Sherman Alexie (15:12)
Housekeeping, marie said for the fourth time. No response, so she knew there was nobody in the room. The guest was gone. He was a clean one. Almost all the garbage was in the wastebaskets. The toilet was flushed. The sink had been wiped down. The used wet towels were piled in the shower instead of tossed onto the floor. A $1 bill folded into an origami crane had been left on top of the tv. A small gratuity. There were no human or animal body fluids splashed on the floors, walls, or ceiling. None that were obvious, anyway. But the guest had left takeout food in a Styrofoam container on the wooden table, a mostly eaten hamburger and fries. More than anything, Marie hated to clean up food. That's why she had never worked at a restaurant. It's why she rarely ate at restaurants. A table full of greasy dishes and half empty water glasses and coffee cups made her nauseated. In particular, she hated the smell of old cooked onions. Dear Big Bang, she'd thought more than once, if I am going to hell, then I hope hell doesn't smell like old onions. In her Bible study group. She'd referred to Satan as old onions so much that some of her fellow parishioners had started doing the same. She'd even heard Father James say it once or twice. Old onions. She hated old onions. But she needed her job. She believed in her job. So she picked up the Styrofoam container, held her breath against the smell of the onions, and tossed it into the garbage bag hanging off the side of her cart, then sprayed disinfectant into the bag to kill some of the odor. And then she cleaned the room. First she picked up the dirty towels and shoved them into the laundry bag hanging from her cart. She draped clean towels over the thin metal rod. The towels had been washed, yes, but they were so old and threadbare that they'd forgotten how to be towels. Those towels had dementia. And that thin metal rod had been pulled out of the wall so often by clumsy guests that it barely supported the weight of the towels. But no matter. She still draped the towels with an eye pleasing symmetry. Then she sprayed minty soap into the sink and the shower, did a quick wipe with her hand towel, and ran hot water to wash the soap down the drain. She sprayed the toilet bowl, flushed, and repeated the process. She didn't have to scrub any obvious stains because of the departed guest's good manners. She knew she'd only clean the surface of things, but the soap's strong minty smell would make it seem as if she'd cleaned more thoroughly. The illusion of clean. She'd once used that phrase when she'd been talking to Father James about her job and he'd said that the phrase accurately described humans as well. After she was done with the bathroom, she quickly dusted the small chest of drawers, tv, two nightstands, two lamps and chairs and table, plus the chandelier hanging over the table. That chandelier was only a paper covered light bulb hanging on an electrical cord, but saying chandelier was almost like saying feces and urine. Then she dragged in the vacuum and quickly ran it over the carpet. It took her only 15 minutes to clean that room. That was good, because a mother and father with four kids had checked out of room 144. The youngest kid, a toddler in a polo shirt, had taken off. His paint pants and underwear had gone full. Porky Pig then squatted and pushed out a public feces on the sidewalk in front of the soda machine. So Marie was deathly afraid of what that family might have done in the privacy of their room. She dreaded the marathon of cleaning that likely awaited her. In the beginning. There was Marie, Agnes, Rosa and the other Rosa. Agnes was a drunk. She got fired for stealing from the guests. Rosa number one married her high school sweetheart and moved away. Rosa number two was undocumented and quit after she heard rumors about an immigration sweep of local businesses. The sweep didn't happen, not that time. Then there was Olga, who'd come from Russia to marry an American. He'd claimed to be a millionaire, but it turned out he'd only had enough money to pay for Olga's visa and her plane tickets. She'd married him anyway because she believed that American lies were a little better than Russian lies. But she had to take a job, any job, to help with expenses. She got pregnant. They couldn't afford to pay rent and take care of a baby, so they moved to Oregon to live with his parents. Then there was Evie, who worked hard, was Marie's friend for many years, and vanished over the horizon. There was a black woman and a white woman, their names lost to time, who started on the same day and both quit immediately after walking into a room and finding a dead bull snake sliced into thick pieces and arranged in weird patterns on the carpet. There had been five animal sacrifices in the motel over the years. Seven people had died at the motel. Four from heart attacks, two from overdoses, and one when a woman drunkenly fell over the second floor railing and landed headfirst on somebody else's minivan. Marie had been slapped, punched, kicked and bitten by former maids. Her purse had been stolen three times and her car stolen once. One of the crazier maids had robbed Nassim at gunpoint. She went to prison for three years. One of the saddest maids had been assaulted and strangled by a serial killer. He was caught after 30 years of killing poor women and led police to undiscovered bodies so they wouldn't lethally inject him. There were drug addicts and alcoholics and women who doused their cleaning rags with disinfectant and huffed those poisonous and intoxicating fumes into their lungs. There were illegal and legal immigrants, though Marie didn't care about their status. Every refugee is a precious child, she thought. There were maids of every race, of every color, of every religion. At least a dozen women Muslims had worn headscarves while they worked. Marie suspected that one maid, an Italian woman who had to be taught how to use a vacuum, was in the federal witness protection program. There were women who cried often but would never explain their tears. There were women who never stopped talking about their aches and pains. Over the decades, Marie had worked with two or three hundred women. She'd liked half of them, had hated at least 50 of them, and had truly loved maybe a dozen. And then there was Evie, the most beloved, who had transubstantiated into a postcard from Reno. How does a friend, maybe your best friend, leave you like that? Father James, marie had once confessed. God is mysterious, sure, but sometimes I feel like people are even more mysterious. One slow day, as she filled in for the new owner at the front desk, Marie used a motel computer to search for Evie. She typed in Evie's full name in Reno, Nevada, and found nothing. She added the words missing and obituary and death and found nothing. Then she typed in Evie's name and housekeeper and Arizona. And there she was, smiling in an employee photo. She worked at a retirement home in Flagstaff. It had been quite a few years, but Evie still looked exactly like Evie. You're alive, marie said to Evie's photo. Below Evie's photo was an email address and a phone number. I could call you right now, marie said to the photo. Marie thought about distance and time. She remembered reading once that Cleopatra had lived closer in time to the building of the first Pizza Hut than to the building of the great pyramids of Giza. Everything is temporary, Marie thought. Then she wiped tears from her eyes, closed the browser window containing Evie's photo, and turned to greet the new guests who'd walked into the motel office.
