An inquiry into a difficult domestic arrangement.
Does your maid hate you?” my lunch companion asked, out of the blue.
“Why?” I yelped. “What do you know?” Slowly and in a much lower register, I tried again: “What do you mean?”
“You know. Does your maid hate you?”
“Oh,” I said, now understanding that his question wasn’t based on any inside information. “You mean ’hates’ me like our waiter hates us.” I glared at our waiter, who studiously ignored me and the empty iced-tea glass I was shaking like a Yahtzee cup. I wish I could ignore my wife so effectively, I thought. “You mean does she hate me on general principles,” I clarified.
My lunch companion leaned in. “Right! We’ve had a maid now for three months, and I can just tell that she hates me. Us. Well, more me than my wife. But both of us, I’m sure.”
I asked him why he felt that way.
“Well, you know, she has to clean our toilet. Can you imagine?”
“I used to clean my own toilet. So, yes, I can imagine. But in the case of your toilet, I’d rather not.”
He refused to be deflected. “Don’t you feel that there’s just something wrong with the whole arrangement? The economic subjugation, slave-master thing?”
“Wait a minute,” I said, a little confused. “I thought we were talking about our maids.”
An aside: assume you’re an average Dallas/Park Cities/Plano resident who makes a decent living and owns a house with at least three bathrooms. Assume you have a portfolio, no matter how battered it may be. Assume you subscribe to this magazine. Ipso facto, you have a maid. And either you only recently acquired your status, in which case you’re relatively new to the maid thing, or you’re way past ruining your chances of ever holding a presidential appointment. My lunch companion fell into the former category. I, on the other hand, had been a subjugator for quite some time.
“Listen,” I said. “Your question is imprecise. Do you mean, ’Should a maid hate her employers because they live in a house that is five times the size of her whole extended family’s shelter and more likely than not includes separate guest quarters that are never used but which she must nevertheless clean and dust on a monthly basis; and because they regularly buy too much food and then throw it away after it has sat in the refrigerator long enough to grow just slightly stale; and because they offer her their old clothes when they’re no longer in fashion because they hate to throw them out?’ Or do you mean, ’Should a maid hate her employers because they ask her to do chores that they don’t care to do themselves and which are therefore demeaning?’”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” he mumbled, “but I guess I mean a little of both. Basically, I feel guilty for making someone else deal with my personal muck.”
“Okay,” I said, “it’s time you grew up. I had the enormous bad fortune to be born to parents who lived through the Great Depression. As a result, they insisted that I, from a very early age, starting in the summer after my sophomore year in high school, work. This work included mowing not only our own lawn, but also those of all of our neighbors. In 105-degree heat. I also scraped and painted houses. In 105-degree heat. The worst, though, was the summer I had to unload boxcars full of 50-pound bags of chalk. In 105-degree heat. All of my jobs were hot, hard, and very dirty.
“Now let’s contemplate the ’oppression’ of my maid. She works in an air-conditioned environment that is aesthetically pleasant. She might not share our taste in art, but it’s something nice to look at while she’s pushing around a vacuum cleaner. She works under essentially no direct supervision and has flexible hours. She’s free to drink all the Cokes she wants out of the fridge. Heck, we eliminated that fringe benny at my company even before the first round of layoffs. We pay her $10.50 an hour, which, if you were to gross it up for the taxes she doesn’t pay, equates to about 14 bucks an hour in her tax bracket—and, by the way, keep your trap shut about how little I pay her. The group of us that employs her has vowed to hold the line on the rate so as not to trigger an ever-escalating pay war. And, no, you cannot have her name. And job security? How nice would it be to know that you’ve got a job for life so long as you don’t steal anything noticeable?
“Actually, the question should be, ’Do you hate your maid?’ It’s a fair question. She makes you wheedle and beg for an extra day in the rotation. And she can break things with impunity. No matter what she breaks, she can’t afford to pay for it. She knows that you know you can’t dock her pay. She simply wouldn’t show up the next day! And then your whole infrastructure would collapse.”
The waiter interrupted as I was filling out the credit-card receipt to ask if I wanted more iced tea. “You know, I think I would,” I said. He left and didn’t come back. I gave him a 20 percent tip.
“You gotta understand,” I said. “It’s our nature as humans to hate those for whom we toil, especially when it requires direct, one-on-one personal service. I say you haven’t really been hated until you’ve been hated by a New York department store clerk.”
“Okay,” he said. “So you’re the wrong guy to ask about how to deal with feelings of guilt for having a maid. But I’m sure your friends have thought about this. I’m just curious what they say when you’re standing around at a cocktail party, talking about your maids.”
I looked at him incredulously. “Standing around talking about our maids? What kind of bizarre fantasy do you have about social conversation among the upper crust of Dallas? Let me get this straight: I’m at Howard’s house for, say, the AIDS Two-By-Two benefit—oh, and by the way, if you carry the coin of the realm in social currency, that’s what you call the Rachofsky house, just Howard’s house—and we’re standing there complaining about the Robin Hood plan. Or we’re confidently mispronouncing the names of last decade’s art-world darlings, on whose lesser, non-sellable works we’re overbidding despite having promised each other that we would absolutely not bid as high as we did last year because we’re getting killed in the market. And someone is going to pop off with a question about our maids? Is that how you think it goes?”
“Well—” he started.
“No ’well.’ There’s no way. I ask, ’Hey, do you think your maid hates you?’ to someone wearing a $6,500 Vera Wang evening gown, and she’s going to walk nervously away and point me out to Howard. Or to someone who will politely ask me to leave. Don’t you see? A maid’s a given. It would be like asking someone if his washing machine hated him.”
I wadded up my napkin and scooted my chair back. My friend didn’t move. “Don’t sit there gaping at me,” I said. “Look, I’m just kidding, right? Does my maid hate me? I don’t know. Hey, I’m an easy guy to hate. She’d be in good company, what with my friends, partners, siblings, ex-wives. For all I know, you hate me. Even if she wants to hate me on general principles, she has some darn good reasons to. But not the ones you’re worried about. She should genuinely hate me for paying her under the table in cash, instead of taking the time to help her open a bank account and join the American economy. She should hate me for not helping her pay her taxes and establish a credit history. And, mostly, she should hate me for robbing her of her retirement by not withholding and matching her Social Security taxes, as I’m legally obligated to do. Our maid works hard for us, she’s reliable and conscientious, and that poor girl is going to be working for the rest of her life.”
I stood up, and my chair rammed into the hip of our waiter as he was high-chinning his way past. My day was brightening. “I’ve got to get back to the office to the full-time job of hating my boss,” I said to my friend, who was still seated. I reached into my pocket for my keys and realized that I had valeted—at a restaurant overlooking an ocean of parking spaces. Speaking of something worth hating. I said to my friend, “You suppose I could borrow a couple of bucks?”
While D Magazine’s policy is not to run anonymously written stories, we allowed an exception in this case. We trust our readers—and the public servants at the IRS—understand.
