Housekeeping

Ryan Pollard

About twenty years ago, I worked for a while in the custodial and housekeeping department at a hospital. My job title was Environmental Services Technician, which seemed like the most impressive-sounding way they could come up with to say a janitor who made beds occasionally. At that time in my life I had what could charitably be called a significant stutter. I could function well enough socially within the cocoon of my close friends, but treading much beyond that was a minefield, and certain exigencies of the adult world were simply unworkable, at least on my own. One of those requirements happened to be getting a job. All of my employment up to then—supermarket courtesy clerk, lifeguard, warehouse picker, seasonal laborer—had been secured with help from a friend, a family connection, or, God help me, my mother. Someone else always made the phone call, or talked to the right person for me, and then I’d show up, ready to go. This one went the same way.  

I was hired by the housekeeping day manager, a man named Nick Zebrowski, one night in the kitchen of my friend, Woody, who worked at the hospital. Nick was one of those big, genial guys you might have seen managing an Old Chicago or working in the car stereo section at Best Buy. He had a soft voice and a round, pinkish face that gave the effect of protracted youth, like a kind of a suspended ten-year-old. Although he was heavy, you could still make out the remnants of a once athletic body that had gradually been given up or given over through the years. He told me once that he’d pitched at a juco in Nebraska and gotten some looks from pro scouts. A couple of times before he had come over to Woody’s house to hang out with us all, a thing I found strange because, despite his baby face, he also had thinning hair and a weary remoteness about him that made it clear he was not our age. I learned later that he was seventeen years older than us, a gap that put him more in our parents’ generation than ours. He was not anything like our parents, though. He was cool and relatable, he could drink heroically—something we looked upon with reverence—and he’d lived more sex, drugs, and rock & roll than any of us at that point. He’d seen all the good bands and had the stories to match. 

That night in the kitchen we got into a drunken conversation about a U2 concert Nick had seen in the early eighties, before they were big. “Bono was intense back then,” he was saying. “He came into the crowd a lot, like it was a punk show or something. But they were opening for the freakin’ J. Geils Band! I think they closed with some Sinatra song, too, like ‘Send in the Clowns.’” 

I stood there rapt. “Who else have you seen?”

“Ah, I used to go to a couple shows a week back in the day. I saw Black Flag and the Pixies on their first tours. Saw James Brown once at some kind of state fair thing, couldn’t have been more than a couple hundred people there. He’s just up there killin’ it like it’s an arena, sweatin’ his ass off for a buncha clueless white folks.” He could tell he had my attention, so he went on rhapsodizing about his favorite bands while I chimed in now and then with what my meager experience could offer. 

“Nick, you givin’ him an education?” Woody came over to join us. They got onto talking about work gossip and pretty soon they had enthusiastically decided that I should come work with them at the hospital. It paid fairly well and it seemed all they did was goof off and BS all day. Soon enough I was nodding along and making promises. I was prone to blurry late-night commitments back then, but this one turned out to have some legs, because a week or two later, there I was.

I was a little disappointed when Woody left for greener pastures a few weeks after I started, but at least by then he’d introduced me around and I was established as his friend and successor: the next middle-class college boy passing through. After that, my coworkers were mostly middle-aged women from places like Central America, Laos, or the Philippines. There was also the floor tech crew, a group of four guys who strode the halls in pairs, rags hanging from back pockets, their retractable key reels jangling and shirts partially untucked. 

I was usually put on carpet and floor duty. Sometimes I’d get sent to the garbage and recycling crew when they were short. That broke up my routine and got me into other parts of the building, like the nursery or lab. There was even a chapel where I’d sneak off on slow days to nap in the pews. I saw Nick often, as he walked around regularly to check on us and help out. Our relationship took on a veteran/rookie dynamic. We would horse around while unloading supply pallets in the storeroom, bowling giant toilet paper rolls into paper towel stacks and chucking GoJo hand soap bags like an egg toss. He’d chat with me while I pushed my cart down the oncology or telemetry floor, showing me how to make tight hospital corners on the beds or helping me deep clean a suite in the hospice wing that had been occupied for several weeks. Sometimes he’d come in on a Saturday and we’d block off rooms to strip and wax for a couple hours. He was a master with the buffer. He could handle the bouncing, whirling pull of the machine with one hand while we talked, keeping his eye on the ball game playing on the room’s TV. I could never quite keep the damn thing from getting away from me and banging a wall, so he’d put me on detail duty, scraping the edges and scrubbing baseboards.

