A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

by Lucia Berlin

  He asked me how I had liked the retreat. I hate to lie, really can’t stand lying. Not for moral reasons. It’s so hard, figuring it out. Remembering what you have said.

  “Well, it was a lovely place. Ruth is very serene and seemed to adapt perfectly to the atmosphere there. I find it hard to meditate. I just worry, or go back over every mistake I ever made in my whole life. But it was, er, centering. Serene. You and Ruth run along now. Have a nice lunch!”

  Later I got the scoop. Big Sur had been the adventure of Ruth’s life. She knew she wouldn’t be able to tell the M.P.s about doing You Know What. Oral S. for the first time! Well, yes, she had done Oral S. to Ephraim, but never had it done to her. And M-A-R … “I know it has a J in it somewhere.”

  “Marijuana?”

  “Hush! Well, mostly it made me cough and get nervous. Yes, that was very nice, Oral S. But the way he kept asking, ‘Are you ready?’ made me imagine we were going somewhere and ruined the mood.”

  They were going to Mendocino in two weeks. The story was that she and I were going to a writers’ workshop and book fair in Petaluma. Robert Haas was to be the writer-in-residence.

  One night in the middle of the week, she called and asked if she could come over. Like a fool I expected her, didn’t understand that it was a cover, that she had gone to meet Julius. So when Ephraim phoned I could honestly sound cross because she still hadn’t arrived, was even crosser the next time. “I’ll have her call you the minute she gets here.” After a while he called again, this time furious because she was home now and said I had not given her the message.

  The next day I told her I wouldn’t do this for her anymore. She said that was fine, that they were starting play practice on Monday.

  “You and I are in a flower-arranging class on Fridays, at Laney. That’s it.”

  “Well, that’s the last one. You’ve been so lucky he hasn’t asked any specifics.”

  “Of course he wouldn’t. He trusts me. But my conscience is clear now. Julius and I don’t do You Know What anymore.”

  “Then what do you do? Why go to all this secrecy and trouble to not do You Know What anymore?”

  “We found out that neither one of us is a swinger type. I like You Know What with Ephraim much more, and Julius isn’t that interested. I like the sneaking around part. He likes buying me presents and cooking for me. My favorite thing is to knock on a motel door in Richmond or somewhere and then he opens the door and I rush in. My heart beating away.”

  “So what do you do then?”

  “We play Trivial Pursuit, watch videos. Sometimes we sing. Duets, like ‘Bali Hai’ or ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.’ We go for midnight walks in the rain!”

  “Walk in the rain on your own time!” Dr. B. shouted. We hadn’t noticed him come in.

  He was serious. He stood there while she packed up all her Bon Appétit magazines and Trivial Pursuit cards and her knitting. He told me to write her a check for two weeks’ pay, plus what we owed her.

  After Dr. B. left she called Julius, told him to meet her at Denny’s right away.

  “My career is ruined!” she sobbed.

  She hugged me good-bye and left. I moved out to her desk, where I could see the waiting room.

  Ephraim came in the door. He walked slowly toward me and shook my hand. “Lily,” he said, in his deep enveloping voice. He told me that Ruth was supposed to have met him at the Pill Hill Café for lunch, but she never showed up. I told him that Dr. B. had fired her, for no reason. She probably had completely forgotten lunch, had gone home. Or shopping, maybe.

  Ephraim continued to stand there.

  “She can find much better jobs. I’m the office manager, and of course I’ll give her a good recommendation. I’ll really miss her.”

  He stood there, looking at me.

  “And she will miss you.” He leaned in the little window above my desk.

  “This is for the best, my dear. I want you to know that I understand. Believe me, I feel for you.”

  “What?”

  “There are many things I don’t share with her as you do. Literature, Buddhism, the opera. Ruth is a very easy woman to love.”

  “What are you saying?”

  He held my hand then, looked deep into my eyes as his soft brown ones filled with tears.

  “I miss my wife. Please, Lily. Let her go.”

  Tears began to slide down my cheeks. I felt really sad. Our hands were a warm wet little pile on the ledge.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “Ruth loves only you, Ephraim.”

