He said he just wanted towels. There was no reason to be afraid.
Ignore Me | Kathryn Mockler
This is a story I wrote about a frightening experience I had when I was a hotel cleaner in my 20s and a man refused to leave the hotel room.
I Won’t Clean the Tub
He said he just wanted towels. There was no reason to be afraid.
I worked as a cleaner in a small Montreal hotel the summer I graduated from university. It was a four-storey grey building near Mount Royal. Cleaners were instructed to knock on all doors before entering and to never clean a room if a guest was still occupying it. Doors were always to be left open.
I remember being told these rules during my training, but I was focused on learning how to correctly make a bed, which I always failed to get right.
My boss was a harsh woman who looked more like a ballet teacher than a hotel operator. She wore green dresses and a strong perfume that lingered in the hotel rooms and hallways long after she had checked on my work. She was very concerned about my hospital corners.
“Why can’t you learn to do this properly?” she would say as she demonstrated for me for the tenth time how to make a bed.
Working at this hotel is where I discovered the custom of leaving tips for cleaners. Once I got a twenty-dollar bill. I was afraid it was too much money, so I took it to my boss.
“What should I do with it? Should I keep it?” I asked.
“Why shouldn’t you keep it?” she said. “They left it for you. Of course you should keep it.”
Despite complaining about my bed-making ability and that I worked too slowly, my boss left me alone most of the time while she worked the front desk.
The best rooms to clean were on the third and fourth floors. These rooms were the brightest and biggest and had blue and green and yellow floral curtains and bedspreads. Each had a small desk for letter writing, supplied with hotel stationery and pens. The biggest room had a loveseat I liked to sit in.
Often these rooms had families staying in them, their tourist pamphlets spread out on the bed or on the dresser. I would look through the pamphlets even though I wasn’t supposed to. I wanted to be these people travelling to the art galleries in Old Montreal, stopping for lunch, having café au lait on a patio. I did not want to be me, who was not only not travelling but also scrubbing pubic hair off their toilet so it would be clean for them when they returned from sightseeing.
The worst rooms to clean were in the basement. These were single-occupancy rooms where mostly older men stayed for long-term accommodations. The basement smelled musty and was dark. The windows were small, the rooms no bigger than closets. The men who stayed in them never tipped.
I got to the basement on a particularly quiet afternoon well after three. I knew I was behind schedule, but also that there was only one room to clean. I quickly grabbed the metal doorknob and knocked. There was no answer. I knocked again and said, “Maid service,” but heard nothing, so I pulled out my key and opened the door. The room was dark and the curtains were shut. A man around forty was sleeping on the single bed near the door. I apologized and retreated into the hall, but he said, “It’s all right. Just clean while I’m in here. I want the garbage taken out and new towels. You don’t need to vacuum.”
I paused for a moment. “I’m not supposed to clean while guests are in their rooms,” I said.
“It’s fine. I don’t mind,” he said.
I left the door open and brought my cleaning supplies into the bathroom with my head down.
The room smelled of urine. The toilet looked like it hadn’t been flushed in days. I turned away from it almost gagging and stood in front of the mirror. I was about to clean it when I heard
the door of the hotel room click shut.
Suddenly the purpose of the open-door rule dawned on me. I tensed and felt prickles of electricity in every pore. Anything could happen down here. The tiny window in the room had three panes of glass and was sealed shut. No one ever came into the basement unless it was to clean a room. If I screamed, no one would hear me.
I was too frightened to step back into the room but said from the bathroom in a shaky voice, “I’m supposed to leave the door open.”
“Oh, I don’t need it open. I’m just going to be sleeping,” he said.
“My boss wants us to.”
He didn’t answer.
I couldn’t move for a moment. I had to figure out what to do. If I ran out of the room, there was a chance I could unnecessarily escalate the situation. He’d said he just wanted me to tidy the bathroom. He’d said he just wanted towels. There really was no reason to be afraid, I tried to tell myself.
I wiped the mirror quickly, my hands shaking. My throat was so dry I could hardly swallow. I said to myself over and over, I won’t clean the tub. I won’t clean the tub. As if declaring I wouldn’t clean the tub would somehow protect me in this situation.
It was when I bent down to empty the garbage that I saw them: used condoms strewn haphazardly around the bathroom floor. And in the garbage bin, a stack of Penthouse magazines, which were wet.
Fear has no time for disgust in moments such as these, so I quickly emptied the bin into my garbage bag and picked up the condoms with a paper towel and threw them in too. I gave the sink a wipe, grabbed the dirty towels, and stepped back into the small, stale, dark hotel room where the man was face down, snoring.
Holding my breath, I walked across the room to the door, frightened he might grab me on the way, but he didn’t. I silently berated myself for being so stupid as I turned the handle on the door. In one second, it would be over, and I would never set foot in a room with a guest in it again. Never ever, ever again.
Just as I was about to make my escape with my cart down the hall to the elevator and back up to the reception desk, with its fake rubber tree plant and my boss waiting to admonish me with a scowl, the man said, as if he had never been asleep, “Did you put the fresh towels in the bathroom, love?”
I hadn’t. I forgot.
“Not yet,” I said, trying not to sound afraid.
“Could you, please?” he asked.
I gathered some towels for him slowly and debated whether I would go back into the room, when I heard the basement door creak open.
It was my boss. She was walking toward me. She was furious. I smelled a strong waft of her perfume as she stood before me.
“You haven’t finished yet?” she said. “Why are you so slow? You are slower than any of the other girls.” Peering into the room, she saw the man on his bed and frowned.
“He wanted some fresh towels,” I said in a way that almost sounded like I was defending him.
“Sir, she cannot clean the room if you are in there.” My boss took the towels out of my hands and put them at the end of his bed. “If you’d like your room cleaned properly, you must leave before two-thirty.”
“Fuck off, you stupid cunt,” he said, and turned over on his side with his back to us.
She shut his door loudly, then looked at her watch. Her hands shook slightly, and she turned to me. “It is half past three. You should be finished by three. I cannot pay you if you take longer than anyone else to do this job. Today I’ll pay you until three-thirty. Tomorrow I will not. You must learn to work faster. And you must learn to follow the rules.”
I started to cry.
“Why are you crying?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said, wiping my eyes. But I did know. I was crying because I was relieved.
“I Won’t Clean the Tub” originally published in Geist Magazine, Issue 109, Fall 2018 and included in my debut story collection, Anecdotes (Book*hug Press, 2023)
Anecdotes by Kathryn Mockler
Winner of the 2024 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
Finalist for the 2024 VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award
Finalist for the 2024 Fred Kerner Book Award
Finalist for the 2024 Trillium Book Award
Finalist for the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award
Kathryn Mockler is the author of Anecdotes (Book*hug Press).
If you enjoyed this story, check out the prompt it was written from.
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Well told! Those close harrowing calls stay with us forever, especially when our own inexperience contributed to our own terror. Love your treatment of your boss! Great writing.
Powerful. Your story conveys so viscerally what it feels like to be in the field of an unpredictable, volatile being. I'm very glad you made it out of that room unharmed. And I'm grateful to know more about what it's like for those who clean hotel rooms. You painted it heartbreakingly well.