When I was a kid, we had a series of maids parade through our house while Dad and Mum were with their respective boyfriends. At this point in our family history, the two oldest sibs were living in Toronto and the youngest, three teens are doing their own thing, racing through the house unsupervised, were starved of some kind of parental unit. So our parents provided us with someone to cook, clean (light duties…dont touch the kid’s rooms) and laundry. Loads of laundry. I think one of them left because of the stinky pile of cotton that awaited her every other day.
There was Olga. That wasnt really her name but she was Scandinavian for sure. She would take a moment out of her vacuuming to give us kids a back rub while we mushed our faces down on the “good” couch in the living room. She wasnt much of a cook, as far as I can remember, despite her size. Massive. Man hands too. She didnt talk much but I think she genuinely liked her work, but hated kids.
Frau Fraubissenau was tight. She was skinny, high strung and didnt last long. I remember she got into a fight with my Mum about how to feed us. Mum was happy to have her make meals and freeze the next day’s dinner so that we could heat it up in the tiny toaster oven (precursor to a microwave, you under 30somethings). Frau didnt want to freeze her dinners, Mum didnt want to pay her for being at the house more than 3 days. Bye Frau.
Then there was Alice. She stayed on the longest. The same age as my long-moved-out sister, she was gaining extra cash before her university departure. I would come home and sit and watch her in the kitchen, in which she had no skill whatso ever. Many was the meatloaf, coached by my Dad. But she worked hard and put up with my millions of questions: Do you have a boyfriend? Why do you wear your hair like that? Whats for dinner? Can you find my Yoda t-shirt? What are you making? That again? What’s a tampon?
One day I came home from school and there she was doing dishes, her butt swaying side to side in time with the music that was coming out of the speakers (we were a progressive techy family, we had a sound system in the living room with satellite speakers in the kitchen. The wires were loose somewhere and the pressboard speakers would crackle and die every so often and a quick punch to the front of them would reset them). She couldnt sing too but that didnt stop her:
“take it easy
Take it easy!
try to cool it girl
take it nice and slow,
does your mother know”
The music was… disco and it was melodic and it had a beat…! The beat snagged my logic gland and I fell in love with the simplistic yet metred timing.
Big deal, you say, a closeted kid discovers disco. Tell us another, Armistead Maupin!
Well I can say that it was a life defining moment, however I went on to listen to New Wave and Punk. But it was Alice’s record that made me dance about and laugh and experience myself in a different way. A week or two later she brought me a 45rpm (thats a small record, to you 20somethings) of “Does Your Mother Know?” which my brother promptly snapped in half upon my 1000th playing of it.
Alice started to bring in all her ABBA records to work. I demanded it. We would talk ABBA and she told me the secrets of the anagram name and talked of their concerts and fans (a new concept to me… many people liking one group? Fame?) and where they were from (“Norway? Where the hell is that?” Alice didnt know, bless her heart.) Her last purchase was Arrival and she handled the record like it was made of snowflake and ricepaper.
Her final summer, Alice accompanied the family to the cottage for an overnight once a week so she could do laundry there, I guess. I never knew what she was doing for us at the cottage other than dishes. But Mum thought she was smoking pot out behind the sailboat/garbage pile (I suspect it was either Dan or John, my older brothers) and she was let go promptly. I remember Michele trying to reason with Mum that she was crazy and it might have been American cigarettes.
So I say thank you for the music, Alice.
