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I am cleaning the bathroom and I open the bottle of bleach
Instant visions of my Abuelita, my grandmother
R ise with the fumes from the bottle
Many religions believe in the redeeming, purifying value of work
Others believe in cleanliness being next to godliness
I don’t know quite what my Abuelita believes
I only know for sure that she believes in two things
The power of Jesus
And the power of bleach
I think they sometimes become indistinguishable to her
I swear I’ve walked by the open door and seen a flaming tongue above
her head
As she exorcises the demons of filth and soap scum
In her four by six foot cathedral
I can hear her mumbling prayers and evocations
Bouncing off the newly pristine walls
Pouring out and sanctifying the hallway
Ave Maria purisima,
Jesus Christo, reino de los sielos sanctificado sea tu reino,
And Dios de los santos todo poderoso
Seeping forth from the small door
Changing dirt into manna and filth into wine
This has been her life’s work
But even this had a genesis
Her baptism into this kind of worship came in 1963
Central American women with no money have two choices
Work in a factory or clean houses
She chose the latter
Too late to establish the stereotype of the little Spanish housekeeper
But in time to affirm it
Conversion began in the washrooms of upperclass Manhattan families.
There she must have been visited by the Archangel of Ajax
The Saints of steel wool
Or the Virgin Mary of Mistolin
Because the families would whisper of seeing Turin like images on the
towels
Stigmata on the shower door
Sometimes even the transfiguration in the toilet bowl
If they went in as she was just leaving
I know this is not what one would normally consider sacred
But she carried on as if grime was evil incarnate
Battled the stain rings around the drain as if foretold in the book of
revelation
Any shame and degradation that might come with this kind of work
Had been washed away long before I ever knew her
I knew the Abuelita with fingers as smooth as the porcelain she scrubbed
Little pink slabs, made just as brittle and inflexible
Arthritis, like the tortures of a saint
Now, she cannot clean as she once did
The years of crouching in tubs
And mopping Italian marble floors have taken their toll
On her knees and her back
It does not really matter now
She has paid for her passage
At the time of her reckoning,
Hundreds of sinks on the upper east side
Shall testify to the cleansing she bestowed on ungrateful families
The faucets shall gleam a path to the gates of paradise
The very fumes shall lift her soul and clear the nasal passages of the
almighty
They say that when Saints pass away, the smell of flowers is everywhere
around them but I think God may make exceptions
And allow some to smell like Clorox. |
