Bleach, Lye, Bleach
When one door closes, another door opens. This has been the mantra of my life. I don’t mean it in the sense of opportunity. I mean that at the hotel, there’s no shortage of cleaning to be done. When I close one door behind me, there’s another one in front of me, just on the other side of the hall. That door waits to be opened. There’s a mess behind it, and I’ll be the one to clean it.
I’m the best maid at Eden. They don’t call us that at Eden, though. Margaret and the rest of the hotel managers insist upon calling us “room attendants.” I’m not ashamed of being a maid, but it seems like Margaret’s ashamed of managing maids. That’s why she calls herself “Executive Room Attendant.” It sounds more professional. It sounds like something you’d want to put on your résumé. But I don’t need to fill out a résumé because I’m happy being a maid.
I told all this to Margaret, and that was when she told me that I was the best maid at Eden. She said, “Lilly, you’re a fantastic room attendant. Really, between the two of us, you’re probably the best that we have. I just don’t want you to mess it all up with this attitude of yours.”
“I don’t have an attitude,” I replied.
She instinctively looked down at her wristwatch. Margaret was in her early forties, but she wore wire-rimmed glasses that made her look older than that. She loved navy blazers almost as much as she loved to look down at her wristwatch. It was her polite way of saying, Time is money, Lilly. We’re wasting time, so guess what else we’re wasting?
She never said that part out loud, though. She just looked down at her wristwatch and said, “Lilly, you just tend to be contrary. And I’m only telling you that because I respect you and all the work that you do. I mean that. If you smile more often, disagree a little less, then maybe somebody will scratch your back. Do you know what I mean?”
Margaret didn’t understand that I didn’t want anyone to scratch my back. She couldn’t. So I just trained my eyes on her chin and said, “Yes, I know what you mean, Margaret.”
Most of the other maids at Eden share Margaret’s shameful attitude. Cate said that she’s going to quit when her husband finally gets his promotion. Janiece said that she just feels stuck. One day, Faye plainly called it humiliating. When I asked her why she thought that, she looked at me like I was stupid.
We had both been loading towels into the washing machines. I usually timed my trips to the laundry so that I didn’t see the other staff, but Faye was always erratic with her schedule. When I entered the dim room, she immediately looked up at me from her linens. She squinted her eyes but forgot to smile.
“Come to join me in the dungeon?” she asked humorlessly. Some of the other staff liked to call the laundry the dungeon. It was in the basement of Eden, and it was always poorly lit. To me, it looked like an art gallery, or even a museum. There were rows upon rows of steel, industrial washing machines, magnificent in their sheer size. They stood like the columns of the Parthenon.
“Just dropping off a load,” I replied. I began loading linens three machines down from her. All the machines between us were empty.
“How do you do it?” Faye asked.
“Do what?”
“All of this shitwork, day in and day out, with that smile on your face.”
“I’m not smiling.”
“Yeah, but you might as well be. You’re just so good. What, is this your third load this morning?”
“Fourth,” I said flatly.
“Jesus, no wonder Margaret adores you. I can’t stand her, and I can’t stand this job. It’s plain humiliating.”
“How is it humiliating?” I asked. My tone was level, but Faye seemed to take it as an insult. She dropped the towels she was holding and put her hands on her wide hips.
“When I was having my daughter’s friend over for a playdate, the girl’s mom asked me what I did for a living. When I told her I worked at Eden, her mouth started going a mile a minute. Wasn’t it just the nicest place in all of Manhattan? She started going on about the spa and asked me if I was a masseuse. I told her I was a room attendant, and when she asked me what that was, I told her that I cleaned the rooms. Then she smiled real big, all condescending-like, and went, ‘Well, someone has to do it, right?’”
“Someone does have to do it,” I replied. “We’re just the ones who do.”
Faye stared at me. She almost looked like she wanted to hit me. Then she smiled a cheerless smile and said, “Well, lucky us.”
I let the subject drop with Faye, but it was true. The fairies didn’t do it, as my mother used to say. She was a maid the entirety of her life. All my memories of her are in her uniform. She taught my brothers and I the importance of work as far back as I can remember. “If you take your job seriously, everyone will take you seriously, too.” She died of a heart attack at forty-four; I was nine years old when it happened. When my oldest brother sat me down at the kitchen table and told me, I remember that I wasn’t surprised.
