The Turning

On Her Knees

I WAS SIXTEEN when the old man shot through. A year later we moved back to the city where my mother cleaned houses to pay off his debts and keep us afloat and get me through university. She wouldn’t let me get a part-time job to pay my way. The study, she said, was too important. Cleaning was a come-down from her previous job, eighteen years before, as a receptionist in a doctor’s surgery, but it was all she could get. She told me there was more honour in scrubbing other people’s floors than in having strangers scrub your own. But I wasn’t convinced. The only thing worse than knowing she knelt every day in someone else’s grotty shower recess was having to help her do it. Some days, between lectures, I did go with her. I hated it. There were many other times when I could have gone and didn’t. I stayed home and stewed with guilt. She never said a word.

My mother had a kind of stiff-necked working class pride. After the old man bolted she became a stickler for order. She believed in hygiene, insisted upon rigour. She was discreet and deadly honest, and those lofty standards, that very rigidity, set her apart. Carol Lang went through a house like a dose of salts. She earned a reputation in the riverside suburbs where, in time, she became the domestic benchmark. She probably cleaned the houses of some of my wealthy classmates without any of us being the wiser.

She was proud of her good name and the way people bragged about her and passed her around like a hot tip, but I resented how quickly they took her for granted. I’d seen their patronizing notes on floral paper, their attempts to chip her rate down. The householders who thought most highly of themselves were invariably the worst payers and the biggest slobs. It was as though having someone pick up after them had either encouraged them to be careless or made them increasingly determined to extort more work for their money. Through it all, my mother maintained her dignity and her hourly rate. She left jobs, she did not lose them.

In twenty years she was only ever sacked the once, and that was over a pair of missing earrings. She came home with a week’s notice and wept under the lemon tree where she thought I wouldn’t hear. I tried to convince her never to return but she wouldn’t hear a word of it. We argued. It was awful, and it didn’t let up all week. Since the old man’s disappearance we’d never raised our voices at each other. It was as though we kept the peace at all costs for fear of driving each other away. And now we couldn’t stop bickering.

The morning she was to return we were still at it. Then, even while I took a shower, she stood in the bathroom doorway to lecture me on the subject of personal pride. It was as though I was not a twenty-year-old law student but a little boy who needed his neck scrubbed.

I don’t care what you say, I yelled. It’s outrageous and I’m not coming.

I never asked you, she said. When did I ever ask you to come?

I groaned. There was nothing I could say to that. And I knew it was a four-hour job, two if I helped out. Given what the householder had accused her of, it would be the toughest four hours she’d ever put in. But I was convinced that it was a mistake for her to go back. It was unfair, ludicrous, impossible, and while she packed the Corolla in the driveway I told her so. She came back for the mop and bucket. I stood on the verandah with my arms folded. But she must have known I’d go. She knew before I did, and not even the chassis-bending slam I gave the door could wipe the look of vindication from her face as she reversed us out into the street.

The car reeked of bleach and rubber gloves. I sighed and cranked down the window. She drove with both ravaged hands on the wheel, her chin up at a silly, dignified angle. Her mask of composure belied a fear of driving, and the caution with which she navigated made me crazy, but I resolved to show a bit of grace.

What? she said, seeing something in my face.

Nothing, I said, trying not to sound sullen.

You’re good to come with me.

Well. Figure you need the help.

Oh, it’s not help, love. It’s company.

I could have opened the door and got out there and then.

What? she asked.

I shook my head. I couldn’t launch into it all again. She was worth twice what those silvertails paid her. She was more scrupulous, more honest, than any of them. She wouldn’t even open a drawer unless it was to put a clean knife or fork into it. For her to be called a thief was beyond imagining.

I know it’s not easy, she said.

It’s demeaning, Mum! I blurted despite myself. Going back like this. The whole performance. It’s demeaning.

To who?

Whom.

Well, excuse me, constable! she said with a tart laugh. To whom is it demeaning, then, Victor? You?

I looked out of the window, flushing for shame.

You men, she said brightly.

Actually, this is about a woman, Mum. What kind of person accuses you of thieving, gives you the sack and then asks you back for one week while she looks for somebody to replace you?

Well, it’s her loss, said my mother, changing lanes with excruciating precision. She knows she won’t find anybody better than me.

Not even as good as you. Not a chance.

Thank you.

Five-hundred-dollar earrings, Mum. She hasn’t even gone to the police.

As far as we know.

In that postcode? Believe me, we’d know.

She must know I didn’t steal them.

She just wants something, some advantage over you. There’ll be a note there, you wait. She’ll let it slide — this time — and later on, while you’re all guilty and grateful, she’ll chip you down on the rate. Back to a fiver an hour.

The Law, she said. It must make you suspicious. She’s just made a stupid mistake. She’s probably found them by now.

And not called?

These people, they never call. Silence, that’s their idea of an apology. It’s how they’re brought up.

But she looked troubled for a few moments. Then her face cleared.

Oh well, she murmured. There’s the waiting list. I can still fill a dance card in this business.

Sure, I said without any enthusiasm.

Anyway, we’ll show her.

How’s that?

We’ll clean that flat within an inch of its life.

