In a word, it is spotless. But not in a sterile, don’t-touch-anything sort of way. The paint looks fresh, the faint scent of lemon cleanser clings to the air. Everything in the homey Bay Area Victorian is shiny and polished and seems to have a place. This is a woman who, at the beginning of each therapy session, feels compelled to empty her therapist’s wastebasket.

“I live for trash day, what can I tell you?” she sighs.

Rafkin is sitting at her kitchen table with a pile of postcards before her. On the front is a picture of Rafkin, donning sunglasses, broom in hand. The cards announce the publication of her fun new book, “Other People’s Dirt: A Housecleaner’s Curious Adventures.” She is sending them to friends and family but also to many of her old clients, some of whom are portrayed — not always generously — in the pages of her book.

“Will they hate me?” she wonders. “I hope not. I mean, they knew I was a writer.”

Rafkin dishes the dirt on rich clients and waxes philosophic about what it means to be intimate with the stuff — material and bodily — of strangers. Rafkin, 40, who spent seven years cleaning homes in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Cape Cod, is also a gonzo journalist of sorts. She goes undercover as a corporate “Happy Maid,” explores the seamy world of “exotic” housecleaners (women who “clean” in the nude), attends a support group for slobs called “Messies Anonymous” and trails a “decomp” specialist — someone who scrapes up human remains from crime and suicide scenes.

“I found myself repulsed and then curious,” Rafkin writes of her meeting with Kathy Jo, the crime-scene cleaner. “I wanted to know what body remains felt like on the backside of a sponge. Soft? Or hard like a cadaver?” (Answer: It depends on how long the body has been there, and which part of the body you’re sponging up.)

Almost immediately after I enter her kitchen — before she even offers me a cup of coffee — Rafkin pulls me over to a drawer, jerks it open and says, “See? OK — here it is.” She’s pointing to The Drawer. You know the one. The drawer in every kitchen where every orphaned utensil, every stray twistie tie, every random paper clip and every shriveled photo that used to be on the fridge are laid to rest. (My mother calls hers the “crazy” drawer.) Rafkin is showing me hers to prove that even she isn’t above kitchen chaos. The contents of Rafkin’s crazy drawer: candles, incense, swimming goggles and a harmonica, among other clutter. After the showing, Rafkin seems relieved, unburdened, as if she’s gone to confession. Now, she says, the interview can begin.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

“Cleaning is a skill,” Rafkin says between sips of tea. “Very few people can walk into a room and know what needs to be done.” Part of the impetus for writing the book, Rafkin says, was her desire that cleaning be acknowledged as an area of expertise,
not just some menial, demeaning occupation reserved for the lowest-skilled workers. Rafkin, unlike many cleaners, is white and not an immigrant. Dressed in pastel plaid Bermuda shorts and a bright red Coke T-shirt, she looks more like a soccer mom than anything else.

“In some way I think people … trusted me because of the color of my skin,” she says, visibly frustrated. “I mean, they gave me the keys to their houses! Which I still have! I think they thought, ‘I could get a Jamaican person to do this for $10 an hour but I would have to worry.’ I think people want someone kind of like them but not really like them.”

Rafkin’s clients are educated, affluent professionals — academics, movie producers and millionaire retirees. And they can be a pain in the ass. She was fired from one job for leaving two Cheerios in the sink. One New York editor insisted that the pin stripes on her sheets be precisely lined up. Rafkin, who holds a master’s degree in comparative literature, who has published a book of short stories and has had articles in the New York Times, says that despite her credentials, some clients refused to think of her as more than a maid.

“Some of them knew that I wrote, saw my stuff and would say, ‘Saw your thing in the New York Times and can you come on the 30th?’”

Rafkin is what your grandmother would call a hoot. She swears, laughs uproariously and is endearingly flaky — leaving sentences dangling because she is too busy explaining her next thought. Unlike her antithesis, Martha Stewart — whose show she is dying to get on — Rafkin is a girlfriend.

