Tricia cleaned houses, and she was good at it, knew just how to work her way through someone’s home to deal with the messes they didn’t want to take responsibility for. Tricia loved to talk with her clients. That’s how she judged people. If they ignored her or were clipped in their responses she knew they weren’t good people and didn’t feel bad availing herself of some of their possessions—little things they would never miss because they had too much. Tricia wore tank tops and denim cut-off shorts while she worked, leaving her tanned arms and long legs bare. She wore her dirty blonde hair on top of her head, a few loose strands wisping against her neck. Sweat often pooled between her breasts, leaving a damp line down the middle of her shirt. This did not concern Tricia. She was proud to work so hard that her effort left a mark. The wives Tricia worked for didn’t appreciate Tricia’s comfort with her body and her labor, particularly if their husbands were home. They took it as something of an insult: a woman who cleaned their homes had such a naturally fine body while they stretched themselves taut with the finest surgeons in South Florida and didn’t look half as good. It wasn’t fair. Money was supposed to make things fair. Tricia cleaned very big houses—the kinds with rooms that had special designations like media room and fitness center and library. The floors were often marble, and when the women who lived in these houses walked, their heels click, click clacked. Most of the women who cleaned houses in the area were brown-skinned and spoke Spanish or Creole. Tricia was something of a novelty, and her services were in high demand because her clients liked having an English-speaking housekeeper as much as it made them uncomfortable to see a white woman doing the work of la gente. The tension of that was something of a quiet thrill. Once in a while, the wives asked Tricia where she was from, and Tricia explained her people were from the Everglades—generations of her family lived deep in the swamp, so deep you had to take an airboat to get to their land where their homes were all stucco and mold and wide-open windows. The way Tricia said this, it was like she was saying something more, but the wives were never quite sure what, and that was a quiet thrill, too.
Roxane Gay is a writer across genres. She splits her time between Los Angeles and New York.
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