Chore Whore Page 5

  While Shelly eventually adjusted to the fact that she was working as a housekeeper, Esther, her boss, did not. She hired Shelly partially because she didn’t want to be accused of not hiring a black woman. For the first couple of months, Esther called me complaining that she felt guilty for hiring a black woman to clean her house, of all things—too many historical implications, what with slavery and all. “Too much ‘white liberal guilt,’ ” I told her.

  I liked to taunt Esther and ask her whether she would rather pay a hardworking American black woman, historical implications and all, $750 per week to clean or a Latina woman who didn’t speak the same language and would be sending her money home to Mexico. Esther could never stomach answering the question. She tried to mask her guilt by complaining that since Shelly was a fellow follower of Gurumayi, it was too much like having your own sister scrub your toilet.

  Shelly climbs my front steps with vigor. After a full day of cleaning a six-thousand-square-foot home, I wouldn’t be able to muster a smile. Shelly looks up at me standing in the doorway.

  “Hey, mama!”

  “Hey, Shell. You sure you worked a full day? You have a little too much spring in that step.”

  She walks through the door, brushes past me and flops down on the Shabby Chic lounge chair I inherited from Lucy when she last changed her style. Shelly smells like a mixture of sandalwood and 409. She takes off her black-rimmed glasses and shoves them into her bag.

  “I’m telling you, Corki, it’s clean living. Herbs, vitamins and an organic, vegetarian diet. No meat, no dairy.”

  The kids come in from Blaise’s room.

  “You kids almost ready to go? Mama Corki has to get a move on and go cook a dinner for the stars!” Shelly prods as she gathers their backpacks and shoes together. “Real quick, Corki, you hear the latest?”

  “About the doors? Yeah, Esther left me a message.”

  “Oh, not that!” Shelly states. “I’m talking about the little surprise she brought home.”

  “No. What was it?”

  “A bronze statue of Lord Ganesh. A three-thousand-dollar, sixteen-hundred-pound Lord Ganesh for the front patio.”

  The teakettle whistles a shrill reminder that it’s ready. “I’m sorry, girl, but I threw up a minute ago. I need some ginger tea.” I start to get up.

  “You stay right there. Let me do it,” Shelly says as she gets up and goes to the kitchen. “Is that why you look so pale?”

  The sounds of cupboards opening and closing, tea mugs clinking and the click of the stove’s fire being turned off unexpectedly moves me. I hadn’t realized how much I miss being cared for. Forty hours a week I mother my clients, and the rest of the time I mother Blaise. I haven’t been taken care of in a long time.

  “Corki?” she calls from the kitchen, “I’m putting your tea in a travel mug so you can take it with you. That okay?”

  “Perfect. Thank you.”

  “So anyway,” she continues, “I bet I’m going to be spending an hour a day bathing this statue because he’s the Hindu god that requires constant attention. A special-needs god is what I call him.”

  “At least you have a job,” I state flatly.

  “Amen to that. Thank God we both do!”

  “Did,” I correct.

  “Oh no, what happened?” Shelly inquires.

  I tell her the Reader’s Digest version with a little gore to enhance the story.

  “Doesn’t Jock give you some type of retainer or something to tide you over while he’s gone?”

  “Are you joking? It would be nice if he would at least give me a bit of notice so I could try to get another client while he’s gone.”

  “Really!” she says indignantly.

  “What am I gonna do?” I ask.

  “You’ll find a way,” Shelly says.

  “How much you think prostitutes make?” I ponder.

  “Now, there’s a viable option! Come on, woman, get up and let’s get you on your way.”

  She pulls me up out of the chair and helps me gather all the food and cooking utensils I’ll need to use tonight. We herd the kids out the front door. At the curb, I kiss Blaise goodbye.

  “Honey, I’ll pick you up as soon as I finish work, okay?”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  “Shelly, by the way, is it possible you could watch Blaise tomorrow afternoon? I’m sorry to have to ask you but I’m supposed to meet a client at four.”

  “Believe it or not, I’ll have the afternoon off. If you want I can watch him from noon on.”

  “Bless you! That would be great. It’s such an inconvenience that they start winter break in the middle of the week. What kind of school district makes decisions like that?” I ask.

  We get the kids in the backseat, buckle them in, and I slop them all with “mama” kisses until they cringe. I go around to the front seat and hug Shelly goodbye. She hugs me back.

