Relaxed but for the Rug

I began to relax and sat back in the couch. There was nothing good on television. Making my way up the channels, I came across a movie playing on the Independent Film Channel. Pushing the info button on the remote control revealed its plot: “Three Vietnamese sisters keep secrets from one another.”

This’ll do, I thought, at least until the guy comes home.

At first glance the room appeared to be clean, fresh even. But then my eye caught on the dust patches and dog hair matted on the plastic ribbed face of the floor fan. I just cleaned that, I thought with defeated frustration. From the fan my eye wandered to the torn off piece of yarn from the mop that had gotten caught under the free weights on the floor. The yarn tip had attracted its own small galaxy of bits of dust and dirt and fuzz. And the weight, I knew, was stuck to the floor. Jose, I thought, and shook my head. How could Jose have neglected to seal the floor after he painted it?

In his late seventies, Jose was the landlord’s father, who, with his family in tow, had emigrated from Cuba in 1970. So far, his repairs had cost me a good kitchen knife (tip broke when Jose used it as a screwdriver), several gallons of orange juice, and many of my mornings and afternoons. Most minor maintenance tasks required one full day to verify that he had the necessary tools for the job. Work itself usually took several days to complete, what with the warm-up conversation, the task itself, followed by an announcement of the completion of said task, then a detailed recap of how the work had progressed, with the entire enterprise concluding only after the lingering admiration of all present convinced him that he had done well.

At first the concrete floor wasn’t so offensive; with a nice thick coat of grey paint it passed, almost, as polished concrete, the prized flooring in the modernist lofts that were mushrooming in Miami at the time. It had a grid pattern pressed into it, which gave it some texture, and besides, a pretty cotton rag rug covered up most of it. Until—inevitably, I supposed—the dogs had ripped up the rug, and then, in washing the rug, all the fresh spring colors bled together into a light brown-green color. Thank God it was a cheap rug—on sale for forty-five dollars with the Pier One gift card from Mom and Dad. The rug that had replaced it was supposed to have been a quick fix—grey and black stripes, twenty bucks from Kmart. It lasted, however, for months. It matched the floor, a dubious complement if ever there was one, but it was much smaller than the first rug, leaving more floor exposed.

When my darling guy and I rearranged the living room and bedroom, we moved the rug outside, temporarily. The guy said that he was going to pressure clean it, which I thought was pretty stupid. This guy of mine had a knack for complicating small tasks so that they became big tasks that never actually got done. Inwardly rolling my eyes at him and wanting to say, all you have to do is take it outside and beat it, what I actually said was, “Sounds good.” If he really did whip out 3500 psi of water power, that would be one fresh rug. But, after the rolled-up rug lay propped up against the chain-link fence for two nights, I knew that the guy wouldn’t be pressure cleaning shit. Over the next day and night, the rolled-up dirty rug, which by then had toppled over into the grass, was rained on. And then I knew that the rug wasn’t coming back inside, which meant that I had been reduced to no rug at all.

I rotated in two small hallway rugs, but that left the hallway bare. The grey paint became more and more scuffed. Even when it had been freshly scrubbed it still looked dirty. Goddamn Jose. Who the fuck paints a floor? You couldn’t even put in cheap linoleum tile? And the fucking guy—pressure cleaning that rug would be like using a fire-hose to brush your teeth. And now, I shook my head again and exhaled sharply through my nose at the thought, I was going to have to carry that dirty wet thing down to the trash can myself.

Later though, maybe tomorrow, I reasoned, shelving my agitation until the guy came home and I returned my attention to the three Vietnamese sisters who were keeping secrets from one another.