Dolores Claiborne

    I kep at it until a month before Joe Junior was born, and I was back at it even before he was off the titty. In the summer I left him with Arlene Cullum-Vera wouldn't have a crying baby in the house, not her-but when she and her husband were gone, I'd bring both him and Selena in with me. Selena could be mostly left alone-even at two going on three she could be trusted most of the time. Joe Junior I carted with me on my daily rounds. He took his first steps in the master bedroom, although you can believe Vera never heard of it.

    She called me a week after I delivered (I almost didn't send her a birth announcement, then decided if she thought I was lookin for a fancy present that was her problem), congratulated me on givin birth to a son, and then said what I think she really called to say-that she was holdin my place for me. I think she intended me to be flattered, and I was. It was about the highest compliment a woman like Vera can pay, and it meant a lot more to me than the twenty-five dollar bonus check I got in the mail from her in December of that year.

    She was hard but she was fair, and around that house of hers she was always the boss. Her husband wasn't there but one day in ten anyway, even in the summers when they were supposed to be livin there full-time, but when he was, you still knew who was in charge. Maybe he had two or three hundred executives who dropped their drawers every time he said shit, but Vera was boss of the shootin match on Little Tall Island, and when she told him to take his shoes off and stop trackin dirt on her nice clean carpet, he minded.

    And like I say, she had her ways of doin things. Did she ever! I don't know where she got her idears, but I do know she was a prisoner of them. If things wasn't done a certain way; she'd get a headache or one in her gut. She spent so much of her day checkin up on things that I thought plenty of times she would have had more peace of mind if she'd just given over and kep that house herself.

    All the tubs had to be scrubbed out with Spic n Span, that was one thing. No Lestoil, no Top Job, no Mr Clean. Just Spic n Span. If she caught you scrubbin one of the tubs with anything else, God help you.

    When it came to the ironin, you had to use a special spray-bottle of starch on the collars of the shirts and the blouses, and there was a piece of gauze you were supposed to put over the collar before you sprayed. Friggin gauze didn't do a god-dam thing, so far as I could ever tell, and I must have ironed at least ten thousand shirts and blouses in that house, but if she came into the laundry room and saw you was doin shirts without that little piece of netting on a collar, or at least hung over the end of the ironin board, God help you.

    If you didn't remember to turn on the exhaust fan in the kitchen when you were fryin somethin, God help you.

    The garbage cans in the garage, that was another thing. There was six of em. Sonny Quist came over once a week to pick up the swill, and either the housekeeper or one of the maids-whoever was most handy-was supposed to bring those cans back into the garage the minute, the very second, he was gone. And you couldn't just drag em into the corner and leave em; they had to be lined up two and two and two along the garage's east wall, with their covers turned upside-down on top of em. If you forgot to do it just that way, God help you.

    Then there was the welcome mats. There were three of em-one for the front door, one for the patio door, and one for the back door, which had one of those snooty TRADESMAN'S ENTRANCE signs on it right up until last year, when I got tired of looking at it and took it down. Once a week I had to take those welcome mats and lay em on a big rock at the end of the back yard, oh, I'm gonna say about forty yards down from the swimmin pool, and heat the dirt out of em with a broom. Really had to make the dust fly. And if you lagged off, she was apt to catch you. She didn't watch every time you heat the welcome mats, but lots of times she would.

    She'd stand on the patio with a pair of her husband's binoculars. And the thing was when you brought the mats back to the house, you had to make sure WELCOME was pointin the right way. The right way was so people walkin up to whichever door it was could read it. Put a welcome mat back on the stoop upside-down and God help you.