Monday isn’t so bad when the weekend is just a concept for others to plan. When each day is part of the same routine: wake up at 5:30am to do laundry, make breakfast and lunch, leave Maria’s breakfast on the table, lunch in the oven, and run to the bus stop to get to work on the other side of town. The rich side—a forty-five-minute ride on a good day. Two hours if there’s traffic. The side that has pretty parks and cool coffee shops serving expensive cups of anything but coffee, and shoe shops so overpriced Daria’s feet sweat in her cheap trainers at the thought.
When she’s early, she sits on a bench at a nearby park to read or listen to music and watches the sunrise. And she’s always early. Because it’s peaceful, and she can hear herself think. And because if she’s late, she’ll get fired.
At 9am, she buzzes, nods to the bored security guy watching YouTube videos, and enters the imposing white house surrounded by trees and gates, and cameras.
Seven days a week, Daria inhales her bitterness, holds her exhaustion, and exhales a smile as she cleans after the wealthy who run and stress all day wanting more, always more. Women with issues she can’t relate to because their lives are white and clean while hers is grey and messy.
Monday: the botoxed Vanity Fair lady with clogged pores who gives Daria strict instructions before disappearing to sunbathe on the balcony to get out of her way. Daria avoids her reflection in the mirror as she dusts the dozens of creams and elixirs flooding the bathroom. She avoids her reflection as she hoovers and mops slippery marble floors and removes dirt off endless bay windows. Her index finger lingers on the freshly made beds. She reflects on the softness of the silk and wonders if she’d sleep better in those.
Tuesday: the competitive neurotic who cleans beforehand and supervises to see if Daria can do better. Daria hates that flat. Minimalism was never her thing, and all the white reminds her of hospitals. The colour of death.
Wednesday: the depressed live-in maid who directs her to the laundry room and points to the usual pile of clothes (not) needing ironing with Balkan superiority. Daria finds ironing relaxing, like taking a meditation course, except she gets paid to do it. The smell of the freshly laundered clothes soothes her.
Thursday: the invisible woman, whom Daria has never met but knows too much about, because her darkness stains every corner of every room. Thursday is bleach day. Thursday makes Daria miss the dead clean white of Tuesday.
Friday: the grandmother who follows her around with a cuppa or a snack, blabbing on about her youth and beauty as Daria dusts off the loneliness shining through the black and white portraits covering the walls.
Saturday: the cool, hippy butterfly whose only responsibility is to squander her tycoon father’s legacy and whose daughter spends so much time alone she turns as cuddly as a starving stray kitten, purring the minute Daria steps in.
Sunday: the daughter, wrinkled with guilt, who pays for Daria to visit and feed and clean the mother who has lost track of love, time, and life, but who grins and giggles like a little girl when offered a double choc-chip cookie.
Of course, Daria has plenty to say, but she remains quiet, grins, and nods while her mother-tongued inner bitch gives a sarcastic voiceover to a Lily Allen fuck-you soundtrack, making her want to laugh. Or cry.
Miss Daria, the headmistress, had employed a maid, too. Her husband had insisted on it. But then and there are long gone white.
Her now is half-asleep on a packed bus on her way home as she forces her eyes open every few minutes to keep track of the route. She’s not sure what day it is, doesn’t really care. She presses the stop button, forces aside her weariness and trudges home.
Daria inhales her bitterness, holds her exhaustion, and exhales a smile before she enters. She hugs Maria and asks about school before taking off her shoes. She smiles some more, as she prepares their dinner and helps her daughter with her homework, feeling like the then and there teacher for a couple of hours, humming ‘Moj e Bukura Arbëri’ the soundtrack to the life Daria chose for them so Maria doesn’t turn into a stray kitten begging for attention in all the wrong places.
