I bought my house with forty years of other people’s floors. That is not a metaphor. I was a housekeeper for four decades, moving through the rooms of families who had more than I did and who needed someone to maintain the order their lives produced and their schedules could not accommodate.
I cleaned their bathrooms and ironed their shirts and organized the closets of their children, and I did this work with the care and competence I brought to everything, which is to say completely and without complaint, because that was who Rose Gomez was and because I was saving. Every week, something from each paycheck went into an account that I did not touch and did not speak about and that grew with the slow patient arithmetic of small amounts over long time. When I finally bought the house, I was fifty-four years old and I stood in the empty living room for a long time before I put anything in it.
I stood there and looked at the walls and the windows and the light coming through them and I understood something I had not fully understood before, which was that the house was not the point. The house was the evidence of a fact about myself that I had been working toward for twenty years without quite being able to name it. The fact was this: I could provide for myself.
I had done it, was doing it, would continue to do it. I did not need anyone to give me a room. My children grew up and made their lives, and I learned to live in the particular freedom of a woman alone in her own house, which is a freedom that people who have never had it underestimate.
I could watch my programs without negotiating the remote. I could cook what I wanted and eat when I was hungry and leave the dishes until morning if I was tired. I had a sewing room where I kept my machine and my fabrics organized by color and my half-finished projects, which I worked on in the afternoons with the unhurried pleasure of someone who answers to no schedule but her own.
I had a garden in the back, small but mine, that I tended with the same care I had given to other people’s gardens for decades and that produced things I actually got to keep. I had a walking group in the park and a WhatsApp group with the neighborhood women and a granddaughter who had taught me, over a video call with much mutual laughter, how to use Instagram. I was not lonely.
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