Mildred the Maid gives me two-and-a-half days off each week. That’s not including weekends, when I’m expected to do my own thing with my own family, while she does the same with hers (and spends the first hour of her first working day back at the ranch the following week giving me every blow-by-blow detail of that most stressful of periods — “Life At Home”).
Mildred’s mercy days are Tuesday and Wednesday, when she does chores for someone else, and half of Friday. She doesn’t come to work on Fridays, but by the gap between when she finally clears out on Thursday and my hair-raising, hard-working family weekend begins on Friday afternoon, the only time I really have left to myself is Friday morning. That’s my half-day treat, and she makes sure I know it.
My off days, Tuesday and Wednesday, are spent recovering from Mildred Monday and bracing my self for Mildred Thursday.
Mildred is small, wiry and hardly speaks. She has sized me up since I came to live here, having been in occupation of the territory for far longer than I have, and gets on with things as she thinks fit.
I have once or twice tried to chastise her (about things like the self-defined flexible hours she works or disappears without explanation; about disconnecting all carefully tuned electronic devices while she makes the odd desultory motion of dusting and not reconnecting them, so that I have to bring in IT engineers afresh to patch things back together each week; about rearranging papers on my desk, so that they make even less sense to me than they did before, and so on). On these stern, oratorical occasions, she has looked at the floor next to my feet while I have ranted in halting isiSwati, sighed when I have finally run out of steam, and released me with a muttered, “Ngizo zama [I will try].” The “zama” is uttered with such loaded emphasis that I am given clear, unspoken instruction that I am asking the impossible.
I am particularly exasperated because I am psychologically put in the position of the impossibly alien white madam, just by the way Mildred raises an eyebrow, sighs, and gets on with the chores that I am obviously not prepared to do for myself. That’s why she’s here, and poorly paid. The poor pay, which she never talks about, immediately gives her the moral high ground.
Each week I ask myself why it is that I cannot live without her. The only answer I can give to myself is that things look better around my chaotic, intimate space after she has gone.
It’s a matter of degree, of course. I have lived for years, with and without companions, in steadily escalating piles of unfinished business, curious debris and esoteric works in progress. My private work space has always been looked upon by spouses, would-be spouses, and casual visitors alike as a marvel of energetic determination offset by insuperable lethargy. I have gone through many divorces with this proud defence of a personally realised chaos theory of the creation of the universe as a subtext.
But you can’t argue philosophy with Mildred — and believe me, she is not the first, and will not be the last. As far as Mildred is concerned, the universe, like history, is bunk. In this she is, unwittingly, at one with that great America leveller, Henry Ford, creator of the mass-produced automobile. Remarkably, they have never heard of each other.
Just one example of Mildred’s impact on my life: I am not great at opening mail, especially stuff with official stamps on it, preferring to let it mature in various corners until I am ready to respond with suitably defensive panache. Mildred, without discussing procedure with me, helps me out by throwing it all away.
I would embrace her as a fellow revolutionary were it not for the fact that all this officious stuff comes clanging down around my ears some months down the line. By the time I am forced to face up to the consequences, Mildred, like Macavity the Cat, is nowhere to be seen. Revolutionary camaraderie has been all in my mind, not hers. Hers is a purely practical activity, and once she has done with it, she leaves it behind her and moves on.
I suspect that Mildred has a bit of a past. She is not like the maids of all my friends in the black neo-elite, women who lumber around as they did in the white past in pink Pick ‘n Pay housecoats thrown in as an obligatory extra on top of the wages. She has her pride. Her dress sense is faded elegance at all times. She still uses skin-lightening creams, has carefully pencilled eyebrows, and wears her hair in tight plaits around the pale, surreal mask that is what has become of her now inscrutable face.
Yes, she must have been quite racy in her day. But Johannesburg has a way of discarding faded goods, and hordes of people, the majority, in fact, find themselves making do with the best they can — cleaning houses, washing and feeding other people’s children, buying and selling worthless items in the informal economy until the lottery maybe kicks in. Who knows? Who cares?
But I can tell that I am beginning to become sentimental about Mildred as I speak. The fact is that I dread her imminent reappearance. I check off the days of the week according to when she will blast quietly, side-waysly into my sacred space once again, without so much as a “by-your-leave”, and knock my confident, chaotic universe into a spin with her parallel universe of parodied humility.
Sometimes, when she has been working late, I try to bring some form of reality into our relationship. I drive her home. It makes me feel better, and worse at the same time. But as Henry Ford might have said: even reality is bunk.