A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

by Lucia Berlin

  Her picture was always coming out in the El Paso paper. Once it was in it every day for a week … when she was dating Rickie Evers. Rickie Evers had just divorced a famous movie star. His daddy was a millionaire hotel owner and lived on top of the Hotel del Norte in El Paso.

  Rickie Evers was in town for the National Golf Open, and Bella Lynn was bound and determined to go out with him. She made reservations for dinner at the Del Norte. She said I should come along, that eleven years old wasn’t too young for me to get some lessons in sex appeal.

  I didn’t, in fact, know anything about sex appeal. Sex itself seemed to have something to do with being mad. Cats acted pretty mad about the whole thing, and all the movie stars seemed mad. Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck were downright mean. Bella Lynn and her friends would slouch in the Court Café under pompadours, blowing smoke from their nostrils like petulant dragons.

  They were all excited about the National Golf Open. “A gold mine! An oil well right in our own backyard!”

  Wilma, Bella Lynn’s best friend, wanted to come with us to the Del Norte Hotel, but Bella Lynn said Nix. A basic principle of sex appeal, she told me, was always work alone. No matter if the other woman was pretty or ugly … it simply delayed and complicated any operation.

  * * *

  I dressed up in what I thought was the most wonderful dress I had ever seen. Lavender dotted swiss with puff sleeves and a crinoline. Aunt Tiny did my hair in French braids. I didn’t wear lipstick yet, but I put some Merthiolate on my mouth. Aunt Tiny made me wash it right off. She did pinch my cheeks. Bella Lynn wore a mean-looking brown crepe dress with big shoulders, mean dark makeup, and black high heels. We got to the hotel early. She sat in a high-backed chair in the lobby, wearing dark glasses. She crossed her legs. Black silk stockings. I told her that the seams were crooked, but she said slightly crooked seams had sex appeal. She gave me a quarter to go buy a soda, but instead I just went up and down the stairs. A beautiful wide curved staircase carpeted in red velvet, with a curved banister. I’d run to the top and stand beneath the chandelier, smiling regally. Then I’d walk very slowly and graciously to the bottom, my hand lightly brushing the mahogany rail. Then I’d run back up. I did this over and over until finally it seemed that surely it must be time to eat. She said she had postponed the reservation because Evers hadn’t shown up yet. I bought an Almond Hershey and sat down a few chairs away. She whispered to stop kicking the seat. She smoked Pall Malls, only she called them Pell Mells.

  * * *

  I recognized the famous Evers and his millionaire father the minute they came in. They went into the dining room with some other men. All in Stetsons and boots, except for Evers, who wore a pinstriped suit and no hat. But I would have known it was them just by how nasty Bella Lynn was looking, using a cigarette holder now. She took off her dark glasses and we went in. Bella Lynn told the head waiter that her escort had been unavoidably detained. That there would only be the two of us to dine.

  I wanted chicken fried steak, but she said that was too tacky. She ordered us prime rib. A Manhattan for her and a Shirley Temple for me. Only she ended up with a Shirley Temple too, because she was only eighteen. She told the waiter she must have misplaced her driver’s license. How inconvenient.

  The men had a bottle of bourbon on the table and except for Rickie Evers, were all smoking cigars.

  “So how are you going to meet him?” I asked her.

  “I told you. Sex appeal. Just as soon as I catch his eye I’ll have him over here and buying us our little old prime rib dinner.”

  “So far he hasn’t even looked this way.”

  “Yes he has, but he pretended not to … that’s his sex appeal. But he’ll look over again, and when he does I’ll just look at him as if he was the lowest-down, mangiest old hound dog I ever saw.”

  Rickie Evers did, then, look over at her, and that’s exactly how she looked at him, like how did they ever let him in? In two seconds he was standing behind the empty chair.

  “May I join you?”

  “Well. My escort has been unavoidably detained. Perhaps for a few minutes.”

  “What are you drinking?” he asked.

  “Shirley Temples,” I said, but she said Manhattan. He told the waiter to bring me a Shirley Temple. Manhattans for him and the lady. The waiter didn’t say anything about her ID.

  “I’m Bella Lynn and this is Little Lou, my cousin. Sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” she said, although she knew perfectly well what it was.