  Let Me See You Smile

  It’s true, the grave is more powerful than a lover’s eyes. An open grave, with all its magnets. And I say this to you, you who when you smile make me think of the beginning of the world.

  —Vicente Huidobro, Altazor

  Jesse threw me for a loop. And I take pride in my ability to size people up. Before I joined Grillig’s firm, I was a public defender for so long I had learned to assess a client or a juror almost at first glance.

  I was unprepared too because my secretary didn’t announce him over the intercom and he had no appointment. Elena just led him into my office.

  “Jesse is here to see you, Mr. Cohen.”

  Elena introduced him with an air of importance, using only his first name. He was so handsome, entered the room with such authority, I thought he must be some one-name rock star I hadn’t heard of.

  He wore cowboy boots and black jeans, a black silk shirt. He had long hair, a strong craggy face. About thirty was my first guess, but when he shook my hand there was an indescribable sweetness in his smile, an openness in his hazel eyes that was innocent and childlike. His raspy low voice confused me even more. He spoke as if he were explaining patiently to a young inexperienced person. Me.

  He said he had inherited ten thousand dollars and wanted to use it to hire me. The woman he lived with was in trouble, he said, and she was going to trial in two months. Ten counts against her.

  I hated to tell him how far his money would go with me.

  “Doesn’t she have a court-appointed attorney?” I asked.

  “She did, but the asshole quit. He thought she was guilty and a bad person, a pervert.”

  “What makes you think I won’t feel the same way?” I asked.

  “You won’t. She says you are the best civil liberties lawyer in town. The deal is she doesn’t know I’m here. I want you to let her think you’re volunteering to do this. For the principle of the thing. This is my only condition.”

  I tried to interrupt here, to say, “Forget it, son.” Tell him firmly that I wasn’t going to do it. No way could he afford me. I didn’t want to touch this case. I couldn’t believe this poor kid was willing to give all his money away. I already hated the woman. Damn right she was guilty and a bad person!

  He said that the problem was the police report, which the judge and jury would read. They would preconvict her because it was distorted and full of lies. He thought I could get her off by showing that his arrest was false, that the report of hers was libelous, the cop she hit was brutal, the arresting officer was psychotic, evidence had definitely been planted. He was convinced that I could discover that they had made other false arrests and had histories of brutality.

  He had more to say about how I should handle this case. I can’t explain why I didn’t blow up, tell him to get lost. He argued passionately and well. He should have been a lawyer.

  I didn’t just like him. I even began to see that spending his entire inheritance was a necessary rite of passage. A heroic, noble gesture.

  It was as if Jesse were from another age, another planet. He even said at some point that the woman called him “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” This made me feel better about her somehow.

  I told Elena to cancel a meeting and an appointment. He spoke all morning, simply and clearly, about their relationship, about her arrest.

  I am a defense attorney. I’m cynical. I am a material person, a greedy man. I told him I would take the cas
e for nothing.

  “No. Thank you,” he said. “Just please tell her that you’re doing it for no charge. But it’s my fault she got into this trouble and I want to pay for it. What will it be? Five thousand? More?”

  “Two thousand,” I said.

  “I know that’s too low. How about three?”

  “Deal,” I said.

  He took off one of his boots and counted off thirty warm hundred-dollar bills, fanned them out on my desk like cards. We shook hands.

  “Thanks for doing this, Mr. Cohen.”

  “Sure. Call me Jon.”

  He settled back down and filled me in.

  He and his friend Joe were dropouts, had run away from New Mexico last year. Jesse played the guitar, wanted to play in San Francisco. On his eighteenth birthday he was to inherit money from an old woman in Nebraska (another heartbreaking story). He had planned to go to London, where he had been asked to join a band. An English group had played in Albuquerque, liked his songs and guitar playing. He and Joe had no place to stay when they got to the Bay Area, so he looked up Ben, who had been his best friend in junior high. Ben’s mother didn’t know they were runaways. She said it was okay for them to stay awhile in the garage. Later she found out and called their parents, calmed the parents down, told them they were doing fine.

