Meanwhile, the mold in her apartment made her and her daughter sick, and the cleaning made her body hurt: a “constant burn,” “shooting pain,” “tingling sensations” down her limbs. Nerve damage prevented her from gripping with her dominant right hand, so she was forced to use her left. She got in a car accident and lost her car. She had no time to cultivate new friends, and those she already had weren’t always kind about her plight. She was ashamed to be on public assistance. With nobody around to give her the comfort or reassurance she needed, she tried giving it to herself. “I love you,” she whispered piteously when she was overcome with pain or panic. “I’m here for you.” She fantasized about moving to Missoula, Mont., for college; about owning a house like the ones she cleaned; about finding a lasting partner. All her hopes seemed implausible. If she were ever in a position to hire a cleaner herself, she vowed, she’d tip them, offer them food, leave them small gifts. She’d treat them “like a guest, not a ghost.” Sometimes, she cried while she cleaned.

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The strain of caring for a child in insecure circumstances shadowed the pleasures of motherhood. Land followed a strict bedtime routine with her daughter, hoping that rigid structures would increase the girl’s sense of stability, knowing any foundation was being eroded by her shared custody agreement and frequent changes to their living arrangements. After her relationship with the farmer ended, Land regretted the loss on her daughter’s behalf more than her own. She encountered no personal obstacle that wasn’t magnified in some way by being a single parent, no problem of parenthood that wasn’t intensified by her financial predicament.

For a while, as Land recounts in “Maid,” her memoir of her time as a cleaner, she was on seven kinds of government assistance, and still hardly surviving. The paperwork she was forced to complete in order to qualify for help was interminable: applications with questions about her plans for the years to come, detailed proof of income that included documentation of her schedule and letters from clients verifying that she did indeed work for them, and continual updates to account for any change in status. When, at one point, she submitted a handwritten pay stub, an official from the Department of Health and Human Services threatened to rescind her child care grant. To be eligible for a program that subsidized her rent, Land was required to attend a class about how to approach landlords, because they tend to resist renting to those on public assistance.

[ Read an excerpt from “Maid.” ]

Rent plus groceries plus utilities plus laundry plus insurance plus gas plus clothing minus an hourly paycheck of barely more than minimum wage and the scant assistance parceled out by the government with spectacular reluctance — the brute poetry of home economics recurs throughout Land’s book. When Land is faced with any kind of irregular expense, she must check the budget pinned to her wall, next to her notes about when each bill will be withdrawn and for how much. Math like this isn’t complicated, it’s merely endless. Calculated and recalculated as if the sums will improve with repetition, the figures overwhelm the mind.

As Lizzie Feidelson wrote in a 2016 essay for n+1 about her work as a housecleaner, an ambivalent pleasure of the job is that it gives you singularly novelistic insight into the people who dirty the spaces you clean. Details emerge “unbidden, without warning, like smells.” Documents spread on a table, receipts pinned to the fridge, a sound clip emanating from a laptop — the plot points of her clients’ lives, Feidelson observes, “connected in an instant.”