Norma Took My Soap

Norma, the woman who comes once a week to clean my apartment, has been pretty good about leaving things where I leave them when she comes to clean. When I first arrived, for some reason I was getting all stressed out by what seemed to me to be a little tug of war between her and I. I'd leave things in a certain place because it worked better for me and I'd come home on Wednesday to find that she'd moved them. I'd put them back where I wanted and the next Wednesday when I'd come home, I would find that she'd moved them again. Having met her once and received a lecture on the way "Argentines" do things I was sure that this was more than accidental. This was her way of teaching me how to keep my house.

Well, I resented it and didn't like having to look around to find something in the kitchen, or the pair of shoes I left on the floor, or my jacket that I hung on the jacket hanger thing in my bedroom (that she put in the closet), and I wrote to Tomas, the guy who works at the agency I rented from and asked them to ask her not to move things.

After that, she stopped.

But there is still one little area that she seems to be playing games with.

There is a silver soap dish on the sink in the bathroom. I haven't been using it because if I wash my hands with soap, I'll usually just do it in the kitchen, and normally in the bathroom will just wash my hands with water. I think it is kind of messy to put a wet and bubbly bar of soap back on a dish. But I noticed that after Norma was here, the soap dish was always moved from the back of the sink by the mirror, to a position closer to the front of the sink. I don't know why it bothered me, but I always moved it back where it was out of the way.

Each week, after Norma was here, I'd see it had been moved forward again.

It wasn't a big deal, and sometimes I never moved it. But if I did, she always moved it back.

This week, I noticed that she took the soap out of the dish and now the soap dish is all the way back up against the mirror.

I don't know why I find this interesting, but I wonder, what did she do with the soap? Why did she take it? Maybe I am going to get a new bar of soap next week? Am I being punished for not using the soap? Did she take it? Did she throw it away?

To be continued....