It’s a different category of female labor. Harder physically though not what is called unskilled. If you are signed up with a reliable agency and if you can work swiftly and yet efficiently, you won’t do badly at all.

You swallow hard, considering. There would seem to be, in housecleaning, a kind of security, home. The clients will be known to you beforehand, not like the random customers of a restaurant or cocktail lounge. The clients will be, you want to think, guaranteed to be trustworthy

MAID BRIGADE AGENCY OF CATAMOUNT COUNTY. Their billboards of cartoon house-maids are so charming!

As a part-time university student you attend classes in the evenings. Long after the scholarship (of which you’d been so proud: hoping your parents would take notice) has ceased since you’d transferred to another university.

(And why did you transfer from St. Lawrence University?—surely not to sabotage your own university career?)

(Seeing too many familiar faces at St. Lawrence. Shrinking from their startled smiles, stares. Abruptly one day unable to remain in the place where you are but desperate to leave, to move, to begin again, in the place where you are not-known.)

In this way swaths of time have been lost to you. Semesters begun, abruptly ceased. Months when you could not bring yourself to re-enroll at any university. Minimum-wage jobs, or no job at all.

But now, another university: Catamount Falls. Another chance.

Hope like a helium-filled balloon drifting.

An urban campus bounded by tall pines to the north, to the south the thrum of the Thruway. Where you’ve (tentatively) felt at home. Knowing the particular melancholy of dusk on such a campus, as day students depart and evening students begin to arrive. As incandescent lights come on.

Here we are! We belong here, too.

You have surrendered the possibility of being a full-time student. It is likely that you deserve a lowered status, more in keeping with that of an incarcerated person awaiting parole.

This university schedule leaves weekday mornings and much of the afternoons free for (manual) work. You sign up at the Agency for work when you can get it, hoping for work at least once or twice a week.

Because you are new, and inexperienced at housework, and exude an air of plaintive desperation inadequately masked by a brave stoic smile, the Agency will pay you off the books, in cash and not by check, as they pay most of their staff. In this way the Agency is not required to deduct taxes from your wages and aren’t required to pay you benefits if you get sick or are injured.

It’s true, Maid Brigade does have a reputation for exploiting its workers. But not so badly as other local cleaning services.