Nick rarely talked about his home life, but I knew he had an estranged wife that no one, it seemed, had ever met. She was like one of those sitcom characters whose name comes up occasionally but is never on screen. Mostly, we stuck to entertainment or the news, or he’d ask about college life. For some reason it was important for me to impress him, so I’d try to think up some salacious or ridiculous story. Because talking was such a fraught undertaking, I tended to be a bit player more than a principal in those days; my anecdotes usually featured a friend or two making questionable decisions under the influence of one substance or another, with me providing the wry commentary. Nick was patient when we talked, his benign unconcern like a life raft when I’d get stuck interminably on a word. Sometimes we’d discuss my irresolute aims after graduation, or I’d mention a girl in one of my classes I wanted to talk to but knew I wouldn’t. I always wondered if he guessed the real reason for my diffidence with girls whenever the topic came up—my conviction, fixed as a hammered nail, that they’d think less of me once I opened my mouth—or if he assumed it was normal late bloomer stuff and I just needed some nerve like other sensitive souls. Either way, he was always avuncular in his response, encouraging me or offering advice as indicated. “You’re like the little brother I never had,” he joked once. “Or, shoot, I guess maybe son? Are you even twenty-one yet?” I said I was almost twenty-two. “Well, get your degree and do something,” he urged, “wherever you end up: grad school, a real job, whatever. Just aim higher than this place, alright? Promise me that at least.”

I said I would, that I had plans. That happened to be untrue right then, incidentally. I was coasting along like every other rudderless late adolescent who goes to college with about as much intention as he has enterprise and falls into a job that’s more or less given to him. My particular drift happened to be tied to a disability I had yet to face, and it would be a while still before I finally found my footing.

Thankfully, Nick didn’t press me on it. “I’m not planning to stay here forever either, you know,” he said. “I got a part-time gig at a bakery and my boss’s been talking about opening a second store pretty close to my house. Pretty sure he’s gonna ask me to run it. I wouldn’t mind doing something like that, building it up from scratch, then buying him out in a year or two, you know? I’ve run the numbers based off the business we do now; it’s doable.”

I hadn’t met enough dreamers at that point, idle or earnest, to tell one apart from the other, so I didn’t know what to make of it when the topic would come up after that first mention and it was clear that Nick’s bakery wasn’t getting any closer to opening its doors. The others in the housekeeping department didn’t pretend to any such ambitions, or at least none they shared with me. They loved to give me advice, though, the ladies telling me how to find a nice girl to marry and the men how to not get tied down. 

Eddie, one of the floor techs, took it upon himself to warn me of the folly of settling down too soon by sharing stories of his first wife. He’d start off moving his head back and forth slowly, inhaling through his teeth. “Tsk-tsk, mm-mm, must’ve thought I was in love or sumpin’. Cupid strummin’ the harp in my ear. Then on our wedding day, bitch tries to run me over with her car! Fitna break my legs on day one! Probably thought she was gonna keep me in check or sumpin’.”  

He and Dominic, another floor tech, had a running joke of pointing out attractive nurses and CNAs we’d pass in the halls or speak to briefly in the course of our duties. “Damn, son,” Eddie would say as we walked away, pulling on his crotch in mock pain. “How ya gonna not be hittin’ her up for her number? A little piece like that jus’ waitin’ for a handsome boy to step up.” Dominic would chime in to the other ear, “Yeah, take her out somewhere nice. A classy joint, maybe Sizzler. Show her a time.” They both laughed and egged each other on. “He be fitna jump on that before dessert comes,” Eddie declared. “Kid can’t help hisself. Tell ya what though, my man, ya want her to stay, ya gotta get up in there proper, stir up them guts. She’ll never forgetcha after that!” 

