Let’s see: we’ve got the vacuum cleaners (check), the mops (check), the extended fuzzies (check), the buckets (check), sundry cleaning solvents and aerosol sprays (check), rags (check), paper towels (check), two slices of toast (check).

Everything but the toast is loaded into the rear of Kathy Berninger’s black Jeep Cherokee, ready for the day’s round of house cleanings. The toast is in the clutches of Kathy’s sister Clare Low, who scurries out of her front door and into the passenger seat. Already in the back seat is the third member of today’s crew, Clare’s daughter-in-law Linda Marshall. Now Clare hops out of the car to fetch the coffee cup she left on the porch. “This is my breakfast,” she says with only a hint of complaint.

The Jeep rumbles off, stirring up a cloud of dust and one languid cat, only to slam to a halt a few feet down the road. Clare dashes back to the house and returns with an astonishing jumble of hardware: the do-or-die customer key chain.   

On summer weekends, as vacationers – coming and going – wait in ferry lines, Clares, Kathys, and Lindas all over the Vineyard scramble to clean up before and after them. Without these mostly unnoticed and almost always unsung armies of turnover elves, the Island’s vast vacation rental industry would turn to, well, dust. The standard tenant checkout time is 10:00 a.m.; check-in time is 4:00 p.m. Thus, on a given turnover day, every house that changes renters must be straightened up, made spotless, and sanitized within a six-hour window between tenants.     

Clare has noticed a weakening in the turnover-cleaning business in recent years, consistent with a softening rental market. She pins the decline partly to the end of the Bill Clinton vacation boom. For much of the 1990s, Islanders rented a whole lot of homes to a vast presidential entourage for two to three weeks per season. Those days are gone. And turnover weekend – the great midsummer exchange of monthlong July vacationers for monthlong August vacationers – has lost some of its intensity in recent years. Americans are taking shorter vacations.

But Clare has all the clients she can handle, and her loyalty to them is unyielding. Together, Clare and Kathy look after some twenty-five houses, including several non-rental homes they open and close for the summer. They also serve as caretakers for a number of homes during the off-season.

On the eve of each turnover day – they can fall on Saturdays, Sundays, and increasingly on Mondays – the sisters sit down for a tactical summit. Clare’s calendar – “a little book with lots of crap” – is as vital to the business as her monster key chain. Few turnover days are alike. Anywhere from four to eight houses may be on the schedule. They may be conveniently clustered down-Island, or they may stretch from, say, West Tisbury to Chappaquiddick. The drafty, nooked-and-crannied Victorians of East Chop require more cleaning time than a simple new Cape. Some homes may have been empty and clean for a week or two; all they need is a brief de-cobwebbing. If Chappy’s on the schedule, waiting time must be figured in for the ferry. All these factors considered, Clare and Kathy determine how many cleaners they need for the day – in one, two, or three crews, tackling which houses in which order and in which vehicles.

“Driving some of these roads is like mountain climbing,” says Clare. “We can’t take my Chrysler there; we have to take the Jeep.”

Several crew members work on call, including Kathy’s husband Tom and Clare’s husband Sully. “They do the things we won’t do,” says Clare. She cites the disposal of the contents of the tray beneath a portable toilet in Deep Bottom Cove. “If the tray wobbles, it’s like a tidal wave. . . .”
           
Today’s crew of three people has just four houses to clean, and three are within a dust-bunny’s throw of each other on East Chop. But the crew is dressed for combat, in comfy, lightweight clothing and rubber soles. Kathy swears by her oversized, cotton T-shirts, which come in handy for mopping perspiration from her face. Today’s weather starts off kind: mid-70s and overcast.

Arriving at Turnover House One, just off East Chop Drive, at a few minutes past ten o’clock, the crew is pleased not to find any lingering tenants. “We’ve been lucky this year,” says Clare. “We haven’t had to go in and make anyone feel uncomfortable.”

But for a broken coffee carafe and some telltale dog hairs, the tenants have left the old three-bedroom house with the wraparound porch in pretty good shape. The crew quickly unloads the Jeep and deploys in a regimented way: Kathy and Linda advance upstairs to the bedrooms and bathroom. Clare heads to the kitchen, opens the oven, and blasts the interior with cleaning spray. “I always do the kitchens,” she says. “I don’t want the girls to be subjected to these fumes.” Never mind that one girl is a fifty-one-year-old grandmother and the other is a mother of two. With six sons, fourteen grandchildren, and fifteen younger brothers and sisters, Clare, reared on tiny Louds Island off Maine, can’t help but look after people as well as houses.    

