Household Help!

I’ve been interviewing housekeepers again, which my husband swears is my favorite indoor sport next to raising and lowering the hems on all my clothes. I tried Myrtle, who demanded $1.75 for bus fare and drove home in her Buick convertible; Sonia, who smelled of garlic and Pauline, who smoked. This last might not sound reprehensible to you, but I stopped smoking twelve years, eleven months, nine days and fourteen minutes ago, and there’s no one as unforgiving as a reformed sinner. There were also sixteen other women who promised to appear bright and early Monday morning and never did.

Actually, I don’t really enjoy looking for household help. I just do it to while away all the spare time I have left after cleaning the house, doing the laundry, making the meals, car pooling the kids and meeting my editor’s deadlines.

I don’t know why it is, but women applying for domestic work always travel in pairs, like book ends. One of the women ringing your doorbell is smartly dressed, has a smile on her face, remembers your name and strikes up an instant rapport with your baby. She’s the friend.

Her companion, who’s come to work for you, is fat, frowsy and completely devoid of either personality or teeth. It reminds me of the blind dates I had in college, where the handsome six-footer with the leather elbow patches arrived with the short bald guy with glasses and a postnasal drip, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out which one was meant for me.

The thing is, decent household help is impossible to find. Everyone who applies for the job makes it perfectly clear at the outset that if it weren’t for her asthma and sciatica, she’d far rather be digging ditches somewhere in Labrador.

Driven to desperate measures, I put an ad in the paper. The first call came from a harridan who examined my stand on the Middle East before we got down to the crux of the matter, which was how big my house and family were. When I apologetically admitted that they were ten rooms and four children respectively, I could see it was hopeless.

The trouble is, the more children you have, the larger the house you need, and therefore the more household help you require and the less you can afford to pay for it.

One sweet young thing told me she could get sixty dollars a day downtown with no laundry, no children, no windows or walls. It took all my husband’s powers of persuasion to keep me from beating her to the job.

One woman sounded so human, I timidly asked her if she’d do some ironing.

“Of course,” she replied. My joy was unconfined until she added, “I don’t do sheets, shirts, blouses or dresses.” For two weeks we had the best-ironed handkerchiefs and socks in the neighborhood.

The last call came from a woman who told me where I lived, what I served for lunch and how much I paid. Then she said, “I don’t wash windows, walls or floors.” I remember whimpering that our ceilings didn’t get too dirty this time of year before I hung up and had hysterics in the corner.

I’m sitting at the kitchen table writing this. The dining room table, where I usually work, lies buried beneath last month’s newspapers, which I’m going to read the minute I have time, and a set of architect’s plans for a house in Florida, which my husband just brought home from the office. Apparently he figures that if I can’t keep this house clean, he’ll give me another chance to make a fresh start down south.

Anybody wanna buy a dirty house?