I laughed along with them, posturing conversance, but my actual love life at the time was quite stunted. My stutter kept me from meeting college girls through the expected avenues—introductions at parties, hook ups at bars, launching conversations while leaving class—so that left the girls I already knew. Or, more to the point, the ones who already knew me. The problem was, I hadn’t yet grown out of my unfortunate teenage tendency to develop secret crushes on my female friends and then spend the next several months privately wallowing in the unjustness of it all. I was on the third or fourth iteration around this time, not to mention the odd girl I’d single out in a class and develop a whole series of agonies over. I went about it all with a martyr’s solemnity, conning myself into believing I was the most tragic thing on two legs.

All of this is to say that if these well-meaning ladies and ribald guys had known what was what, they probably would have saved their tutelage for a more promising pupil. 

 It didn’t help matters that I lived with my mother. I had moved back in after two years in the dorms. She was glad to have me there, I think; my presence confirmed her secret belief that I wasn’t quite ready for the full brunt of the cruel world just yet, a failing I was happy to concede if it meant not having to pay rent. I had no plan, or even the obscure outlines of one, just a nearly completed degree in psychology that I couldn’t do anything more with than hang in my basement bedroom once it arrived by mail after graduation.  

All of that changed, or began to change, at least, rather abruptly my last semester of college. My Abnormal Psychology professor, Dr. Gerlund, a graying hard-ass who gave his lectures in all caps on the chalkboard, asked me to stop by his office after handing back the first quiz. I walked into the windowless basement room and he started affably, “Thanks for coming by. I had you last year in Principles of Psychotherapy, right?”

I confirmed, then stumbled through praising the class and what I had gotten out of it. 

His eyes never left me. “Hmm, I see,” he mused. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I heard you stutter the first week of class when I called on you.” Hearing him say the word so casually, I stood there stripped to the bone. He must have noticed me blanch. “No, no, I just wanted to congratulate you on getting a perfect score on the quiz. My assignments are challenging, they’re meant to be. I recall you did quite well last year as well, and I don’t think you ever spoke a word in that class. I think I see why now.”

I was startled, exposed, but managed to mutter something like, “Yeah, I, uh, I don’t like talking in class.”

“Well, a young man of your intellect shouldn’t be held back by this. There’s simply no reason. My brother stuttered growing up, in fact he still does sometimes, so I have some understanding of it. Let’s get you some help. Have you had speech therapy before?”

“Not since middle school,” I confessed with effort, staring at the floor. I imagined him taking in my contorted face, the quick downward jerks of my head. “I’ve been meaning to go back…”

“Well, there’s a clinic right here, over on old campus. I can take you right now. Come on.” 

His logic was so uncomplicated and final—there’s something standing in your way, so remove it—that I couldn’t resist; I found myself in his car, driving across campus. He took me into the clinic, spoke with the lady at the front desk, I mechanically signed some forms, and there I was, whisked just like that onto the path I had longed for but not yet summoned the will to put myself on.  

Over the next year and more I learned how to better control my mouth’s tendency to seize up and disobey me. That was the easy part, it turned out. Far more difficult was the interior work, as I knew it would be. Years of neglect and delay had left a mess that required an effort every bit as herculean as cleaning the Augean stables themselves. I sweated and squirmed through phone calls and drive-through orders and raw confessionals with those I loved, reckoning with what it had cost me and, far worse, it turned out, what it had not, despite all my insistence otherwise. I didn’t become fluent, exactly—more like an obese man who works his way down to an extra-large—but I came to believe, for the first time, that a life beyond my present circumstances was now at least possible.    

When I graduated that spring, the housekeeping staff celebrated me with a potluck and a personalized sheet cake. Yadira, one of the team leads, a stout woman and devout Catholic, handed me a card signed by everyone and pressed me warmly to her bosom. “Now we just need to find you a decent girl,” she said and kissed my cheek. 

“That’s right, mijo,” Dominic looked up from his plate. “What good are those brains if you can’t get yourself una novia?”      

Nick took me out after work for dinner. “So what’re you gonna do with yourself now?” he asked when our beers arrived. 

I had been fielding that question a lot and always managed to fumble through something noncommittal, but this time I decided to tell the truth. “I’m applying to some MFA programs for creative writing this fall, so we’ll see.”    