Before writing her book, Rafkin wanted to make a video about her job, sneaking cameras into her clients’ homes and narrating them, Michael Moore-style, from the trenches. “I would say, ‘This is the pond inhabited with fish that cost more than my day’s wages from a woman who paid me in loose change,’ and ‘This is the note from the woman who asked me to keep the dead ants I found in her house’ and ‘Here is the bedside table of the most prudish, conservative woman ever and the camera would point to her sex toy.’ You know, that sort of thing.” Sadly, Rafkin couldn’t convince any of her video artist friends to help out. “They were afraid of being sued,” she sighs.

“In this society, housecleaners don’t talk — you’re not supposed to be smart enough to talk! And if you do talk you’re not supposed to have noticed anything.”

Boy, does she notice.

Take medicine cabinets. “Prozac is everywhere,” Rafkin declares. “You could probably have a black market on Prozac just from the stuff that cleaners have pilfered.” If Rafkin is snooping, I mean, cleaning, and discovers pills she’s not familiar with, she’s been known to ask a physician friend to look it up in the Physician’s Desk Reference, a directory of drugs. And yes, Rafkin herself has pilfered on occasion, but not drugs. “Innocuous stuff like cans of tuna, a book or extra paper towels if I knew the next job needed it,” she says without a trace of guilt.

Rafkin has developed an eagle eye for eating disorders. Dead giveaways: “Refrigerators with models taped to the door, with little notes saying things like ‘Healthy is as healthy does’ and ‘I am more than what I eat!’” she explains. And fridge and cabinets stocked with “non-foods” like celery, pickles and Snackwells. (Rafkin has also learned a thing or two from reading other peoples’ grocery lists: One listed eggs, milk and penis butter.)

By cleaning up, Rafkin says she can tell whose bowels are moving (toilet bowls tell stories), who is cheating (illicit, low-voiced answering machine messages), who is a compulsive gambler (grown men forced to move home to their parents’ house), who has AIDS (stuffed medicine cabinets), whose marriage is crumbling (sheets on the couch) and, of course, who is having sex.

“Middle-class people usually hide their sex toys under the mattress, but you go to the fags’ houses and the whip stands are there and the hardware is hanging off the wall. I was cleaning with someone once who was, like, ‘Why are all these pulleys on the wall?’”

Has Rafkin herself, alone for the afternoon in a deluxe manse, a sprawling Cape Cod beach house for instance, invited a lover over for a romp? “One lover once surprised me at work,” she says. “It was pretty funny, we were on the bed and I looked up and on the bedside table there was a Hallmark card that said, ‘Certain people are a joy to know …’”

Rafkin’s job demands a stomach of steel. She hates when people leave dirty underwear lying on the floor, expecting her to pick it up. She gets really annoyed when people forget to flush the toilet before she comes. But in the hierarchy of grossness, Rafkin says that fingernail clippings are the worst.

“Tampons mummified in cocoons of toilet paper like little creepy voodoo dolls are bad,” she writes. “Q-tips in catalog shades like ‘Sunset’ and ‘Burnt Sienna’ are really bad. But the worst of all is nail clippings. Nail clippings cling to carpets and can hide stubbornly in the crevices between grout and the tub.” Add used condoms and flaky skin to the list.

“There is stuff that just falls off people,” she says. “Even if you’re clean, there is stuff that flies off you and sometimes it lands in the tub. What is it? It is just body.”

Rather than getting too grossed out, Rafkin says she tries to see the humanness in it all. “I actually try to get all religious about it,” she says. “We are humans made of human stuff and it falls apart.”

I’m dying to know — what products does Rafkin swear by? “Lysol Basin Tub and Tile Cleaner,” she answers without pause. “It takes all that s— off. I don’t know how, I don’t want to know how.” Rafkin will tell you straight: She is not a “green” cleaner. In fact, she can’t really tolerate those who insist on natural products. “Can’t we just pour bleach on this and we’ll be done with it?” she once asked an eco-freak client. The answer was a firm no. “I felt like saying, ‘It’s all very well for YOU to be environmentally sensitive — you don’t have to clean it!” Rafkin ended up quitting the job.

