A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

by Lucia Berlin

  “Look, Miss Dawson. You can’t hitchhike here. They don’t understand … it could get us in trouble, two women hitchhiking. Listen to me!”

  But a farmer in an old truck had stopped, the engine ticking on the dusty road. I offered him money to take us to the outskirts of town. He was going all the way to downtown, could take us all the way to her house easy for twenty pesos. We climbed into the bed of the truck.

  She put her arms around me in the wind. I could feel her wet dress, her sticky armpit hairs as she clung to me.

  “You can’t go back to your frivolous life! Don’t leave! Don’t leave me,” she kept saying until at last we got to her block.

  “Good-bye,” I said. “Thanks for everything,” or something dumb like that. I left her on the curb, blinking at my cab until it turned the corner.

  The maids were leaning on the gate talking to the neighborhood carabinero, so I didn’t think anyone was home. But my father was there, changing to go play golf.

  “You’re back early. Where have you been?” he asked.

  “To a picnic, with my history teacher.”

  “Oh, yes. What is she like?”

  “Okay. She’s a Communist.”

  I just blurted that out. It had been a miserable day. I was fed up with Miss Dawson. But that’s all it took. Three words to my father. She was fired sometime that weekend and we never saw her again.

  No one else knew what had happened. The other girls were happy she was gone. We had a free period now, even though we would have to make up American history when we got to college. There was nobody to speak to. To say I was sorry.

  Melina

  In Albuquerque, in the evening, my husband Rex would go to class at the university or to his sculpture studio. I took Ben, the baby, for long walks in his stroller. Up the hill, on a street leafy with elm trees was Clyde Tingley’s house. We always went past that house. Clyde Tingley was a millionaire who gave all his money to children’s hospitals in the state. We went by his house because not just at Christmas but all the time he had Christmas tree lights strung up, all over the porch and on all the trees. He would turn them on just as it was dusk, as we were on the way home. Sometimes he would be in his wheelchair on the porch, a skinny old man who would holler “Hello” and “Lovely evening” to us as we passed. One night though he yelled at me, “Stop! Stop! Something wrong with that there child’s feet! Need to be seen to.”

  I looked down at Ben’s feet, which were fine.

  “No, it’s because he’s too big for the stroller now. He’s just holding them up funny so they won’t drag on the ground.”

  Ben was so smart. He didn’t even talk yet but he seemed to understand. He set his feet squarely on the ground, as if to show the old man they were okay.

  “Mothers never want to admit there’s any problem. You take him to a doctor now.”

  Just then a man dressed all in black walked up. Even then you rarely saw people out walking so he was a surprise. He was squatting on the sidewalk holding Ben’s feet in his hands. A saxophone strap dangled from his neck and Ben grabbed at it.

  “No, sir. Nothing wrong with this boy’s feet,” he said.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it,” Clyde Tingley called.

  “Thanks, anyway,” I said.

  The man and I stood there talking, and then he walked us home. This happened in 1956. He was the first beatnik I ever met. There hadn’t been anyone like him that I had seen in Albuquerque. Jewish, with a Brooklyn accent. Long hair and a beard, dark glasses. But he didn’t seem sinister. Ben liked him right away. His name was Beau. He was a poet and a musician, played saxophone. It was later I found out that it was a saxophone strap hanging from his neck.

  We became friends right away. He played with the baby while I made iced tea. After I put Ben to bed we sat outside on the porch steps talking until Rex came home. The two men were polite to each other but didn’t get along too well, I could see that right away. Rex was a graduate student. We were really poor then, but Rex seemed like someone older and powerful. An air of success, maybe a little conceit. Beau acted like he didn’t much care about anything, which I already knew wasn’t true. After he left, Rex said he didn’t like the idea of me dragging home stray hepcats.

  Beau was hitchhiking his way home to New York … the Apple … after six months in San Francisco. He was staying with friends, but they worked all day, so he came to see me and Ben every day, the four days he was there.

