Cleaning God’s House
I grew up in the exalted spaces of a United Methodist Church. Dad was a pastor who, after graduating from seminary in Ohio, drove with my mother across the country to the far west of Washington, with six-month-old me strapped into a bassinet behind the front seat. In the early days of memory, I enjoyed singing hymns, drinking grape juice from thimble cups at communion, and helping Mom entertain parishioners in groups according to their last names for lunches in our home, where she served vegetable soup and black bottom cupcakes until she’d run through all the letters of the alphabet.
It felt like privilege to be the daughter of the big man of the house. Before each church service I assumed the right to sit with Dad in his office and ask what he’d been talking to God about. He told me he asked God to guide his words which, in hindsight, was a delicate proposition given that Dad wanted people to understand Jesus was essentially a socialist. I would join Mom and my younger brother, Christopher, at the last minute, entering the sanctuary after everyone else was seated, just as the organ swelled and Dad walked down the aisle. Feeling that I took a back seat to God, Jesus, and my mother, I sought any modest source of recognition as often as I could. To be seen sitting down right before the pastor took to the pulpit suggested I was a trusted advisor to the voice piece of the Lord, even if I was only eleven.
My brother and I used our position to test our parent’s good graces. Christopher would crawl under the pews during the sermon. I would leave during a hymn if I was bored or pull out a Nancy Drew Mystery from my knapsack. Sometimes I refused to stand during the singing, drawing attention to myself as independent rather than defiant. Or so I saw it. Mom could only control our behavior so much in the presence of two hundred other people. My brother and I were then inexplicably praised by the parishioners as they filed out of the narthex, the gathering space outside the sanctuary, leading to my sense that Christians were not immune to hypocrisy. Their kindness made me feel I was unassailably special by association, despite often acting as though I existed outside the bounds of good manners.
By the time I was a teen, I was both bored of church and a little ashamed to be there. I’d sleep in past Sunday school and make excuses for not showing up for worship, with the exception of Sundays when there was a church potluck. I’d arrive after the last hymn had been sung and join the line to fill my plate with tater tot casserole and strawberry rhubarb pie and nice people would ask how I was enjoying school.
When I was fourteen, Dad asked if I wanted to step in and clean the church. The janitor had quit, or been fired, or had been remiss, having something to do with, I’d overheard, an alcohol habit. The church would pay me fourteen dollars an hour, an enormous wage in 1981, which was what the janitor had been paid because it was considered a living wage job. I had never cleaned anything larger than our family kitchen floor and the most I’d earned was eighty cents an hour to babysit. I said yes.
Dad showed me to the janitor’s closet. It contained a paint-splattered utility sink and was cluttered with mops and brooms, rags, gallon jugs of bright yellow antiseptic and a stainless-steel industrial floor polisher that stood as high as my chin. The machine’s buffing discs hung on the wall and were nearly as big as car tires.
I didn’t think I’d done a particularly good job the Saturday I returned home eight hours after my first crack at cleaning the church. I had tidied and wiped down and swept or vacuumed: two levels of Sunday School rooms, the fellowship hall with its adjoining kitchen, a library, choir loft and alter, sanctuary and narthex, as well as Dad’s office with its shelves covered in books and his collection of monk figurines. The worst part of the job was cleaning the men’s urinal which, despite the bright pink deodorizing puck sitting in the basin, always smelled like the ammonia of those whose aim was poor. I was exhausted that first day and didn’t touch the floor polishing machine. It looked every bit as easy as operating a two-stroke dirt bike.
When the parishioners exclaimed on Sunday they’d never seen the church looking so clean, and who on earth was the new janitor, I felt the exhilarating power of praise for something I’d done, not just who I was. If nepotism, rather than desperation, had landed me this job, at least I had impressed them with the work I’d done. What adoration might be heaped upon me if I improved upon this first attempt?
The following week I set about raising the bar on my own efforts. The first order of business was to pipe my transistor radio through the church sound system which could reach every room in the building. Now Casey Kasem was narrating the nation’s Top 40 and I was shining the pews to Sheena Easton and singing My baby takes the morning train. . . Only I quite logically fantasized that I was the baby making the bucks and looking forward to the man who would be cooking my dinner when I returned home. This time I cleaned the windows, organized the hymn books, aligned the choir chairs more perfectly. And I decided to tackle one room with the floor polisher.
The fellowship hall was nearly the size of a basketball court. First, I pushed a long-poled duster, as wide as I was tall, in hypnotic swirls on a linear grid until all the dust and loose dirt was sequestered into one corner of the room. Then I rolled the galvanized pail on wheels full of hot water mixed with Lysol cleaner and swabbed the floor with the unkempt poodle mop in a less waltz-like fashion across the linoleum tiles in factors of four by four in a line stretching from the windowed side of the hall to the wall side.