What about paper towels? “I love them, I love them, I just love them!” (She is alarmingly ecstatic.) “Bounty is great, but generic brands are fine too. Paper towels are just good.“

We are interrupted by the phone. As Rafkin disappears into the other room to take the call, I surreptitiously circle her kitchen. Sure, any home can look tidy from afar, but will it hold up to close inspection? The knobs on her stove are a little grimy. There are some dog hairs scattered across the floor. It is an unusually hot spring day and sun is streaming through the windows. I run my finger across the top of a red wooden table, hoping against all hope to find — please God — a smidgen of dust. I am desperate to prove that even the cleaning woman has not conquered the scourge of all homes, that even Rafkin is not above dust. I look at my finger: not a speck.

From the comic strip “Cathy” to TV’s “Ally McBeal,” from chick flicks like
“Walking and Talking” and the forthcoming “I Love You, Don’t Touch Me” to
popcorn novels like Laura Zigman’s much-hyped “Animal Husbandry” and the
British bestseller “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” female basket cases abound.
No one seems to be griping about them, though, and that’s probably because
their existence can’t really be blamed on men. Women, for the most part,
create these characters, and it’s female audiences who gobble them up with
so much enthusiasm.

Granted, no one really wants to see the kind of character that some
feminists once called for: brilliant, accomplished, sleekly independent,
politically unimpeachable — in short, a tedious paragon. It’s
understandable that women might turn with relief to stories about mere
mortals, someone they can identify with rather than feel inferior to,
particularly when they need a few laughs. Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones
begins her diary with an impossible to-do list of self improvements,
including “develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of
substance, complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain
boyfriend,” demonstrating how easily a principle intended to unleash women
can be twisted (by women themselves) into yet another task to fail at. In
the end, feminist nostroms about what women could be swiftly mutated
into a new, but still unfulfillable, list of things they should be.

So when Zigman’s depressed protagonist wallows in a slough of worthlessness
after being dumped by her patently duplicitous boyfriend and lies awake at
night moaning, “Why me?” (when the more obvious question is: Why him?),
we’re meant to chuckle with rueful recognition. Isn’t that just like life?
And, of course, life — or, more precisely, love, because these stories are
always ultimately about the travails of romance — sometimes is like
that. On the other hand, life is like a whole lot of other things as well,
things like adventure, inspiration, faith, vocation, idealism — none of
which ever seem to surface when our perpetually crestfallen heroines occupy
center stage. It can be refreshing to see the mucky, inglorious aspects of
contemporary women’s lives reflected in books, TV and movies for a change,
but a little bit of this stuff goes a long way. And there’s a whole lot of
it going around.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

After repeated exposures, the lonely gal heroine — whose love life never
works out, who pines for the wrong guys and who’s having a really good day
when she can scrape together enough shreds of self-respect to tell one of
them off — starts to feel just as suffocatingly limited as Martha Stewart.
It’s as if the icons of femininity that women create for themselves must be
either flawless, like Martha, or a total mess. “I feel ashamed and
repulsive” scribbles Bridget Jones after a Cathy-esque junk food binge, “I
can actually feel the fat splurging out from my body” — this despite the
fact that she weighs a perfectly normal 130 pounds. She can’t allow for, or
live with, any middle ground between fashion-model slender and “flabby body
flobbering around.”

For Bridget, feminist ideals likewise mean either emulating an impossibly
detached “inner poise” or indulging in sodden they’re-all-bastards raging
at the local pub with her pal Sharon. This impasse is partly the heritage
of the ham-fisted cultural analysis of feminism’s second wave, which
devolved into op-ed page homilies about “good role models” and “strong
women” without ever getting at the root of the problem. Surprisingly, sometimes tackling the problem can be as easy as learning from the other side. For example, pop
culture is just as full of idealized images of masculinity — take James
Bond, again, who looks, dresses, fights, loves, shoots and drives better
than any real guy ever could. But men don’t seem to have the same love/hate
relationship with Bond that women have with supermodels. They can walk out
of the latest 007 (or Bruce Willis, or Arnold Schwarzenegger) movie,
well-entertained and with a bounce in their step — not muttering bitterly
about “unrealistic standards.” While masculinity’s more excessive demands
can lead to chronic social woes ranging from war to domestic violence, the
average guy is happy just to win every once in a while, while the average
woman wants to be perfect.

