Nickel and Dimed: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Barbara chooses Maine because of how white it is—from college students and professors to the hotel housekeepers and cab drivers. She feels she’ll fit in as an English-speaking Caucasian in search of low-wage work. She also had noted on an earlier visit that Portland seemed eager for employees—a TV ad mentioned a “mothers’ shift” for a telemarketing fair, and the radio was promoting job fairs. The lengthy help-wanted ads she downloads from the newspaper’s web include several promises of “fun, casual” workplace environments, which she finds appealing.

On August 24th, Barbara arrives at the Portland bus station and takes a cab to the Motel 6 where she’ll stay until she finds a job and home. She knows it can’t be common to leave a familiar place and settle down far away where she knows no one, but she figures that these kinds of dislocations take place in the lives of the very poor, who might lose their job or babysitter, or live with a sister who throws you them because she needs the bed, et cetera.

Barbara has arrived with a laptop and suitcase with some clothes, a tote bag with books, and $1,000. She’s paying $59 a night for a room in a Motel 6 that still contains remnants of previous inhabitants, like deposits of cigarette smoke and Cheeto crumbs under the bed. Outside the main entrance there’s a Texaco station and Clipper Mart, and across the turnpike (which is terrifying to cross on foot) there are more food options, like a supermarket and Pizza Hut. She brings pizza and salad back to dinner.

Barbara reasons that it should feel exhilarating to blow off all old relationships and routines and start over from scratch. But educated middle-class professional like her, she realizes, never hurl themselves into the future without a plan or to-do list. Everything is always anticipated. Now, to get a job she needs an address, but to get an apartment it helps to have a history of stable employment. She decides to do everything at once and use the hotel phone as her answering machine.

It turns out that while there are plenty of condos and $1,000-per-month apartments, the only low-rent options seem to be thirty minutes south—though even there rents are over $500. A few phone calls reveal that the poor tend to live, at least during the winter, in the low-rate motel rooms after Labor Day.

Barbara goes to check out a room share instead, for $65 per week. The landlord shows her around, saying that the roommate is a “character” but has a job. In the basement of the motel-boardinghouse, there’s a closed door to the kitchen, but there’s someone sleeping in there, so they can’t go in. the room is down the hall from the kitchen, with two unmade twin beds and a few light bulbs, with no window.

Barbara decides to forgo the room share, and visits the SeaBreeze motel, but at $150 a week it’s too much. On the way home, she notices that the Blue Haven Motel on Route 1 has apartments to rent for $120 per week, and it looks almost picturesque. The security deposit is only $100, so she pays on the spot. She probably could have found something better with more time, but she’s eager to get out of the Motel 6.

Barbara now knows to apply for as many jobs as possible. She’s ready to move on from waitressing, and she doesn’t have enough office-type outfits for clerical work, so she calls about cleaning, warehouse and nursing home work, and manufacturing. Applying is humbling, since it consists of offering yourself and your life experiences to a series of people who just aren’t very interested. She is interviewed by a bored secretary at a tortilla factory, and fills out an application at Goodwill, which she knows has been positioning itself as the ideal employer for the poor recently out of welfare. There, no one meets her eye except for one person staring and making swimming motions above his head, perhaps to warn her off.

At a Wal-Mart advertising a job fair, a woman shows up after a ten-minute wait, flustered since, as she explains, she just works there and she’s never interviewed anyone before. Barbara fills out a four-page “opinion survey” with, apparently, no right or wrong answers. The form has questions about forgiving or denouncing a coworker caught stealing, and if management is to blame if things go wrong, with answers ranging from “totally agree” to “totally disagree.” Barbara finds it hard to believe that employers can learn anything from these tests, since most people can see through to the “right” answers—knowing to say she works well with others, but would denounce them for any infraction, for instance.

At a housecleaning service called The Maids, Barbara is given the “Accutrac personality test,” which warns at the beginning that there are multiple measures that detect attempts to “psych out” the survey, but the “right” answers are just as transparent. Barbara decides the real information is for the employees, who learn that they can keep no secrets from their employers, who will control every part of them.

