To my great surprise, the only B. Rushforth lived on Plum Hill, a charming and prestigious neighborhood down near the lake. A cleaning woman who lived there? Now I was thoroughly intrigued, and so was Roberta after hearing about the call and my little research.

"Oh Scott, maybe she'll be like Auntie Mame. Rich and eccentric. We'll have Rosalind Russell cleaning our house!"

Early the next morning, I got a call from a colleague who needed my help immediately, so I had to leave and miss the meeting with the mysterious Beenie.

When I returned at lunchtime, Roberta filled me in. "What does she look like?"

"Middle-age, middle-size, a little round, short gray hair. She looks like a masseuse."

"I thought so. How'd she dress?"

"In one of those bright running suits and complicated sneakers. She's very friendly, but also very take-charge. Know what I mean? She asked if she could look around the house before I even offered her the job. Checking out the work load.

"You did offer it?"

"Yes. Sweetie, she's nice and looks dependable: Any person who lives on Plum Hill but wants to clean houses to keep busy has got to be at least interesting, right? And if she turns out to be a good cleaner, too, all the better."

"True. Bring on the Beenie."

"She starts tomorrow."

My seminar in Hawthorne took up most of the next morning. It's a good class, full of intelligent students who appear to have a genuine interest in the work. Generally I come out of there feeling invigorated and happy to be a teacher. That day a rather heated discussion arose over certain imagery in the short story "Young Goodman Brown." In the middle of it, one fellow asked another, "Do you think you'd say all these things if you knew Hawthorne was sitting in the back of the room? You should hear yourself. Would you be so confident if you knew the guy who'd written it was listening?"

A good question I'd heard asked in a variety of ways over the years. I was thinking it over as I walked in our front door and was greeted by the familiar voice of our vacuum cleaner.

"Anyone home?"

The vacuum kept up its high roar.

"Helllllo?"

Nothing. Then a burst of familiar laughter from the living room. I walked in and saw Roberta bunched over on the couch, cackling. My wife is a dramatic laugher – she'll smack a knee and rock back and forth if the joke's good. It's easy to amuse her, and a pleasure, too, because she's so appreciative. I think part of the reason why I fell in love with her in the first place was that she was the first woman to genuinely laugh at my jokes. Sex is great, but making a woman laugh can be even more satisfying sometimes.

"You must be Scott. Roberta was giving me the lowdown on you." She was all gray and silver. Gray hair, gray sweatsuit, gray sneakers. Hands on hips, she looked me over as though I were a used car. The vacuum was still on and stood humming by her side. "Beenie?"

"It's really Bernice, but if you call me that, I'll quit. How do you do?"

"Very well. Looks like you two are doing O.K."

"I was telling Roberta about my son."

My wife waved a hand in front of her face as if there were a fly too close. "You've got to hear these stories, Scott. Tell him the one about the rabbit. Please!"

Beenie looked both pleased and shy. "Aww, I'll tell him some other time. I got to get this vacuuming done. I want to get to the windows today, but I'm still not half-done with this."

She unplugged the machine and pulled it behind her into the hall. A moment later it started up again in the dining room.

I looked over my shoulder to make sure she wasn't near. "How's she doing?"

"Terrific! She's an atomic power plant. Have you seen the kitchen yet? Take a look. It's like an ad for floor wax on T.V. – the whole room is one big gleam. You need sunglasses. I think we lucked out with her."

"That would be nice. Why were you laughing so hard?"

"Oh, because she's funny. The woman tells stories… You've got to hear her talk."

"I'll be happy if she can clean."

"That's what's great – she does both."

New sounds filled our house that day. Pillows pounded and plumped; the vacuum cleaner hissed up against floorboards and walls that hadn't been cleaned in years. She found a window in the bathroom that had probably never known full sunlight to pass through it since the house was built thirty years ago. The dog bowls shone; curtains were washed; Roberta couldn't get over the fact that the area under the unused back bathroom sink was not only spotless, but also smelled wonderfully of an unknown new disinfectant. Beenie's answer? "When it comes to cleaners, I bring my own." My desk was dusted and the papers neatly arranged. Even the books on it were stacked alphabetically. I didn't like anyone touching my desk – it was one of those great taboos in the family – but I was so impressed by the detail of her cleaning that I said nothing. Neither of us knew if this whirlwind stopped for lunch. Neither of us saw her even sit down. She accomplished so much in that eight-hour period that, after she was gone, the two of us walked around our still-glowing house, exclaiming about one find after the other.

"My God, she washed the dog, too?"

"No, just vacuumed and brushed him, but did you see your shoes? They've been polished."

"And my underwear? I think she ironed them. No one's ever ironed my underpants."

"Are you trying to tell me something dear husband?"

It was an Easter-egg hunt. Who would think of cleaning invisible things like light bulbs in table lamps or the top of the saltshaker? This latter cleaning I discovered days later at breakfast. I had often looked at that object and thought about wiping the glut of white crystals away and sticking a toothpick down the holes to free up the blockage. Now it had been done, along with so much else.

God knows, Roberta and I have enough to talk about. If it's not the kids, it's our life, or our separate lives, or books, or whatever. But Beenie Rushforth was a major topic of conversation the next few days. Whether it was what she'd done or how she'd done it, somehow or other, she kept coming up. We discovered after the initial shock that not only had she cleaned, ironed, scrubbed, polished … her way through the entire house, but also had done a myriad of small things in most rooms to organize us better. The alphabetized books on my desk, for example. In the kitchen cupboard the canned foods were ordered, the spices arranged in such a way that they were now all visible, rather than before, when they had been thrown together in a heap that needed sorting through any time one needed bay leaves or cinnamon. The ink bottle on Roberta's desk had been wiped, and the envelopes next to it sorted and arranged by color.

"This is too much."

"What?"

"Look – the toothpaste tube's been squeezed from the bottom so it's all up in the top. You didn't do it, did you?"

"Me? You've been yelling at me for thirty years to squeeze from the bottom."

"I thought so. Roberta? Why are we so astonished by our cleaning lady?"

"Because she's amazing. And costs the same as the last one, who didn't lift a finger."

"Tell me what else she told you. How does she work living on Plum Hill?"

"It's not what you think. Apparently, it's someone's estate, but there's a small gatehouse on the edge of the property, and that's what she rents. She's been there for years, and pays very little for it. Her husband died ten years ago. He was an executive for an insurance company in Kansas City."

"I guess that explains why she said she didn't need the money: Whenever an insurance guy pops off, his family inevitably inherits a bundle because he held the best policy."

"She did say she was comfortable."

"I'll bet. And she had a son?"

"Yes, and a daughter. He sounds like a card. Get her to tell you the story about the cigars."