Yet to us, Orlando Metti was surprisingly polite. That afternoon. For we had worked very hard. For we had spent a good deal of time removing, with varying degrees of success, dog-urine stains, and worse, from carpets scattered about the eight-room apartment, made by the client’s daughter’s little French bulldog, kept temporarily on the premises while the daughter was at college.

Soap and water, bleach. Doggy-Out! in an aerosol spray.

Indeed, the client was polite, almost apologetic.

Assuring us that the “damned little dog” would not be in the apartment much longer, if he could help it.

Metti had been absent for most of the time we were cleaning but returned in time to inspect the premises, as Felice had told me he would do. I held my breath as he checked the interior of the refrigerator, one of the tedious tasks Felice had assigned me.

Held my breath as the (elegantly groomed) client ran his finger along a stretch of counter behind a microwave oven which one might not have thought of cleaning since it was out of sight, out of mind.

A few minor items needed re-checking, re-cleaning of which only one was within my province, the others Felice’s.

But Dr. Metti didn’t seem grievously annoyed by these minor mistakes only pointed them out with a grimace somewhere between a smile and a sneer as if saying Gotcha, girls!

Then, with the dignified magnanimity of the patriarch, though scarcely glancing at us, Dr. Metti declared Good work, girls! and pressed bills into our hands as we left the apartment.

Twenty dollars. Was this a generous tip?—it seemed so, to me. For there would be another, second gratuity from the Agency included with our payment for the week.

In the glass elevator soundlessly descending to the ground floor, a fluid vertical slide that made me feel faint, the very smoothness of it, the silence of the descent, a luxury we somehow didn’t deserve but were receiving, a bonus, like another tip—(for Felice and I were a brute sort of proletariat labor, there was less romance in housecleaning than in, even, waitressing)—Felice folded her twenty-dollar bill carefully and put it in her handbag. Her face was tired, drawn, petulant. Her thin-penciled eyebrows frowned. Her lips were pursed tight. She’d been friendly with me previously. She’d been patient giving me instructions, advice. But now when I tried to speak to her Felice frowned and shrugged and turned away.

Felice was a bosomy woman, with an air of careworn glamour, barely five feet tall. Awkwardly I towered over her. Somehow this made her rebuff all the more shocking.

Later I would discover from another girl at the Agency that Felice bitterly resented it, that the client had given me the identical tip he’d given her. Though I was only assisting her, and was much younger than she was, and Felice had been cleaning for this particular client for years.