  Beau really needed to talk. It was wonderful for me to hear somebody talk, besides Ben’s few words, so I was glad to see him. Besides, he talked about romance. He had fallen in love. Now I knew that Rex loved me, and we were happy, would have a happy life together, but he wasn’t madly in love with me the way Beau was with Melina.

  Beau had been a sandwich man in San Francisco. He had a little cart with sweet rolls and coffee, soft drinks and sandwiches. He pushed it up and down the floors of a gigantic office building. One day he had pulled his cart into an insurance office and he saw her. Melina. She was filing, but not really filing, looking out the window with a dreamy smile on her face. She had long dyed blond hair and wore a black dress. She was very tiny and thin. But it was her skin, he said. It was like she wasn’t a person at all but some creature made of white silk, of milk glass.

  Beau didn’t know what came over him. He left the cart and his customers, went through a little gate over to where she stood. He told her he loved her. I want you, he said. I’ll get the bathroom key. Come on. It will just take five minutes. Melina looked at him and said, I’ll be right there.

  I was pretty young then. This was the most romantic thing I had ever heard.

  Melina was married and had a baby girl about a year old. Ben’s age. Her husband was a trumpet player. He was on the road for the two months Beau knew Melina. They had a passionate affair and when her husband was coming home she said to Beau, “Time to hit the road.” So he did.

  Beau said you had to do anything she said, that she cast a spell on him, on her husband, on any man who knew her. You couldn’t get jealous, he said, because it seemed perfectly natural that any other man would love her.

  For example … the baby wasn’t even her husband’s. For a while they had been living in El Paso. Melina worked at Piggly Wiggly packing meat and chickens and sealing them in plastic. Behind a glass window, in a funny paper hat. But still this Mexican bullfighter who was buying steaks saw her. He banged on the counter and rang a bell, insisted to the butcher that he see the wrapping woman. He made her leave work. That’s how she affected you, Beau said. You had to be near her immediately.

  A few months later Melina realized she was pregnant. She was really happy, and told her husband. He was furious. You can’t be, he said, I had a vasectomy. What? Melina was indignant. And you married me without telling me this? She kicked him out of the house, changed the locks. He sent flowers, wrote her passionate letters. He camped out outside the door until at last she forgave him for what he did.

  She sewed all their clothes. She had covered all the rooms in the apartment with fabric. There were mattresses and pillows on the floors so you crawled, like a baby, from tent to tent. In candlelight day and night you never knew what time it was.

  Beau told me everything about Melina. About her childhood in foster homes, how she ran away at thirteen. She was a B-girl in a bar (I’m not sure what that is) and her husband had rescued her from a very ugly situation. She’s tough, Beau said, she talks nasty. But her eyes, her touch, they are like an angel child’s. She was this angel that just came into my life and ruined it forever … He did get dramatic about her, and even cried and cried sometimes, but I loved hearing all about her, wished I could be like her. Tough, mysterious, beautiful.

  I was sorry when Beau left. He was like an angel in my life, too. When he was gone I realized how little Rex ever talked to me or Ben. I felt so lonely I even thought about turning our rooms into tents.

  * * *

  A few years later I was married to a different man
, a jazz piano player named David. He was a good man but he was quiet too. I don’t know why I married those quiet guys, when the thing I like best in the world to do is to talk. We had a lot of friends though. Musicians coming into town would stay with us and while the men played we women cooked and talked and lay around on the grass playing with the kids.

  It was like pulling teeth to get David to tell me what he was like in first grade, or about his first girlfriend, anything. I knew he had lived with a woman, a beautiful painter, for five years, but he didn’t want to talk about her. Hey, I said, I’ve told you my whole life story, tell me something about you, tell me when you first fell in love … He laughed then, but he actually told me. That’s easy, he said.

  It was a woman who was living with his best friend, a bass player, Ernie Jones. Down in the south valley, by the irrigation ditch. Once he had gone to see Ernie and when he wasn’t home he went down to the ditch.

  She was sunbathing, naked and white against the green grass. For sunglasses she wore those paper lace doilies they put under ice cream.