Oh yeah, I muttered. That’ll put her back in her box. Go, Mum.

We pulled up in the leafy street beneath a block of Art Deco flats. You could smell the river. Even after three years at the university, whose lawns all but ran to the river’s grassy banks, that constant, brothy presence stank of old money, of posh schools and yacht clubs. Sometimes it reeked of Law itself, of port and cigars, chesterfields, musty paper and the men who owned this city because of it. That smell kept me alert. It made me wary and determined.

Drive on up, Mum, I said. Use her car space.

I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

I did not roll my eyes. I got out and hoisted the vacuum cleaner off the back seat. She grabbed a bucket full of rags and squeeze bottles along with the mop.

Don’t you use her gear?

Not today.

Don’t tell me. The principle, right?

She winked and I felt sick for her.

I followed her up the long garden steps. Veins stood out in her calves. Beneath her loose shorts her thighs were white and dimpled. She seemed so old. I balanced the Electrolux hose on my shoulder and stared at the tennis shoes that she scrubbed and bleached every week to keep them looking new. As if anyone but her gave a damn.

Up on the porch, she fished the key from her blouse. All the keys hung from a piece of string around her neck. The sound of them jangling onto her dressing table at night signalled the end of her day.

The apartment had a closed-up smell intensified by the pong of housebound cats. While Mum went through to the kitchen I stared a moment at the Klee reproductions, the dreadful cat photos in gold frames, and the Kokoschka poster which appeared to be new. I heard an envelope torn open and I came in as she held up the mauve paper, one hand on her heart.

What does it say?

Nothing, she said too quickly. She stuffed the note into her pocket and patted her hair. The envelope lay on the bench. There was money in it.

I opened the fridge, a huge American thing with two doors and an icemaker.

No snooping, she said. Not even today.

There were two kinds of white wine, tomato juice and jars of condiments. On one shelf was a stack of foil boxes, some kind of packaged food without labels. I closed the fridge and looked at the wine rack, a shoulder-high stack of bottles that, after her second week, my mother was requested to leave undisturbed, unrolled, unwiped and undusted.

Don’t be a stickybeak, she murmured, pulling on gloves.

Today I just couldn’t help myself. It wasn’t only resentment. I was curious. What kind of person would do this? After years of faultless service there was no discussion, just the accusation and the brusque termination in three scrawled lines.

Cat tray, she said.

I went into the airless laundry where the litter tray lay beneath the steel trough. The stink was awful. I got down with a garbage bag and tried to breathe through my mouth but the dust from the grit rose onto my lips and tongue and I started to gag. I grunted a bit, swung the hair out of my eyes and got it done, twisting the bag shut. I was supposed to disinfect the tray and I’d never dared cut corners before, but I just tipped some litter in and left it at that.

From the bathroom came the sound of my mother’s off-key singing. I paused at the doorway a moment where a stinging fog of ammonia spilled out into the hall. She stopped warbling as if conscious of my presence. She was bent over the tub, Ajax in hand, veins livid in her legs. As I walked on, the sound of her brush panted against the enamel.

I binned the cat bag and began damp-dusting. With every surface so crowded with objets, it was slow work. Every trinket, souvenir, ornament and figurine had to be wiped, lifted, dusted beneath and replaced precisely. Standing orders. Mum would inspect it like a sergeant-major at barracks inspection. We both agreed that nobody who cleaned their own place would bother keeping such junk. A week of doing for herself and this woman’d ditch the lot out with the cat litter.

It was a lonely apartment. We’d had a grim few years, Mum and I, but you wouldn’t walk into our place and feel the same melancholy you picked up here. Another person might have found it tranquil, but to me it felt as stale as it smelled. I dusted the Andrew Wyeth reproduction and the steel and leather chairs. I brushed and wiped and waxed the long shelves of books and tried to imagine having strangers in our place looking in our fridge, touching our stuff, ripping hanks of our hair from the plughole. You’d have to imagine they were some kind of sleepwalker, that they were blind, incurious, too stupid to notice intimate things about your life. You’d have to not think about them, to will these intruders away. Or just be confident. Yes, I thought. That’s what it takes to be blasé about strangers in your house — a kind of annihilating self-assurance.

The bookshelves in the livingroom were stocked with novels and popular psychology. There were big celebrity hardbacks as well as the usual stuff by Germaine Greer, Erica Jong, Betty Friedan. But I found both volumes of the Kinsey Report and boxed sets of erotica I took some minutes to thumb through, wondering how Mum had missed them.

In the study I flicked the duster across slabs of specialist material, academic stuff, lever-arch files and archive boxes. I found biographies of Paul Robeson, Leadbelly, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, each of them bristling with tabs of paper and pencilled notes. On the desk beside the typewriter was a pile of what I instantly recognized as student papers. The title of the topmost was Throwing Off the Shackles: consciousness-raising and the delivery of change. I turned the cover page and read a few paragraphs. It was all the safe, right-thinking stuff of the time but clumsily written. The comments in red biro were good-natured and forbearing.

