DAN’S PAPERS
August 16, 2013 Page 63
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GUEST ESSAY
Dust Bunnies By COCO MyERS
O
L. Goodchild.
n a hot morning in early June 1976, my best friend, Katy, and I met at the corner of Darby and Georgica and took off on bikes to our first housecleaning job. We pedaled at a clip, her tire nicking mine, all the way to the end of Further Lane. What must we have looked like, biking madly past golf greens and leafy estates, wearing white maids’ uniforms made of some god-awful synthetic with our Ray Ban sunglasses and Tretorn sneaks? I could smell the heat from the sun baking into the road, the pungent scent of newly cut grass. I was glad summer was back, stretching out before me in all its perennial possibilities. I was also a little nervous. Could we really pass as professional housecleaners? The only houses either of us had cleaned were our own. But we needed a summer job to make spending money—new bikinis, cocktails and door cover at the Talkhouse—and to save a little for our freshman year of college (I was off to Princeton, Katy to Smith), so we concocted this cleaning and party-help business and ran an ad in the local paper with a photo of us posing in our uniforms, holding feather dusters aloft. Katy’s father took the picture with his tripod, while sipping a martini. Within a week, we had a dozen jobs lined up, from grand summer homes to grungy share houses. We arrived a bit wobbly legged that first day, leaned our ten-speed Peugeots against a tree
Coco Myers is a freelancer who grew up in East Hampton with her friend and co-Dust Bunny, Katy [Kay] Spear. She worked in Manhattan as an editor and writer at womens’ magazines before moving back to raise her three sons.
and stood a moment, looking up at the threestory house with its flower-filled window boxes, wondering whether to knock at the front door or walk around to the back. Fortunately, we were saved by the bell—or lack of it. When the front door opened, a middle-aged woman in Bermuda shorts and ropes of pearls waved us toward her. As we approached, she studied us doubtfully. “You’re awfully young,” she said. I glanced at Katy. What could we say? We were. “How much per hour did you say you charge?” she asked. “Five dollars,” I said. “Each.” She was aghast. “Five each? That’s ten dollars an hour!” I felt my face flush and my words pile up on top of each other. “But we’ll do the house in half the time, because there are two of us, so really you’re paying the same as you would if there were only one...” She flicked a glove in the air like she was swatting a fly. “Well, come inside. We’ll see how this works out.” We followed her into a long paneled living room furnished with sofas and chairs in various plaids and more end tables than there were ends of furniture, each one covered with clusters of silver picture frames and bowls of potpourri. “Along with the normal cleaning, I’d like you to polish all the furniture in the house with lemon oil,” she said. All of it? We came up with a game plan, and a template for the rest of the summer: start upstairs and work our way back down, always in the same room—one of us dusting or waxing, the other vacuuming; one cleaning the shower, the other the sink. This way, we could talk and laugh and keep each other company. We’d always stuck together, growing up yearround in this resort town, weathering the long, isolated winters, when all there was to do on a weekend was stroll along the empty beach and wander up to the houses (Continued on page 66)
This essay is one of the many nonfiction essays entered in the Dan’s Papers $6,000 Literary Prize competition. We editors liked this entry and present it here, hoping you’ll like it. For more info, go to literaryprize. danspapers.com