Life of Leisure Is a Full-Time Preoccupation : Don't paint the house or clean the pool--the neighbors might be watching. These days, the middle class takes pride in having other people do their dirty work.

Life of Leisure Is a Full-Time Preoccupation : Don’t paint the house or clean the pool--the neighbors might be watching. These days, the middle class takes pride in having other people do their dirty work.

By MICHELE LINGRE

April 9, 1995 12 AM PT

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A Jewish immigrant walks the streets of New York City all day wearing other people’s new shoes. He gets paid to break them in. That’s an early scene in the movie “Avalon.”

In real life today, I don’t know anyone who indulges their feet that way, but a lot of people fall just short of it, farming out anything that remotely looks like a chore or a threat to their nail polish. They do this, of course, amid daily whining about their declining lifestyle.

The size of the household service industry is not known--federal statistics show it to be stagnant--since official numbers fail altogether to measure the size of the illegal work force. “Everybody is hiding, employer and employee, and this is a very convenient backstage door into the country,” says Shirley Smith, a specialist in international labor affairs at the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

All around me people are working quite hard at other people’s homes, cleaning, gardening, watching over children, maintaining seldom-used pools. Among my friends, acquaintances and neighbors, only one lacks a regular gardener. The gardeners generally visit the day the trash cans have to be lugged to the sidewalk. Two or three of my friends do their own laundry, ironing and housecleaning. A very few wash their own cars. Fewer still paint or wallpaper rooms in their house. Most have baby-sitters or nannies--rare are those who give their children a “homemade” birthday party and homemade cake.

Then there are the extremists. One acquaintance has a carwash company come to his home to shampoo and detail his ego on wheels. Another argues that he works so hard he can’t afford to go grocery shopping and needs to hire someone to handle that for him.

In short, a degree of coddling once reserved for the upper crust is now normal in the middle class.

But it’s only partly the result of cheap labor and two-paycheck couples. As I talk to people, I find that most have made hard choices, giving up some things so they can buy leisure time.

The luxury of having someone else buy your lettuce does not come cheaply. One couple that hires a gardener, housekeeper and baby-sitter once a week and sends out shirts, pants and dresses to be cleaned and ironed spends at least $200 a month on those services. That, of course, does not include regular child care.

Nor does hiring other people always result in more leisure.

“Leisure time has actually decreased in the past decade,” says psychologist James W. Gottfurcht, who specializes in the psychology of money. “People are running on empty because life has gotten so fast and demanding.”

These folks are buying something “they say they need and deserve,” says Gottfurcht. “There is a feeling of entitlement and pride in being able to afford those services.”

That pride, I have long suspected, comes into play more strongly once everyone is hiring help. For some, chores are just too demeaning, associated with what Gottfurcht calls “poverty thinking.” The idea is, “If I clean my own yard, the Joneses will think I am the gardener’s wife.”

Part of me, obviously, is trapped in the ‘50s. I hate to delegate and I like mundane tasks. I find them relaxing, down-to-Earth, a sanity check. In America, the land of doing it yourself, someone actually doing it herself is as conspicuous as a snowman in July.

Not long ago I went into the front yard, turned over the soil next to the sidewalk, uprooted a bunch of ivy, rebuilt a cinder-block flower box and stuccoed it.

I became a victim of drive-by gawk and comments that included good-humored jokes by workmen in trucks, second looks from Benzed and Beemered neighbors and the sympathetic statement by a kind gardener that such work is too hard for a lady and I needed help.

I chalked it up to male chauvinism until my husband went out to paint the house. He was halfway done when a woman stopped her car, walked up the driveway and asked for his business card, ready to haggle over his charge for painting her house.

The pendulum might take a swing with the next generation. The boomers’ kids might become avid do-it-yourselfers, putting their money into tools and savings accounts.

Then, imagine--Martha Stewart, who makes her living teaching lost souls how to stock a pantry, will show up on TV with tips on assembling the well-stocked workshop.