the things that other people didn’t want anymore: a waffle maker, given as a wedding gift to a couple we didn’t know; a coffee table thatmight match a couch we didn’t own; and numerous other doodads we might be able to piece a life around.
I hated yard sales. To me, used stuff was junk, and we had just gotten rid of all of our junk. Our hotel room began to look more and more like our house had. Each new purchase recreated the claustrophobic conditions I’d prayed so hard to get away from. The hotel was starting to feel like home.
After a month, the insurance company stopped paying for our hotel. According to them, we needed to make a choice: rebuild, which would consist of living in a trailer on our front yard, or buy a new house. My mom couldn’t stomach the idea of living in front of the wreckage, so we downgraded to an hourly-rate motel off of the highway willing to give us a discount. Cheap and small and dingy, there was no pool or almond-scented shampoo, but for the time being it would suffice as home. Unlike the Comfort Inn, the maids at the motel would come tidy up the room whether we were in it or not, which meant I got to spend a lot more face time with the cleaning staff.
I was fascinated by the women who would come in and out of each room with carts of toilet paper, towels, and Lysol. At first I would just watch them attentively, but as I got more comfortable, I started following them around to other rooms, watching the way they made tight corners with the sheets and wiped down any visible surfaces with dingy rags.
Most didn’t speak much English, or at least pretended not to, and therefore couldn’t tell me to get lost. The exception was Rosa, who was younger than the other maids and made a habit of winking at me each time I passed her and her cart of towels on the way to the ice machine. I made up a story that she wasthe daughter of the hotel’s owner, the owner decidedly being the man in the office who gave out the room keys. When she came to clean our room, I perched myself on the faux-wood-finished dresser that furnished the barebones hotel room and watched her every move.
“Hi. I like the way you make the beds,” I told her.
“I can show you how, if you want,” she responded, and waved me over to her.
I’m not sure where my father was at this point. I assumed he was sitting in the car listening to the radio, and I hoped he wouldn’t come back and ruin my opportunity to get a housekeeping tutorial from a real-life maid. Rosa taught me how to make tight corners with top sheets and creases for the pillows and how to properly fold the bedspread. The next day, I had the beds made before she got there, but she allowed me to follow her into the empty guest rooms and make them up.
If Rosa was annoyed by my overzealous companionship, she didn’t show it, and she let me help with the dusting, polishing, and vacuuming—things I had never done or seen my parents do at home. My favorite chore remained bed-making, but I made careful mental notes about each housekeeping duty we did together so that I would have a plan of action for my family’s new house. I would take over the cleaning in our new house, and I would ask my parents to give me an allowance. I had seen that on TV.
My parents’ goal was to move before the school year started in September, since I couldn’t register for school from a hotel. As August approached, my mom took more and more time off of work to dedicate to our hunt for a new home. The prospect offinding, closing, and moving into a house in less than a month seemed increasingly unlikely. Especially given my mother’s propensity to hate every house she saw.
My dad didn’t have much of an opinion about where we ended up, but my mother found veto reasons in white carpets, narrow doorways, shower doors, lack of fencing, and floral wallpaper. There didn’t appear to be a house on Long Island that was right for our family.
And then we saw the worst of the lot: tan and
I hated yard sales. To me, used stuff was junk, and we had just gotten rid of all of our junk. Our hotel room began to look more and more like our house had. Each new purchase recreated the claustrophobic conditions I’d prayed so hard to get away from. The hotel was starting to feel like home.
After a month, the insurance company stopped paying for our hotel. According to them, we needed to make a choice: rebuild, which would consist of living in a trailer on our front yard, or buy a new house. My mom couldn’t stomach the idea of living in front of the wreckage, so we downgraded to an hourly-rate motel off of the highway willing to give us a discount. Cheap and small and dingy, there was no pool or almond-scented shampoo, but for the time being it would suffice as home. Unlike the Comfort Inn, the maids at the motel would come tidy up the room whether we were in it or not, which meant I got to spend a lot more face time with the cleaning staff.
I was fascinated by the women who would come in and out of each room with carts of toilet paper, towels, and Lysol. At first I would just watch them attentively, but as I got more comfortable, I started following them around to other rooms, watching the way they made tight corners with the sheets and wiped down any visible surfaces with dingy rags.
Most didn’t speak much English, or at least pretended not to, and therefore couldn’t tell me to get lost. The exception was Rosa, who was younger than the other maids and made a habit of winking at me each time I passed her and her cart of towels on the way to the ice machine. I made up a story that she wasthe daughter of the hotel’s owner, the owner decidedly being the man in the office who gave out the room keys. When she came to clean our room, I perched myself on the faux-wood-finished dresser that furnished the barebones hotel room and watched her every move.
“Hi. I like the way you make the beds,” I told her.
“I can show you how, if you want,” she responded, and waved me over to her.
I’m not sure where my father was at this point. I assumed he was sitting in the car listening to the radio, and I hoped he wouldn’t come back and ruin my opportunity to get a housekeeping tutorial from a real-life maid. Rosa taught me how to make tight corners with top sheets and creases for the pillows and how to properly fold the bedspread. The next day, I had the beds made before she got there, but she allowed me to follow her into the empty guest rooms and make them up.
If Rosa was annoyed by my overzealous companionship, she didn’t show it, and she let me help with the dusting, polishing, and vacuuming—things I had never done or seen my parents do at home. My favorite chore remained bed-making, but I made careful mental notes about each housekeeping duty we did together so that I would have a plan of action for my family’s new house. I would take over the cleaning in our new house, and I would ask my parents to give me an allowance. I had seen that on TV.
My parents’ goal was to move before the school year started in September, since I couldn’t register for school from a hotel. As August approached, my mom took more and more time off of work to dedicate to our hunt for a new home. The prospect offinding, closing, and moving into a house in less than a month seemed increasingly unlikely. Especially given my mother’s propensity to hate every house she saw.
My dad didn’t have much of an opinion about where we ended up, but my mother found veto reasons in white carpets, narrow doorways, shower doors, lack of fencing, and floral wallpaper. There didn’t appear to be a house on Long Island that was right for our family.
And then we saw the worst of the lot: tan and
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