Now they knew that she was a real princess because she had felt the pea right through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eider-down beds. Nobody but a real princess could be as sensitive as that.
—“The Princess and the Pea,” Hans Christian Andersen, translated by H. P. Paull
Gui
Gui’s father ran the cleaning shop for twenty years before Gui was born, and then another twenty after. This wasn’t a place that laundered dresses and starched shirts; people went there and paid to get rid of unwanted memories. A neighborhood institution, really.
When Gui took over, a year earlier, he had closed the doors for a week and cleaned the place from top to bottom, scrubbing every square inch. Even when you were a professional cleaner, layers of memories accumulated in the place you grew up. What was the point of keeping around riddles with no answers, locks with no keys? When the doors reopened a week later, there was a new sign over them: “A Fresh Start.”
Other businesses along Pleasant Street in East Cradock, Massachusetts, had come and gone every few years, reflecting the advancing and receding tides of the economy: Brazilian grocery store, thrift shop, travel agency, computer repairer, tax preparer, bank branch (that later turned into the offices for a trio of bankruptcy lawyers), thrift shop again (that also promised to help you sell things online) . . . but this place had hung on like the mussels clinging to the pier down by the beach. Now it was bracketed on one side by James’s Tactical Supplies and on the other by A-Maze Escapes. Whatever the trendy currents were for how people wanted to spend their money, there was always the need to scrub off unpleasant mind-sheddings, to become a different person.
The woman entered the shop on a chilly February Monday morning, the snow outside frozen in dirty gray clumps. He judged her to be fortysomething. Her coat, bright orange, ragged and lumpy, was zipped tight like a suit of armor. Her frizzy red hair was tied up in a messy bun that left her gaunt face unframed. Her brows were furrowed in a way that reminded Gui of the tracks left by seagulls on a deserted winter beach.
She hesitated for a moment before approaching the counter. “I have a big job for you.”
Gui waited, holding her gaze. He had found that being only twenty-one meant that customers didn’t always trust him right away. If he said nothing and allowed the awkward silence to stretch out between them, taut and brittle, customers tended to interpret his reticence as the gravity of experience.
“I’ve never done this,” she said, putting her hands on the counter supplicatingly. He noticed that she didn’t wear gloves: not afraid of the pain of others, or, more likely, just inured.
Gui nodded, retrieved a sheet of rates and terms, and pushed it toward her. He waited while the woman read it over.
“You don’t do walls and carpets?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I’m a one-man operation. Whatever you need cleaned has to fit in my truck. I do everything here.”
People rarely asked for whole-house cleanings unless they had something to hide or if it was for an estate sale. His parents had done many estates, but Gui refused them on principle.
“Just as well,” she said. “I probably can’t afford a house-wide scouring anyway. But we—he had a lot of things.”
So someone had died. He thought about refusing, but something about the way she held herself, alone but resolute, made him want to help. Besides, she wasn’t wearing gloves. Didn’t seem like the fussy type.
“I can work through a lot if you’re willing to wait,” he said. “But I only do complete scourings. No selective washes.”
Estates were among the most delicate and difficult of professional cleaning jobs. It wasn’t the quantity of the work, but the quality. Often, the family didn’t want deep cleaning of the deceased. They wanted editing. Wedding dresses, books, Christmas ornaments, furniture, collections of porcelain figurines—those objects had decades of memory deposits on them, all conflicting. What was a pleasant memory for one was also a source of jealousy and rancor for another. Everyone wanted the possessions to conform to the story they’d been telling themselves for years. Cleaning became the excuse to refight old wars, to reopen scabbed-over wounds, to relitigate settled truths. He had neither the interest nor the capability for such work.
“That’s exactly what I want,” she said. Then, she pointed to the privacy clause. “This . . . this is absolute?”
Gui gestured at the walls, empty save for a single abstract painting of entwined pastel swirls, like the smoke tendrils inside the disposal oven. “I never reveal my clients.”
On reality TV shows like Cleaning Up after the Rich and Famous, the cleaners festooned their shops with photographs of celebrity clients who would bring a dress or an expensive handbag in for a cleaning after a night of indiscretion. But everyone understood that was entertainment, the kind of fake cleaning staged to generate gossip and web traffic. “The law does require that I make a report if I discover evidence of ongoing abuse or the commission of a crime,” he added.
“And after—the memories are unrecoverable?”
Gui didn’t mind the implied mistrust. There were unscrupulous cleaners who saved the dregs and sold them. There was a market for the anguish of others. Always had been.
He decided to reassure her by walking her through his process. “Do you do much cleaning yourself?”
She hesitated for a beat. “Just around the house.”
“What do you use?”
“Just the standard: alcohol and vinegar, maybe some oil of Mnemosyne after a bad night. I don’t use any chemicals I can’t pronounce.”
He chuckled. “I don’t either. They don’t work as well as they want you to believe. Even oil of Mnemosyne can’t completely dissolve deposits more than a week old. Most people think commercial cleaners use something special to loosen old deposits, maybe the kind the police use to lift memory prints so they could be saved whole. The truth is that I scrape them off the same way you would, but I can do it for longer and harder because I don’t shrink back from the pain. That’s how I get everything out. The dregs are then destroyed the old-fashioned way: incineration.” He pointed behind him. The boxy oven loomed in the workshop in the back.
“I have to warn you . . .” She paused, screwing up the courage. “Some of it was unpleasant, even harsh. It will sting.” Her voice softened. “It must be hard, to feel so much and to say nothing.”
He took a deep breath. “Not really. I’m not sensitive.”
“At all? Not even to your own deposits?”
He shook his head.
“Then . . . you can’t relive memo—” She stopped, realizing how personal she was getting.
He shrugged. “I’ve been that way since I was born.” People thought of cleaners as extra sensitive, and the stereotype had some basis in reality. But he had his own niche.
The woman nodded absentmindedly. He suspected that she already knew his quirk and merely wanted to hear him confirm it. It was how he had been able to stay in business as a one-man shop. The chain cleaners charged much less and had fancy machines that allowed their operators to home in on just one stain with inhuman precision. But word of mouth spread his name: the cleaner who couldn’t blab about your business because he couldn’t sense substantiated memories.