  “So. That’s it?” I prodded.

  “Well, yeah. That’s it. I fell in love.”

  “But what was she like?”

  “She wasn’t like anyone in this world. Once, Ernie and I were lying around by the ditch, talking, smoking weed. We were real blue because we were both out of work. She was supporting us both, working as a waitress. One day she worked a noon banquet and she brought all the flowers home, a whole roomful. But what she did was carry them all upstream and dump them in the ditch. So Ernie and I were sitting there, gloomy, on the bank, staring at the muddy water and then a billion flowers floated by. She had taken food and wine, even silver and tablecloths that she set up on the grass.”

  “So, did you make love with her?”

  “No. I never even talked to her, alone anyway. I just remember her—in the grass.”

  “Hm,” I said, pleased by all that information and by the sort of sappy look on his face. I loved romance in any form.

  * * *

  We moved to Santa Fe, where David played piano at Claude’s. A lot of good musicians passed through town in those years and would sit in with David’s trio for one or two nights. Once a really good trumpet player came, Paco Duran. David liked playing with him, and asked if it was okay with me if Paco and his wife and child stayed with us for a week. Sure, I said, it will be nice.

  It was. Paco played great. He and David played all night at work and together all day at home. Paco’s wife, Melina, was exotic and fun. They talked and acted like L.A. jazz musicians. Called our house a pad and said “you dig?” and “outta sight.” Their little girl and Ben got along great but were both at the age where they got into everything. We tried putting them both in a playpen but neither one of them would go for it. Melina got the idea that we should just let them carry on and she and I should get inside the playpen with our coffee and ashtrays safe. So there we were, sitting in there while the kids took books out of the bookcase. She was telling me about Las Vegas, making it sound like another planet. I realized, listening to her, not just looking at her but being surrounded by her otherworldly beauty, that this was Beau’s Melina.

  Somehow I couldn’t say anything about it. I couldn’t say, Hey, you are so beautiful and weird you must be Beau’s romance. But I thought of Beau and missed him, hoped he was doing fine.

  She and I cooked dinner and the men went off to work. We bathed the children and went out on the back porch, smoked and drank coffee, talked about shoes. We talked about all the important shoes in our lives. The first penny loafers, first high heels. Silver platforms. Boots we had known. Perfect pumps. Handmade sandals. Huaraches. Spike heels. While we talked our bare feet wriggled in the damp green grass by the porch. Her toenails were painted black.

  She asked me what my sign was. Usually this annoyed me but I let her tell me everything about my Scorpio self and I believed every word. I told her I read palms, a little, and looked at her hands. It was too dark so I went in and got a kerosene lantern, set it on the steps between us. I held her two white hands by lantern and moonlight, and remembered what Beau had said about her skin. It was like holding cool glass, silver.

  I know Cheiro’s palmistry book by heart. I have read hundreds of palms. I’m telling you this so you’ll know I did tell her things that I saw in the lines and mounds of her hands. But mostly I told her everything Beau had told me about her.

  I’m ashamed of why I did this. I was jealous of her. She was so dazzling. She didn’t really do anything special, her being dazzled. I wanted to impress her.

  I told her her life story. I told her about the horrible foster parents, how Paco protected her. Said things like, “I see a man. Handsome man. Danger. You are not in danger. He is in danger. A race driver, bullfighter maybe?” Fuck, she said, nobody knew about the bullfighter.

  Beau had told me that once he put his hand on her head and said, “It will all be all right…” and she had wept. I told her that she never ever cried, not when she was sad or mad. But that if someone was really kind and just put their hand on her head and said not to worry, that might make her cry …

  I won’t tell you any more. I’m too ashamed. But it had exactly the effect I had intended. She sat there staring at her beautiful hands and she whispered, “You are a witch. You are magic.”

  We had a wonderful week. We all went to Indian dances and climbed in Bandolier monument and Acoma pueblo. We sat in the cave where Sandia man had lived. We soaked in hot springs near Taos and went to the church of the Santo Nino. Two nights we even got a babysitter so Melina and I could go to the club. The music was great. “I have had a wonderful time this week,” I said. She smiled. “I always have a wonderful time,” she said, simply.

