Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The Cleaning Lady

As I was staying at Nate and Megan's, I tried to be a good houseguest, which meant being as out of the way as possible.  Megan and two of the other roommates went out for the weekend, so it was just Nate and I hanging out.  I was thinking about blogging here to you, but then I decided that I should do something nice for Nate and co.
I had just taken a shower, and, perhaps feeling like there needed to be some cleaning, I started working on the kitchen.  In my pink bathrobe.  I started on the dishes, but then realized there were just too many, and many of the things were caked on.
So I went looking through their stuff for one of those brillo pads that scraps stuff off really good.  That was my first clue that people didn't clean too often, because there weren't any.  There were just one sponge.
Then I noticed that someone had tried to bake stuff.  There was a small cake in a pan.
"Should I put this in the fridge?" I called to Nate, holding the pan up.  Nate was on the other side of the room, on his computer, working on his online class.
"Yeah...that's a good idea."
There was a cupcake pan with chocolate cake still stuck, glued really, to it.  I would need to soak this.  Soaking something requires that I temporarily plug their sink.  So I went looking for the rubber stopper that every house has.  Nothing.
This of course led to the next best thing: filling the two bathroom sinks with water and then plugging both of those up.  And then putting in the pan, silverware, plates, a water bottle, Tupperware.
On the way to the first bathroom sink, I found a spoon sitting next to a sock.  If I had seen it in any other context, I would assume it was a piece of modern art.  I showed Nate and he was grossed out by it.
Putting things in a different part of the house would mean I would need to carry it.  They had a plastic dish holder/rack thing that was meant to hold dishes as they dried.  I was about to use it when I noticed that too was stained a orange color.  I imagined it was meat sauce from something.  But I could be wrong.  So I started scrubbing it.
In the meantime, Nate saw me and decided I needed some music to help, so he put it in some Lady Gaga, a favorite of mine.  He put on one of my favorite songs, "Bad Romance."
As I was cleaning, I bounced around and sang the song, as Nate almost certainly knew I would.  Nate, for some odd reason or another, really likes me singing.  He sang along too.
There was something nicely and bizzarely domestic about the too of us.  I could totally see us living together, doing this sort of thing.  Nate would make food, I would wash dishes, we would pretend to be in a musical about the woes of college life.  We'd be bigger than Rent.  
After "Bad Romance," Nate put on "Telephone," which I am embarrassed to say is a song I'm actually working at perfecting.

I scrubbed at the rack thing.  The tough thing was it's odd shapes and little crevices that I couldn't get to with the sponge.  If I had a toothbrush on me, I could have used that, but I wasn't willing to sacrifice my own, and I was afraid going to look for one wouldn't work, since I had already tried to find a vacuum cleaner, to no success. 

2 comments:

  1. Eliza you could set up your own cleaning business here in Wimbledon.

    The dancing to music thing could be a great selling point. You could gain loads of material for writing your musical, at the same time.

    You could make a fortune in the homes and houses here in South London.

    Love the details you describe. It really makes your writing live.

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  2. Thanks. I feel like "Cleaning South London" would actually make a great memoir too.

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