  It had all worked out. He and Joe did yard work and hauling, other odd jobs. Jesse played with other musicians, was writing songs. They got along great with Ben and with his mother, Carlotta. She appreciated how much time Jesse spent with her youngest kid Saul, taking him to ball games, fishing, climbing at Tilden. She taught school and worked hard, was glad too for help with laundry and carrying groceries and dishes. Anyway, he said, it was a good arrangement for everybody.

  “I had met Maggie about three years before. They called her to our junior high in Albuquerque. Somebody had put acid in Ben’s milk at lunch. He freaked out, didn’t know what was happening. She came to get him. They let me and Joe go with her, in case he got violent. I thought she was going to take him to a hospital, but she drove us all down by the river. The four of us sat in the rushes, watching red-winged blackbirds, calming him down and actually helping him have a pretty cool trip. Maggie and I got along fine, talking about birds and the river. I usually don’t talk much but with her there is always a lot I need to say.”

  I turned a recorder on at this point.

  “So we stayed a month at their house in Berkeley, then another month. At night we’d all sit around the fire talking, telling jokes. Joe had a girlfriend by then and so did Ben so they’d go out. Ben was still a senior and he sold his jewelry and rock star photos on Telegraph, so I didn’t see him much. Weekends I’d go to the marina or the beach with Saul and Maggie.”

  “Excuse me. You said her name was Carlotta. Who’s Maggie?”

  “I call her Maggie. At nights she’d grade papers and I’d play my guitar. We talked all night sometimes, our whole life stories, laughing, crying. She and I are both alcoholics, which is bad if you look at it one way, but good if you look at how it helped us say things to each other that we had never told anybody before. Our childhoods were scary and bad in exactly the same way, but like negatives of each other’s. When we got together her kids freaked out, her friends said it was sick, incestuous. We are incestuous but in a weird way. It’s like we are twins. The same person. She writes stories. She does the same thing in her stories that I do in my music. Anyway, every day we knew each other more deeply, so that when we finally ended up in bed it was as if we had already been inside each other. We were lovers for two months before I was supposed to leave. The idea was to get my money in Albuquerque on December 28, when I turned eighteen, and then go to London. She was making me go, said I needed the experience and we needed to split.

  “I didn’t want to go to London. I may be young but I know what she and I have together is galaxies beyond regular people. We know each other in our souls, all the bad and the good. We have a kindness to each other.”

  He told me then the story of going to the airport with her and Joe. Joe’s belt knife and zippers had turned on the alarm at security, all three were strip-searched and Jesse missed the plane. He was hollering about his guitar and music being on the plane, got put into handcuffs, was being beaten by the police when Maggie came in.

  “We all got arrested. It’s in the report,” he said. “The newspaper headline was ‘Lutheran Schoolteacher, Hell’s Angels in Airport Brawl.’”

  “Are you a Hell’s Angel?”

  “Of course not. But the report says I am. Joe looks like one, wishes he was. He must have bought ten copies of that paper. Anyway, she and Joe went to jail in Redwood City. I spent a night in juvenile hall and then they sent me to New Mexico. Maggie phoned me on my birthday and told me everything was fine. She didn’t say a word about any trial, and she didn’t tell me she had been evicted and fired, that her ex-husband was taking her kids to Mexico. But Joe did, even though she told him not to. So I came back here.”

  “How did she feel about that?”

  “She was furious. Said I had to leave and go to London. That I needed to learn and to grow. And she was believing all the shit about her being bad because I was seventeen when we got together. I seduced her. Nobody seems to get that part, except her. I’m not your typical teenager.”

  “True,” I said.

  “But anyway, we are together now. She agreed not to decide anything until after the trial. Not to look for a job or a place. What I’m hoping is by that time she’ll go away with me.”

  He handed me the police report. “The best thing is for you to read this and then we’ll talk. Come over for dinner. Friday okay? After you’ve read this. Maybe you can find out something about the cop. Both cops. Come early,” he said, “when you get off work. We live just down the street.”

  Nothing applied anymore. I couldn’t say it was inappropriate. That I had plans. That my wife might mind.