To maintain the appearance of thinglike perfection presented by someone
like Stewart or Kate Moss requires constant vigilance and unending effort.
That’s a lot of time to spend working on yourself, but Martha’s not the
only one logging in lots of time with her own navel. In one episode of
“Ally McBeal” the Zeitgeist’s darling collars a co-worker in the powder room
and launches into a litany of disappointment. She expected, by age 28, to
be married, pregnant with her first child and on track to make partner at
her law firm, she wails. “Ally,” the other woman replies, “can you tell me
what it is that makes your problems so much bigger than everybody else’s?”
Ally takes a deep breath, squares her plucky little shoulders and says,
“They’re mine.” In fact, in “Ally McBeal,” everybody else’s problems are
always Ally’s problems. Every case her firm tries is just another
opportunity for her to reflect on Issues Important to Ally, whether it’s
monogamy, romance or her own biological clock. Whenever she blunders into
someone else’s personal dilemma, the conflict turns out to be little more
than a Lesson for Ally to Learn.

For it turns out that daunting perfection and chronic self-loathing have
something in common (beside their complete alienation from reality): They
both require precisely the same massive amount of self-absorption.
Fielding’s “Bridget Jones’ Diary” riffs on Jane Austen’s “Pride and
Prejudice” to the extent that the good egg Bridget finally winds up with is
named Mark Darcy. But, although Bridget lives a much less constrained life
than Elizabeth Bennet, reading about her feels much more claustrophobic
because Bridget’s mind and self are so much smaller. By the end of
Fielding’s book, it’s not plausible that a brilliant “human rights
attorney” like Mark Darcy would really fall for Bridget; she’s certainly no
Elizabeth Bennet. Of course, Mark’s own work only interests Bridget to the
extent that it labels him a stellar catch, bearing the imprimatur of
liberal do-goodism in addition to having all that money.

Bridget begins each diary entry with meticulous accounts of her weight and
the calories, “alcohol units” and cigarettes she consumes. Like Ally
McBeal’s washroom confession, bringing this kind of secret, compulsive
self-monitoring into the open air wins an immediate, knowing laugh, but
the revelation quickly begins to curdle once exposed. At some point, you
start to wonder whether this kind of humor isn’t just a way of getting
comfortable with the neurotic legacy and restricted worldview of
conventional femininity, when just 20 years ago women dreamed of kicking
off those traces. That wry, isn’t-that-just-like-life grin segues so easily
into a shrug; how could life, then, be any other way?

These bosomy fowl are baring all, of course, to lure you into the magazines’ thick annual flagship issues, drumming up subscribership and newsstand sales as we hunker down for a long winter of gravy drinking. But the rub, contentwise, is that while these trend-driven magazines thrive on the constant cycling of in-and-outgredients, the Thanksgiving feast, like any other Puritan sex ritual, admits of little creativity — sea to shining sea, it’s a rote, missionary-position scrimmage followed by a little tube-watching and a snooze.

A frustrated food editor can but give us our humble turkey and try to jazz things up with the trimmings, which Bon Appetit does by featuring the American West, a land still regularly prospected by starry-eyed Eastern greenhorns for its rich deposits of high-grade myth. The operative myth here is that America is still an idiosyncratic confederation of regions with distinct personalities and tastes rather than one nation under Ocean Spray (a canard that, for example, Jane and Michael Stern’s quixotic “Road Food” column in Gourmet disproves by exception). The magazine itself isn’t much of a read, though if you ignore the forgettable travel features you’ll find several elaborate holiday menus from the Rockies, the Texas Hill Country, California and even Hawaii, where the naughty bird gets a sesame-oil rubdown from “Entertaining” columnists Jinx and Jefferson Morgan.

Oh, and don’t forget the Pacific Northwest — as if you’ve been able to do so for the past 10 years — a region that is also ascendant in its cedar-planked, pinot noir glory in the current issue of Gourmet, which earns kudos for daring to present a birdless Thanksgiving dinner featuring salmon. Indeed, it is to Gourmet’s credit that, except for its “Happy Thanksgiving” cover and a going-through-the-motions “traditional” menu feature, it gives only perfunctory recognition to the holiday; it knows you’re going to roast your frozen Bowlingball like you always do, and it’s perfectly willing to wait for you to get back to serious cooking. And serious reading — instead of simply upping its recipe count, it gives generous space to writers like Alan Richman, grouchily witty in a column on the emergence of fine dining in Israel.

