Remembering our cleaning lady

I belong to an online forum for women over forty. We ask and answer questions, share pieces of our lives and try our best to support each other. One of the women recently wrote in: I hired a cleaning lady, is that terrible?

I guess she meant, is it terrible in this insane COVID-19 world we’re living in? Perhaps she thought it was terrible because she could be putting the cleaning lady in harm’s way, or maybe exposing her family to the virus, or maybe she thought it was terrible because she should be doing the work herself.

Rather than think about how to reassure this lady that she probably wasn't being terrible, I started to think about the time that our family had a cleaning lady in the 70s and early 80s.

I, of course, would have loved to have had a live-in housekeeper, a sassy member of the family who does all the chores and becomes a confidant to the children and the parents alike; but that dream, like all my dreams about family, stemmed from what I saw on television. We were nothing like a television family. And we wouldn’t have been able to afford a housekeeper. We were not rich; we were ultra middle class in that Chef-Boyardee for lunch, Canadian Tire for all our outdoor needs kind of way.

Our cleaning lady was called Mrs. Brewer and she came every Thursday to clean. I remember that she came on Thursdays because my mother would clean maniacally every Wednesday. Mrs. Brewer came from an even smaller town than where we lived, so small that it had the name “Corner” in it. She was wide and carried her girth like a man. She always wore tight-fitting dresses and flesh-coloured pantyhose. Her face was obscured by enormous, thick glasses, but her short honey-colored hair was always freshly curled as if she had just taken her rollers out.

Early Thursday mornings, my father drive downtown to the bus station to pick her up just as I was waking up. By the time I’d be on my way to the downstairs bathroom, she’d be in the kitchen, having a cup of tea. “Good morning Mrs. Brewer,” I would say mechanically. “Good morning dear,” she would answer.

By the time I was ready at the kitchen table for breakfast, I noticed that my father had tuned into the country radio station. My parents always had the radio station set to CBC, but when Mrs. Brewer came over, we listened to country, as if we listened to it all the time. Mrs. Brewer adored a local country band called Stacey’s Country Jamboree and my father would listen to her stories about them with great interest as if he grew up loving them and not the Mighty Sparrow.

When it was time to get down to cleaning, Mrs. Brewer always needed help. She would fill up a large basin with hot water and vinegar and then she would ask for my father’s help bringing it to the floor. Then she would kneel beside it and dip her brush and start scrubbing the floor in a circular motion as if she were atoning for her sins. When she finished, she lumbered through the house in search of her next task, it might be polishing the silver, dusting or vacuuming. After finishing a task, she would take a short break.

When I’d come home for lunch, the table would be set and I’d find Mrs. Brewer sitting at the table across from me. When Mrs. Brewer wasn’t there, the kitchen would be dim, I’d find a bowl of Chef Boyardee covered with wax paper, a quartered apple beside it on a side plate and a glass of orange juice. My mother was either at university or studying. Depending on the day, my father was either teaching, or he’d be downstairs watching television shouting at the contestants on The Price is Right.

But on Thursdays, my mother, Mrs. Brewer and I ate together. Before we ate, Mrs. Brewer would bow her head and say grace. If I hesitated, my mother would just shoot me a look that made me drop my head instantly. But that was as far as I went. When Mrs. Brewer and my mother both crossed themselves, I abstained. As my mother served Campbell’s tomato soup, Mrs. Brewer would start talking about the Pentecostal revival up in her “Corner” of the world so I’d just fixate on the small crucifix nestled in the folds of her neck. And then she would crumple about 20 soda crackers into her soup and I would lose my appetite.

When I came home from school, she would be getting ready to go. My father sat waiting as she covered her hair with a chiffon scarf and got her bag ready.

“Goodbye Mrs. Brewer,” I’d say.

“Goodbye dear,” she would answer. And she would climb into the front seat of the Volvo and my dad would drop her off to take the bus home.

Years later, my parents switched cleaning ladies. Instead of Mrs. Brewer, we had a young woman called Valerie who cleaned everything in about half the time. When she needed a break, she smoked a cigarette quickly and got back to work. She finished doing everything by about 11:30 a.m. and never stayed for lunch.

But I missed Mrs. Brewer. There was something about the way my parents acted around her that made me miss her desperately.