The client’s apartment is a symbol of Carol’s personal pride. Carol cleans it thoroughly and cares for it to the best of her ability each week, taking pride in her work. When she is accused by the client of theft, Carol takes even more care than normal in cleaning the apartment, as a statement to both herself and the client that her pride is uninjured by the accusations. She ensures that she takes nothing from it, bringing her own cleaning supplies and leaving the money the client leaves as payment. Carol uses the cleanliness of the apartment as a personal verification of her innocence. By returning to clean, she asserts that she has nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of. Once cleaned, the apartment is like her: neat, fastidious, and above reproach. She is proud of it, as she is proud of herself.
The client’s house also functions as a representation of the arrogance of the wealthy client and the alienation of the wealthy in Australia from the working class. While cleaning the apartment, Victor recognizes the arrogance necessary to hire someone else to clean up your messes. The clients remain unaware of their own clutter and disorder since they never have to tidy it. As Victor describes it, the apartment itself is a symbol of the “annihilating self-assurance” the clients must feel to be able to bring strangers into their homes and into their messes. This sort of self-assurance is incomprehensible to Victor. As a working-class person, he can’t imagine allowing someone into his home to touch all his possessions—a stark difference between himself and Carol’s clients. Victor also notices the differences between the apartment and his own home. The apartment feels sad and “stale” to him, and as such implies a sadness and staleness to the lives of the upper class.
The Client’s Apartment Quotes in On Her Knees
Then, even while I took a shower, she stood in the bathroom doorway to lecture me about personal pride. It was as though I was not a twenty-year-old law student but a little boy who needed his neck scrubbed. […]
But I was convinced that it was a mistake for her to go back. It was unfair, ludicrous, impossible, and while she packed the Corolla in the driveway I told her so.
It’s demeaning, Mum! I blurted despite myself. Going back like this. The whole performance. It’s demeaning.
To who?
Anyway, we’ll show her.
How’s that?
We’ll clean that flat within an inch of its life.
Oh yeah, I muttered. That’ll put her back in her box. Go, Mum.
I was curious. What kind of person would do this? After years of faultless service there was no discussion, just the accusation and the brusque termination in three scrawled lines.
I brushed and wiped and waxed the long shelves of books and tried to imagine having strangers in our place looking in our fridge, touching our stuff, ripping hanks of our hair from the plughole. You’d have to imagine they were some kind of sleepwalker, that they were blind, incurious, too stupid to notice intimate things about your life. You’d have to not think about them, to will these intruders away. Or just be confident. Yes, I thought. That’s what it takes to be blasé about strangers in your house—a kind of annihilating self-assurance.
The lantern-jawed woman who appeared in so many—it was her. She looked decent, happy, loved by friends and family. Even as I clawed through her desk drawers, finding nothing more remarkable than a tiny twist of hash in a bit of tinfoil, I knew I wouldn’t find anything that would satisfy me.
Honestly, Mum, why didn’t we just give the place a light go through? Or better, just take the dough and split.
Because it would look like an admission of guilt.
Shit.
Language.
But this won’t convince her, Mum.
No, probably not.
You could report them missing yourself. Ask them to search our place. Force the issue. There’s nothing that can come of it.
Except talk. Imagine the talk. I’d lose the rest of my jobs.
In the kitchen I put the earrings beside the unstrung key and the thin envelope of money.
My mother stood silhouetted in the open doorway. It seemed that the very light of day was pouring out through her limbs. I had my breath back. I followed her into the hot afternoon.
The Client’s Apartment Symbol Timeline in On Her Knees
