The Goyah

If you’ve ever invited an illegal alien to your home to clean for a rate slightly above minimum wage then you should know she's probably stealing from you on the side.

Most of the cleaning ladies we hired practiced thievery. I attribute it in part to the fact that my mother called them collectively “the goyah”. [Thee Goyah] It wasn’t like she pointed at gentiles at the supermarket and called them ‘goyahs’; it was a term specifically reserved for cleaning ladies.

It was epic to watch her fumble for a good term to dub our next ‘goyah’ when Katya informed us that she was Jewish. 

My mother was not prepared to handle this kind of situation, so she did what she normally did with strangers who showed up unannounced at our door; she made Katya part of the family. I would often come home from school to see Katya forcing my mom into her special Russian massage or engaged in a competition to see who can destruct one another's language more better.

You can imagine our shock and dismay when we learned that Kayta was neither Jewish nor trustworthy. Katya was said to have allegedly fled to Vegas, with a handful of goodies, probably to con another family- bribing them with massages and tile cleaner- only to later betray them.

Upon her departure, we went back to trailing the maids as they cleaned and my mother went back to calling them ‘the goyah’.

I suppose I can understand why so many people use this slightly derogatory label. It must be uncomfortable to refer to people who clean our toilets by name; it's hard enough to look them in the eye and ask them if they'd like a glass of iced tea. It's just easier to dehumanize them than to face the fact that we order little foreign people to our homes to do things we deem much too icky to do ourselves.

Since Katya, we’ve employed one cleaning lady, who didn’t steal (that we know of), but it's probably because she was wealthier than we were. Natalia was a pretty Russian girl in her early twenties. She was in college at the time, which was more than any of us could say, and she drove a more luxurious car than my parents did. The fact that she was willing to scrub our floors for ten dollars an hour- when other than that she led a more privileged life than we did-was confounding to us. But she religiously used deodorant and she hadn’t taken anything from us, so as far as goyahs were concerned, she was the cream of the crop.

You should know, however, that she is a stark distinction from the norm. Most of them do not possess a bachelors degree and a great deal of them actually do steal. You make it crazy easy to do, especially since you kind of degrade them, and also diamonds are oh-so-pretty. There's a reason they charge minimum wage, and it's not because they're worried about your finances. Don't let the accent fool you.

*Disclaimer: I am in no way a xenophobe. My mom is foreign and I think the absolute world of her. :) Also, this is all "alleged" as she was not tried in a court of law.