Barbara is surprised to learn from her job hunt that Portland, despite its labor shortage, is still a $6-7-an-hour town. At another housecleaning service, Merry Maids, the interviewer tells her not to try to calculate the “$200 to $250” per week in dollars per hour, but of course she does anyway and discovers that it comes to $5-6 per hour for heavy labor with risk of repetitive stress injuries. She realizes that one job will not be enough, and that the laws of supply and demand do not seem to apply here.

After two days of job applications, Barbara sits and waits in her small, dingy Motel 6 room (she can’t move into the Blue Haven until Sunday). The phone rings twice that morning, and she accepts both jobs immediately: a nursing home on weekends for $7 per hour, and The Maids starting Monday for $6.65. She isn’t sure how “maid services” differ from agencies, but the office manager assures her that the work will be easy and familiar. She’ll supposedly be done at around 3:30, leaving time for job hunting for better options in the afternoons. She celebrates by eating dinner at Appleby’s—$11.95 plus tip for a burger and glass of wine.

The next day Barbara wakes up early to be at the Woodcrest Residential Facility (also a made-up name) by 7:00am for her first day as a dietary aide. Her supervisor tells her about her rights and responsibilities. Today they’ll be working in the locked Alzheimer’s ward, which involves transferring food from the main kitchen to the ward kitchen and serving and cleaning up after the residents.

As a former waitress, Barbara finds this work relatively simple, rushing around pouring decaf-only coffee and taking “orders.” The fact that it’s an Alzheimer’s ward means she doesn’t have to worry about forgetting things, but she tries to remember the residents’ names: Grace, who demands that her untouched cup be refilled, Letty, a diabetic who sneaks doughnuts from others’ plates, and Ruthie, who pours orange juice all over her French toast.

Cleaning up is less pleasant, since a “dietary aide” ends up meaning a dishwasher—rinsing, presoaking, and stacking the dishes of the forty people at each meal, before bending down to the floor with the full rack of 15-20 pounds. Though Barbara is used to washing dishes at home, it’s a struggle to make sure there’s always a new rack ready as soon as the last one is done, all while keeping an eye on the residents.

Barbara chats with Pete, one of the cooks, during the midmorning break. She’d like him to be an ally, since she realizes that a dietary aide is dependent on a cook just like a waitress is. They sit in Pete’s car smoking cigarettes. She tells him that her dad’s last days were spent in an Alzheimer’s facility, so it already feels familiar. Pete warns her about one coworkers backstabbing and their manager’s strictness.

Pete continues asking Barbara questions, and she feels awkwardly that Pete might be treating this as a date. He says that he’s made far more at restaurants than he makes now, but it doesn’t bother him, since he’s gotten rich from gambling and investment (even though he’s driving a rusty old car and his front teeth are in a sad state). He says he tried just staying home since he doesn’t need to work, but he got stir-crazy from not being around a community. Barbara is somehow touched by this, the idea that the facility could be a true community.

At lunch, Barbara is surprised to find that many residents seem to recognize her and are happy to see her. She starts thinking she’ll become the star of the facility and compensate for her own father’s more impersonal care—until she refills the milk class of a tiny old lady who immediately throws the entire glass at her, soaking her clothes.

That night, Saturday, is Barbara’s last at the Motel 6, and she decides to try to see what there is to do for fun with limited means. There is a marquee in front of the “Deliverance” church downtown advertising a “tent revival,” and, as an atheist, Barbara is curious enough to drive over. About 60 of the 300 seats are filled, mainly with white “hillbilly” types, and a woman gives Barbara her own Bible. There’s singing and preaching, from a man saying that the Bible’s the only book you need to another attacking the “wicked” city for its low attendance at the revival. Barbara wonders what good an immortal soul would do for her Alzheimer’s patients at the Woodcrest.

Barbara thinks it would be nice if the preachers mentioned income inequality and Jesus’s precocious socialism, but only the crucified Jesus seems to make an appearance here—she sneaks out.

On Sunday Barbara moves into the Blue Haven, though it’s smaller than she remembered, with the toilet less than four feet from the kitchen table and the bed right next to the stove. But her anxiety starts to ebb, since she now has an address, two jobs, and a car—this time a Rent-a-Wreck. She is one of the only people in the community with a unit to herself: the others are mainly blue-collar couples with children, crowded three or four into an efficiency or one-bedroom. A grandmotherly type tells her that living in a motel can be hard at first, but she’s been there for eleven years now.