My mother didn’t work at a hotel like Eden, but I know that she would have been honored to. Everyone should be. I wear my uniform on the subway to and from work like a badge of pride. It’s just like Eden itself. Eden is all sharp edges; the black marble floors meet the white walls at a perfect ninety degrees. I keep my uniform just as neat and geometric. When I’m in my uniform, I am Eden, and Eden is me.
Of course, only the rich can book a stay at Eden. The other maids take offense at this, but I don’t see the issue. The guests at Eden make the job more interesting. Poor people’s messes are all alike, but every rich person is messy in their own way. That was probably my first thought as I stepped into Room 217.
It was a usual day. I had been going from room to room as I did every morning. When one door closed, another door opened. There was something rhythmic, even musical, about the click of the doors as I shut them behind me. The maids at Eden offer daily housekeeping, so long as there is no “Please Do Not Disturb” sign hanging from the door handle. Truth be told, I hold some contempt for these signs. They interrupt my rhythm, and they prevent me from my work. When I finished Room 216, I began across the hall to Room 217. Fallen on the floor a few inches from the door was a “Please Do Not Disturb” sign lying face-down on the black marble.
I hesitated for a long moment. Usually, I treated those signs like magical wards—I never even touched them if I didn’t have to. But with it lying face-down on the black marble, its magic seemed to be broken. It could have been dropped there by any guest. It could have fallen off the handle of Room 215 and gotten kicked across the floor. So, I decided to knock. After a minute, I knocked again. After another minute, I entered.
The sight of blood on the sheets didn’t disconcert me. I had cleaned up everything imaginable at Eden. Semen, urine, feces, sweat, and blood had all seeped into the cracks of my being. I was more taken aback by the curtains. One of them was pulled off the rod. It was one thing I had never seen in my time at Eden; lamps were knocked over, pillows lined the floors, but curtains never got torn off the rod. Through the window, the skyline brooded over the room. A helicopter whirred by in the distance. I began removing the sheets from the bed.
Nothing else in Room 217 seemed unusual. No lamps were knocked over, no pillows lined the floors. It was a very nice suite that I had cleaned dozens of times. The bedroom was spacious, with a king-sized bed and a black wooden dresser. Through a set of black double doors was the residential space. A white sectional surrounded a black coffee table. A chessboard sat on the coffee table, next to a few magazines. There was a desk in the corner of the room that sat opposite a white tufted armchair. Usually, I fluffed the throw pillows and readjusted the blanket on the back of the couch. It did not look like anyone had used the residential space, though. The whole room barely seemed lived in. There was a pair of men’s dress shoes neatly placed at the foot of the bed. There was a small suitcase set upon the dresser. There was an open bottle of wine on the night table. There was a curtain torn off the rod, and there was a massive bloodstain that had soaked through to the mattress. Otherwise, the room was completely in order.
The body in the bathroom made the room seem lived in. The bathroom, just off the bedroom, was perhaps the shining jewel of the room. There were two black marble sinks with golden faucets. In between the two of them, there was usually a pyramid of rolled towels and a tall white orchid. The mirror was long, rectangular, and backlit. The stark white of the rest of the room beautifully contrasted with the vanity. There was the white tiled flooring, heated for the guest’s enjoyment. There was the white toilet, glimmeringly bright. Most striking of all was the white soaking tub that ran along the side of the wall. Of course, there was also a walk-in shower; the guests could choose at leisure which way they would decide to bathe. But nothing quite gleamed like the soaking tub after a good scrub. Its white porcelain reflected the bathroom light as steadfast as the North Star. That’s where the body was lying.
The body upset the black and whiteness of the room. It was a young girl, maybe in her early twenties, with a wood-handled corkscrew in the side of her neck. She had bleached blonde hair, but her dark roots were growing out. She was very pale, and her skin had become livid, slightly bluish and purple. All the towels from the vanity were stuffed in the tub around her, saturated with ruby red blood. She was wearing a lime green tank top, navy jean shorts, and no shoes. She had violet track marks. Her brown eyes were glazed over, and her pink lips were slightly parted. She looked like Ophelia in the river.
It was a day of firsts. It was the first time that a curtain had been torn off the rod, and it was the first time there had been a body in the soaking tub. I stepped back out of the bathroom and sat down on the bare mattress. The whole time that I was sitting there, I couldn’t stop picturing my mother’s body. She had always insisted upon an open-casket funeral. “Somebody’s gotta look at me square in the face someday,” she used to say. It was the only time I could remember her out of her uniform.