  He told her his name and she said, “Your daddy and my daddy play golf together.”

  “Will you be at the Golf Open tomorrow?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. The crowds are so excruciating. Little Lou has her heart set on it though.”

  They ended up deciding to go to the golf tournament the next day so I wouldn’t be disappointed. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but by tomorrow they had forgotten how much I was supposed to want to go anyway.

  They drank their Manhattans and then we had shrimp cocktails before our roast beef. Baked Alaska for dessert, which I thought was amazing.

  After dinner they were going nightclubbing in Juárez, and there was the problem, over crème de menthe, of how to get me home. A taxi, Bella Lynn said, but he insisted that they could drop me off before they crossed the border.

  Bella Lynn went to powder her nose. I didn’t go, didn’t know yet that you’re always supposed to go, to assess the situation.

  * * *

  When she was gone Rickie Evers dropped his gold cigarette lighter on the floor and when he reached down for it he ran his hand up my leg, stroked the inside of my knee.

  I took a bite of the Baked Alaska and said I wondered how they ever managed to do it. He picked his lighter up and told me I had Baked Alaska on my chin. When he wiped it with the big linen napkin his arm brushed my breast. I was embarrassed, I still didn’t even wear a training bra.

  Bella Lynn came back from the powder room sauntering in her crooked seams, pretending not to notice all the men staring at her. The whole dining room had been staring at Bella Lynn and Rickie Evers throughout the meal. I think the Mexican busboy saw what Evers did when he dropped his lighter.

  * * *

  I sat between Evers and Bella Lynn in the big black Lincoln. The windows rolled up and down when he pushed a button, even the back ones. There was a cigarette lighter, and he would brush my leg as he pushed it in, and my breasts again as he reached across to light her Pell Mells.

  We pulled up in the driveway.

  “How about a good-night kiss, Little Lou?” he asked. Bella Lynn laughed. “Why, she’s not even sweet sixteen.” While she was getting out he bit my neck.

  Bella Lynn went in with me to get her wrap and her atomizer of Tabu.

  “See what I told you, Lou, about Sex Appeal? Easy as pie!” I went in to listen to Inner Sanctum with Uncle Tyler and Aunt Tiny. They were pleased as punch that Bella Lynn was going out with the ex-husband of the most beautiful movie star in the world.

  “How did she ever manage that?” Uncle Tyler wondered.

  “Why, Tyler … you know our Bella Lynn is the prettiest thing west of the Mississippi!”

  “No. It was Sex Appeal,” I told them.

  They glared at me.

  “Child, don’t you ever let me hear you use that word again!” Aunt Tiny said, real mean. She looked just like Mildred Pierce.

  Teenage Punk

  In the sixties, Jesse used to come over to see Ben. They were young kids then, long hair, strobe lights, weed and acid. Jesse had already dropped out of school, already had a probation officer. The Rolling Stones came to New Mexico. The Doors. Ben and Jesse had wept when Jimi Hendrix died, when Janis Joplin died. That was another year for weather. Snow. Frozen pipes. Everybody cried that year.

  We lived in an old farmhouse, down by the river. Marty and I had just divorced, I was in my first year of teaching, my first job. The house was hard to take care of alone. Leaky roof, burned-out pump, but i
t was big, a beautiful house.

  Ben and Jesse played music loud, burned violet incense that smelled of cat pee. My other sons Keith and Nathan couldn’t stand Jesse—hippie burnout—but Joel, the baby, adored him, his boots, his guitar, his pellet gun. Beer-can practice in the backyard. Ping.

  It was March and cold for sure. The next morning the cranes would be at the clear ditch at dawn. I had learned about them from the new pediatrician. He’s a good doctor, and single, but I still miss old Dr. Bass. When Ben was a baby I called him to ask how many diapers I should wash at a time. One, he told me.

  None of the kids had wanted to go. I dressed, shivering. Built a piñon fire, poured coffee into a thermos. Fixed batter for pancakes, fed the dogs and cats and Rosie the goat. Did we have a horse then? If so, I forgot to feed him. Jesse came up behind me in the dark, at the barbed wire by the frost-white road.

  “I want to see the cranes.”

  I gave him the flashlight, think I gave him the thermos too. He shined the light everywhere but the road and I kept bugging him about it. Come on. Cut it out.