  “You get my message about the crack dealer?” she whispers in my ear.

  I nod my head.

  “I told Esther and she was properly horrified. Sent her right into rescue mode. She started ranting and raving saying that all our kids should go to Atom’s school, where they’d be safe from that kind of thing. Of course, I pointed out that none of us have eighteen thousand dollars a year to spend on private school.”

  “Yeah, hello!”

  “So she got on the horn with some bigwig at Envision Prep and told him that they don’t have enough ‘color’ there and if she wanted her son, Atom Chase-Schwartz, to think that only blond-haired, blue-eyed kids deserve a good education, she would have had him schooled in Germany! She asked them just what they planned on doing about it. But before he could answer she interjected her own solution. They should admit three ‘African-American’ kids and she happens to have the perfect candidates.”

  “Oh no, let me guess. Might they be named Eden, Star and Blaise?”

  “Oh, you’re a smart one! You’re definitely gonna find your way!”

  Lucy’s dinner party is a success. Most of the food on my menu is considered “legal” by Atkins, Zone and South Beach: salmon and lobster with a sautéed tangerine reduction, a leek gratin with goat cheese and prosciutto, a grated raw zucchini salad with fresh mint, and edamame beans with olive oil, scallions and cilantro. Since Ben Harper is the only one who wholeheartedly indulges in dessert, my favorite course, I spoil him. Dessert is moist chocolate cake topped with espresso mocha frosting accompanied by homemade violet ice cream.

  I try to spend as much time in the kitchen as I can. I don’t want to look into Lucy’s dining room and see John wiping tangerine juice off his chin or Meg with lobster stuck in her teeth. Or even worse, I don’t want to see someone politely saying “No thank you” to a dish that I slaved over.

  As the dinner chatter gets louder, I start to feel the tension in my neck. An acute muscle spasm is starting above my shoulder blades. I rub and squeeze my neck and the pain seems to only worsen. Alejandra, Lucy’s housekeeper, a tiny, beautiful woman who was a television reporter in Guatemala, plays waitress tonight in the dinner drama. She brushes past me in the kitchen as she takes drinks out to the party.

  I hear Courteney laughing generously in the other room, followed by a hearty chuckle of Melissa’s. What was Lucy possibly thinking, asking me to cook for movie stars who have dined in the finest restaurants in the world? I can’t concentrate with all the butterflies fluttering in my stomach.

  I grab a red plastic cup and make a dash down to the small, personal-size wine cellar in the basement.

  Lucy doesn’t drink wine or spirits. Every bottle in here was a gift. I move the bottles around and all are unopened. I finally find a bottle of cognac that is open. It was a gift from Kevin Kline. I hope he doesn’t mind.

  Remy Martin Louis XIII.

  I pour a full cup, take a gulp and pour some more. I trot carefully up the stairs, and before I hit the last step, I feel a comforting warmth spread through my stomach. I know this would be a no-no on Dr. Trabulus’s list of
ways to feel better after throwing up, but . . . I sip some more cognac and am ready to finish cooking.

  Dinner slips by in a bit of a blur. As they eat, I stand behind the dining room door, unseen, watching the guests through a crack. Seeing John smile lovingly at Kelly, Courteney laugh at David’s jokes and Laura rub Ben’s back makes me suddenly melancholy. I take another generous drink of the Rémy Martin.

  It’s almost Christmas, I’m tired and alone, quickly on my way to becoming tipsy, and I still have to pick up Blaise. I tiptoe to the sink and dump the rest of the cognac down the drain.

  At ten P.M. I finish washing my pots, pans and dishes and start hauling them back to my truck. After being on the go for eighteen hours, I’m ready to go home and climb into bed. Alejandra helps me. I wrap up the remaining cake for her to take home.

  “Before you leave, Corki, Lucy wants me to show you some stuff she’ll need for tomorrow night.”

  Alejandra and I quietly make our way past the dwindling party and into the guest bedroom. When she turns on the light, I am assaulted with the vision of a mountain of shopping bags. There are twenty-six visible—more hidden behind the bed. Each one contains a number of gifts with nametags. This is the trouble with actors who are out of work during Christmas—they like to shop. There must be 150 to 200 gifts that will need to be wrapped in twenty-four hours—not possible.

  “She wants to have them for her road trip,” Alejandra says apologetically.