It may have been the mothering instinct that inspired Clare’s career (nurse’s aide) before this one. “I have a reputation for getting along with difficult people,” she laughs. After moving to the Island in 1987, Clare began caring for an elderly woman in West Tisbury. Since the woman’s death in 1991, Clare has served as caretaker of her Island properties on behalf of the family. The caretaker-and-cleaning business took off by word of mouth. Clare cares for another West Tisbury woman, aged ninety-two. She still mourns the death of a previous client, a gentleman she’d nursed for eight years. “In nursing, there’s never a good result.” Getting good results from scrubbing kitchens helps her cope with losing people she’s grown to love. Then again, climbing on counters and ladders, getting down on hands and knees, and doing it all under the pressure of time, can make nursing, by comparison, feel like a day of rest.

By no means does Clare consider the cleaning  menial work. “Both jobs are stressful,” she says, “but each one relieves the other.” She takes pride in being able to summon, on a moment’s notice, a plumber or electrician to fix a problem – a skill that even the most seasoned homeowner can only dream of. Her clients become her friends, and she admits to having a few favorites. She’s proud to say that since coming to the Vineyard, she’s never had to fill out a job application. Self-employment hasn’t hindered her ability to land a home mortgage or otherwise secure her footing in the community. The respect Clare gets from homeowners is total. “It’s rare to find people who don’t care about the people who care for their property,” she says, and then she looks down. “Look at the size of this spider! That’s a humdinger.”  

Kathy has started her day’s work literally at the top, attacking cobwebs in the vaulted rafters of the bedrooms with her “extended fuzzy,” a magnetic duster attached to an extension pole. She invented the swivel-action tool herself. Kathy’s weekday gig is the house-painting business she runs with her husband.     
“See if the bathroom rugs need to be thrown into the washer,” Clare shouts up the steps.

Like a runaway train, Kathy moves furniture, vacuums, dusts, and mops. No sill, fan, knickknack, or picture frame goes untouched. No mold spore escapes her detection. Beds are checked for wetness. Linda is on a roll too, scouring the old bathroom with the footed tub. She’s been helping her mother-in-law clean houses while she awaits feedback from Martha’s Vineyard Hospital on a job application. After nineteen years as a nurse off-Island, she recently completed training in dialysis. On turnover days, her six-year-old daughter occasionally joins the cleaning crew. “She dusts,” says Linda. “Then we go back over it.”   

The crew assembles downstairs for the usual finale: the cleaning of the living and dining areas. Both vacuum cleaners are in full drone. Clare moves a chair from one side of the room to the other. “I know my houses. I can always tell when something’s been moved out of place.”    

The house is done in an hour flat – and not a moment too soon for Karen Giatrelis of Norton, Massachusetts, who’s steering a jam-packed Volvo wagon up the drive. The weary incoming tenant is here five hours ahead of check-in time, due to an early-morning ferry reservation. Clare advises her about the coffee carafe and promises to return with a replacement.  

Sited on a partially wooded lot off Munroe Avenue, Turnover House Two is a typical Vineyard hybrid of old cottage and subsequent add-ons. A turret affords a view of the Sound.  

“Oh, my God!” says Clare, opening an envelope on the fireplace mantle. It’s a tip from the landlord – a career first – and the probable reason for it is quickly apparent: The rugs are loaded with sand. The floor tiles are dirty. The dust is thick. The refrigerator is half full.

“The rental agents are generally good at scaring people into leaving houses the way they found them,” says Clare. Among the major exceptions to the rule, she cites a booze-happy group of students who left a small house awash in bodily eruptions. “It’s just a few young tenants that give the rest a bad reputation.” Aside from the occasional tenant “who wants me to wash their underwear by hand,” Clare rarely encounters attitudes. “I think my own attitude wards that off. I’m comfortable in my own skin.”

Kathy reports the death of one vacuum cleaner – the second casualty in as many days. It’s not an unusual event, given the sandy homes the machines are up against. Clare reverses the position of the dust bag, and the cleaner hums anew. Eyeing a mouse flitting across the screened-in porch, she beckons Kathy to banish it to the yard. “I don’t do critters,” says Clare.   

It takes a full two hours to make the house tenant-ready. Along with the cleaning paraphernalia, the crew loads the Jeep with a large bag of orphaned food. “I can’t throw food away,” says Clare, who recalls tough times during childhood. “It’s the way I was raised. God won’t allow it.” On one turnover occasion, she discovered a freezer filled with frozen meats and vegetables. She gave all the meat to a woman who lives solely on Social Security.

The crew proceeds to Turnover House Three. The sun is high, the humidity is threatening, and Kathy’s T-shirt is soaked to the max. “By this time,” says Clare, “we’re usually calling each other the b-word.” On turnover days, there’s never enough time  for lunch – or much inclination to eat it,
either. At day’s end, someone will muster the energy to cook dinner.

One thing is certain: no one will clean house.