Memory doesn't lie about the hotel work she loathed

20 years later, revisiting housekeeper job is a reminder of the work's monotony

ORLEANS - As soon as the door swung open to room 46, the smell hit us. The occupants had left, but their room was filled with the stench of garlic.

"Disgusting," said housekeeper Svetlana Sadyrova, rushing in to open a window. "I can't breathe."

Smells can trigger powerful memories and so it was this week when I revisited a chapter of my youth, returning to Cape Cod to work at the same motel where I was employed as a college student nearly 20 years ago. I wanted to see if my memories matched the experience and if the work was as solitary and tiring as I recalled. Call it a form of reverse nostalgia.

I'd like to think everyone has had a summer job they recall with loathing. Apart from a terrible summer job working at a dry cleaners in Worcester, for me, this was it.

First a little background. The Governor Prence Inn is a family-owned 56-room motel on Route 6A charging about $129 a night that will never be confused with a Ritz-Carlton. Housekeepers do not wear stiff white aprons or carry feather dusters.

When I arrived for my encore last Wednesday morning, general manager David Ross handed me my uniform, a tan T-shirt emblazoned with the inn's logo of a stern Pilgrim.

The Governor Prence offers affordable housing to students, allowing them to live on site in apartments. But boarders must agree to work at the inn as part of the deal.

Of course, there is no time for idle chitchat while the clock is running. Head housekeeper Bernice Bartolini helps me punch in and ushers me to my assigned rooms. On the way, she tells me that this year's housekeepers are an international group of girls. Mostly in their 20s, they are in the United States on guest visas from Eastern block and South American countries. Many are here to earn money ($8.50 an hour plus tips) and practice their English.

I follow the lead of Svetlana, a petite 21-year-old from Russia who can strip and make a bed in the time it takes me to change a pillowcase. She says she learned speediness working at a 4 1/2-star hotel in New York last summer. She also learned how to fold facecloths into frilly arrangements there, a practice she continues at the Governor Prence. She gets on her hands and knees to clean the bathroom floor as I finish making a bed.

Bartolini, ever watchful, inspects the housekeepers' work on her rounds. The inn covers several acres and she wears a walkie-talkie to keep in constant contact with the front desk. She uses a facecloth to check the cleanliness of a bathroom floor, instead of a disposable wipe.

"The boss loves it because I'm kinda frugal," she says.

Bartolini also seemed more nurturing than the head housekeeper I recall. She was a bleach blond 50-something who often wore tank tops that showed off her tattoos. She once took a group of housekeepers to Provincetown for an outing that included a surprise trip to a strip club. The trip was supposed to be a bonding experience, and it was. I recall being surprised to see my fellow maids wearing makeup and smiling. During the workweek, we were a pretty morose bunch.

Svetlana exhibits that same somber resignation about her work. She silently plucks wet towels from a bathroom floor and empties an overflowing trash basket. She says she sometimes watches television as she goes about her tasks, just as I did.

As we snap on our plastic latex gloves and dive into a bathroom cleaning job, she says she is majoring in English literature and financial planning at a college in Russia. Standing together in a guest's dirty bathroom, she says she prefers reading classics, like her current novel, "Vanity Fair" by William Makepeace Thackeray.

The life of a housekeeper is full of unsanitary experiences. There are crumbs and food left in people's beds. Some leave underwear between the sheets. Their shoes, smelly from days of vacationing fun, sit out in the open. I wonder if the experience taints Svetlana's view of Americans. When I ask, she only giggles.

"I'm incredibly homesick this year," she says as we lug a vacuum and bags of trash along to our next room. She says she misses her boyfriend in Russia. Sometimes she realizes how far she is from home. Last year she worked with a maid who was accused of stealing a gold ring. She was later absolved after the ring was found elsewhere, but it made Svetlana realize how vulnerable she is to accusations of theft.

"You're lucky you quit housekeeping," she says.

When Svetlana leaves to get fresh laundry, I spritz the rug with a mold-reducing scented liquid - and long for this little trip down memory lane to be over. I remember back to that summer, punching out from work and riding my bike home, exhausted but free.