“That’s really great, man.” He clinked my glass. “I’m proud of you. I didn’t know you were a writer. I tried to do the starving artist thing for a while after college, with music, though. I was in a few bands back in the day, we played some clubs around town. It never really went anywhere.” 

Stirred by his minor divulgence, I shared another admission, one I hadn’t fully worked through myself but wanted to try verbalizing. “Yeah, we’ll see about the whole writer thing. Seems romantic, but not too practical, you know? But know what I’ve been thinking about? If I strike out with the writing programs, maybe I’ll go into speech pathology.” I glanced up to see how it landed. “Wouldn’t that be kinda cool? Helping others with the same problem; I mean what could be more rewarding, right?” I couldn’t tell if I was more excited by the prospect itself, or that I was telling it to someone, inching it toward actualization. Nick was supportive, of course. I filled him in on what I’d been doing in therapy, explaining that the act of telling him—“disclosing,” it was called—was actually part of the process.   

We drank and talked through dinner, eventually getting back to his old band, then on to his glory days in toto: baseball, music, women he’d dated, bleary-eyed wild nights. Based on his animation and faintly wistful tone, I guessed he hadn’t revisited those years in a while. He ordered us shots and more beer. At some point I made a razzing comment about how he’d somehow turned into a respectable guy, the kind everybody liked at work. “You seem pretty happy where you are,” I said ingenuously. 

His face took on a more distant aspect, one I hadn’t seen before. “Yeah,” he sighed. “That’s probably what everyone figures. Everyone sees this cheery, happy guy around work. But if they only knew, heh,” he said with sham levity. He took a deep drink, raising his eyebrows. “I tell you what, man, if you scratched away that smiling face I wear… I swear, man, no kidding. Sometimes at night, even when I’m dog-tired I can’t get to sleep. So I’ll just get on the freeways and drive. Not going anywhere, really. Just put a CD in or something and drive.” He looked to somewhere far from where I was, then quickly came back. “That’s your area, right? Us wackos? Brother, I could tell ya a story or two about old Nicholas…”

I didn’t have a suitable reply for that, let alone any countenance or empathy for a grown man’s discontent, so I said something about it being above my bachelor’s degree pay grade. He shook his head a little, exhaling a partial laugh out his nose. “Eh, don’t listen to an old fart like me. You got your whole life ahead of you.”   

That summer we had drinks after work most Fridays and Nick joined my friends and me—The Youth of Today, he called us—on one of our camping trips. He came to Woody’s house a few times when we’d have weekend parties, usually bringing alcohol to share and sweets from the bakery. He was always solicitous and genuine with everyone on those nights. The girls thought he was a polite old man, about as appealing as a softball coach, maybe, but still worth conversing and sometimes flirting with the more they drank. We’d teased him to give it a go with this or that girl, but he’d just smile and chuckle, “I’m about twenty years too late to the party, boys.”   

In early fall, Nick called on a Sunday morning to invite me to a football game downtown. He said I might as well meet him at his house, since it was near the stadium, and we’d eat lunch before walking over, but something seemed guarded in his offer. I pulled up to a pre-war craftsman bungalow with long eaves and a wrap-around front porch. He let me in and, as the screen door banged shut and I glanced around, it didn’t take long to decipher the earlier wariness in his voice. 

The ground floor was a grid—not quite a maze, but getting there—of folding chairs, coffee and end tables, recliners, laundry baskets, tower speakers, a console TV, an ironing board and an upright piano and so forth, all supporting neatly stacked piles of boxes, empty packaging, paperback books, VHS and cassette tapes, newspapers and magazines, board games and other flotsam. There were half-filled ashtrays topping several of the domestic cairns. You could make your way through it unimpededly, and it was ordered just enough to still have a credible purpose, but even still I’m sure he knew he had to say something. 

“Sorry about the mess, it’s kinda gotten out of hand lately since my old lady’s been away. Guess housekeeping’s not my strong suit after all, eh?” He smiled ironically then motioned with his head, “Here, come in the kitchen, I’ll get ya a beer.” 