I smoothed the paper back into place and dusted the pin-up board of snapshots above the desk. The photos were of people in heavy coats and hats with earflaps, of fir trees, snow, people with big, pink smiling faces and spectacles. Americans. The lantern-jawed woman who appeared in so many — it was her. She looked decent, happy, loved by friends and family. Even as I clawed through her desk drawers, finding nothing more remarkable than a tiny twist of hash in a bit of tinfoil, I knew I wouldn’t find anything that would satisfy me. Now I just wanted to get the job over with.

In the bedroom I worked in a frenzy. Every sill and architrave, each lamp and mirror got a grinding wipe. I Windexed the glass, waxed the girly dressing table. When it was done I went out for the vacuum, cranked it up and ploughed my way through the whole place. At one point, when the old girl glanced up from the kitchen floor, I averted my eyes.

The thought kept returning to me. Why would someone not report the theft of a pair of five-hundred-dollar earrings? Even to claim the insurance you’d have to report it. Perhaps it was my own uneasiness at having overstepped the boundaries, at having gone through somebody’s stuff, which made me consider the chance that this woman might know about me, be aware that I’d helped here before. Could she have suspected me rather than Mum? Worse still, did she know who I was, that I was an undergraduate at her own campus? And then could it be possible that her failure to report a theft to the cops was an act of kindness towards my mother, an act of mercy toward me?

I vacuumed and raked feverishly. When I got to the bedroom, the cats who’d thus far evaded us leapt out from behind the curtains. They were sulking great Persians. I threw down the nozzle and chased them out of the room.

My mother was still in the kitchen.

Mum, I said. What did the note say?

Did you leave that machine going?

Was it about me? Does she suspect me?

You? Don’t be stupid.

I haven’t been here for months.

Turn that thing off.

No, I said feeling ridiculous. It doesn’t matter, I’m going back.

Don’t forget those curtains!

I gave the bedroom curtains a good going over. I could never understand how so much cat hair could accumulate in a week.

Mum came in while I was on my knees still vacuuming the flounces and folds of the patchwork quilt.

Windex? she said.

I pointed to the dressing table. She lingered. I turned the machine off.

What were you on about before?

Honestly, Mum, why didn’t we just give the place a light go through? Or better, just take the dough and split.

Because it would look like an admission of guilt.

Shit.

Language.

But this won’t convince her, Mum.

No, probably not.

You should report them missing yourself. Ask them to search our place. Force the issue. There’s nothing that can come of it.

Except talk. Imagine the talk. I’d lose the rest of my jobs.

She was shining with sweat. Her hair had tightened into damp poodle curls. She had been so pretty once.

So you’re stuffed either way.

Love, we grin and bear it.

I shook my head. I hit the button on the vac and blitzed the carpet beneath the bed. I could sense her still behind me, waiting to say something but I pretended to be absorbed in the work. Up at the head of the bed there was a nest of Red Tulip chocolate wrappers. They made a slurping noise as they were sucked into the machine. I only had half of them up when the ping of something hard racketing along the pipe made me turn my head.

Mum stepped on the button. The machine wound down to silence.

Money, probably, I murmured.

Let’s open it up.

I cracked the hatch and felt around in the horrible gullet of the dustbag. From wads of lint and hair and dirt came an earring.

Five hundred dollars? she muttered. That’s rich.

I didn’t know anything about jewellery. I shrugged, gave it to her.

Look under there. The other one’s bound to be close by.

I found it hard up against the skirting board.

She’s left them on the pillow, she said. Forgotten about them. She’s come in and swept them off as she got into bed. She hasn’t even looked. That’s all it was, just carelessness.

All this fake outrage. She couldn’t be bothered going to the cops because they’re cheap? Is that it?

I don’t know.

It wasn’t important.

It was important to me.

Well, you’ve cleared your name. That’s something.

She shook her head with a furious smile.

Why not? I asked. Show her what we found, what she was too lazy to look for. Show her where they were.

All she has to say is that she made me guilty enough to give them back. That I just wanted to keep the job. To save my good name. Vic, that’s all I’ve got — my good name. These people, they can say anything they like. You can’t fight back.

I looked away at the floor. I heard her blow her nose. I was powerless to defend her. It was the lowest feeling.

I’ll finish the kitchen, she said. Ten minutes.

I vacuumed the rest of the bedroom. The earrings lay on the bed. I looked at them. They were pretty enough but I was no judge. Perhaps their real value was sentimental. I snatched them up from the quilt and took them into the laundry. I chucked them into the cat tray. Let her find them there if she cared to look.

In the kitchen Mum was ready to go. The rags and bottles were in the bucket. She walked a towel across the floor and that was it.

What about the money? I said, looking at the scrubbed bench.

I’m worth more, she said.

You’re not taking it?

No.

I smiled and shook my head.

You forgot the vacuum, she said.

Oh, yeah. Right.

I went back to the laundry, knelt at the catbox and picked out the earrings. I dusted them off on my sweaty shirt. In my palm they weighed nothing. I grabbed the Electrolux from the bedroom and made my way out again. In the kitchen I put the earrings beside the unstrung key and the thin envelope of money.

My mother stood silhouetted in the open doorway. It seemed that the very light of day was pouring out through her limbs. I had my breath back. I followed her into the hot afternoon.