A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

by Lucia Berlin

“Ma, I can’t believe you are doing this. You never even go out with anybody, and here you are spending a week with some stranger. He could be an axe murderer for all you know.”

  Maria’s son Nick was taking her to the Oakland airport. Lord, why hadn’t she taken a cab? Her sons, all grown now, could be worse than parents, more judgmental, more old-fashioned when it came to her.

  “I haven’t met him, but he’s not exactly a stranger. He liked my poetry, asked me to translate his book to Spanish. We have written and spoken on the phone for years. We have a lot in common. He raised his four sons alone, too. I garden; he has a farm. I’m flattered that he invited me … I don’t think he sees many people.”

  Maria had asked an old friend in Austin about Dixon. A genius. Total eccentric, Ingeborg had said. Never socializes. Instead of a briefcase he has a gunny sack. His students either idolize him or hate him. He’s in his late forties, quite attractive. Let me know everything …

  “That was the weirdest book I ever read,” Nick said, “not that I could read it. Admit it … could you? Enjoy it, I mean.”

  “The language was great. Clear and simple. Nice to translate. It is philosophy and linguistics, just very abstract.”

  “I can’t imagine you doing this … having some kind of a fling … in Texas.”

  “That’s what’s bothering you. The idea that your mother might have sex, or that somebody in her fifties might. Anyway he didn’t say, ‘Let’s have a fling.’ He said, ‘Why not come to my farm for a week? The bluebonnets have just begun to bloom. I can show you notes for my new book. We can fish, go for walks in the woods.’ Give me a break, Nick. I work in a county hospital, in Oakland. How do you think a walk in the woods sounds to me? Bluebonnets? I may as well be going to heaven.”

  They pulled up in front of United and Nick got her bag from the trunk. He hugged her, kissed her cheek. “Sorry I gave you a hard time. Enjoy your trip, Ma. Hey, maybe you can get to a Rangers game.”

  Snow on the Rocky Mountains. Maria read, listened to music, tried not to think. Of course, in the back of her mind, there was the idea of an affair.

  She hadn’t taken off her clothes since she had stopped drinking, the idea was terrifying. Well, he sounded pretty stuffy himself, maybe he felt the same way. Take it a day at a time. Practice just being with a man, for Lord’s sake, enjoy the visit. You’re going to Texas.

  The parking lot smelled like Texas. Caliche dust and oleander. He tossed her bag into the bed of an old Dodge pickup truck with dog scratches on the doors. “You know ‘Tennessee Border’?” Maria asked. “Sure do.” They sang it. “… Picked her up in a pickup truck and she broke that heart of mine.” Dixon was tall, lean, good laugh lines. Squint lines around open gray eyes. He was entirely at ease, asked her one personal question after another in a nasal drawl just like her uncle John’s. How did she know Texas, that old song? Why did she get divorced? What were her sons like? Why didn’t she drink? Why was she an alcoholic? Why did she translate other people’s work? The questions were embarrassing, buffeting, but soothing, the attention, like a massage.

  He stopped at a fish market. Stay here, be right back. Then the freeway and hot gusts of air. Down onto a ribbon of macadam road where they never saw another car. One slow red tractor. Windmills, Hereford cattle knee deep in Indian paintbrush. In the small town of Brewster, Dixon parked across from the town square. Haircut. She followed him past the barber’s pole into a one-chair barbershop, sat listening while he and the old man cutting his hair discussed the heat, the rains, fishing, Jesse Jackson running for president, several deaths and a marriage. Dixon had just grinned at her when she asked if her bag would be all right in the back of the truck. She looked out the window at downtown Brewster. It was early afternoon and no one was walking in the streets. Two old men sat on the courthouse steps like extras in a southern movie, chewing tobacco, spitting.

  The absence of noise was what was so evocative of her childhood, of another era. No sirens, no traffic, no radios. A horsefly buzzed against the window, snip of scissors, the rhythm of the two men’s voices, an electric fan with dirty ribbons flying rustled old magazines. The barber ignored her, not out of rudeness but from courtesy.

  Dixon said “much obliged” when he left. As they walked across the square to the grocery store she told him about her Texan grandma, Mamie. Once an old woman had stopped by to visit. Mamie had served tea in a pot with a sugar bowl and creamer, little sandwiches, cookies and cut-up pieces of cake. “Mercy, Mamie, you shouldn’t go to so much trouble.” “Oh, yes,” Mamie had said, “one always should.”