My mother looked nothing like the girl in the tub. My mother was tall and broad, and the girl was short and frail. Still, my mind started to merge the image of the two of them together. I had to keep standing up, walking into the bathroom, and making sure that it wasn’t my mother in the soaking tub. My mother could never have died in such a messy way, though. She died how she lived: tidily. When her heart burst, it didn’t splatter all over. She managed to keep it inside.
When I heard the door click open behind me, I didn’t start. I was already expecting the guest to come back any minute. You couldn’t leave a body in your hotel room one night and check out the next morning. And I was eager to see what he looked like. Very eager, even.
He was about what I had expected, almost disappointingly so. He looked like the average guest at Eden: swept-back hair, five o’clock shadow, gray suit jacket, navy button-down without a tie. He even had a navy pocket square in his jacket to match. I wondered if he had gotten ready in the bathroom. He must have used the walk-in shower.
“What are you doing in here?” was the first thing that he asked. His voice was level, but his face betrayed him.
“Cleaning.”
“Didn’t you see the sign on the door?” he asked as he puffed out a breath. His cheeks were turning red. “Can’t you read?”
“It wasn’t on the handle,” I replied. He looked down at the clump of bed sheets on the carpet. Then, he looked back at me. I was enamored by his pocket square. It was folded like a mountainscape. I almost reached out and touched it.
“What do you want?” he asked, his voice raising. “What the fuck do you want?”
I almost said, To clean the room. To do my job. I didn’t, though. I just looked toward the open bathroom door, realizing the gravity of my situation. I wondered what my mother would do. My hands felt slick as I rubbed them together. I took a deep breath and sighed.
“Listen, you want money or something? This some kind of blackmail? Name your fucking price,” he said, rooting around in his pocket. He pulled out his wallet. “Name it.”
I hadn’t thought of blackmail. I hadn’t been thinking much at all. I just had to see the man that could kill in a place like Eden. It was like killing someone in a church. Only a heretic could kill in a place like Eden.
“What was her name?” I asked. I thought that he might say Lilly.
“Are you serious? What the hell are you talking about?”
“How did you get the blood out of the carpet?” I asked instead. I was more interested in this question anyway. The carpet was wet in places and smelled of chemicals, but any blood that had been there was invisible. He’d done an impressive job.
“What the hell is wrong with you? Is this some kind of game to you? You’re sick in the head.” He shoved the wallet in my face. “What do you want?”
I kept sitting on the mattress and thought about what I wanted. He kicked the shoes at the foot of the bed across the room. One struck the wall, the other struck the nightstand. The lamp still didn’t fall over. I thought about my mom’s advice: If you take your job seriously, everyone will take you seriously, too. I wore her words like a shield.
“Give me the room,” I said. He stopped pacing around the foot of the bed and looked at me squarely.
“What?”
“Give me the room. Keep it checked out indefinitely. I’ll get rid of the body, the blood, everything. I’ll do my job. Just give me the room.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said, and he ran his hands through his neatly combed hair. “Do you know how expensive this room is? Do you have any fucking idea?”
I stared at him. All at once, I suddenly had the feeling that I recognized this conversation. It wasn’t déjà vu, exactly—just the keen sense that I always knew it was going to come. Suddenly, too, I knew that my mother had felt the same way. So had the girl in the tub. There was always the inevitability of having to look the devil in the teeth, to hand your body over to its rightful owner. I knew how it ended for us, for them. I had read the story before. Still, there was some relief in that ending finally coming to pass.
He sighed. He stood perfectly still for a long moment. I stared out the window at the skyline, and I almost got up and adjusted the curtain. No, they didn’t need to see it all unfold. As he walked in front of me, I refused to hold my breath. Then, he stuck out his hand—not to strike me, but to shake mine.
Wordlessly, he retrieved his suitcase and grabbed his wayward shoes. I expected a parting threat, but he didn’t bother; some part of him knew that he could trust me. He left the wine untouched. I didn’t know what to think, so I thought about the work cut out for me. Before he even left the room, I started on the bathroom. There was comfort in the rhythm. I used glass cleaner on the mirror and walk-in shower door. I wiped down the vanity. I submerged my gloved hands in the toilet water and scrubbed with a sponge and bleach. Putting on a different pair of gloves, I decided to move to the residential space before I handled the body.
