Sometimes the bad housekeeper just know when it’s going to be a crappy day. For instance, when she finally rolls out of bed after a night of little sleep due to allergies and end-of-the-world nightmares. End-of-the-world nightmares where there’s no drinkable water but somehow also simultaneously worldwide floods, and she finds herself stranded atop a stone castle as tall as a skyscraper, and she’s being chased by robots and also for some reason her mother, and the only escape is to jump.
That’s the first sign.
Then she gets up and feels about fifty times heavier than she usually does and looks in the mirror and although her face appears normal she feels a major breakout coming on. And there are eyebrow hairs where she remembers no eyebrow hairs in the past. Ever.
So the bad housekeeper decides to be proactive, because that’s the way she rolls. She’s strong. She’s resilient. She’s going to conquer the morning hours by ordering a caramel macchiato and applying for three promising job positions she found online. Even if this means heading to the nearest wifi spot, which happens to be a Christian bookstore where she has to keep her eyes glued to the screen to avoid Jonah and the Whale hand puppets, choir robes, and Thomas Kincaid’s new line of teapots.
However, because this is a bad day, the internet decides to screw her over. Her pages aren’t opening and the cover letters she labored over don’t seem quite right. She begins to wonder what crap organization would ever hire her, or in the off chance that happened, how long it would take them to kick her ass to the curb.
She opens an email from her best friend, hoping this will give her solace. It does, in a way. But the bad housekeeper’s best friend is traveling the world, just went snorkeling with sharks, zooms around on the motorbikes of attractive Italians, and also was accidentally interviewed for CNN while in Thailand. Before reading this, the bad housekeeper had been excited about possibly shopping for new bedding.
So she says screw it and buys a hamburger and changes and heads to work, and thinks her luck is changing when her boss asks if she will attend a special event in the evening, for which she will be allowed to leave early and dress. Sure thing!
And the special event? A women’s health expo, dinner, and reception at the only Catholic church in town. The bad housekeeper picks up a skirt on clearance at Target and wrangles the boyfriend into being her date, but as they sit down in a gymnasium packed with a couple hundred middle-aged women at a table marked “Tennessee Valley Urology Center,” she fears she has leapt out of the frying pan and into the fire. The perfume-thick, menopausal fire.
Then, surprise. The chicken isn’t that bad. There’s a tube of lavender-scented intensive foot cream in the complimentary goodie bag, and the night’s speaker tells a few funny stories, the longest about being pinned inside a wrecked Crown Victoria while wearing no underwear.
And the cherry: the bad housekeeper wins a door prize, a $50 gift certificate to a local boutique, which is nothing to laugh at.
Although what she and the boyfriend decide IS something to laugh at- that the Women’s Health expo at the Catholic church ended up being the best night out they’d had in a while.
Here’s to a better tomorrow, with softer, sweet-smelling feet.
