I ask you, is sadder than being an also-ran to The Yo-Yo Man?
I particularly felt sorry for the guy furthest in the background. Furthest Guy, as I thought of him, was kind of geeky-looking, with short-cropped brown hair and uncool clothes; I couldn’t make out his eye color. And I guess that was part of the point: to even rate eye color in the commercial, to be as cool as The Yo-Yo Man, a guy needed Ball & String.
And ever since this commercial started airing, nearly every night I had a dream about a man with a yo-yo. The man in my dream was faceless, so it was hard to tell if he was supposed to be The Yo-Yo Man or not, but whoever he was, he was just as amazing with his tricks as The Yo-Yo Man. I don’t want you thinking I was obsessed or anything and it wasn’t as though I dreamed of him all night long, but, as I say, he haunted me often enough.
As soon as the commercial ended, the strains of The Yo-Yo Man theme song abruptly cut short, I switched off the TV.
I grabbed my lunch bag and looked down at my attire: a black Coldplay T-shirt that had seen better days, faded khaki shorts, scuffed Nikes.
Sighing at the underachieving squalor that was me, I grabbed the last Ernest Hemingway book I needed to read to make my tour of him complete and my yellow bucket, in which were my squeegee, a shammy, a paint scraper and two rolls of paper towels.
My employer? Squeaky Qlean Window Washing.
Yes, I wash windows.
2
Even if I hated the name Squeaky Qlean—the name dreamed up by the business’s proprietor, Stella Davis, a woman who had yet to realize that there were misuses for the letter Q—window washing was the perfect job for me. The repetitive motions fit the internal rhythms of my obsessive personality, plus, although there was not a whole lot of prestige involved—precisely, none—at least my mind was my own. I’d had jobs where I was actually required to think on someone else’s time clock and I found the lack of opportunity for free association to be just too mentally confining.
“You’re twenty-eight years old now, Delilah.” Hillary would attempt to grow me up from time to time. “Isn’t it time you thought about getting a real job?”
Those words always rankled some, but it was hard for me to get mad at Hillary or if I did get mad, to stay mad for too long, because Hillary Clinton was the best friend I’d ever had. She was not only my best friend, though, my mother long dead, she was like a mother to me, too. We may have squabbled like family members constantly, but I loved her. She was my favorite living woman in the world.
And, yes, her name really was Hillary Clinton.
But this was no time to be thinking about Hillary Clinton, or the fact that she was my best friend, or the fact that she’d remained my friend even though I was not much of an achiever and she was a huge one, or the fact that maybe I was something of a charity case for her, her continued friendship toward me making me something akin to her more lost-cause clients—Hillary always said that my obsessions were both a comfort to me and what victimized me most, making it a perfect vicious circle—because Stella Davis, my boss, was pulling up in the Squeaky Qlean van outside my condo, South Park. The van was pristine white, with a picture of a tuxedo-wearing penguin cleaning a window on it, the window having those little sparkly star thingies all over it, not unlike on a Windex bottle, in order to symbolize the acme of window-cleaning perfection.
South Park always seemed to me to be a silly name for a condo in Danbury, since Connecticut is north and there was no park in sight, but we at least had a stamp-sized balcony—fraternal twin to the minuscule kitchen—off the living room of our unit that afforded a view of the pool down below, so I tried to suck it up about the nonsensical name.
Another thing that impressed me as silly, as it did every workday, was Stella’s appearance and attire. Stella had her blond hair in an honest-to-God bouffant style, her green eyes highlighted by full makeup, her buxom top encased in a faux tuxedo T-shirt that had tails down the back, her perky bottom in pristine white shorts, with black socks on her feet and white leather sneakers over those that she polished every day. When we picked up Stella’s two other employees, Conchita and Rivera, both from Brazil, they would be similarly dressed, sans the hooker makeup.
“If we look better than the competition,” Stella was fond of saying, “people will want to use us instead. After all, who would you rather hire, a window washer that looks like she’s ready to accept an Academy Award or one who’s dressed sloppy like, well, you?”
I’d pointed out to Stella, repeatedly, that while penguins were my favorite non-cat animal, loving penguins and wanting to look like a penguin were two very different things and that with my shortness, I couldn’t help but look like a waddling refugee from Antarctica in one of her getups. If I were any other member of the crew, undoubtedly Stella would have fought me on this—Stella was big on fighting—but she grudgingly acknowledged that I was the best worker she’d ever had. My nickname among the crew, The Golden Squeegee, ensured that I’d have a job with Stella for as long as I wanted one. And, besides, the pristine white shorts they all wore always wound up splattered with gray window sploodge by the end of the day anyway, kind of spoiling Stella’s desired effect of bucket-carrying Hollywood stars on the red carpet.
As for Conchita and Rivera, and the all-girl crew, Stella was also fond of saying, “I don’t hire men anymore. The EOE people can sue me if they want to, but have you ever hired a man to do hard work? What a bunch of whiners. ‘It’s too hot out here.’ ‘When do we get off work?’ ‘I have a second job to get to.’ ‘That ladder’s too high.’ ‘I’m taking my break now.’ I swear to God, I always thought it was just me. But then I talked to a colleague who owns a landscaping service and he said the exact same thing. ‘Ask a 100-pound girl to pull a tree out of the ground with her bare hands and she gets right to it. Ask a 200-pound man and before he’s even touched the damn thing, he’s calling Worker’s Comp on his cell phone to verbally file papers for his bad back. Give me a six-pack of chicks any day.’ Naturally, I poked him in the gut with my pool cue for saying ‘chicks,’ but, believe you me, I know from whence he speaks.”
“So what did you do last night?” Stella asked, snapping her omnipresent gum as she keyed up the ignition. “What’re you reading today? Not that Hemingway guy again. Isn’t he the one who hated chicks?”
I knew that the barrage of questions—Stella was a relentless talker—would continue until we picked up Conchita and Rivera, at which point Stella’s attentions would focus solely on them. Unlike me, but very much like Stella, Conchita and Rivera were big talkers.
Like me, Conchita and Rivera were short and dark. But unlike me, where in Stella’s uniform I would have looked like a reject extra from March of the Penguins, Conchita and Rivera looked hot hot hot, like maybe they worked at an upscale Hooters or something.
“Stel-la!” Conchita and Rivera jointly trilled as they hopped into the van.
Conchita and Rivera lived in a neighborhood that would have depressed me, one of Danbury’s few rough neighborhoods, but they never seemed to mind, greeting each day of being alive with an exuberance I could only envy. Of their former home in Brazil, obviously worse, all they would ever say was, “You don’t even want to know, Delilah. Better for us here.”
The Girls From Brazil, as Stella and I referred to them, were illegal aliens. But I was sure not going to be the one to turn them in. If their situation here wasn’t scary enough, the tone they got in their voice when they told me I didn’t even want to know what it was like where they came from. During the three years I’d been working for her, whenever Stella had put ads in the paper prior to hiring them, despite the fact that Stella offered a generous hourly wage, the only people to apply were other Brazilians. The way I figured it, they weren’t stealing jobs from legal people, because no one legal wanted their jobs; no one except me, that is.
The Girls From Brazil also always greeted Stella as though they were trying to pick her up, in that way, which was not far from the truth since Conchita and Rivera were free-living lesbians, always willing to expand their circle of love.