Seven Strategies for Survival (in a small town)

By Matthew Roberson

Preparation

It’s up at six, and in and out of the bath, and feeding the dogs, and making sure she’s got all the equipment in the truck. She’s got to make sure of your supplies ahead of time, because there’s no way during the day to stop at the Depot and get more bleach.

Then it’s out the door before Bill’s up and around and needing something, ’cause if she gets started with that there’s no end to it, and if she doesn’t work, doesn’t nobody eat.

One stop at Michael D’s for an egg sandwich and coffee, and then to the first house, which she’ll make do on her own, ’cause she just loses workers when she asks them to be up at dawn. It’s not a battle to fight, no more at least, because she can always take two hours to do house number one herself, the way she always does, starting with the bathrooms, then moving onto the hardwoods, then the dusting and vacuuming, then on to the kitchen, which she does appliance by appliance till finally she’s on her knees, scrubbing the floor, getting every crack and corner. Empty the garbages, and done, and on to the bigger houses, where she’ll meet one of her girls.

It’s not complicated, the cleaning, but if she doesn’t have all her equipment, and if it isn’t organized in the back of her truck, just how it’s supposed to be, and if she doesn’t let her clients know ahead of time to get more of the cleaners they like best, ’cause maybe they’re running low, and if she doesn’t remind her girls of when they’re working, and if they don’t keep at it good so they can get done and on to the next job, and the next, then it’s all to hell.

So, it ain’t easy, and that’s not even about the cleaning, which she’s got to get just right for each house. Maybe it’s the microwave’s got to sparkle, or the man over by the big church wants all his knick-knacks dusted every time. Or how the sorority sisters want her to undo every inch of filthy mess they make in their bathrooms.

Make a half hour in the middle of it to get some lunch at Michael D’s and some more coffee, and then a couple more houses, and that’s a full day, and since Bill’s not up to cooking, she’ll take home some chicken, and see how he is since he last called, and if he even managed to make it out of bed. One of these days they’re going to have to hire an in-home nurse for him, but she doesn’t want to think about it, because of the cost. The doctor visits already cost enough.

More than once, she’s thought they should hire a cleaning service, because she can’t clean one more inch after a long day, and the place is looking worse for wear, especially with dogs and the cat leaving all that hair around, and the garbage piling up in the kitchen, the toilets needing more than a good scrub. But how would that look, her hiring a cleaner. Wouldn’t that make people laugh?

Compensation

What Dr. Abhilasha knows is you must pay more for good secretarial staff. Dr. Abhilasha tried it the other way, when his practice started, and he paid the going rate, and he got what you get in a little town like this, the average quality, which is well below average, all things considered. Even if he insisted on a high school education, the girls confused the filing, if they could remember to do it at all. They confused appointments. They forgot to send out reminders for blood tests or results. They failed to call in prescriptions. They seemed more interested in chat, chat, chatting, and the worst of them were rude to his patients, which he couldn’t have. Dr. Abhilasha joked to his doctor friends that only he got to be rude to his patients.

And Dr. Abhilasha could see those girls resented a strange man coming into their little town and making what to them seemed a fortune. A foreign man, no less. Maybe Dr. Abhilasha was a terrorist. He told them again and again: he was a Hindu, not a Muslim — though they didn’t understand the difference — and he said that they could go to medical school, too, if they wanted to be doctors and make lots of money, though it was not about the money, he always said. It was not about the money.

On the other hand, sometimes it is about the money, because when Dr. Abhilasha started offering five thousand dollars above average salary, he started getting girls who could do the work. If he offered them good raises, they stayed. His life, it was easier, and he kept more patients, and it is still so, which has made his days go by with less fuss and his list of patients as full as any in town.

From among these girls, too, Dr. Abhilasha met his wife, who now manages the office and will continue to do so until they have children. His choice of a wife, of course, caused an upset among his family, who expected he would marry an Indian woman and had several good prospects picked out. But how can one fight love, Dr. Abhilasha says to his wife, who shakes at him her blonde hair, which he likes so much, before she asks if he wants to take an evening appointment with a young woman who seems to be suffering from an incurable itch. When he says he does, she purses her lips and says in a little voice, Oh, yes, Doctor. Yes.