  “You can see. You’re walking along. You obviously know the road.”

  True. The dizzy arcs of light swept into birds’ nests in pale winter cottonwoods, pumpkins in Gus’s field, prehistoric silhouettes of his Brahmin bulls. Their agate eyes opened to reflect a pinpoint of dazzle, closed again.

  We crossed the log above the slow dark irrigation ditch, over to the clear ditch where we lay on our stomachs, silent as guerrillas. I know, I romanticize everything. It is true though that we lay there freezing for a long time in the fog. It wasn’t fog. Must have been mist from the ditch or maybe just the steam from our mouths.

  After a long time the cranes did come. Hundreds, just as the sky turned blue-gray. They landed in slow motion on brittle legs. Washing, preening on the bank. Everything was suddenly black and white and gray, a movie after the credits, churning.

  As the cranes drank upstream the silver water beneath them was shot into dozens of thin streamers. Then very quickly the birds left, in whiteness, with the sound of shuffling cards.

  We lay there, drinking coffee, until it was light and the crows came. Gawky raucous crows, defying the cranes’ grace. Their blackness zigzagged in the water, cottonwood branches bounced like trampolines. You could feel the sun.

  It was light on the road back but he left the flashlight on. Turn it off, will you? He ignored me so I took it from him. We walked in his long strides in the tractor tracks.

  “Fuck,” he said. “That was scary.”

  “Really. As terrible as an army with banners. That’s from the Bible.”

  “Oh yeah, teacher?” He already had an attitude, then.

  Step

  The West Oakland detox used to be a warehouse. It is dark inside and echoes like an underground parking lot. Bedrooms, a kitchen, and the office open off a vast room. In the middle of the room is a pool table and the TV pit. They call it the pit because the walls around it are only five feet high, so the counselors can look down into it.

  Most of the residents were in the pit, in blue pajamas, watching Leave It to Beaver. Bobo held a cup of tea for Carlotta to drink. The other men were laughing about her running around the train yard, trying to go under the engine. The Amtrak from L.A. had stopped. Carlotta laughed too. All of them running around in pajamas. Not that she didn’t care about what she had done. She didn’t remember, didn’t own the deed at all.

  Milton, a counselor, came to the rim of the pit.

  “When’s the fight?”

  “Two hours.” Benitez and Sugar Ray Leonard for the welterweight title.

  “Sugar Ray will take it, easy.” Milton grinned at Carlotta and the men made comments, jokes. She knew most of the men from other times here, from detoxes in Hayward, Richmond, San Francisco. Bobo she knew from Highland psych ward too.

  All twenty of the residents were in the pit now, with pillows and blankets, huddled together like preschool kids at nap time, Henry Moore drawings of people in bomb shelters. On the TV Orson Welles said, “We will sell no wine before its time.” Bobo laughed, “It’s time, brother, it’s time!”

  “Stop your shakin’, woman, messes the TV.”

  A man with dreadlocks sat down beside Carlotta, put his hand inside her thigh. Bobo grabbed the man’s wrist. “Move it or I’ll break it.” Old Sam came in wrapped in a blanket. There was no heat and it was bitterly cold.

  “Sit there on her feets. You can hold them still.”

  Cheaper by the Dozen was almost over. Clifton Webb died and Myrna Loy went to college. Willie said he had liked it in Europe because white people were ugly there. Carlotta didn’t know what he meant, then realized that the only people solitary drunks ever see are on television. At three in the morning she would wait to see Jack the Ripper for Used Datsuns. Slashin’ them prices. Jest a hackin’ and a hewin’.

  The television was the only light in the detox. It was as if the pit were their own smoky ring, with the boxing ring inside it in color. The announcer’s voice was shrill. Tonight’s purse is one million dollars! All the men had their money on Sugar Ray, would have had. Bobo told Carlotta some of the men there weren’t even alcoholics, had just faked needing detox so they could watch the fight.

  Carlotta was for Benitez. You likes them pretty boys, Mama? Benitez was pretty, with fine bones, a dapper mustache. He weighed 144 pounds, had won his first championship at seventeen. Sugar Ray Leonard was scarcely heavier but he seemed to tower, not moving. The men met in the center of the ring. There was no sound. The crowd on TV, the residents in the pit held their breath as the boxers faced each other, circling, sinuous, their eyes locked.

