The Magic Maid

In the 70’s my mom and dad had a traditional marriage.  They were not hippies.  They preferred scotch to marijuana, and Nixon over McGovern.  They stayed within the boundaries of their upbringings, rarely questioning the status quo.  In fact, when my mother got pregnant with me while she was in college, my father immediately married her.  Had Roe vs. Wade been established, it’s very possible that I would not be here to write this essay.  In short, they were good people who did the right thing 99.9 percent of the time.  Was their marriage happy?  Not really.  Even so, they both knew how to get what they wanted from one another, even if on the sly.

The house in Malibu my parents purchased in 1971 had cost them 66k, a huge stretch.  They were nervous about such a large mortgage.  It seems laughable now, that people spend more than that on a kitchen remodel.  Inflation is a baffling concept that requires the passage of time before its full effect can be appreciated.

My father commuted to Downtown LA five days per week, working well over the 40 hours his salaried position paid.  He was one of the hardest workers I’ve ever known.  He left for the office early in the morning to beat traffic and arrived home roughly 12 to 14 hours later.  We only had family meals on the weekends.

My mother, so young and restless (come to think of it, that was her favorite Soap Opera), stayed at home.  What she got up to during the day, I’m not sure.  But she was always pulled together, manicured and coiffed to perfection wearing her rhinestone covered T-shirts and her Chemin de Fer jeans.  She has always been hip and beautiful, so this is no great revelation.

My mom’s job was to “keep house”.  Our house was the jewel of the street.  My aunt christened my mom the “Better Homes and Garden Sister” a term bestowed with some envy.  But hey, my mom had style and flair.  She loved to decorate and was always moving furniture around, (still one of her favorite past times).  She created terrariums out of Sparklett’s water bottles and had our entire entry hall covered in cedar shingled paneling.   Any time a guest entered, they would remark that our house smelled like fresh pencils.  It did.

Still, my mom got frustrated at times, having to keep a 3000 square foot house clean.  It had a huge entryway, formal living and dining rooms, a large kitchen with an attached family room, a lower level den with a spare guest room, and three other bedrooms along with three full bathrooms.  The Brady Bunch abode had nothing on our tri level 1970’s beauty in Sunset Mesa.  

I wonder if Mom was fed up, having to follow us kids about, picking up our messes.  You know how it is with children: the minute they see a clear space in a room, like homing pigeons, they gravitate toward it, ready to create a new hurricane.  Board games and blanket cities made alongside the ambient music of the Partridge Family on a portable record player, dragged from the bedroom, and a round of “52 card pick up” flying toward the ceiling, just to finish off the disaster.   In short, my friends and I were always busy, always creative.

In the kitchen we painted, sometimes by numbers and sometimes just on rocks.  We did wood burning with pyrography pens, making peace signs and daisies on pieces of pinewood.  We crocheted yarn into long chains for no purposes, beyond tying our younger siblings to chairs.   And we’d steal away into our parent’s walk in closets for darkness, to use a Ouja board, or a Lite Brite. Naturally, we never put things away unless threatened with death or no dessert.

We lived with typical American excess, game boards crashing on our heads as we tried on tippy toe to retrieve things off tall shelves in our bedroom closets.  And, when my friends and I got bored, we’d just move to another house and create mountains of destruction in a different setting.

We were not a dirty family, just messy.  Some houses were a lot worse, but still, my mom was drowning in housework and childrearing.

My dad, the progeny of people reared during the Great Depression, was a chronic worrier, especially about money.  Thus, he had placed my mom on a strict budget.  It pissed her off.

So when she asked my dad if she could hire a cleaning lady once a week he said,

“Absolutely not.  We cannot afford that”

A few weeks later my dad asked my mom to pick up his custom made suits from the Wilger Company in Westwood.  The total for three suits was over $900.  It was a revelation; the life vest she needed in her drowned sea of toys. 

And, I can’t afford help, she thought.  Hmmm

So, she hired Leticia. 

Leticia came to clean with her long glossy black hair tied into a ponytail, her small shy smile revealing white teeth.  She was eager and sweet, her brown doe eyes shining as she gloved up, ready to attack our large house.

Coming home after school on a Wednesday, my nose would fill with the scent of bleach and Pine Sol.  I’d enter the house and feel the calm and order of her visit.  Charging up to my room I’d see that she’d made my bed perfectly, aligning my stuffed animals into a little semi circle around the pillows, like they were having a weekly Stuffed Animal Convention.

Post Leticia: no wet towels on the bathroom floors, no slimy dishes in the sink and the piles of our shag carpeting standing with military precision.

My dad would come home from work and would admire what he thought was my mom’s homemaking genius.

Once, he peered into my three-year -old brother’s closet and noticed all of his little shoes: Keds, sandals, slippers and Stride Rites, lined up along the doorjamb, their heels equally spaced. 

“Wow, Jason – your shoes look so orderly”

“My maid did it” my brother replied.

Jason’s lack of elaboration must have reinforced my father’s admiration for my mother’s housekeeping.  He left the house in spiffy suits; and she (with the help of Leticia), left the linoleum floor spiffy. 

Leticia was with us for a long time and my dad didn’t have a clue.

I see my mom now, cooking at the Gaffers and Satler mustard yellow electric stove, phone crooked at the side of her neck as she stirred beef stroganoff and gossiped with her friends.  She’d flit about the kitchen, always with that long phone cord stretching from the cupboard, to the fridge, to the dishwasher and the dryer.  That cord was a part of her, chronically wrapped around her body and she did a clever choreographed dance to untangle herself multiple times in one conversation.  The cord was long enough so that she could reach just beyond the kitchen to the hall and holler our names for dinner.

Was it the phone with the long cord that betrayed her secret, or her gift of gab?

There was no call waiting feature in the 70’s and unless one wanted to conduct an “emergency breakthrough” with a live operator, all one would get was a busy dial tone.  In hindsight, the only people that I knew who utilized emergency breakthroughs were teenagers.  After all, isn’t everything an emergency to a teenager?  I hardly think that my Dad would have wanted to talk to my mom that much though.  Still, Dad, frustrated by the constant busy signal, had a second line installed.

One day, when she was upstairs gabbing yet again to another friend, the second line rang and rang and rang and rang.

Leticia, who happened to be mopping, couldn’t take it.  She picked up the phone

“Bueno”

“Hello, I am looking for my wife, did I dial the wrong number?”

“Momento”

Mom got on the phone with Dad.

“Who was that?” he asked

“That was Leticia, our maid”

“We can’t afford a maid!”

“I think we can.  She’s been with us for three years”

The gig was up. Leticia stayed.  My mom came clean, and the house remained clean too. 

As for us children, we never learned how to pick up after ourselves.  We relied on Leticia to pull us together, if only once a week.  I wonder where she is now?  I’m hoping that today that she is resting in a lazy boy chair somewhere gloves off, margarita in hand, and that her kids and grandkids staunchly refuse let her lift a finger.