Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA by Barbara Ehrenreich

when we're assembled in the office, and learn,
first, that no one seems to be homeless. Almost everyone is embedded in extended
families or families artificially extended with housemates. People talk about
visiting grandparents in the hospital or sending birthday cards to a niece's
husband; single mothers live with their own mothers or share apartments with
a coworker or boyfriend. Pauline, the oldest of us, owns her own home, but she
sleeps on the living room sofa, while her four grown children and three grandchildren
fill up the bedrooms. [15]
    But although no one, apparently, is sleeping in a car, there are signs, even at the beginning, of real difficulty if not actual misery. Half-smoked cigarettes are returned to the pack. There are discussions about who will come up with fifty cents for a toll and whether Ted can be counted on for prompt reimbursement. One of my teammates gets frantic about a painfully impacted wisdom tooth and keeps making calls from our houses to try to locate a source of free dental care. When my or, I should say, Liza's—team discovers there is not a single Dobie in our buckets, I suggest that we stop at a convenience store and buy one rather than drive all the way back to the office. But it turns out I haven't brought any money with me and we cannot put together $2 between the four of us.
    The Friday of my first week at The Maids is unnaturally hot for Maine in early
September—95 degrees, according to the digital time-and-temperature displays
offered by banks that we pass. I'm teamed up with the sad-faced Rosalie and
our leader, Maddy, whose sullenness, under the circumstances, is almost a relief
after Liza's relentless good cheer. Liza, I've learned, is the highest-ranking
cleaner, a sort of supervisor really, and said to be something of a snitch,
but Maddy, a single mom of maybe twenty-seven or so, has worked for only three
months and broods about her child care problems. Her boyfriend's sister, she
tells me on the drive to our first house, watches her eighteen-month-old for
$50 a week, which is a stretch on The Maids' pay, plus she doesn't entirely
trust the sister, but a real day care center could be as much as $90 a week.
After polishing off the first house, no problem, we grab “lunch”—Doritos for
Rosalie and a bag of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish for Maddy—and head out into the
exurbs for what our instruction sheet warns is a five-bathroom spread and a
first-timer to boot. Still, the size of the place makes us pause for a moment,
buckets in hand, before searching out an appropriately humble entrance. [16] It sits there like a beached ocean liner, the prow cutting through swells of
green turf, windows without number. “Well, well,” Maddy says, reading the owner's
name from our instruction sheet, “Mrs. W and her big-ass house. I hope she's
going to give us lunch.”
    Mrs. W is not in fact happy to see us, grimacing with exasperation when the black nanny ushers us into the family room or sunroom or den or whatever kind of specialized space she is sitting in. After all, she already has the nanny, a cooklike person, and a crew of men doing some sort of finishing touches on the construction to supervise. No, she doesn't want to take us around the house, because she already explained everything to the office on the phone, but Maddy stands there, with Rosalie and me behind her, until she relents. We are to move everything on all surfaces, she instructs during the tour, and get underneath and be sure to do every bit of the several miles, I calculate, of baseboards. And be mindful of the baby, who's napping arid can't have cleaning fluids of any kind near her.
    Then I am let loose to dust. In a situation like this, where I don't even know how to name the various kinds of rooms, The Maids' special system turns out to be a lifesaver. All I have to do is keep moving from left to right, within rooms and between rooms, trying to identify landmarks so I don't accidentally