  They put the groceries in the back of the truck and drove to the feed store, where Dixon got mash and chicken feed, two bales of hay, a dozen baby chicks. He smiled at her when he caught her staring at him and two farmers talking about alfalfa.

  “What would you be doing now, in Oakland?” he asked when they got in the truck. Today was pediatric clinic. Crack babies, gunshot wounds, AIDS babies. Hernias and tumors, but mostly wounds of the city’s desperate and angry poor.

  They were soon out of the town and on a narrow dirt road. The baby chicks chirped in the box on the floor.

  “This is what I wanted you to see,” he said, “the road to my place this time of year.”

  They drove along the empty road over gently rolling hills, fragrant and lush with flowers, pink, blue, magenta, red. Bursts of yellow and lavender. The hot, perfumed air enveloped the cab. Huge thunderclouds had formed and the light grew yellow, giving miles of flowers an iridescent luminosity. Larks and meadowlarks, red-winged blackbirds darted above the ditches by the road; the singing of the birds rose above the sound of the truck. Maria leaned out the window, her damp head resting on her arms. It was only April, but the heavy Texan heat suffused her, the perfume of the flowers lulled like a drug.

  An old tin-roofed farmhouse with a rocking chair on the porch, a dozen or so kittens of different ages. They put the groceries away in a kitchen with fine Sarouk rugs in front of the sink and stove, another burned by sparks from a woodstove. Two leather chairs. Bookcases lined the walls, with books two-deep. A massive oak table covered with books. Columns of books were stacked on the floor. The old, rippled glass windows looked out onto a field of rich green pasture where kid goats suckled their mothers. Dixon put the food into the refrigerator, put the chicks in a larger box on the floor, with a lightbulb in it, even though it was so warm. His dog had just died, he said. And then for the first time seemed self-conscious. Need to water, he said, and she followed him past the chicken sheds and barns to a large field planted with corn, tomatoes, beans, squash, and other vegetables. She sat on the fence while he opened sluice gates to start the water into the furrows. A chestnut mare and colt galloped in the field of bluebonnets beyond.

  It was late afternoon when they fed the animals by the barn, where in a dark corner dripped cloth bags filled with cheese, and more cats scampered along the rafters, indifferent to the birds that flitted in and out of the upper windows by the lofts. An old white mule, Homer, lumbered up when he heard the sound of the bucket. Lie down with me, Dixon said. But they’ll step on us. No, just lie down. A circle of goats blocked out the sun, their long-lashed eyes gazing down at her. Nuzzle of Homer’s velvety lips on Maria’s cheeks. The mare and the colt snorted, spraying hot breaths as they checked her out.

  The other rooms in the farmhouse were not like the cluttered kitchen at all. One room with wooden plank floors, nothing in it but a Steinway grand. Dixon’s study, which was bare except for four large wooden tables covered with five-by-eight white cards. Each one of them had a paragraph or a sentence on it. She saw that he shuffled them around, the way other people move things in a computer. Don’t look at those now, he said.

  His living room and bedroom were one large room with tall windows on two sides. Large lush paintings on the other two walls. Maria was surprised that they were done by Dixon. He was so quiet. The paintings were bold, lavish. He had painted a mural on his corduroy couch, figures, sitting there
. A brass bed with an old patchwork quilt, exquisite chests and desks and tables, early American antiques that had belonged to his father. The floor in this room was painted glossy white under more priceless Persian rugs. Be sure and take off your shoes, he said.

  Her room was a sun porch along the back of the house, with screens on three sides, of a meshed plastic that blurred the pink and green flowers, the new green of the trees, the flash of a cardinal. It was like the basement of L’Orangerie where you sit surrounded by Monet’s water lilies. He was filling the bathtub for her in the next room. You’ll probably want to lie down awhile. I’ve got some more chores to do.

  Clean, tired, she lay surrounded by the soft colors that blurred when the rain began and the wind swirled the leaves in the trees. Rain on a tin roof. Just as she fell asleep Dixon came and lay down beside her, lay next to her until she woke and they made love, simple as that.

  Dixon built a fire in the iron stove and she sat by it while he made crab gumbo. He cooked on a hot plate but had a dishwasher. They ate on the porch by lantern light while the rain abated and when the clouds cleared turned off the lantern to look at the stars.