Adulation

Oh, you’d think it’s all about how you cut or whether you’ve got your scissors sharp or if you use one of the newer clippers, but it’s not. It’s about you — plain and simple. Are you sweet with the ladies. Do you get to know their names. Do you ask about their kids or their grandkids. Do you show the guys a little boob. Brush up against them. Tell them they look ten years younger than they are? She picks a stray piece of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. And everybody’s got really beautiful hair. You know that, right?

I mean I give ‘em good haircuts, don’t get me wrong, but it isn’t only about that, and if you screw up, they’ll still ask for you, if you’re nice. Especially the guys. They’ll maybe ask for you more than you want. I’ve had ‘em call back to the shop five minutes after leaving to ask me out.

The ladies get the expensive cuts, and they come more often, and they tip good. And some of them are the sweetest little things. So, treat them nice.

Last but not least, be good to the girls in the shop. You’ve got to come in on time, and you’ve got to have a good attitude. Sweep up your hair, and if someone needs a pair of scissors, you loan yours. And don’t get involved in the gossiping. That’s only asking for trouble, she says, dropping her cigarette under her heel, raising her collar against the wind.

She’s going to have to quit smoking, if she decides to keep the baby. Probably it doesn’t hurt to have a few cigarettes before she even starts to show. How much harm can that do, really? She’ll stop before anyone knows. She’ll have to. The things they would say. Every girl in the shop can be a real bitch. But she isn’t even sure she’s going to keep it. How is she supposed to take care of a baby by herself. Sure her mom will help. But the money. It’s not like a stylist makes anywhere near enough. So, she just isn’t sure.

Acclimatization

Here’s the thing: he works out of his truck, from the minute he’s out the door and on his way to the job to the minute he pulls back in the driveway at night to strip off his work clothes and have some supper. Maybe it’s a full roof they have to tear down to the plywood before re-shingling, or maybe it’s a patch job on a rubber roof ’cause it’s pooling. Doesn’t matter where or what or when, his truck’s a moving office and tool storage and break room. F450 crew cab dually 4X4 with a gooseneck hitch in the bed. Forty grand.

So, here’s the rest: he likes to leave her running a lot, ’cause it’s good to have a warm spot when you’ve been working in twenty degree winds, and it’s as nice to jump in the air-conditioned cab for lunch when it’s July and you’ve been sweating over shingles putting up so much heat that you see it move in the air. Doesn’t mean he leaves her on all the time, which would cost too much, even with diesel, but he’ll hit the remote start a half hour before he figures they’re gonna go on break. Big deal. And if he’s in the habit of leaving her on while he runs into the drugstore or to grab something from Taco Hell or to get a haircut, then so what. Anybody who’s got a problem can fuck right off. Do they work out their trucks. More like they spend eight hours in a climate-controlled building that burns a hundred times the fuel his truck does, and they’re giving him a dirty look?

Habituation

She hates the house, because of the kitchen, which has appliances from the Stone Age, she says. And the kitchen’s too small, like their bathrooms. And there’s no central air, and Abe won’t get window units, because it’s not hot enough in the average summer, he says, and she says it’s not worth fighting over. It’s just not. And she’d have thought it was the final straw when the heating went to hell in Abe’s man cave, but he just bought space heaters and said it didn’t bother him a bit. And all the rooms could use some paint, but there’s so much stuff on the walls, and even if they hired someone to help, they’d end up moving furniture, and it’s just too much to do. On the outside, though, it’s a different matter, and at a certain point, she says, she’s going to have to put her foot down, because your siding will rot if it’s not properly painted, it’s like the roof that way, and you’ve got to get it taken care of, or you’re in for a lot worse. You don’t wait for the leaks to start dripping down while you’re lying in bed, she says. And don’t get her started on the lack of storage — which shouldn’t be an issue, because, if you take the basement into account, they’ve got almost three thousand square feet, but all their junk — the toys and movies and knick knacks, and Abe’s weird collectibles off of eBay, and the furniture they’ve moved downstairs, it’s like they’re living in a rummage shop, and it’s even spread so far into the garage that she can’t pull in her car. If they had a yard sale, it’d be like winning the lottery the money they’d get, but try and get Abe to part with any of it, she says, and the boy’s as big a pack rat as his father, with his Pokemon cards and Legos and Bakugans and his stuffed toys and magic kits and ten times a hundred books crammed onto at least a dozen shelves, because they can’t use the library or borrow AR books from school. And the yard’s a mess, because the lawn guy’s got a disability, with some sort of paralysis on his left side, and he can’t hold a weed whacker, and they’ve got tall grass growing up around every tree and bush and up by the house, but she can’t let him go, she says, because he didn’t ask to be handicapped, and he does his best. Right. It’s all you can do, is your best, and learn to make do. It’s true for all of us.

