By Bernhard Adrià
Translated by Scot Bellavia
When we moved to America just a few months ago, my family flew into the Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C. As we waited for our luggage to arrive, I started a conversation with a representative of Movers and Shakers (M&S), a moving company with a booth in the airport. It was that representative who recommended our current neighborhood and also gave me a job on the M&S team.
Because of the pandemic, it was a slow season when I started. Few people were moving, and those who were were hesitant to let strangers touch all their belongings. Fortunately, my income wasn’t based on hours or the families we moved, so it was a low-stress transition to employment in a new country. My English speaking skills improved slightly as I got to know my co-workers. I quickly became familiar with M&S’s operations and how to get around the nation’s capital.
One day, in early January, we landed a big contract. The client reserved our entire fleet of vehicles and paid a large deposit upfront - even before we were told the former residence, where we usually begin the packing process. There seemed to be more gossip and secrecy around this contract than with other clients. I heard my co-workers say that we’d be moving a family of three out of a white house in Pennsylvania to Florida.
I was confused because we only ever moved people within the beltway. But I was told, “You’ll understand when we get there.” I was eager to see more of America and made plans with my wife to manage the home and children during the week I’d be working out of state.
As my buddy led our caravan from our headquarters in Alexandria, I soon realized we weren’t going out of state. When he parked the van, I noticed we were near Pennsylvania Avenue. Per the contract, we weren’t allowed to bring our phones on this move, so I was looking forward to surprising my family that evening, all of us thinking I would be gone for a week.
We parked outside a black fence with tourists lined along it, holding cameras, waving flags of all kinds, and carrying signs. Some looked angry, and others excited. We had to pass through two security guard entrances and have our IDs triple referenced by other security. Ultimately, we walked through a metal detector in the doorway of this palace’s basement.
I still wasn’t sure who lived in this white house but knew they were wealthy and probably important. The security process went smoothly for me because, as an immigrant, I’ve made it a habit to carry my passport and work permit around with me inside my coat pocket. My co-workers kindly spoke on my behalf as it was hard for me to interpret the client’s security staff’s gruff tone.
At M&S, we pride ourselves on being a shelf-to-shelf company. That means you don’t have to do any packing. We’ll organize your belongings into appropriate bins, label items, and secure breakables. We follow the homeowners’ directions and then reverse the process at the new residence. With that policy, it is customary that we meet the homeowners upon arrival if we hadn’t already met them at the office when they signed their contract. But no one I met in the first three days of the job seemed to live at this huge, white house.
All the people giving me directions were dressed professionally. The servant men had on suits and ties, and the servant women wore dresses and heels. They each wore badges on lanyards around their neck. The interior of this house was jaw-dropping. The hallways seemed endless as we were led to new rooms every day. I didn’t know how we would finish the job in time. But not all of it would be moved. In fact, much of the first floor would be kept as-is for the next owners.
Whenever the homeowners are out of earshot at other jobs, my co-workers usually talk about the clients and what we were packing and unpacking. But for this job, my buddies kept tight lips. It almost seemed like they already knew the family or that everything to be said about them had already been said. Part of their silence, I later learned, was a directive of the chief of the servant staff. Our moving had been requested to be as inconspicuous as possible, for the sake of the head of the household. “Was it a surprise?” I thought. It felt more like a covert operation.
On the third day of packing, I found a walk-in closet where I heard some shuffling and what I thought was crying. In it, I found a tall blond teenage boy on his phone and looking red-faced and puffy under his eyes. I don’t recall exactly all he said, mostly because I didn’t understand most of it, but I could tell that he lived in the house and was a member of the family we were moving. My co-workers had told me cute stories of children that would come up to them as they packed their stuff, asking why they were moving and where they would be going. So in my broken English, I tapped into my fatherly persona and gave this boy some comforting words.
“You’ll be okay! You have a lot of money and lots of servants to make life easy for you,” I said, finding out later this bluntness is not received well by Americans. “Tell me what you liked about living here. Did you get your friend’s phone numbers so you can see them when you move to Florida?”
Oops! This boy didn’t know he was moving to Florida yet. He responded as if I had just told him he was adopted. Suddenly, a beautiful woman rushed into the room, putting her arms around the boy, shushing his sobs. If she was his mother, I considered that he was adopted as I could see nothing similar in their faces.
“[Barron], ignore this man. He’s just doing what he’s told. We aren’t going anywhere. Daddy’s still in charge.” This woman was not from America nor my homeland, but she was easier for me to understand than the boy.
But what did she mean, “We aren’t going anywhere?” Didn’t my uniform make it obvious what I was doing there? I tried to explain to this woman and represent M&S with as cheery a face as I could put on, despite my earnest confusion.
Soon, staff members announced that we were in “lockdown.” Something had happened in the Capitol and I was reconvened with my M&S co-workers. Things happened in the capital** all the time; I never did understand why our moving the family had significance to anyone. Nevertheless, our packing was put on hold, but we would stay at the client’s house overnight. I was allowed to call my family to let them know I was fine but wouldn’t be home that night.
I encountered my new friends, Barron and Melania, twice more that night and made small talk, mostly her thanking me for trying to do what I could for Barron. She apologized that I wouldn’t get to meet her husband, Donald, and I said, “Perhaps in Florida.”
She looked at me quizzically and smiled before walking away with some of her servants.
A week later, we were finished packing and fueled the vans for a drive to Florida. I interrogated my buddies to ensure that we were going out of state and not Florida Avenue.
Unloading and unpacking is always a quicker process than what we do at the prior residence, but here we had to get creative because the Florida home was much smaller than the D.C. home. On top of that, we had to make it look as much like the white house as we could because we were told Donald was resistant to the move, much more than how I had found Barron in that closet.
Apparently, the goal wasn’t to make him think he was still in D.C., it was only to make the transition less jarring for Donald. I haven’t been moving people in America long, but replicating the layout was only one among the many strange directives we had in the entire process. Barron and Melania were nice but Donald was certainly odd. It was strange to me that our orders came not from him, the head of the household, but from the chief of the servant staff. We had been closely guarded when we resumed packing once the lockdown was lifted and we were bound to secrecy the things we saw and heard while doing our regular responsibilities at this white house.
On our drive back, I learned the family had other properties and businesses. We delivered items that didn’t fit in the Florida home to these residences before ending the trip. We drove back to the white house to pick up some things we left and, to my surprise, the new residents had already moved in!
We hadn’t been contracted for these new homeowners but I thought it was just as well, because I imagined that any head of the household who moves to a home like this white house must be as eccentric as it seemed Donald was.
*Publishers of this article in Bernhard’s home country titled this article, “My Experience Moving One of the Wealthiest Families in America”.
**Because Capitol and capital are homophones, Bernhard did not realize people were speaking about the attack on the Capitol Building on January 6. Instead, he thought they were referencing the general city - the capital of the United States.