A Sweeping Acquisition

 Occasionally, I find it needful to use a broom. If a man employs a maid every day of the week, or perhaps just a wife, sweeping might be avoided altogether, but if he is like me and has no wife and has a maid only two days a week, he may well find that sweeping becomes an urgent matter, especially if he lives, as I do, in an area where ongoing construction is continually ushering clouds of invisible black dust through the doorways and windows--invisible, that is, until it silently settles on the floor tiles, which are white, of course.

I was going to say that I am allergic to brooms, but the truth is that I merely resist them. It's not just that I'm lazy, although there is that, but brooms in Indonesia are consistently fashioned, machine engineered one might say, in such a way as to be useful only to unusually short Indonesian women--just like the kitchen counter, the bathroom sink, the hallway mirror, and so on. These miniature brooms are maneuvered with a competent grace that is actually lovely to behold--you know the pose, one arm held loosely behind the back, hand fluttering above the buttocks like the wing of a butterfly, the other guiding the broom itself with dance-like precision, and indeed the whole process seems more like a waltz than work. 

But with me, bending hunch-backed over this sawed off barrel of a broom, the result is no waltz. It is a back-breaking torment that hobbles for hours afterward, and which ends, surprisingly, in the removal of very little dust. And I'm not trying to be inventive in the use of the term 'sawed off'. No, my maid has in fact sawn the broom handle to a shorter length than the already abbreviated length at which it began. I guess one might say that she has customized it.

Imagine, then, my pleasure this morning when salesman came puttering past my door on a scooter loaded stem to stern with every sort of housecleaning tool--mops, buckets, feather dusters, wastebaskets ... brooms! 

I dashed out to the curb, explained my situation, and he produced a dustpan. 

"No, no, Pak. I need a broom. A broom with a long handle." 

He produced two brooms, much like my own sawed off model, one red and one blue. My initial enthusiasm was swiftly waning. And then I spied the thing myself. A beautiful, solid plastic handled broom standing as high as my own shoulder. 

"That's it! Yes!" I snatched the tool from its nook, looked it up and down, took a few practice swings. "Perfect! How much?" 

He thought it over.

"Tujuh puluh." 

"Hah?"

"Ya."

"Seventy thousand? For a broom?"

He pointed at the handle admiringly.

"Long handle," he said. 

"Yeah, that's what I want. But I don't want to pay seventy thousand." 

"No? Hmm. How much?"

I looked into my wallet.

"Fifty." 

Clear disappointment furrows on his brow. 

"Fifty-five?"

This doesn't help. This is, after all, a long-handled broom. It is, as he has realized, a treasure.

"Sixty," he says. 

"Well, shoot," (or something like that), "I don't have any other small money." 

"It's okay," he says, rushing to the rescue, "I can make change." 

"Okay ... So, I give you a hundred, and you give me what?"

The man holds out a twenty and a five." 

"Dude, that's more expensive than you began with!" 

"Oh. Ya." 

So he adds a ten, I give him the hundred, and hallelujah, I have a broom! A long-handled broom. A normal broom. A man's broom!

I return to the house, hoping I don't have to use the thing very often. And wondering whether the maid will even know what it is.