  “What road trip is this?” I ask, appalled by the sight.

  She raises her shoulders. “I don’t know. All Lucy said was that she was going away for Christmas.”

  “This is the first I’ve heard,” I say with exasperation. “I’m sorry to ask you this, Alejandra, ’cause I know you’re as tired as I am, but will you help me load this into my truck?”

  “Of course.”

  We load the bags into Betty’s trunk space. I hit the twenty-four-hour store for wrapping supplies before I pick up Blaise.

  After five hours of sleep, I spend ten hours wrapping gifts with $528 worth of holiday paper, ribbon, boxes and tape and deliver them to Lucy’s house. I go directly from there to the Four Seasons Hotel to meet Lucy for tea and pray I can stay alert enough to write detailed notes.

  I pull my SUV, which hasn’t been cleaned in a good month, into the stone-paved driveway. The lineup of Rolls-Royces, BMWs and Maseratis, all shining clean, is intimidating. I don’t see infant car seats protruding from the backseats or spent milk cartons in the cup holders. I see a plethora of brand new ghastly expensive cars that get replaced every two years with new models. Maybe I should park my eight-year-old Betty a block or so away.

  I know when I pull up to the valet (who will look down his nose at me, but who will almost certainly have a car very similar to mine in age and dirt level parked beneath the hotel), he will search frantically for a place to put Betty where no one else will see her. I suppose if my job depended on it, I, too, would scramble to hide Betty in order to preserve the image of a perfectly manicured hotel.

  I roll down my window and a young man approaches. His hair is trimmed and clean, his uniform is pressed with perfect creases, and his nametag reads “Homer.” Homer smiles widely, showing a set of dazzling teeth he probably got whitened in an hour and paid for with a Visa card he can’t pay off.

  “Hello, ma’am. May I ask how long you’ll be staying?”

  “Just an hour or so.”

  “Okay, ma’am, if you’ll pull your truck over there”—he points to some tall bushes—“I’ll take care of it for you.”

  I park Betty and quietly slip into the lobby of the hotel, where people are milling around waiting to be checked in. I veer to the right and enter the crowded tearoom.

  As I scan the drinkers for Lucy, the room goes silent for an instant as the “tea-totalers” look up from their steaming brews and stare just long enough to dismiss me as no one of importance. Lucy hasn’t shown up yet. Besides being incredibly indecisive, she is always late.

  I look for a host or hostess to seat me, but none is present. I go to a table in the corner and pull out a seat. It’s the only table left without a reserved sign on it. Waiting for Lucy, I stare out the window at the sky starting to open up and sprinkle water droplets everywhere.

  A clean-cut, blond-haired host breaks into my reverie.

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but you can’t sit here. It’s reserved,” he informs me.

  “It doesn’t have a ‘reserved’ sign on it.”

  “That may be so,” he says curtly, “but it is still reserved.”

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Michael.”

  “Michael. There was no sign on it, so I sat down. There are other seats with ‘reserved’ signs.”

  He clears his throat.

  “Yes, ma’am, I know, I put those signs on there and was on my way to put a sign on this one when you came in and sat down. So, this one is reserved.”

  “Well, Michael, I’m not a psychic, how would I have known?”

  I gather my purse and sweater, get out of the seat and walk toward the door, wondering where Lucy and I are going to sit. Everyone in the tearoom watches as Michael sweeps the table off. I brush by Denzel Washington sitting with a few executive-looking, Creative Artist–agent types. Angelica Huston sits in a far corner enjoying crumpets with two other women.

  I wait in the hotel’s foyer and recall walking shyly into the third-grade classroom of my new elementary school in Visalia, late for my first day. As I slid into my assigned seat, the boy sitting behind me leaned forward and whispered into my ear, “Niggers don’t belong here.”

  A high-pitched shriek comes from behind me.

  “Miss Corki Brown!” Lucy sweeps all seventy-two inches of her fat-free body through the crowded hotel entrance. She throws her arms around me and we hug each other tightly.

  “Hi, darlin’! It’s been forever!”

  There it is again, the slight twang. I didn’t notice it so much last night, but it has returned with a vengeance.

  “Hi, Lucy. I have some bad news. I tried to get a table and was told the last one was reserved. I was kicked out by that guy over there.”

  I point to Michael.

  Lucy drags me, lovingly, by the arm back into the tearoom. “Don’t be silly, Corki. I’m sure they can do something for us.”