As we walked through the dining room and past a long table nearly covered with magazines, clothes, an in-progress or abandoned puzzle, the smell caught me mid-stride. I must not have concealed my grimace very well because Nick said, “Fuckin’ cats. I clean the litter box every day and that’s the thanks I get.” He pulled a beer from the fridge for me and left the room to take care of it. When he returned, he explained, “We got both of ’em back when Char and I got married. I wanted a dog, but she wasn’t having it. I’m kind of attached to them now, though. Never thought I’d be a crazy cat lady, heh.” I looked around for them. “They’re scaredy cats,” he said. “Don’t like to come out when there’s company. Probably hiding under something.”

He grilled some brats and as we ate standing in the kitchen, I looked around for signs of a woman’s touch but didn’t see any. I quietly pondered the etiquette of asking about his wife. 

At the game I tried my best to keep up while Nick drank draft beers like water. My discretion couldn’t hold out long at that rate; before halftime I was peppering him with questions, trying to learn about Char. For a topic that oddly never came up at work, he talked freely about her now. He said she was living with her mother a few miles away. Evidently his mother-in-law was constantly in and out of the hospital with some illness or other. When she was well enough, Char would stay with her, and when she needed extra care but wasn’t quite “hospital worthy,” the two of them would stay with Nick. He said that he didn’t mind, the big house got too quiet without them and he truly cared for the old woman, although he was sure she was never as sick as she made herself out to be. I told him it didn’t make sense to me. To live apart except when his wife needed him, I meant. He said it didn’t have to make sense, it was the right thing to do, simple as that. I asked if they’d ever wanted kids. He gave me a sad look and said that they’d tried for a long time, ended up spending a fortune trying, in fact. She was quite a bit older than him, so it sort of felt like a race against the clock. “Speaking of a race,” he laughed, “I’d have to run home from work whenever she called with her temperature up and we’d get busy. I was Johnny-on-the-spot back then! We were gonna make that damn baby happen if it killed us.” But nothing worked, not even in vitro, and eventually they ran out of money and gave up. That’s when she lost her job and he had to take the bakery gig on weekend nights. “She’s been sorta down in the dumps on and off ever since,” he confided. There was no bitterness as he sketched the story, just a gentle forbearance that I couldn’t get my young head around. All I saw was a deadbeat wife and an extra, wrinkled stone around his neck. At any rate, he’d been living like that for a while, hardly sleeping on the weekends, his wife bouncing between their house and her ailing mother’s, always about to get a job or just having lost one, cat shit and ash trays piling up. 

I could barely see straight when we walked back to his place after the game. We each drank another beer before I finally passed out on the couch. Sometime in the next few black hours, I woke up incompletely, my eyes still closed. I had a fragmentary, liminal notion of a hand on my head, its fingers smoothing my hair back tenderly, like my father did when I would sit in his lap and watch TV before bed. I fell back into sleep almost as quickly as I had risen out of it, hearing Nick’s soft voice above me saying rest easy, sweet boy, everything will be all right.

At some point later on, well after dark, the irresistible urge to piss brought me fully awake. After tottering toward the only light still on—a weak bulb over the stair landing—and ending up in the second-floor bathroom, I came out and realized that I was the only person in the house. Nick’s bedroom door was open, but he wasn’t in it. Holding steady onto the door jamb, I could make out the impeccably made bed, a vanity and dresser on one side, a nightstand and lamp on the other, a steam radiator under the window, and a chair next to it. I didn’t dare cross the threshold, although I deeply wanted to go in, to see the secret recesses of this man’s life, or what had become of it. It’s likely I would have found nothing in his closet but clothes and shoes, nothing under his bed but darkness. I peered down the hallway and then down the stairwell to where it turned, straining my ears. The wooden floor groaned as I shifted my stance, as did each stair when I descended back down. One of the cats approached me before darting up the stairs without contact. It occurred to me that Nick must have gone out driving like he’d told me about, that whole strange thing with the freeways, and now as I stood in the half-light surveying the desolate yet oppressively crowded living room, I supposed I understood why. I imagined the floor and stairs creaking under his weight when he returned, the piercing quick-then-slow screech of the old door hinges, his bed heaving when he got into it and turned back and forth to find sleep, and then at last it all going still and silent again until morning.

 I had reached the front door by then. Fumbling it open, I got out of there in a hurry, found my car, and carefully drove back to the place I called home, and would for a while longer still.