I took my lunch in the small adjacent library where I read teen encyclopedia entries on genitals and reproduction and anything containing the word “sex” until the floor was dry. Using a sponge mop, I applied floor wax in neat vertical lines and got dizzy from the fumes. After the wax had dried the floor looked luminous, a Mop-&-Glo shine that exceeded my actual efforts. I nearly left it at that, but I wanted to see what the machine could do to improve the results. I wanted a gloss reminiscent of the bubble gum Kissing Polish we girls slathered on our lips between classes.
It was a steep learning curve to corral an eighty-pound floor waxer to do my bidding. I began by trying to push and pull it through sheer force but gradually understood I should let the machine lead the way, and my job was to nudge it in a certain direction. At that point, it was like dancing with my more stubborn partner; I understood his disposition to lead, so I learned to follow and together we glided like a slightly more lumbering Fred and Ginger.
Looking over the results of that final pass, I was besotted. The fellowship hall floor looked like the surface of an ice rink after the Zamboni had passed through. I went home ten hours after my arrival, calculating my wages and feeling like the You’ve Come a Long Way Baby I was destined to be, that janitorial work was only the first job of many forthcoming jobs I’d master, commanding higher salaries and lots of praise.
Of course, I slept through the church service, no longer interested in what God had to say to Dad. But I did want to see the reaction of the churchgoers. I arrived well after the service had ended and about halfway through the coffee hour. I wore my Sticky Finger jeans and mother of pearl button down and froze at the threshold to the fellowship hall. Unlike how I had left it, the glowing floor looked like dueling hockey teams had been thrashing it out after the halftime break. Scuff marks, black smudges, and brownie crumbs smeared beneath the dress shoes of suited men glared back at me. The entire surface of that once perfect floor was marred in some way, as though the simple act of their existence, all these people, had rendered my work irrelevant. I felt enraged.
“Karin,” I heard at the periphery of my tunnel vision. “This place looks wonderful! Thank you for doing such a good job!” I turned to see the choir director smiling at me and nodding, but no amount of teenage indifference could hide the horror on my face. “Are you ok?” he asked.
“It looked a lot better yesterday,” I said quietly, still searching to find an unsullied section of linoleum.
“Ah, it looks terrific!” he assured me.
More people offered thanks as I moved toward the apple juice and cookies. Christopher slugged me in the arm and ran away. Mom told me in her cloying sarcasm that it was good of me to join them. I retreated to the kitchen where most of the teens hung out, sitting on top of the deep countertops, talking about bad teachers and upcoming sporting events. If my peers knew anything about my being the new janitor, they didn’t mention it. And I didn’t want them to know. Whatever glory had been witnessed at the onset of the hour was now gone and I wanted to slink off the field into the locker room with my head hanging low.
As the fellowship hall emptied and I helped load the dishwasher and throw away paper napkins, I went from anger to sorrow to mild despair. I realized this is what it was going to be like, over and over again; I would clean and polish and make everything shine and I could never hold the world static in that condition of perfection for more than the moment I witnessed its completion.
When I looked at the floor of the empty room I felt again as though it had been my masterpiece, a clean and minimalist canvass that was itself the completed work of art and all these thoughtless idiots had ruined it. But what was the alternative? That everyone would take off their shoes and tiptoe across my ego? I had a choice. I could come back on Saturday and mop and buff and sweat all over again. I could just sweep up and mop the obvious messes. I could find some middle ground, perhaps buffing without laying down the wax, waxing without buffing, gradually retreating from excellence and settling for good enough. I could spend more time in the library reading about biology and puberty, justifying my hours as the church’s contribution to my education, knowing that I would never shirk my job completely because of a hangover.
I’m sure the people of the church noticed the building never looked as good as it had the first month of my employment. I did what I needed to do. I made more money than any of my friends and bought a subscription to Seventeen magazine and a new curling iron. I saved the rest. When Dad asked me to help with mowing the lawn, I did that, too. And I went through the cycle again; a flush of pride followed by the encroaching sense that any and all work would eventually have to be done again. And again. And this was the way of life.
-Karin Jones
Karin Jones writes the “Savvy Love” column for the UK’s Erotic Review Magazine. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Times of London, Huff Post and Entropy magazine, among others. She practiced medicine for eighteen years as a Physician Assistant before returning to writing. She works at her dining room table on memoirs about menopause and motherhood in Bellingham, Washington.