  Lucy walks in, commanding as much attention as a slim, pretty, six-foot-tall, blonde, double Academy Award–winning actress can. She waves the scarf in her hand at Michael, who suddenly smiles graciously. Lucy rolls on, full steam ahead.

  “Hi, my friend here says she tried to get a table and there wasn’t one. That can’t possibly be true, can it? What’s your name?”

  “Michael,” I pipe in with disdain.

  Lucy continues with her twinge of Tennessee coming in a bit stronger. “That can’t be right, can it, Michael?”

  “No, Miss Bennett, I’m sure there was a huge misunderstanding,” he backpedals ferociously.

  Lucy pours it on as thick and sweetly as Memphis-style barbeque sauce. “Michael, I know we don’t have a reservation, but I’ve never had a problem here before.”

  Michael guides us back to the same table where I had sat before. “And Miss Bennett,” he oozes, matching her syrupy tone, “you certainly won’t have any problems here today.”

  He pulls out Lucy’s chair for her. I pull out my own. As Lucy turns to say hello to a studio exec at the next table, I give Michael a cold stare and mouth the words “Ass kisser!”

  Slightly embarrassed, he smirks, then says to Lucy, “I’ll send your waiter over immediately.”

  The moment he turns away, Lucy announces, “What an asshole!”

  The people around us erupt in nervous laughter and Michael shoots them a look that could carve pumpkins. I wonder if he’s going to spit in our teapot.

  I wait quietly for ten minutes as Lucy makes her rounds to each table. While she’s doing her kissy-kissy routine with all her “film friends,”
I order food and tea for both of us. My watch reads 4:41 P.M.

  Lucy comes back to our table and scoots her chair over until it touches mine. She lets out a huge sigh, as if all this networking exhausted her.

  “So, Corki, first off, I want to tell you how much everyone enjoyed your dinner last night. Rave reviews from all.”

  “Thank you,” I say, embarrassed but pleased.

  “But that’s not why I wanted to meet you here now. Let me get straight to the point. Cork, after my marriage to Roger broke up . . .”

  She’s not going to get straight to the point, that I can already see.

  “. . . well, I went out with a couple of fellas.”

  Fellas?

  “I mean, you know, none of them were really for me. A woman knows these things. If I meet a new man, I just know whether it is meant to be or not. For instance, I knew Roger was meant to be.”

  Roger, whose last name I could never pronounce because it’s French and complicated and laden with so many vowels that I can’t wrap my tongue around it. Roger, who I truly liked in the beginning because he remembered me on his trips to Paris and always brought me back chocolate-covered truffles even though Lucy told him she didn’t want him contributing to my gaining an ounce . . .

  “Corki, what’s that look on your face?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m here.”

  “You weren’t thinking Roger wasn’t meant to be, were you?”

  “Oh no, he was certainly meant to be with you. I was just remembering the truffles.”

  The waiter brings tea with a silver three-tiered tray full of small, crustless sandwiches, crumpets, lemon curd, jam, a small scoop of Devonshire cream and teacakes. I serve us both. Lucy stares longingly out the window. It has begun to rain, hard. The windows are becoming streaked with sheets of water.

  “He was meant to be with me. He had his demons, and even though it ended like it did, we had a marriage made in heaven.”

  The “heaven” only lasted six weeks. When Roger lost it one night after drinking an entire bottle of Lafite Rothschild ’82, he pushed Lucy so hard that her head snapped back and caused her to be bound in a neck brace for a month with acute muscle spasms. Roger refilled the wine bottle with his own urine that he said was “almost as good as the original contents” and proceeded to drink some and pour the rest on Lucy as she huddled in the corner holding her neck, crying hysterically. It wasn’t heavenly when I was jarred from a deep sleep at three o’clock in the morning by Lucy, who called and begged me to come help her. I carried my crying child out into the cold night, packed him into Betty’s backseat and drove to Beverly Hills to rescue her. I calmed Roger, calmed Blaise and simultaneously washed the urine out of Lucy’s hair. Their relationship ended after I caught Lucy writing in bloodred lipstick on Roger’s garage door, “Make Love, Not War.” Roger’s gardeners tried scrubbing it off, but the waxy, oily lipstick had already sunken into the paint job. When I drive by his house today, I still see the faded note that no one bothered to paint over.