Barbara arrives at The Maids’ office on Monday morning at 7:30, knowing little about the cleaning service besides that it has three hundred franchises nationwide. Her uniform will be kelly-green pants and a blinding yellow polo shirt. In the next day and a half of training, she learns about the code of conduct—no smoking, eating, drinking, or cursing in a house.

About 20 other employees arrive for the free breakfast provided by The Maids. The average age is the mid-twenties, and all but one is female. Barbara and the other new girl sit and wait while the teams are dispatched to the day’s houses—one woman tells her that you aren’t necessarily on the same houses every week or even the same team from day to day. Perhaps one of the advantages for the owners is the lack of relationships developed, she thinks, since the customers almost exclusively communicate with the office manager or the franchise owner, Ted.

It’s difficult to see the advantage to the cleaner, since while independent cleaners can earn up to $15 an hour, and The Maids charges $25 per person-hour, the cleaners receive $6.65 per hour. The only advantage seems to be that you don’t need a clientele or a car.

Barbara is led into a tiny room to watch a videotape of the company’s method of dusting, bathrooms, kitchen, and vacuuming. Each is broken down into sections: where to begin vacuuming, how to disinfect surfaces, and where to polish or buff. Ted stops in sometimes, mentioning proudly that this was all figured out with a stopwatch. He warns that there’s a danger in undersoaking the rags with cleaning fluids, which are less expensive than her time, and Barbara thinks it’s good to know that the company considers something cheaper than her time.

The vacuuming video is the most disturbing, dealing with a vacuum that is meant to be strapped around one’s back like a backpack. When strapped in, the video seems to say, the maid will become a vacuum cleaner. Barbara is exhausted by this video and by the sterile, impersonal model home and model maid.

Barbara realizes that there is no water involved, unlike the methods taught to her by her mother, a compulsive housekeeper on a war against germs. The video never mentions germs: scrubbing is only for removing visible impurities, while wiping is for everything else. The cleaning, in fact, is entirely cosmetic, from giving toilet paper rolls a special fold to spraying the house with the signature air freshener.

On her first day, Barbara realizes the video had been in slow motion—the team races to the car and from the car to the house. Her first team leader explains that only a certain number of minutes are allotted per house. After an hour, even dusting becomes like an aerobic exercise, but as soon as she’s done she must report to the team leader to help someone else.

The promised thirty-minute lunch break turns out to be a five-minute pit stop at a convenience store. The older women eat sandwiches and fruit, while the younger ones tend to eat pizza or a small bag of chips. Barbara recalls a poster showing the number of calories burned per minute for each task—on average, in a seven-hour day, she notes, 2,100 extra calories are needed. Barbara admonishes Rosalie, a recent high school grad, for her lunch of a half bag of Doritos, but Rosalie responds that she had nothing else in her house and she doesn’t have money with her. She admits that she gets dizzy sometimes.

Barbara doesn’t want to ask straight out about her coworkers’ economic situations, so she listens. Eventually she learns that everyone seems to live among extended families or house-mates—the oldest, Pauline, owns a home, but she sleeps on the sofa while her children and grandchildren sleep in the bedrooms. There are signs, though, of real difficulty: they argue about who will come up with the 50 cents for the toll and if they’ll be quickly reimbursed by Ted; someone has a painfully impacted wisdom tooth and is frantically calling to try to find free dental care.

On Barbara’s first Friday, it’s 95 degrees, and she’s teamed with Rosalie and their leader, Maddy, who’s sullen and brooding about her childcare issues: her boyfriend’s sister watches her 18-month-old for $50 a week, already a stretch even though a real daycare could be $90. The first house to be cleaned is a 5-bathroom spread, a massive place that Barbara compares to a beached ocean liner. Maddy hopes that “Mrs. W.” will give them lunch, but Mrs. W seems exasperated when the nanny, one of several other caretakers, brings them to her.