When I left the bathroom, the guest was already gone. The residential space was barely touched, but I cleaned it nevertheless. I vacuumed the carpets even though they were still damp to the touch. I fluffed the pillows, readjusted the blanket on the back of the couch, stacked the magazines so that they were perfectly in line. In the bedroom, I rehung the curtain on the rod, but I left it drawn open. The mattress was the trickiest part, but I knew how to handle it. I mixed some ammonia with cold water—you never use hot water on a stain—and dipped a towel into the solution. It took me over half an hour, but I scrubbed the stain out of the mattress. I smiled. After I looked over all my work for a second time, I left the room to retrieve the laundry cart.
When I returned, I brought the cart into the bathroom. Taking her by the wrists, I tried to hoist the girl’s body into the basket. I was not as strong as my mother. Twice, I tried picking her up, but she flopped back onto the bloody towels with a slap. I wasn’t sure how long she had been dead, but I was amazed at how little she smelled. Only the scent of disinfectant and bleach pervaded the room. On the third try, taking her by the shoulders, I heaved her from the tub into the laundry basket. I pulled some towels over the body, then collected the bloody ones from the tub. I put the bloody towels and bloody sheets into a trash bag with the wine bottle, tied it in a knot, and set it on the far side of the bathroom, next to the walk-in shower. Then, I wheeled the basket out of the room and down to the industrial washing machines.
Faye was not there when I arrived. I smiled again. I’d read true crime novels, but I didn’t know how to dispose of a body. Still, I kept my faith in Eden. I thought about hurling the body into a machine and washing away the evidence, but I figured that the thudding would cause a commotion. As I looked around the room, the same anxiety from before began to rise in my throat, but I breathed and swallowed it quickly.
The maids were supposed to load the linens into the machines themselves, but Janiece had started leaving her carts for the other girls to tend to. A few others followed suit, and Margaret reprimanded them for it. It did not matter to those girls, of course. They did not care about their jobs, so they continued. I shoved the cart among the rest of the unlaundered linens. All the baskets looked the same.
The body was discovered the next morning. The maids had an urgent staff meeting that afternoon where the police questioned us as a group. That’s what Margaret had called it: “Lilly, we have an urgent staff meeting for all room attendants. It has to do with something found in the laundry. Be in Conference Room 3 in fifteen minutes.”
We sat in the rolling chairs like we were businesspeople. The police officer didn’t call us room attendants. He asked, “Is this all of your maids?”
Margaret replied, hesitantly, “Yes, yes, it is.”
I stared across the room at her and beamed.
The police conducted a discreet search of the hotel, but nothing turned up. The night before, I had taken the bag of bloody towels, sheets, and uncorked wine on the subway home, and I threw it in a dumpster a few blocks away. I begrudgingly pitched that uniform, too. There were no cameras in the laundry for the police to check. The officers took each maid aside to ask them if they knew anything, but none did. While we were waiting to be interviewed, Cate said indignantly, “This whole place is going to go down for this.”
It didn’t. The police took a look at the girl, and the investigation didn’t go much further. There was no notable press about it whatsoever. Eden cleaned up everything tidily, just as I had. I was still Eden, and Eden was still me. It was all merely the price of keeping paradise running.
The guest kept his end of the bargain. For months, the room remained rented out. I talked to my landlord and let the lease run out on my apartment. I got my security deposit back; he said that the place looked better than ever. The money didn’t excite me, though. I didn’t need expensive things, especially when living in Eden.
I convinced Margaret to let me have the exclusive privilege of cleaning the suites on my floor. “Sure,” she said. “The suites require the best of the best.” While I work every day, I ensure that the “Please Do Not Disturb Sign” stays fixed to the door. It’s the moat around my palace. Despite all these protections, though, I still wake up before sunrise every morning to avoid any wayward maids. I watch as the dawn envelops the skyline from the window, painting the skyscrapers a mess of colors: auburn, gold, light blue. In the room, though, everything remains black and white.
I’ve scrubbed, and brushed, and washed the soaking tub, but it still isn’t the same shade of white that it once was. It doesn’t shimmer in the light like it used to. Some nights, I have vivid dreams that my mother is lying there, cradled in a bed of bloody towels, her body looking like the girl’s: small and frail, shriveled and depleted. As I pull her out of the tub by her shoulders, she opens her eyes and grabs me by the forearms. Her look is wild, and her breath smells like bleach. She says to me, “Somebody’s gotta look at me square in the face someday.” But I leave those dreams for the dark. I wake, and then I work.
Hunter Golder is a sophomore at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA, pursuing a dual degree in English and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. At Dickinson, Hunter serves as a member of the English Majors Committee and regularly contributes to the Dickinson Review. When not writing, he enjoys reading classic literature and attending shows on Broadway.
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