Decomposition                                                

by Joy Wells

 
I peeled off my sweatshirt, then t-shirt, dirt-caked jeans, and sweat drenched underwear.  The smell of the pile at my feet was repulsive.  Yuck, I thought, grabbing up the disgusting things and throwing them into the hallway.  Harriet, my housemate, would later complain of the rank smell.  I stared at my upper body, naked in the mirror.  A band separated dark from light where my T-shirt sleeves left off, and mucky rivulets of dirt went down my arms.   Letting the shower water run awhile and steaming up the bathroom, I guzzled milk straight out of the carton like a starving animal. Today I had walked in wastelands of human filth, scrubbed neglected stoves, refrigerators, toilets, and showers, and I wondered about the anonymous tenants who had occupied the rented rooms.  Under the hot, fresh water the dirt rolled off of me and down the drain. This was my first day of self-employment.

Weeks earlier my friend Kate and I were at a party in our friend’s living room.  We started complaining about money, work, and life. I was working for a bank as a bill collector at the time.   Kate was getting her MBA.  Our party talk turned serious.

 “I hate collecting, most of my caseload are GM autoworkers.  I want to cry after every phone call.”

 “I know a landlord we could work for,” Kate said.  “We could clean rentals and make a lot of money.”

 “Cleaning houses? How bad can that be?  How much money?”

 “There’s probably a ton of work.  We’d be our own bosses.  I’ll do the business plan and you gather the supplies.”

 Our hypothetical ramblings resulted in a midnight spawning of a business we named Customized Household Services.  We thought the name sounded like an established, traditional business.  Kate tapped into the idea of doing a start up business as a project for school. The next day she called our first major client, David Copi, owner of 73 rental apartments and homes.  Yes – he was interested in our proposal.  Yes, he needed help with his move outs coming up soon. Now, the reality of what we had created was manifested in every muscle, bone, and piece of skin on my entire body.  I had never worked so hard in my life, but I felt free, at least that first day because I was the boss. 

I felt lucky to find Harriet earlier that year, an older woman I met at St. Andrews.  She was letting me live with her in exchange for housekeeping and chauffer duties. We lived on Redeemer Street, just a block away from Michigan stadium in her 3 bedroom brick no nonsense rancher with a basement full of dysfunctional appliances.  Harriet was 85 years old, a retired librarian.  She kept the dogs of time at bay with a full schedule which included two bridge clubs, a full slate of friends, and church on Sunday.  Harriet loved crossword puzzles and was fond of balancing her checkbook to the penny.  Once, from morning to evening she hunched over her adding machine to find a missing ten cents.

 That spring Harriet was sick with diarrhea and was running a fever.  I carried her to the car, drove her to Urgent Care, and stayed with her during her exam.  She was surprisingly light.  She weighed about 90 pounds, just skin and bones.  It was a bacterial infection, and I took her home to lie on a lounge chair in the basement where it was cool. Upstairs she would have watched TV:  Wheel of Fortune, “Pick a letter,” “E,” “yes, there’s 2 E’s!” “Get your vowels, vowels!!”  Harriet would urge the oblivious contestants.  But the TV in the basement didn’t work.  She wasn’t in a cheerleading mood anyway.

Harriet maintained a large garden, and spent as little money as possible at the store, clipping coupons for those times she did need an item from the market.  One day we walked to the Saturday Farmers’ Market, a good mile from her house, and she gravitated toward a stand of squash.

“That’s a good deal,”

 “We just got here,” I said, hoping for few strolls around the stands. 

 “These could go fast, we better get them now.”

 She picked out 6 decent size summer squash and loaded me with four of them.  I wrapped my arms around them, hugging them tight to my body, their weights displacing one, then the other as I walked jerking from side to side. We poked around a stand that sold berries and strange items like leeks and alfalfa, but juggling our loads of squash took the fun out of browsing, so we went on home.  I never did see the stampede of squash shoppers that Harriet had anticipated.

 Harriet had a habit of sealing her front door keyhole with a mailing label – the free ones they send you with contributions. There was a thick layer of pasted labels – broken by her - under the new clean one. 

 “Harriet, why do you do that – put that label over the key hole?”

“That way I can tell if anyone’s disturbed the lock,” she said, her confident tone trying to cover her fear, her weariness from years of lonesome living.  She put her key through the label, broke the seal and let us in, convinced to go forth.

 Harriet often lost her key to the house. She’d hide it and forget where she put it for safe keeping, another indication of her security worries.  I had learned from necessity how to break into the house.  She never gave me a key.  I could pry open the basement window, slide myself in, and jump down to the floor.   After such a time she would fixate upon the lost key throughout the evening ‘til the bugger showed up in some little crack of her coin purse.  I perfected my techniques over the years – but sometimes after a clever entrance she’d see the weakness in her defenses and make that way impossible to penetrate.  I laughed to myself under my breath at these comical scenes, but it wasn’t funny. 

 On May 16^th we began what came to be known as Move Outs.  Mr. Copi’s units were older homes that had been converted into rentals – 6 or 7 University of Michigan students leased them for the school year and wreaked havoc for nine months.  We contracted to clean 20 units; one unit was typically a seven bedroom, 2 bath home.   Kate’s boyfriend Stephen, my friends Kathleen and Catherine and a woman named Lori answered an ad to complete our crew. For the next four years cleaning Move Outs would fill the majority of my days in May and August, and Lori was to become one of my closest friends.

 We found out soon into it there was an unexpected perk:  the students left behind a lot of stuff, perfectly good stuff.  Copi wanted everything out– either we took it away or it went in front of the house for the trash collection. That’s how I got my bike and a whole wardrobe of nearly new clothes for my Chinese friend Jing.

 “I found these clothes in a house I was cleaning,” I told him.  “They look like your size.”

 “You shouldn’t take them; they’ll be coming back for them.”

 “No they won’t,” I tried to explain.  “The people are gone; these would have gone in the trash.”

“I don’t understand Americans throwing things away.”

Our second day on the job we walked into a house that looked from the outside like an American dream: a 1940’s Dutch colonial, once loved and cared for by a family.    I imagined this street in the glory days of the 1950’s:  kids riding bikes up and down the street, playing catch, large Chryslers and Buicks parked in the driveways.  We walked up the stairs leading up and into a spacious foyer once the center of children’s comings and goings, and a gathering place for hats, coats, books, and briefcases.  Inside, the original oak baseboards lined every room, and French doors opened into the living and dining area.  This beautiful house had been given up to souls just passing through, whose careless habits had left their mark in every room, and one room more than the rest.

 We divided up jobs, I went to the downstairs bathroom, Kate took the kitchen, and Stephen was on baseboards.  I pulled back a limp shower curtain and saw the black wall, the tiles covered with a thick layer of black mold.  Could a person feel clean after taking a shower in here? I wondered.  The tub was lined with pink mildew and black filmy rings.  I sprayed the whole thing down with ammonia and walked out to let it soak.  After awhile we were separately settling into our quiet scrubbing, when I heard Kate’s voice.

 “O my god – what is that?”

“I ran into the kitchen where Kate was leaning over the sink, the refrigerator door was ajar.”

“Shut the door – shut the door, I think I’m gonna vomit.”

 “Whoa, it smells like…someone died in here,” I said, as soon as I got a whiff. 

 The refrigerator had been turned off and was full of rotten food.  We opened the freezer door, and saw a mound of unknown stuff oozing, moldering: the blast of decay so foul, I didn’t know if we could keep going. Stephen ran into the kitchen, looked at the refrigerator, and screwed up his face as the putrid fumes hit.

 “We’re dead meat.”

 
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