The turkey is madonna and whore to Eating Well, which represents better than its upscale peers the culinary contradictions of the high-carbo ’90s. If you want information on great healthful cooking, it’s here, and often well presented — Deborah Madison’s vegetarian column is a standout example — but it appears amid the sort of guilt-ridden tease that has rafts of Americans “dieting” all the way to the bottom of their bushel bags of Baked Tostitos. “Indulge!” “Indulgent!” “Indulging!” the articles enthuse, even as they enumerate fat grams to the decimal place. Here’s a real appetite suppressant: Molly O’Neill concludes the issue with another sappy boomer mea culpa for abandoning tradition, bemoaning the lost years when she spurned the bird of our fathers for quail, capon and even tofu (cue up “Turn, Turn, Turn” here).

For the front of her Thanksgiving issue, Martha Stewart, iconographer nonpareil, opts for no bird but rather an oddly mesmerizing centerpiece of bundled wheat. The fragile stalks bound together into a strong column make a simultaneously warming and vaguely literal fascist symbol; when a strong leader finally restores order after the next civil war, bet on Martha to design the new flag. Martha Stewart Living nods to the occasion with a feature spread on Thanksgiving in New England with Brendan Walsh (late of New York restaurant Arizona 206) but, hell, every day’s an American holiday with Stewart, as shown in the drop-dead-lovely regular features, with their quasi-religious devotion to Doing One Thing Perfectly, be it knitting or making gourd vases.

It’s funny, though — despite Stewart’s marketing as America’s ur-traditionalist, her magazine is really the hippest of the lot; for all its celebration of Northeastern rusticity, its overall aesthetic is about as gingham as the Guggenheim Museum’s. Thus the focus on decontextualized treasures — buartnuts, pewter vessels, wildflowers — all photographed tight and displayed against spare backgrounds with sans-serif labels, so that you could as easily imagine them in your own apartment or split-level as in a New Hampshire farmhouse, as long as you have the resources and, most important, the all-consuming will. The Way of Martha is not about returning to the land, in other words, but conquering it. And they say no one remembers the true meaning of Thanksgiving.

RABBIT, RUT – - – >

The New York Review of Books (Dec. 4) promises John Updike on the gaunt, clinical nudes of Egon Schiele, showing at the Museum of Modern Art, but don’t be fooled — it’s really an essay on the art of John Updike. Granted, you can’t even read Updike on, say, sunbathing (Allure, October) without noticing his inward gaze, but this is an apt match of reviewer and material even by NYRB standards. Both men aimed at transcendence by depicting a gross (by conventional standards) sexuality — Schiele’s hairy, inflamed genitalia; Updike’s hairy, inflamed New England husbands. Take Updike on Schiele’s “Self-Portrait in Black Cloak, Masturbating”: “(The painting) makes explicit a quality latent throughout his studies of males: a joyless, quizzical onanism, a morose fondling of a problem.” There’s more than an angstrom of self-recognition there. Elsewhere, Robert Stone charitably reviews Updike’s “Toward the End of Time,” the badly received novel that prompted a prepostmortem by David Foster Wallace earlier this fall in the New York Observer and then an op-ed tut-tutting Wallace by Anne Roiphe (whose pitying condescension belittled Updike far more than a respectful and well-reasoned pan like Wallace’s ever could).

META-HOT LIVE PARANOIA – - – >

Remember Time magazine’s cover story about pornography on the Internet? Remember the media hand-wringing the issue engendered over its sensationalism and acceptance of specious information? Remember the deer-in-the-headlights photo of a small child washed in the lurid glow of a monitor? Well, why should you if Newsweek doesn’t? The special issue Computers and the Family reprises the image on page 14, its popeyed tot sporting a devil and angel on either shoulder. The “Coping with the Internet” feature it accompanies includes a sidebar rating porn-blocking software; it also notes that “the Net is packed with lies, inaccuracies, and hoaxes.” Meanwhile, an editorial denounces “quill-and-parchment-era” constitutional freedoms and calls for a family-friendly military protectorate to aid overwhelmed parents and their vulnerable children. Ha! Just kidding on that last one, kids! Kids?