Stephanie Land és una escriptora
que ha hagut de treballar netejant cases. Això li ha fet ser molt conscient de
les injustícies entre rics i pobres, de la dificultat de viure en el límit d’aquesta
pobresa i, també, de l’evidència que tenir diners, per molta gent, no significa
la felicitat.
Porn, opioids and a
freezer full of cigarettes: what one cleaner saw in America’s homes
Sian Cain
As a single parent caught
in the welfare trap,
Stephanie Land got the only job she could, tidying homes for the comfortably well-off. Now she has turned her experiences
into an acclaimed new book
Caught: catch / caught
Well-off: someone who is well-off is rich
enough to be able to do and buy most of the things that they want
@siancain
Wed 23 Jan 2019 11.00 GMT
At first glance, it’s not immediately obvious
that the toddler in the
video I am watching is taking her first wobbly steps in a homeless shelter. Watching the tiny girl babble to her mother behind
the camera, I am distracted by how spotless the floor looks. Yet in the eyes of Stephanie Land, the person who cleaned it, it
was appalling: “Years
of dirt were etched into the floor. No matter how hard I scrubbed, I could
never get it clean.”
Toddler: a young child who has only just
learned to walk or who still walks unsteadily with small, quick steps
Wobbly: something that is wobbly moves
unsteadily from side to side
Homeless
shelter: a
hostel for homeless people
Babble: if someone babbles, they talk
in a confused or excited way, gabble, chatter, gush, spout
Spotless:
impeccable
Appalling: terrible
People such as Land are perhaps the biggest
threat to the myth of the American Dream: someone who worked hard, yet found her very country pitted against her success.
Her new book, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, is both
a memoir of her time working as a cleaner in middle- class households, and a
dismantling of the lies the US tells itself about the poor: namely, that they don’t work.
As Land puts it, she was “overwhelmed by how much work it took to prove I was
poor”.
Pit
against: if two
opposing things or people are pitted against one another, they are in conflict.
Namely: that is, in other words,…
“The country lives by the myth that if you work
hard enough, you’ll make it,”
she says. “For me, I felt like if I wasn’t making it, I wasn’t working hard
enough.”
You’ll
make it: you’ll
get it, you’ll achieve it
Frighteningly, before she arrived at that
homeless shelter, Land’s life was unremarkable. In her 20s, she wandered from low-paid to
low-paid job: barista, dog daycare, stalls at farmers’ markets. She had none of the usual factors
society would pick out to explain her poverty: no alcohol problems, no history
of drug use, a regular, if fractured, family life. At 28, she became pregnant.
But the father, she writes, flew
into rages, threatened and insulted her. With no family to rely on, Land entered the welfare system,
moving to the shelter –
where her daughter took her first steps – to transitional housing, to a trailer
parked in a driveway, always desperately clinging to stability.
Wander: if you wander in a place, you
walk around there in a casual way, often without intending to go in any
particular direction.
Fly into
a rage: to
suddenly become very angry. Note that is most normal to use “into a rage” than
“into rage”
Rely on: if you rely on someone or
something, you need them and depend on them in order to live or work properly
Enter: go into
Cling to: grip, embrace
Subsidising her meagre income with welfare meant submitting her life
to relentless scrutiny:
curfews and urine tests
at the shelter; welfare officers wanting proof that her car wasn’t too nice;
supermarket cashiers silently judging her groceries when she used food stamps.
She endured each indignity to look after her daughter, Mia.
Meagre: insufficient
Relentless: persistent
Curfew: a curfew is a law stating that
people must stay inside their houses after a particular time at night, for
example during a war.
Searching for work in an economy that was still raw from the global
financial crisis, Land began working as a cleaner for a private firm; $6
(£4.65) an hour for tidying up
houses she could only dream of affording.
Still
raw: Still
crude
Affording: to be able to buy or do
something because you have enough money or time
Strikingly, all her fellow cleaners were women
and a huge proportion were single mums. Now 39, Land’s explanation for this is
simple: “It is flexible, most of the cleaning happens during school hours, you
can bring your kid, and it is a job no one wants to do. As long as you are
willing to get on your knees to scrub a toilet, you will always be able to find work. And no one
is as desperate as a single parent.” Eighty percent of the US’s 12m
single-parent households are headed by mothers – and 40% live below the poverty
line.
Strikingly: in a way that is very unusual
Scrub: to rub something hard in order
to clean it, especially using a stiff brush, soap, and water
On such low income, money became a relentless weight: every car
journey had to be weighed up
against the cost of petrol. Providing food for Mia often meant going
without herself, bolstering
her stomach with instant coffee and, on the good days, a peanut butter
sandwich. She would shop for groceries at night, to avoid the gaze of fellow shoppers; one man,
after seeing the food stamps in her hand, shouted: “You’re welcome,” as if he was personally paying for her to eat.
In one of their homes, a tiny humid studio in Skagit valley, Washington, a relentless black mould continually
resurfaced, making Mia constantly ill; kind hospital nurses tending to Mia gave
her a dehumidifier.
Bolster: Support
Fellow
shoppers: sharing
a particular activity, quality, or condition with someone or something (els
alters compradors / los otros compradores)
Black
mould: bread
mould, (floridura negra / moho negro)
It is remarkable what a cleaner can learn about
your life from the receipts on your fridge, the number of family photos on your
walls, the papers on your desk. Going through middle America’s dirty laundry
gave Land the time and the perspective to mull over the myth that work always means success.
