The Housemaid

FIFTEEN

This Saturday afternoon, Nina is throwing a small PTA gathering in her backyard. They’re meeting up to plan something called “field day” in which the kids play in a field for a few hours, and somehow it takes months of planning to prepare for it. Nina has been talking about it nonstop lately. And she has texted me no less than a dozen times to remind me to pick up the hors d’oeuvres.

I’m starting to get stressed because, as usual, the entire house was a mess when I woke up this morning. I don’t know how this house gets so messy. Is Nina’s medication treating some sort of disorder where she gets up in the middle of the night and makes a mess in the house? Is that a thing?

I don’t know how the bathrooms get so bad overnight, for example. When I come into her bathroom to clean in the morning, there are usually at least three or four towels strewn on the floor, sopping wet. There’s usually toothpaste caked into the sink that I have to scrub to get free. Nina has some sort of aversion to throwing her clothes in the laundry basket, so it takes me a good ten minutes to gather her bra, underwear, pants, pantyhose, etc. Thank God Andrew is better at getting his clothing in the laundry basket. Then there’s the stuff that needs to be dry cleaned, of which there is a lot. Nina doesn’t distinguish between the two, and God forbid I make the wrong decision about what goes in the laundry machine and what needs to be run to the dry cleaner. That would be a hanging offense.