  In the third round Leonard’s quick hook knocked Benitez to the ground. He was up in a second, with a childlike smile. Embarrassed. I didn’t mean for that to happen to me. At that moment the men in the pit began to want him to win.

  No one moved, not even during the commercials. Sam rolled cigarettes all through the fight, passed them. Milton came up to the ledge of the pit during the sixth round, just as Benitez took a blow to the forehead, his only mark in the fight. Milton saw the blood reflected in everyone’s eyes, in their sweat.

  “Figures … you’d all be backing a loser,” he said.

  “Quiet! Round eight.”

  “Come on, baby, don’t you go down.”

  They weren’t asking Benitez to win, just to stay in the fight. He did, he stayed in. He retreated in the ninth behind a jab, then a left hook drove him into the ropes and a right knocked out his mouthpiece.

  Round ten, round eleven, round twelve, round thirteen, round fourteen. He stayed in. No one in the pit spoke. Sam had fallen asleep.

  The bell rang for the last round. The arena was so quiet you could hear Sugar Ray Leonard whisper. “Oh, my God. He is still standing.”

  But Benitez’s right knee touched the canvas. Briefly, like a Catholic leaving a pew. The slightest deference that meant the fight was over; he had lost. Carlotta whispered,

  “God, please help me.”

  Strays

  Got into Albuquerque from Baton Rouge. It was about two in the morning. Whipping wind. That’s what the wind does in Albuquerque. I hung out at the Greyhound station until a cabdriver showed up who had so many prison tattoos I figured I could score and he’d tell me where to stay. He turned me on, took me to a pad, a noria they call it there, in the south valley. I lucked out meeting him, Noodles. I couldn’t have picked a worse place to run to than Albuquerque. Chicanos control the town. Mayates, they can’t score at all, are lucky not to be killed. Some white guys, with enough long joint time to have been tested. White women, forget it, they don’t last. Only way, and Noodles helped me there too, was to get hooked up with a big connection, like I did with Nacho. Then nobody could hurt me. What a pitiful thing I just said. Nacho was a saint, which may seem hard to believe. He did a lot for Brown Berets, for the whole Chicano community, young people, old people. I don’t know where he is now. He skipped bail. I mean a h
uge bail. He shot a narc, Marquez, five times, in the back. The jury didn’t think he was a saint, but Robin Hood maybe, because they only gave him manslaughter. I wish I knew where he was. I got busted about the same time, for needle marks.

  All this happened many years ago or I couldn’t even be talking about it. In those days you could end up with five or ten years for just a roach or marks.

  It was when the first methadone rehabilitation programs were starting. I got sent to one of the pilot projects. Six months at La Vida instead of years in “la pinta,” the state prison in Santa Fe. Twenty other addicts got the same deal. We all arrived in an old yellow school bus at La Vida. A pack of wild dogs met the bus, snarling and baying at us until finally they loped off into the dust.

  La Vida was thirty miles out of Albuquerque. In the desert. Nothing around, not a tree, not a bush. Route 66 was too far to walk to. La Vida had been a radar site, a military installation during World War II. It had been abandoned since then. I mean abandoned. We were going to restore it.

  We stood around in the wind, in the glare of the sun. Just the gigantic radar disc towering over the whole place, the only shade. Fallen-down barracks. Torn and rusted venetian blinds rattling in the wind. Pinups peeled off the walls. Three- or four-foot sand dunes in every room. Dunes, with waves and patterns like in postcards from the Painted Desert.

  A lot of things were going to contribute to our rehabilitation. Number one was removing us from the street environment. Every time a counselor said that we laughed ourselves silly. We couldn’t see any roads, much less streets, and the streets in the compound were buried in sand. There were tables in the dining rooms and cots in the barracks but they were buried too. Toilets clogged with dead animals and more sand.

  You could only hear the wind and the pack of dogs that kept circling. Sometimes it was nice, the silence, except the radar discs kept turning with a whining petty keening, day and night, day and night. At first it freaked us out, but after a while it grew comforting, like wind chimes. They said it had been used to intercept Japanese kamikaze pilots, but they said a lot of pretty weird things.