  “Sure, I’ll be there at six.” The address he gave me was one of the worst blocks in town.

  * * *

  It was a beautiful Christmas. Sweet presents for each other, a great dinner. Keith invited Karen, one of my students. I guess it’s childish, but it made me feel good for him to see how much she looked up to me. Ben’s girlfriend Megan made mince pies. Both of them helped me with dinner and it was fun. Our friend Larry came. Big fire, nice old-fashioned day.

  Nathan and Keith were so glad Jesse was leaving that they were really nice to him, even gave him presents. Jesse had made gifts for everyone. It was warm and festive, except then in the kitchen Jesse whispered, “Hey, Maggie, whatcha gonna do when I’m gone?” and I thought my heart would break. He gave me a ring with a star and a moon. By coincidence we each gave the other a silver flask. We thought it was great. Nathan said, “Ma, that’s so disgusting,” but I didn’t hear him then.

  Jesse’s plane was leaving at six. Joe wanted to come along. I drove us to the airport in the rain. “The Joker” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” on the radio. Joe was sipping from a can of beer and Jesse and I from a pint of Beam. I never gave it a thought, that I was contributing to their delinquency. They were drinking when I met them. They bought liquor, never got carded. The truth was I was so much in denial about my own drinking I wasn’t likely to worry about theirs.

  When we got inside the airport, Jesse stopped and said, “Christ. You two will never find the car.” We laughed, not realizing it would be true.

  We weren’t exactly drunk, but we were high and excited. I was trying not to show how desperate I was about him leaving.

  I realize now how much attention we must have attracted. All of us very tall. Joe, a dark Laguna Indian with long black braids, in motorcycle leather, a knife on his belt. Big boots, zippers and chains. Jesse in black, with his duffel bag and guitar. Jesse. He was otherworldly. I couldn’t even glance up at him, his jaw, his teeth, his golden eyes, flowing long hair. I would weep if I looked at him. I was dressed up for Christmas in a black velvet pantsuit, Navajo
jewelry. Whatever it was, the combination of us, plus all the buzzers that Joe’s metal set off going through security … they saw us as a security risk, took us into separate rooms and searched us. They went through my underwear, my purse, ran their fingers through my hair, between my toes. Everywhere. When I got out of there I couldn’t see Jesse, so I ran to the departure gate. Jesse’s flight had left. He was yelling at the agent that his guitar was on the plane, his music was on the plane. I had to go to the bathroom. When I came out no one was at the ticket counter. The plane had gone. I asked somebody if the tall young man in black had made the plane. The man nodded toward a door with no sign on it. I went in.

  The room was full of security guards and city police. It was sharp with the smell of sweat. Two guards were restraining Joe, who was handcuffed. Two policemen held Jesse and another was beating him on the head with a foot-long flashlight. A sheet of blood covered Jesse’s face and soaked his shirt. He was screaming with pain. I walked completely unnoticed across the room. All of them were watching the policeman beating Jesse, as if they were looking at a fight on TV. I grabbed the flashlight and hit the cop on the head with it. He fell with a thud. “Oh Jesus, he’s dead,” another one said.

  Jesse and I were handcuffed and then taken through the airport and down to a small police station in the basement. We sat next to each other, our hands fastened behind us to the chairs. Jesse’s eyes were stuck shut with blood. He couldn’t see and the wound on his scalp continued to bleed. I begged them to clean it or bandage it. To wash his eyes. They’ll clean you up at Redwood City Jail, the guard said.

  “Fuck, Randy, the dude’s a juvenile! Somebody’s got to take him over the bridge!”

  “A juvenile? This bitch is in big trouble. I ain’t taking him. My shift’s almost over.”

  He came over to me. “You know the peace officer you hit? They have him in Intensive Care. He might die.”

  “Please. Could you wash his eyes?”

  “Fuck his eyes.”

  “Lean down a little, Jesse.”

  I licked the blood off of his eyes. It took a long time; the blood was thick and caked, stuck in his lashes. I had to keep spitting. With the rust around them his eyes glowed a honey amber.