Determination

So, maybe she hasn’t been teaching long, but she knows this: Don’t take your work home. Literally. She’d rather stay at the school till six or later, taking care of business, if it means she can go home, and cook dinner, and then sit on the couch for a couple hours without any grading or prepping or searching the Internet for ideas about science projects or whatever. None. Zero. Zip. She tries not to take any of the other stuff home, either — how angry she is about how J. acts without thinking or how I. can’t have a thought without it spilling out her mouth no matter if Mrs. L. is talking to the class! The way N. ignores her because they’ve just never gotten along. It is simply inappropriate to ignore your teacher when she says return to your seat!

And the teachers are another matter, with their cliques. Sure, they’re polite and make small talk, but Mrs. L. is new, and they’ve been around forever and know the little gossipy shorthand that leaves her out of almost every conversation. Except when it comes to dispensing advice. That they’re free with, even when she doesn’t ask, especially Mrs. C, who should get “Just be firm” tattooed on her forehead. And the way they talk about the kids. “That one,” they’ll say, “he’s a problem,” with their body language, and the looks on their faces that mean he’s a little asshole they’d like to slap across the face. God help her if she ever gets to thinking like that or wearing the faces all the other teachers seem to have — that set like they’re in the final part of a marathon that never ends.

That can’t be all it adds up to. Because she believes that teaching is a labor of love, no matter how hard, and there is a joy in shaping young minds and characters, and that’s why she does this and always will, and that’s something she believes, she really does, and it’s what she wants for her own kids someday, after she finds someone she can love, and they get a house that suits them and has enough room and a lawn and is away from the kind of noisy neighbors who should know by now that she’s a teacher and has to be up at the crack of dawn.

Though maybe she shouldn’t spend too many late nights grading at school and then falling asleep on the sofa if she wants to meet the guy who can help make it all come true. Keep that in mind, and it’ll all be okay. It has to be.

Masturbation

First rule being, of course, do it now.

So, he washes dishes after supper and empties the garbage when it looks a little full. Shovels the driveway right away. Answers that email. Finishes the files he brought home from work.

Otherwise it accumulates — especially when you have two kids and three dogs and a house, a car, and the house has plumbing problems, and the car has engine problems and exhaust problems and tire problems. And the dogs aren’t in perfect health.

And the problems his older kid has with his teacher, his younger with her friends. His ex-wife with him.

Gotta take care of what you can. Get the bills paid, the taxes filed, books back to the library. Gotta get to the grocery store. Get a haircut. Fold the laundry.

It’s a lot, but it needs to get done, and right away, except for the cleaning, which he’s glad to pay for, twice a month, when the woman comes and scours the kitchen and vacuums and scrubs the toilets and mops the bathroom floor, onto which he eases himself after the kids have gone to bed, if it’s his weekend, before opening his laptop to private browsing and finding his way to the pictures that show women being fucked while strangled to suffocation. Schoolmarmish women sitting on men’s faces until their arms beat in a struggle for air. Fucking and punching. Spanking. Hair pulled so hard the owner’s heads snaps back at impossible angles.

That sort of stuff, and then he beats himself off.

Matthew Roberson is the author of two novels, 1998.6 (FC2) and Impotent (FC2), and editor of a critical book, Musing the Mosaic (SUNY). His short fiction has appeared in journals such as Fourteen Hills, Fiction International, and Western Humanities Review. He teaches at Central Michigan University, in Mount Pleasant.