In this case, Barbara is grateful for The Maids’ special system, since it means she only needs to move from left to right, room to room. She dusts around a whole shelf of books on pregnancy, breastfeeding, and raising children. As she Windexes and wipes the endless glass doors, she watches the construction guys outside drinking Gatorade—maids cannot drink while inside a house. She sweats constantly, unable to replenish fluids like in her regular, yuppie life. In the living room, she wonders if Mrs. W. will ever realize that all her amassed objects and expressions of individualism are, in another sense, just an obstacle between a thirsty person and a glass of water.

Next, Maddy assigns Barbara to clean the kitchen floor, following The Maids’ corporate “hands-and-knees” approach. It’s a selling point, even though the advantage is undermined by the fact that the maids are instructed to use barely any water. But the posture of submission seems to gratify the customers. She realizes at one point that Mrs. W. is staring at her—she wonders if she’s about to be offered a glass of water, but Mrs. W. just wants to make sure that nothing is missed.

At the end of the day, Barbara rushes home and congratulates herself on her first successful week, accomplished without a breakdown. Still, it turns out she often doesn’t end work until 4:30 or 5:00, and, sweaty and soaked, there’s no way she can go to other job interviews after work. Instead, she goes for a walk on the beach, and stops to listen to a group of Peruvian musicians, transfixed. She gives them a dollar after their song—that dollar is worth about 10 minutes of sweat.

Soon, though, Barbara starts to suffer from a skin disease. At first she thinks it’s poison ivy from hunting around for a way in when customers forget to leave the door unlocked (which Ted blames on the maids, saying it “means something”), or it may be the cleaning fluids. She knows she probably shouldn’t work since she looks like a leper, but Ted has no sympathy for illness or injury. He says it must be a latex allergy and sends her off. She breaks down and calls her real-life Key West dermatologist, who prescribes various creams, which set her back $30.

Barbara, Rosalie, and Maddy fantasize one day in the car about full water immersion after cleaning a house with a pool and gazebo. They aren’t even allowed to wash their hands in the houses after drying and buffing the sinks.

Barbara has been proud of how she’s kept up with women twenty or thirty years younger. Any bond they have is physical: everyone shares their medication and complains about their back pains and cramps. Lori and Pauline can’t vacuum because of their backs, while Helen has a bum foot and Marge’s arthritis makes scrubbing painful. It’s a world of pain manage by Excedrin, Advil, and cigarettes, with alcohol on the weekend. Barbara wonders if the owners have any idea of the misery that goes into making their homes perfect, and if they’d care if they did. One owner, who actually offers her water, works part-time as a trainer and says she tells her clients to fire their cleaning lady if they really want to be fit. Barbara refrains from saying that this exercise is brutally repetitive and more likely to cause injury than strengthen muscles.

The owner of another sprawling condo points out the marble walls of the shower stall, which she says have been “bleeding” onto the brass fixtures. Barbara wants to say that it’s not her marble bleeding but rather the working class, which has enabled her comfortable life, that’s bleeding. Of course, Barbara admits to herself that she is not a member of that class—she can work hour after hour because she has gotten decades of good medical care, a high-protein diet, and workouts in expensive gym. She has, however, never employed a cleaning service, finding the idea of such an asymmetrical relationship repugnant.

For instance, Barbara is shocked the first time she encounters a shit-stained toilet. There are several kinds of these stains, she explains, and while she wouldn’t have wanted to know this, she is forced to figure out how to clean each kind. Pubic hair is another unsavory aspect of cleaning the homes of the elite. Owners can also spy, leaving tape recorders or video cameras: Ted encourages them to imagine that they’re under constant surveillance. Owners also arrange to be home so that they can check up on them while they work.

Barbara isn’t interested in decorating and lacks the vocabulary to describe in detail all the intricate furnishings of these houses. The books are mainly for show: real life seems to go on in the large-screen TV room. She is mainly offended by all the antique books bought in bulk and placed on end tables, not to read but for quaintness and “authenticity.”

Around a quarter to a third of the houses seem middle-class rather than rich. However, once Barbara asks her team leader, Holly, if the next house is “wealthy,” and Holly responds says that if they’re paying to have their house cleaned, they’re wealthy.

