THE BATHROOM CLEANER

By Elizabeth Orndorff

Her youngest grandson, the one who changed oils at Mammoth Garage on the main street, he thought she was old-school, that she was not with it, but she really did not know what she was supposed to be with. She told him that, but he was such a hot-head and got so angry with her, just like his daddy used to, that she let him be. He didn’t know everything like he thought he did. But he would get so fired up, sometimes it hurt. Sometimes he would throw out a curse at her like a rotten tomato, aim it right at her and hit her good with it. A nasty curse like he shouldn’t have known how to say, he was so young. Bad enough you cleaned for white folks, he would holler, now you got to clean for niggers, too?

She told herself that she had to allow for that, because he was not old enough to learn the things she knew, things that the Lord held your face right down into for so long that you had to learn. It seemed to be the Lord’s way, generally, and He was a real good teacher, especially in the hard things. It was the hard things that her grandson didn’t know about. He thought that getting angry would solve all his troubles. It didn’t solve anything that she could see, but make a lot more unhappy people in this world.

But her grandson would say, We ain’t angry enough. He would say, We got to be a whole lot angrier than we been because we going nowhere fast. What did he know about going nowhere fast? He was so young, her baby. You be angry, she told him, you got to have a reason to be angry. A real good reason, one that will stand up on its own two legs, and walk away, if need be. Just walk away. But her grandson did not believe that was right, to walk away. He wanted to fight it out, all the time. Sometimes he even tried to fight with her, but she wouldn’t let him. Someday, she said, the Lord will speak to your heart and take that fire away, and put something better in its place. But when she said that to him he was hateful to her all over again.

He didn’t like her job. Yes, she had a job all right. It wasn’t a real job, not like his, and it didn’t take much of her time, but it was a job. She was proud of the work she did. It took her a long time to become proud of it, to see it for what it meant rather than just what it was. In the beginning she drew her work-energy from the hate and anger that filled her up to almost overflowing. She did not want to ever tell her grandson about that. The hate and the fire did give her strength for a time.

Her job came to her from the Benevolent Sisters Club No. 1, where she had been a member since she turned eighteen, the same year that the big century turned over, way back so far she could hardly remember a time when she wasn’t a Benevolent Sister. The Sisters were about Love, that is what they did, that was their sworn reason for being, to do Love things where they could find them. Her grandson had a hard time with that. He seemed not to know about any kind of love except for what he had with his little girlfriend.

But the Sisters were different. They said their Love was for all God’s children wherever they were. They even tried to love the white people whenever they could. But mostly they started by loving each other and the rest of the folks at the Baptist church out the rural route four. So the church brothers and sisters became their ministry, their home, their Loves. It was that simple. And there was plenty to keep them busy with the Love.

Some folks thought that the Love has got to be a high and mighty thing, like what the angels do for the Lord God in Heaven. All fancy and electric and puffed up to be important. But she and the Sisters knew better. They had lived long enough to know that Big Works of Love is just made up of a bushel of little works, one on top of another, and the Big Works were nowhere without the little works. Some folks were blessed to do just the Big Works. That was their job that the Lord gave them. For the rest of us, she would tell her grandson when he stayed long enough to listen to her, for the rest of us the Lord has given us the little things to be doing. Lots and lots of little works in every single minute of the day, some so tiny and lowdown that you might miss them, and then you are lost because they never come the same way again.

The Sisters specialized in the little works of love, the smaller and more lowdown the better. That was because they looked at Jesus and saw what he did. He was kind to riff-raff. In fact, that seemed to them to be a good part of the Gospel message, and worthy of their attention. This is what made her grandson so angry. That she was riff-raff to him. That she was not more high and mighty. That every day, rain or shine, she cleaned the toilet down at the beauty shop on the corner of Vine and High. That was her job for the Benevolent Sisters Club No. 1.

The Sisters say that they “maintain the restroom” at Mamie’s Beauty Salon. They have been maintaining the restroom for seventeen years, since 1937, so that colored folks can have a place to use the bathroom when they are downtown. But she is the one who does the work. She has maintained until her knuckles are raw with Dutch Cleanser and she has permanent tile marks on her knees and she is closely acquainted with the bathroom habits of almost every colored person in the city. She can tell that Dempsey Gorder who lost his last good eye in a poker game has probably got prostate trouble because he has trouble making water. She knows that Maybella Johnson has got sugar, just like her mother did. The whole Huxton family lives off the patch of asparagus they have growing in their front yard in the summer. She knows who’s been eating too much fatback and corn and beets and spinach. She knows who drinks too much. She knows who’s on the rag and when. She has never decided if knowing the people who use this bathroom makes it harder to clean, or easier.

She collected old toothbrushes from the Sisters and had her own bucket and scouring pad, the Dutch Cleanser, rags, a special toilet brush with a long handle, and a black rubber plunger because some folks ask too much of that old toilet. She kept a jar of vinegar and water and some old newspapers to clean the mirror and the faucets. She even put some Modess in a paper sack with For Women Only written on it in black ink, the top folded down tight. These things she hid in a wooden crate under the sink. She kept a fresh supply of tissue stacked on the handle of the plunger and every day she brought in a clean and pressed towel for the roller bar on the back of the door. She had been doing this for seventeen years. She was the only one to ever maintain the bathroom.

She smiled at the corn-colored stain at the base of the toilet. It looked a little like a giraffe the way it stretched its grit-specked neck between two octagon tiles. She could smell the faint sweetness of sugar that she could never seem to wash away with her bleach and toothbrush. She smiled at the thought of the old man from the newsstand down the street, distressed and ashamed that he needed to use the toilet in the women’s beauty shop, and use it so frequently because of his troubles.

