solitaire, Crazy Eights, Go Fish, and how to fancy-shuffle a deck. We played a few fun-filled hands every day. It gave me a chance to get to know her and to become familiar with an elderly person–a quieting experience for the soul. I studied her pale skin with its deep crevices, her stiff yet beautiful hands hands, and her silky white hair.

When she was a young girl, a pot of boiling water spilled on one of her legs. She kept an Ace Bandage on it. I never pried or asked to see it.

Sometimes my mother would come home from work early and Housekeeper No. 3 could go home at a decent hour. On those nights I would help my mother cook dinner.

My parents divorced when I was 11. My mother, undergoing financial hardships, proposed an idea to me about not having a housekeeper at all and what did I think? I thought it was a good idea, because at that age, I was a little embarrassed to have what felt like a babysitter, and I thought that I could handle being what we now call a Latchkey kid and to oversee my younger sisters. I was already proficient with making dinner, doing laundry, running the dust mop. I thought I could manage things well until my mother got home from work.

It was a horrible idea. An 11-year old is really a child herself and needs someone else to come home to and to oversee her. And there were times that Mother stopped to have a drink before coming home. With Housekeeper No. 3 gone, I played solitaire and upheld my half of the bargain.

When I had my Driver’s License and car, I went to visit Housekeeper No. 3. I found her tiny cottage in back of another house tucked into a wooded lot.  Her living space was shockingly small. She showed me the fig tree, the provenance of those bounteous brown paper bags filled with the fruit she brought to us in the years prior. How we loved that fruit. She would peel and cut them, then sprinkle them with sugar and pour milk over the top.

I thought, thank God she’s got a fruit tree. I hadn’t realized how poverty-stricken she was until I saw it for myself. I wanted to help yet I was so used to manners getting in the way, not prying, not overstepping my bounds, not being nosy. I should have looked inside her refrigerator like a social worker would do. I should have driven to the store and bought food and come back, but I didn’t. Why? I still beat myself up over that. I didn’t know if she’d accept it or want it. And then came the kicker. She told me she was ready to die.

She said, “I feel I’m ready to go.” And she shook her head to herself.

I could tell she wasn’t well but I had no idea how to help at that moment so I just stood there and listened. It was still late 1970s and I hadn’t learned how to cope with these things. I didn’t know if she could afford a doctor or if she was already terminal with something that she herself wasn’t privy to.

As I glanced around, which didn’t take long, I spotted a little paper plate that I’d painted in fifth grade, a class project. It was a blue flower on a lighter blue background. It was bold and cheerful, and I’d given it to her proudly the day I made it. It gave me a pang in my heart to think that she still had it sitting on her dresser as if it meant something after all of this time. I saw a tin of Almond Rocha and thought about her sweet tooth and how she used to make brown sugar sandwiches with butter for herself–quirky things I’d never thought of or would have done but have actually done since.

At 17 I was too timid to do a lot of things I should have done on that day and afterward, knowing what I saw. I was a late bloomer in this regard. Although I thought of her and worried, and reported it to my mother, I didn’t take the bull by the horns. Shortly thereafter, I went away to college. Then we found out, through her son, that our quiet anchor, Housekeeper No. 3, had passed away.

Not only did the circumstances of her passing feel wrong, life seemed unfair, unbalanced. The only solace I could bring to myself was the hope that the painted plate had given her some iota of joy. And I was glad she had that fig tree.

Photo: Zemanta

Copyright 2012