I tried to explain to my mother that Geraldine Pyne was one of the nicest girls in sixth grade. She was not a spoiled girl, and you would never guess that she was a “rich” girl. A very thoughtful girl, a quiet girl, who seemed for some reason (God knows why) to like me.

“She thinks I’m funny. She laughs at things I say, that other people don’t even get. And Mrs. Pyne is—”

Rudely my mother interrupted: “They look down their noses at us. People like that. Don’t tell me.”

I had never seen my mother’s face so creased, contorted. At first I thought she must be joking . . .

“Oh, Mom. They’re nothing like that. You’re wrong.”

“And what do you know? ‘You’re wrong’—like hell I am.”

Driving on, furious. I could not think of a thing to say—my mother whose chatter was usually affable and inconsequential, like a kind of background radio noise, was frightening me.

As we drove in a jerky, circuitous route back home my mother recounted for me in a harsh, hard voice how as a girl she’d cleaned “the God-damned” houses in this neighborhood. Rich people’s houses. She’d had to quit school at sixteen, her family had needed the income. At first she’d cleaned houses with a cousin, who did the negotiating, then it turned out the cousin was cheating her, so she’d worked on her own. Five years. She’d worked six days a week for five years until she met my father and got married and started having babies and taking care of a house of her own, seven days a week. Her voice rose and fell in an angry singsong—

quit school, sixteen, got married, started having babies. Seven days a week.

There was a particular sort of bitterness here directed at me. For I was one of the babies. And I’d betrayed her with my careless, insulting friendship among the enemy.

“In those houses I had to get down on my knees and scrub. Kitchen floors, bathroom floors. I had to clean their filthy tubs and toilets with Dutch cleanser. Toilet brushes, Brillo pads. I had to strip their smelly beds and wash the sheets, towels, underwear and socks. I had to drag their trash containers out to the curb, that were so heavy my arms ached. Sometimes the kids would come home from school before I was finished, and they’d get their bathrooms dirty again, and I would have to clean them again. Sinks I had scrubbed clean, mirrors I had polished, I would have to do again. Piss splattered on the floor. They laughed at me—the boys. God-damned brats. If they even saw me at all.”