She scrubbed vomit, mould and blood from the
homes of people who, despite their 2.5 bathrooms and nice cars, seemed just as
unhappy as her. In one house she dubbed the Porn House, she tries to figure out the lives of its
owners: the husband with his Hustler
magazines and lube
always out on display in his bedroom, the wife’s extensive collection of
romance novels in hers. Popping
ibuprofen to cope with
the constant strain that cleaning took on her body, Land gazed longingly at the large opioid
stash in the Chef’s
House. Wiping down the
already spotless
surfaces of the Cigarette Lady’s House, she finds connection with the
mysterious owner by discovering her secret: a freezer packed with Virginia Slims.
Mull
over: If you
mull something over, you think about it for a long time before deciding what to
do.
Dubbed: named
Hustler: prostitute
Lube: lubricant
Longingly: if you look longingly at something you want, or think
longingly about it, you look at it or think about it with a feeling of desire.
Stash: drugs kept for personal consumption (partida / alijo)
Wiping
down: if you
wipe down something, you wash or dry its surface completely.
Virginia
Slims: a tobacco
brand. Virginia Slims were introduced on July 22, 1968 and marketed as a
female-oriented spinoff to their Benson & Hedges brand.
After Donald Trump’s election victory in
2016, much was made of the power of the disgruntled working poor. Yet Land encountered the most aggression from
those on the other side of the “welfare cliff”: those not quite poor enough to
receive benefits. She straddled
the line a few times: a few dollars more a month meant she could
suddenly lose hundreds in benefits: “I was penalised for working more, for
working harder. Why, as an example, do some states require you to have less
than $1,000 [£775] in savings? They are actively discouraging people from
saving. Some people work really hard and still have no food in the fridge, while
the wealthy are just getting wealthier while promoting this rhetoric that poor
people are the ones taking all the money. And we still think they’re the ones
making the best decisions. Hell, I thought that when I went into their houses.”
After: in this case, probably the sense
is “considering”
Disgruntled: If you are disgruntled, you are
cross and dissatisfied because things have not happened the way that you wanted
them to happen.
Straddle: if you straddle something, you
put or have one leg on either side of it.
Later on, when Land “came out” as poor, some of
her own friends told her that they were on food stamps or using Medicaid. “I
had no idea how many friends were struggling. We need to have an honest conversation about the face
of welfare. I think that poor people are scary for a lot of people, because
they represent what could happen to them.”
Struggle: fight
In her journalism – spoiler: Maid does have a
somewhat happy ending – this anxiety is best reflected in sanctimonious comments left
by readers. Strangers demand to know why she has tattoos, a smartphone, why she
didn’t get an abortion. “I think they’re trying to reassure themselves that it
couldn’t happen to them, that this was all the result of my bad decisions.”
Sanctimonious: hypocritical
Her first paid piece of writing, an essay for
Vox about her time working as a cleaner, went viral in the worst way. “My
sleepy little website, that usually was only seen by my mum, was getting 5,000
hits an hour. People were calling me a cockroach, vermin, telling me I should
be in jail. People with cleaners didn’t like knowing that their cleaners had
opinions about them. It was hard for me to even go outside for a couple of
weeks.”
While Land’s book is set during Barack Obama’s
presidency, she is watching Trump’s welfare and tax policies with trepidation.
“They are making it harder to be on welfare – raising the age to qualify or
allowing states to require more paperwork. They are clinging to this idea that poor people don’t
work.” She cried when Trump was elected: “It felt scary. Suddenly, everyone
felt emboldened to do
whatever they wanted. Trump’s election gave trolls a platform to treat people horribly. That is
a scary feeling for a mum of two daughters.”
Emboldened [ɪmboʊldən ]: If you are
emboldened by something, it makes you feel confident enough to behave in a
particular way
The book ends on a high: with Land moving to Missoula,
Montana, a place she had always dreamed of living. She enrolled in university,
then navigated support programmes for underprivileged writers, which helped
place her pieces in papers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times,
as well as providing a stipend.
Off paper, however, things didn’t get easier. A
month after graduating, she gave birth to a second daughter, Coraline, named after one of Neil
Gaiman’s heroines. (Gaiman has been a surprise source of support: “I once sent
him a photo of Coraline and we’ve sort of become friends. Every time I get something published, he
tweets something like, ‘I am really proud of her’, which is nice.”) She found a
new balance with Jamie, Mia’s father, but then married a man who later
physically abused her.
While Land is no longer on welfare (although
she still lives in low-income housing), money has not healed all wounds. The price of poverty – exhaustively
self-evaluating herself, in welfare meetings, in supermarket queues, in the aftermath of unexpected costs
– was panic attacks, a distrust
of happiness and signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. “Right now, my anxiety levels
are really high because things are going really well and I am just waiting for the catch.”
She looks startled when
I ask if she would ever take a holiday. “A vacation is airfares, hotel, food,
childcare. Is it really worth
it to be on a beach for a week? Exercise, hiking, showers – I don’t have time for that! I have
piles of laundry, I have to pick up the kids, I have an overwhelming amount of work to do.”
Heal: mend, regenerate
Startled: Surprised
Is it
really worth: (Realment paga la pena? / Realmente merece la pena?)
Hiking: climbing
After seeing inside the homes of the better off, Land does not want to be
rich. “I’d like to not be in debt, I’d like to own my home, but I still imagine
myself living a very simple life. It would be nice to have enough money to put
my kids through college, to not worry about money. But that’s about it.”
She has considered one indulgence: a cleaner.
“It’s been so busy, I’ve been thinking it would be nice for a couple of months.
But I could never bring myself to do it. There is no way I could afford it,
because I would just want to throw money at them – I’d leave $20 bills in every
room.” She laughs, but it is sad. She found it such a demeaning and
demoralising job, she says, quietly. “I couldn’t do it to someone else.”
I could
never bring myself to do it: I never have been enough brave
• Maid, by Stephanie Land, is published by
Orion (£14.99 rrp). To order a copy for £13.99, with free UK p&p, go to
guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846
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