The Maid's Diary(3)

So I go about my dusting and vacuuming, and I snoop.

That’s the other thing: I have a snooping problem.

I mean, we all get a dopamine-adrenaline kick when we glimpse something that wasn’t meant for us to see, right? Don’t pretend you’re above it. We scroll through social media, hunting for the train wrecks happening in real time, and we cannot look away. We click on those links that promise to reveal a Hollywood star in a compromising bikini shot, or without makeup, or being a bad mommy in Starbucks. In the supermarket checkout line, we reach for the tabloid that screams with promises of insider tidbits about a British prince’s affair. I just take it up a level. It keeps my days exciting.

When I arrive at a job, I already have my snooping strategy in place. I set a timer, and I do my cleaning fast enough that I always have a spare chunk of time to go through a dresser, a closet, a box in an attic, or a certain room.

And I follow the little clues. I find secrets that the occupants of a house try desperately to hide even from one another: the wife from her husband, the father from his daughter, a son from his mother. I see the little blue pills. A syringe. Breath mints and cigarette butts hidden in a cracked pot in a garden shed. A teen’s tequila bottle stashed at the back of an underwear drawer. A husband’s porn links saved in his computer. A wife’s carefully hidden note from a not-so-long-ago lover, or a letter from a parole board. A pregnancy test secreted among trash that has been set aside for me to take out.

I see these people.

I know the occupants of these houses.

But they don’t see me.

They don’t know me.

Should I bump into one of them on a nearby sidewalk, or in the aisles of a grocery store, they won’t recognize the invisible girl in their lives. The anonymous girl. I don’t really care—I don’t want to be “seen.” Not by them.

My therapist has some theories on my desire to remain invisible. After I told her I was a ghost in people’s homes, she asked if I’d always been a ghost. I wasn’t sure how to answer, so I just clammed up. Her question has been worrying me, though. After a few more back-to-back abortive therapy sessions of us getting nowhere on the invisibility issue, my shrink suggested journaling.

She believes that opening up to private, nonthreatening blank pages might be a way for me to mine deeper into the unconscious parts of my psyche that are hiding things from my conscious (and even subconscious) self. She made it clear I should not feel compelled in any way to share my writing with her. But I can if I want to.

“It’s only when you look at something long enough, Kit,” she said, “and in the right way, that the real image starts to appear. But first you need something to look at. You need words on a page. Even if those words seem banal or tedious or incongruent, or shameful, or even embarrassing, it’s from this field of text that your true story will arise. And don’t self-edit,” she warned. “Because until the full image is revealed to you, you won’t know what part of the story is real, true, and what part you should leave out.” She said the process is similar to those ambiguous, trick-the-eye reversible images—you know that classic drawing of the young woman? When you stare at it in a certain way, the image of the young woman suddenly flips into an old crone. And then you can’t unsee it. It’s a matter of shifting your perspective.

Honestly, I doubt any miracle is going to magically rise from the Jungian basement of my soul and spill onto these journal pages, but here we are, Dear Diary . . . I’m a maid. I like to snoop. I’m probably snooping too much. Okay, I admit—it’s an addiction. I can’t stop. It’s getting worse. I’m taking increasing risks. Truth is, it’s this addiction that made me seek therapy. It’s my “presenting problem”—that’s what my shrink calls it.

“Aren’t you afraid that one day you’ll poke too deep and see something you cannot unsee?” my best friend, Boon, asked me not long ago. “Because if you do, Kit, if you see a shocking secret that someone desperately wants to keep hidden, you could be in trouble. People—rich people—will do anything to protect themselves and their families, you know,” he said. “Even kill.”

That chilled me.

Boon said I needed to be more careful. “They have power. Power that you can’t access.”

He said I was crossing lines, that my habit was becoming reckless, that I was even inviting discovery. I needed to tone it down, watch my back.

I thought he was being dramatic. Because that’s Boon. And he was messing with my fun.

I told him if people truly wanted to hide something so badly, they wouldn’t invite a maid into their house.

Now I’m not so sure . . .





THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW


October 31, 2019. Thursday.

Beulah Brown sits in her wheelchair at the long corner window in her upstairs room. The pallid morning sun peeks through a break in the clouds and shines upon her face. The puddle of light holds zero warmth, but it’s sun nevertheless. Which is nothing to sneeze at in this gloomy rain forest climate of the Pacific Northwest. Especially during the autumn monsoons. And Beulah doesn’t know how many more times she will see the sun. She does know she’ll never see another fall. A tartan rug covers her lap. A plate of lemon cream biscuits rests on the small table at her side, and she holds a china cup of milky tea. She’s impressed that she can still hold her cup so steadily. Cancer might be strangling away her life, but she does have fairly steady hands for her age. Her illness has not taken that.