I always thought I’d do my own cleaning,
never
forget the working-class way
of Italian American women like my mother who kept
a broom
beside her front door as if it were
a sign that read, “we work hard, we clean hard
so wipe
your damn feet on the welcome mat before
you step inside.” The broom was a sign that well-off
‘mericans
didn’t understand; they saw it as clutter
that belonged in a tool shed behind a fence
in the back
yard with the snow blower and the leaf blower
and the lawn mower. Then I moved to Brooklyn,
bought
a co-op apartment, had a baby and a contractor who
skipped town in the middle of renovation. He left me in
dirty
living hell with a nursing newborn,
650 square feet of filth and six ounces of breast milk
every four hours,
dust he knew my own prosperity created
because I could afford to add on a second bedroom. I was
another
‘merican in this immigrant’s eyes who’d just pay
to have someone else clean up after him. It was
all I could
do to take a shower but I ignored signs
in our lobby that advertised “PhDs who clean.” It wasn’t
in me
to hire someone, even a scholar gathering
dust samples for a doctoral thesis. I still thought
money
would never change hands to get the apartment
clean when my mother came for a visit. She wanted to but
didn’t ask
why not a house in Pittsburgh, why I waited so long
to leave my job and have a baby. She filled a bucket
of water,
scrubbed the floor on her knees one square foot
at a time. Payback for all the Saturdays I cleaned my room. As she
rinsed
her rag and said the contractor’s name in vain,
I rested on the sofa with my son, remembering
dust to dust.
Paola Corso is a New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow and author of a book of poems Death by Renaissance (2004) set in her native Pittsburgh river town where her Italian immigrant grandfather and father worked in the steel mill. Her story collection Giovanna’s 86 Circles, also set in Pittsburgh, is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press. Email her at paola_corso@hotmail.com.