She pushed her splayed blue toothbrush around the base of the toilet, always starting at the middle of the front, counterclockwise, forty-eight tiles, one for each state. Every day she cleaned the toilet she took a trip around the United States of America just to pass the time in her head. The first tile, the one front and center, was her own state, Kentucky. Next was North Carolina, where her mama was from. Then came Georgia (favorite aunts) and West Virginia (first husband, the good one). She found a connection to every tile in the country, even if some of them were questionable. Wyoming, the last tile next to Kentucky, was the scene of a favorite Western movie, although she couldn’t remember its title. Sagebrush something.

The toilet itself was the worst job, and in the early days she would often vomit into it first before setting down to cleaning it. She carried a little bottle of clove oil in her apron pocket, and on days when the stink was so bad she couldn’t bear it, she would dab the burning oil inside each nostril. Once, when her grandson was a teenager, he came into the shop to give her a message and found her on her knees in front of the toilet, for she always cleaned with the door left open. She watched his eyes fly open in rage as he spit out the words he had for her, so harsh they made her flinch. Then he had turned and left, and in all these years he had never come back, even though he could have found her there any morning, except Sunday.

She had decided that he was too modern, that was his trouble. He was so way ahead of himself that he didn’t know how to see what he saw. He had no truck with the reasons behind the way things happened. It was enough for him that they just were.

She looked down at her knees and saw the octagon spider web etched in her dry, brown skin. Almost like a snakeskin, or alligator, or a giraffe. She smiled at herself and ground the blue toothbrush into the cleanser paste in her hand before applying it to the poor yellow giraffe from Wyoming. Another one done.

When she had been cleaning the bathroom for about two years she brought in a sign to hang over the toilet. She did this for the men. She lettered out a Bible verse of her own selection and taped it to the wall. She changed it every Saturday. When she got a nice response to the Bible verses she began writing small sayings and proverbs, sometimes words to a hymn or a little poem from the Sunday School booklet. Mamie never said anything to her, so she kept on doing it.

The white pedestal sink with its watery rust stains was almost a joy to clean. She could stand up and stretch her legs. She could fill her lungs with the smell of bleach and vinegar instead of urine and bowels, and the sparkling nickel of the faucets always cheered her, she didn’t know why. The huge mirror over the sink was the one incongruity in the small bathroom. It reflected its beauty shop origins in the cupids and flowers carved into its gilt gesso frame, and she wondered if it bothered the men who went here. That’s probably why she started putting the Bible verses up, just for them.

She often studied her face in the big mirror while her right hand, without conscious thought, moved the vinegar-soaked newspaper over its surface. She only liked to look at herself because she so easily saw her mother’s face looking back at her. People used to say they were more like twin sisters instead of mother and daughter. It was a compliment they both accepted. She knew her mother’s face better than her own, for hadn’t she stared into it for more than fifty years? Hadn’t she stroked the lined cheeks and kissed her eyes so many times she couldn’t remember? That’s what she wanted to tell her grandson about. She wanted to tell him so many things, but he wouldn’t stop his own thoughts enough to listen. He despised her so.

For all her working life she had fed her children and supported her husbands and kept her house respectable with the money she made from cleaning the houses of white ladies. So did all her friends and their friends and their sisters and mothers and aunties. There was plenty of work to go around. She never paid much attention to it. It was just work. It didn’t mean something other than what it was. You didn’t have to love it to do it, to take the money, to spend it on things you did love. That much her grandson understood.

She shook her head slowly and looked again into her mother’s eyes. She saw their fullness and dark sadness, and she could feel the warmth of her mother’s thin fingers as they grasped for her hand that horrible day seventeen years ago. She heard again the low moans that began deep inside her mama as they hurried their steps along the sidewalk, past forbidding whites-only storefronts with clean and private bathrooms, brushing by the shoulders and bags and strollers of fast-looking people who did not see them at all, praying for a place before it was too late. Then her mother beginning to cry, right there on the sidewalk, because she felt alone, and her daughter could not make them disappear and could not help her any longer.

Now she ran her fingers under the warm water faucet as she did every cleaning day. She could not bear to see her mother cry. So she did this for her mother. It was the best she could do to take up her mother’s pain, to imagine the warm streams running down her legs as she doubled over in anguish on the main street, held in her daughter’s arms, as her bowels loosened onto the bright, sunny sidewalk, the busy people stepping around them, keeping their shoes clean.

No, these things her grandson would never understand. This kind of love he was not yet blessed to know. That out of pain and degradation could spring a fire of purpose that went so far beyond anger and rhetoric, that carried with it a passion fueled with the kindling carried by a servant, a slave, a bathroom cleaner.

She rinsed out her rags and brushes and put a fresh roll on the toilet-paper bar. Then she stowed all her supplies in the wooden crate and checked to see if the little brown sack needed more napkins. She smoothed her hand over the roller towel, the green striped one with the red roses in the corners, and cast an eye over her bathroom. Her mama’s bathroom. It smelled good now. She turned out the light and pulled the door shut. It would have been nice to speak a word or two to the ladies, but Mamie had customers in the chairs, and they were chattering like birds. Mamie did not look up from the wet head she was working on, and no one saw her walk through the shop.

When she got to the street door she turned and smiled, and said, as she always did, Clean again! From under a pink plastic drape at the shampoo sink, an anonymous hand waved in acknowledgement. Yes, clean again, she nodded.

She pulled the heavy door open and went out onto the sunny, bright sidewalk and entered the crush of hurrying people, who might have, if they were paying any sort of attention, overheard the little colored woman telling her mother about her lovely day at work.

Copyright © 2004 Elizabeth Orndorff