Fire and Ice

I heard about the job through the grapevine. A lady who my parents used to know, ran a daycare center from her home. I ended up working there.

The house was messy, and I don’t just mean cluttered, I mean filthy. I mean when the lady told her children to clean they just shoved everything into any crack they could find. Garbage was piled between the wall and the back of the couch. In the kitchen cupboards you would find phone books and food and napkins and hair brushes crammed in as though they were packed in a hurry. I didn’t know how the parents of the daycare children could leave their kids there, and they were even paying to leave their kids there. But there were about seven daycare children in all, so some parents didn’t find the place objectionable. Although maybe she hid all the grossness when they signed up, like she did when she hired me.

Her name was Melissa. The house didn’t seem extraordinarily messy as she showed me around. “It was just a routine knee surgery,” she said as we went down into the kids play area. “Everything went fine and then after the surgery, they went in to check on him…” She went into the kitchen and I followed. “…and his heart had stopped. He was already dead when they found him.” She reached the sink and turned around to face me. “It had only been an hour since they left him.” She glanced around. “The snacks are usually just cheese bread or peanut butter bread,” she said. “They’ll just be on the counter here. Any questions?”

“Should I keep track of my hours or….”

“No, you don’t need to worry about that. I’ll keep track,” she said.

After the initial hiring, where she told me her husband died, I never saw her again. Melissa’s children were all teenagers and they were usually watching the kids when I got there.

I earned about five or six dollars an hour which was okay in those days, but then her teenage kids started relaying messages from their mom to me.

“She says you need to clean the house more,” her fifteen year old daughter, Becky, told me as though I was her personal slave. “You leave the house so messy.”

The truth was, I found the house so disgusting, I regularly just collected garbage from the carpet and under the couches and then vacuumed, except they didn’t own a vacuum, so I swept the floor with a broom, which was more work for worse results. The crumbs just hopped around. As far as the me leaving the house messy, I was pretty sure the half eaten dried out hamburger sitting on top of a McDonald’s bag full of plasticky french fries was not shoved under the couch cushions by me or the day care children, but I didn’t say so. I just stopped cleaning from that day forward. I only cleaned up the dishes we used and put away the toys we used.

My hours stayed the same as my paychecks got smaller, and the tension between Becky and me grew tenser, and I began looking for other jobs. Then one day, before I left for my job at the daycare center, my mom told me my grandmother had died. I had never experienced death of a loved one before and didn’t understand the reality of grief. I went to work where I took care of seven kids for several hours. I was in a daze, unable to focus, but taking care of kids doesn’t take a lot of brain power, right? I thought I was fine. The oldest girl in the daycare, a nine year old named Cassidy, reminded me it was time to go to the school to pick up some of the other daycare kids.

“Oh yeah,” I said, and continued to sit there.

“Should I go pick them up?” she asked. The walk took about three or four minutes each way. “I could take Jonathan and Brian and Beth.”

“Yeah,” I said. I needed to just sit there for awhile. Cassidy was perfectly capable of walking to the school with some of the other older kids. So I let her go while I stayed at the house with the babies.

Cassidy came back soon enough. “I think you’re in trouble,” she said.

Moments later Becky came at me with flames in her eyes. “Cassidy was walking to the school with all the kids, by themselves,” she said, facing off against me in a doorway. “We aren’t paying you to sit on your fat ass all day doing nothing while Cassidy does all the work…” I tried closing the door between us “…and all you do is feed the kids cheese bread at snack time…” but it was a pocket door “…My mom should fire your ass. You are such a bitch…” with one of those tiny tricky levers that you really have to look at to grab, “…And you go through our stuff. I told my mom you’re probably stealing…” but I couldn’t look at it because I didn’t want to break eye contact with her. “…And you’re not cleaning like you’re supposed to…” Breaking eye contact would mean she won. She ran out of steam before I got the door closed.

I soon found another job, a nice job, in a nice library at the college where I was taking classes. I wrote a note to Melissa giving my two weeks notice since I never saw her. With the note in hand I approached Becky, who was lounging in the dark living room, with a bag of fast food spread all over the couch, as she watched TV.

“Can you give this to your mom?” I asked.

“What is it?” She didn’t take her eyes off the TV.

“Just give it to your mom,” I said.

“I’m not giving it to her. Just set it down,” she said.

I looked at the filth and garbage everywhere. It would get lost the moment it left my hands. “Will you just give it to her?” I asked.

“No,” she said. Still refusing to meet my eye.

I left it on top of the TV since that was the cleanest surface with only a paper cup and a few napkins.

I told the daycare kids when it was my last day. They cried. I got a call from Melissa a few days later. She yelled at me almost as much as her daughter had. “You didn’t even tell me you were quitting, you just never showed up. So no one was there to watch the kids. I had to leave my other job to cover you.”

“I never see you, so I left a note,” I said.

“Where is it?”

“I left it on the TV.”

“Well how was I supposed to find it there?”

“I told Becky to give it to you.”

“Well you can’t expect her to remember everything. A lot of kids were taken out since you quit. You’ve cost me a lot of money. That’s coming out of your paycheck.”

True to her word and her habit. When I went there to pick up my last check, Becky answered the door, handed me the check and shut the door in my face. For two weeks and 60 hours of work I was paid $110, that’s low even for 1997 standards.

Months later I was driving past Melissa’s house when I saw the street blocked off. Fire trucks were parked everywhere and Melissa’s house billowed smoke. I learned later (through the grapevine) that no one was hurt. That was the last I heard about that family.