  The house was very quiet when they had gone. I woke up, as usual, when David came home. I think I wanted to confess to him about the palm reading, but I’m glad I didn’t. We were lying in bed together in the dark when he said to me,

  “That was her.”

  “That was who?”

  “Melina. She was the woman in the grass.”

  Friends

  Loretta met Anna and Sam the day she saved Sam’s life.

  Anna and Sam were old. She was eighty and he was eighty-nine. Loretta would see Anna from time to time when she went to swim at her neighbor Elaine’s pool. One day she stopped by as the two women were convincing the old guy to take a swim. He finally got in, was dog-paddling along with a big grin on his face when he had a seizure. The other two women were in the shallow end and didn’t notice. Loretta jumped in, shoes and all, pulled him to the steps and up out of the pool. He didn’t need resuscitation but he was disoriented and frightened. He had some medicine to take, for epilepsy, and they helped him dry off and dress. They all sat around for a while until they were sure he was fine and could walk to their house, just down the block. Anna and Sam kept thanking Loretta for saving his life, and insisted that she go to lunch at their house the next day.

  It happened that she wasn’t working for the next few days. She had taken three days off without pay because she had a lot of things that needed doing. Lunch with them would mean going all the way back to Berkeley from the city, and not finishing everything in one day, as she had planned.

  She often felt helpless in situations like this. The kind where you say to yourself, Gosh, it’s the least I can do, they are so nice. If you don’t do it you feel guilty and if you do you feel like a wimp.

  She stopped being in a bad mood the minute she was inside their apartment. It was sunny and open, like an old house in Mexico, where they had lived most of their lives. Anna had been an archaeologist and Sam an engineer. They had worked together every day at Teotihuacan and other sites. Their apartment was filled with fine pottery and photographs, a wonderful library. Downstairs, in the backyard was a large vegetable garden, many fruit trees, berries. Loretta was amazed that the two birdlike, frail people did all the work themselves. Both of them used canes, and walked with much
difficulty.

  Lunch was toasted cheese sandwiches, chayote soup, and a salad from their garden. Anna and Sam prepared the lunch together, set the table and served the lunch together.

  They had done everything together for fifty years. Like twins, they each echoed the other or finished sentences the other had started. Lunch passed pleasantly as they told her, in stereo, some of their experiences working on the pyramid in Mexico, and about other excavations they had worked on. Loretta was impressed by these two old people, by their shared love of music and gardening, by their enjoyment of each other. She was amazed at how involved they were in local and national politics, going to marches and protests, writing congressmen and editors, making phone calls. They read three or four papers every day, read novels or history to each other at night.

  While Sam was clearing the table with shaking hands, Loretta said to Anna how enviable it was to have such a close lifetime companion. Yes, Anna said, but soon one of us will be gone …

  Loretta was to remember that statement much later, and wonder if Anna had begun to cultivate a friendship with her as a sort of insurance policy against the time when one of them would die. But, no, she thought, it was simpler than that. The two of them had been so self-sufficient, so enough for each other all their lives, but now Sam was becoming dreamy and often incoherent. He repeated the same stories over and over, and although Anna was always patient with him, Loretta felt that she was glad to have someone else to talk to.

  Whatever the reason, she found herself more and more involved in Sam and Anna’s life. They didn’t drive anymore. Often Anna would call Loretta at work and ask her to pick up peat moss when she got off, or take Sam to the eye doctor. Sometimes both of them felt too bad to go to the store, so Loretta would pick things up for them. She liked them both, admired them. Since they seemed so much to want company, she found herself at dinner with them once a week, every two weeks at the most. A few times she asked them to her house for dinner, but there were so many steps to climb and the two arrived so exhausted that she stopped. So then she would take fish or chicken or a pasta dish to their house. They would make a salad, serve berries from the garden for dessert.