Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [28]
But what to see? Something sweet and stupid and harmless. At the movie theater on Second Avenue and Twelfth, a title caught my eye. I thought, That seems good. Jodie Foster and a puffy, friendly farm animal, a butterfly.
I unzipped my jacket and headed inside to see a movie I’d heard the name of but knew nothing about. It was called The Silence of the Lambs.
DEBBY’S REQUIREMENTS
T
he year I snuck an interracial lesbian couple into the background of an American Airlines commercial, I was feeling particularly flush. (The dykes had been a real coup, considering the client told me, “No white, white bathing suits; no black, black people.”) I’d just been promoted from senior copywriter to associate creative director. With this promotion came a fat raise and the loss of the measly four hours a week I had to myself. Now, I would be expected to live at the office. I knew some copywriters who actually slept there several nights a week, talking full advantage of the shower in the men’s room. Now I would never have time to clean my apartment. As it was, I was reduced to taking one Sunday a month and just scooping everything into trash bags. But even this Sunday would be taken from me.
So I decided I would treat myself to a cleaning lady.
In Manhattan, the idea of hiring a cleaning lady is not as bourgeois as it might be in Harrisburg. New Yorkers regularly drop off their laundry to be washed and folded. So why wouldn’t they have somebody else scrub the inside of their toilet bowl?
I approached my friend and former blind date Brad, the heir to a fortune made from Saturday morning cartoons. His grandfather had created a character that got its own show, then its own lunch box, then its own studio. So having been raised with housekeepers, Brad was very experienced in these “domestic matters.” And because he was agoraphobic and never left his apartment, he would know firsthand how good the cleaning lady really was because he’d follow her from room to room, watching her clean while he ate sunflower seeds. In the two years I’d known him, he’d already gone through eight different cleaning ladies.
“Call Debby,” he said. “She seems pretty good so far.”
“Pretty good, huh?” I said. “I want really good.”
Brad said, “Well, she’s a grandmother, and she doesn’t stink or anything.”
I liked the idea of a grandmother cleaning my apartment, especially one who didn’t trail a nasty vapor. Perhaps she even smelled like lilacs or, better yet, spray starch. I decided to take Brad’s referral. It beat looking through the Yellow Pages under “Cleaning Lady,” which would undoubtedly bring a transvestite in a French maid’s uniform to my door.
“I’m not like Brad,” I told Debby over the phone. “I won’t need you to come every day. Just once a week. Is that too little for you to even be interested in?” For all I knew, she was a three-day-minimum housecleaner.
“Oh no,” she laughed. “That’s normal. I don’t have any other client like Brad. He wants me there seven days a week including holidays. Believe me, you could serve clams casino off Brad’s bathroom floor.”
She had a pleasant, friendly voice without an accent. This was a relief, because I knew from experience that I wouldn’t be able to learn even “hello” in another language.
Oddly, I found myself lowering my voice on the phone, trying to sound mature and calm, like I was talking to a blind date.
She was uncomfortable giving me even an estimate over the phone. “You say it’s a studio with a little bedroom attached,” she said. “But I’ve seen some studio apartments that are as large as houses. Everybody’s idea of size is different.” Tell me about it, Debby.
We agreed that she would stop by my apartment the following Saturday to see how large it was and how many hours it would take to clean, in order for her to set a fair price.
That morning, she buzzed my intercom promptly at ten. Because I lived on the third floor of a walk-up building, I always had a little time to prepare myself for visitors after they buzzed. But nothing could have prepared me for Debby. While not technically a dwarf, the