In late September, Barbara starts being assigned to Holly’s team day after day. This is a serious team, and conversation is restricted to the houses about to be cleaned. Holly is visibly ill. She is twenty-three and manages to feed herself, her husband, and an elderly relative on her salary, minus rent, or $30-50 per week (only a little more than what Barbara spends on herself). She weighs very little and only ever eats than tiny cracker sandwiches. Every afternoon in the car she starts food-fantasy conversations, asking others what they’ve eaten recently.

One day Holly admits that she’s a little nauseous, but refuses to say any more. Barbara suggests Holly refrain from vacuuming, but Holly refuses. When Barbara finishes her task, she rushes into the kitchen to find Holly slumped over the counter. Holly admits she’s probably pregnant, but she wants it to be a secret until she can inform Ted. Barbara can only talk Holly into eating one of her sports bars. Barbara also takes over the driving for the rest of the day. For the first time, Barbara feels she has a higher purpose than just meeting New England bourgeois standards. The next house has a Martha Stewart-like owner who insists that every decorative pot and pan hanging in the kitchen near the ceiling needs to be polished, which can only be done by kneeling on the kitchen counter and reaching up. As Barbara does so, a pan slips and comes crashing down into a fishbowl: fish fly and water soaks everything. Barbara’s only punishment is seeing Holly’s terrified face.

They take a cigarette break, and Barbara muses that she has to get over her “savior complex,” her desire to save the people she is working with. She wonders if she wants to do this because she is sick of her insignificance. Barbara asks why so many owners seem hostile or contemptuous, and Holly says that the owners think the cleaners are stupid, that they mean nothing to them. At convenience stores, a maid’s uniform seems to make even other employees look down on them. Barbara gets stares at supermarkets. She wonders if she’s getting a small glimpse of what it would be like to be black.

At the next house, the liquid around Barbara’s toilet brush spills out on her foot. In normal life, she would take off the shoe and sock and throw them away, but here she can do nothing but work through it.

Barbara also has problems of her own: money issues. She didn’t get a check her first week, and learns that the first paycheck is withheld until she eventually leaves or quits, so that she doesn’t fail to show up a second week. The rent for her first week at the Blue Haven was more expensive at first because the tourist season wasn’t deemed completely over, and she had to spend extra money on kitchen supplies at Wal-Mart. Until the other checks arrive, she’ll have to live even more leanly.

Though help for the working poor exists, it takes determination and, ironically, resources to find it. Barbara calls the Prebles Street Resource Center one evening after work and learns that it closes at 3 p.m. (not practical for the working poor). She waits on hold for the help number listed and tells the operator that she is employed but needs some immediate food aid or cash assistance. The man asks her accusingly why she needs help if she’s employed, and why she didn’t check out the rents before moving, but finally gives her another number. After several more calls she reaches Gloria, who tells her to go to the food pantry in Biddeford the next day between nine and five—times that are also no good for a working person.

So Gloria connects Barbara to Karen, who finally tells her she can pick up a food voucher at a Portland Shop-n-Save, and asks what she’d like for dinner. She can’t have cash, and is limited to any two of a list including spaghetti noodles, baked beans, and hamburger—no fresh fruit or vegetables.

After picking up the food, Barbara calculates that she’s acquired $7.02 worth of food in 70 minutes of calling and driving, minus $2.80 for phone calls.

At the Woodcrest on weekends, Barbara tries to forget, like the residents, about the functioning people they used to be, and treat them as toddlers at a tea party. She makes friends with other cooks, nurses, and dietary maids, and enjoys the lack of supervisors and the greater autonomy.

One Saturday, though, Barbara arrives to find that the other dietary aide has failed to show up and she’ll be the only one. A dishwasher is broken, and a set of keys she needs is missing. Barbara only remembers the day as a panicky blur, remembering the lesson learned at Jerry’s about how to refrain from stopping and thinking.

After work Barbara visits the state park, and wonders what a few months with zero days off would do to a person without the kind of accolades and praise that come from writing, for instance. She already has tunnel vision: slights loom large, and mistakes aren’t easily forgotten. She wakes up at night after the Woodcrest solo day convinced that Pete deliberately was trying to trip her up, until the next weekend he brings her breakfast as a treat and she realizes her theory was groundless.

Barbara starts her third week at The Maids committed to staying detached, like the others seem to do. One of the only forms of rebellion she’s seen, in fact, is theft—at one meeting Ted says that there’s been an “incident,” and the perpetrator, whom the nearly 100-percent-reliable Accutrac test somehow failed to weed out, is no longer there.

As Barbara scrubs and Windexes, she tries to cobble together a philosophy of nonattachment, melding a socialist Jesus with a tale her friend had told of rich people paying to do menial chores at a Buddhist monastery in California. In this new fantasy, she is part of a mystic order performing hated tasks cheerfully rather than working for a maid service. She’s realized, for instance, that the pay clock only starts at 8 a.m., even though they have to arrive at the office at 7:30, but this time she doesn’t complain.

Only a day later, Barbara’s mood of detachment is shattered when Barbara cleans the home of an actual Buddhist, with a Buddha statue in the living room. As they leave in the usual rush, Holly trips and falls down and screams. She says something snapped, but she’ll only consent to calling Ted from the next house, while Barbara begs her to go to the emergency room. At the next house Barbara tells Holly not to work, and as she listens to Holly talk to Ted, she feels the Zen detachment fade away. She grabs the phone and begins a diatribe to Ted about putting money above his employees’ health, before hanging up on him. She tells Holly that she won’t work if Holly won’t sit down—she’ll go on strike. But Holly ultimately wins out, continuing to work.

On the ride back, Barbara imagines the rousing argument against human indignity she’ll give when Ted fires her for insubordination. Marge, another cleaning lady in the car, says that she looks tired. Barbara won’t be fired, Marge says brightly, but the rest of them need her—and she can’t just leave Ted in the lurch. Barbara asks why they’re all worrying about Ted—he can hire anyone to do the job. When Holly mentions the Accutrac test that they have to pass, Barbara says that that’s bullshit—anyone can pass it. She knows this is insulting to Holly and her sense of professionalism, and she’s gone against the no-cursing rule. Even now, however, Barbara isn’t sure how she should have handled the situation.

Ted doesn’t fire Barbara—he says he’s sent Holly home, but that you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. A few days later Barbara is out with Holly, who hasn’t forgiven her, and Ted calls to say that Barbara is to be sent back to the office to join another team. Ted picks her up to bring to her to the other team. As he drives her he tells her he’s giving her a raise, and then says that he’s not a bad guy and cares about his girls. He just wishes a few “malcontents” would stop complaining. Barbara knows she’s supposed to name names. Instead she asks him if Holly will be paid for the day he sent her home. He says of course, chuckling in a forced way.

Barbara wonders why anyone puts up with this job when there are so many others. But changing jobs means at least a week without a paycheck. There’s also the appeal of Ted’s approval and praise, which keeps many of the workers going. On Pauline’s last day—she’s sixty-seven and has been on the job longer than anyone—Ted makes no mention of her departure and doesn’t wish her well privately. Barbara offers her a ride home that day, and Pauline talks mostly about how hurt she feels, and how Ted hasn’t liked her since she stopped being able to vacuum.

Barbara wonders if Ted’s approval means so much because of the chronic deprivation and lack of approval for a job well done. No one will congratulate or support these women—they do an outcast’s invisible work. Ted may be greedy, but he represents a better world, in which people wear civilian clothes to work and live in nice houses. Sometimes he’ll even send a team to his own house to clean.

Low-wage work may have the general effect of making one feel like an outcast, Barbara thinks. On TV, nearly everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and all the shows are about middle-class professionals. It seems like nurses’ aides and fast-food workers are anomalies. The poor are not a part of visible culture, even of religion, if the tent revival she attended in Key West was any indication.

On Barbara’s last afternoon on the job, she tries to explain what she’s been doing to the other workers. At first, no one listens, but then Lori latches onto the idea that Barbara has been “investigating,” which Lori finds hilarious. Barbara asks how they feel about the owners, whose situations are so different from their own. Lori says she feels motivated—she’d like to get to where they are. Colleen, a single mother of two, says she doesn’t want what they have, since she’s a simple person. But she’d like to take a day off once in awhile and still be able to feed herself the next day.