  They fed the animals at the same time each day but the rest of the days and nights got turned around. They stayed in bed all day, had breakfast when it got dark, walked in the woods by the light of the moon. They watched Mr. Lucky with Cary Grant at three in the morning. Lazy in the hot sun they rocked in the rowboat on the pond, fishing, reading John Donne, William Blake. They lay in the damp grass, watching the chickens, talking about their childhoods, their children. They watched Nolan Ryan shut out the A’s, slept in sleeping bags by a lake hours away through the brush. They made love in the claw-foot tub, in the rowboat, in the woods, but mostly in the shimmering green of the sun porch when it rained.

  What was love? Maria asked herself, watching the clean lines of his face as he slept. What’s to keep the two of us from doing it, loving.

  They both admitted how rarely they spoke with anyone, laughed at themselves for how much they had to say now, how they interrupted each other, yes, but. It was hard when he talked about his new book or referred to Heidegger and Wittgenstein, Derrida, Chomsky and others whose names she didn’t even recognize.

  “I’m sorry. I’m a poet. I deal with the specific. I am lost with the abstract. I simply don’t have the background to discuss this with you.”

  Dixon was furious. “How the devil did you translate my other book? I know you did a good job by the response it got. Did you read the damn thing?”

  “I did do a good job. I didn’t distort a word. Someone could translate my poems perfectly but still think they were personal and trivial. I didn’t … grasp … the philosophical implications in the book.”

  “Then this visit is a farce. My books are everything I am. It is pointless for us to discuss anything at all.”

  Maria started to feel hurt and angry and to let him go out the door alone. But she followed him, sat down beside him on the porch step. “It’s not pointless. And I’m learning about who you are.” Dixon held her then, kissed her, gingerly.

  While he had been a student he had lived in a cabin a few acres away, in the woods. An old man had lived in this house and Dixon had done errands for him, brought him food and supplies from town. When the old man died he left the house and ten acres to Dixon, the rest of his land to the state for a bird sanctuary. They hiked the next morning to his old cabin. He had even had to carry in his water, he said. It was the best period of his life.

  The wooden cabin was in a grove of cottonwood. There had been no path to it, and there seemed to be no landmarks at all in the scrub oak and mesquite. As they got close to it Dixon cried out, as if in pain.

  Someone, kids probably, had shot out all the windows of the cabin, hacked up the inside with axes, spray-painted obscenities on the bare pine walls. It was hard to imagine anyone coming so far into the wilderness to do this. It looks like Oakland, Maria said. Dixon glared at her, turned around and started walking back through the trees. She kept him in sight but could not keep up with him. It was eerily quiet. Every once in a while there would be an enormous Brahmin bull in the shade of a tree. Just standing there, unblinking, stolid, silent.

  Dixon didn’t speak on the drive home. Green grasshoppers clicked against the windshield. “I’m sorry, about what happened to your house,” she said and when he didn’t answer she said, “I do that too, when I feel pain. Crawl under the house like a sick cat.” He still said nothing. When they pulled up outside his house he reached over and opened her door. The engine was still running. “I’m going to go get my mail. Back in a while. Maybe you could read some of my book.”

  She knew that by book he meant the hundreds of cards on the tables. Why had he asked her to do that now? Maybe it was because he couldn’t talk. She did that sometimes. When she wanted to tell someone how she felt it was too hard, so she would show them a poem. Usually they didn’t understand what she had intended.

  With a sick feeling she went into the house. It would be fine to live where you didn’t even close your doors. She started into Dixon’s living room to put on some music, but changed her mind, went into the room with the cards. She sat on a stool that she moved from table to table as she read and reread the sentences on the cards.

  “You have no idea what they say, do you?” He had come in silently, was standing behind her as she leaned over the table. She had not touched any of the cards.

  He began to move them around the table, frantically, like someone playing that game where you line up numbers correctly. Maria left and went out on the porch.

  “I asked you not to walk on that floor with shoes on.”

  “What floor? What are you talking about?”

  “The white floor.”

  “I haven’t been near that room. You are crazy.”

  “Don’t lie to me. They are your footprints.”

  “Oh, sorry. I did start to go in there. I couldn’t have taken more than two steps.”

  “Exactly. Two.”

  “Thank God I’m going home in the morning. I’m going for a walk right now.”

  Maria walked down the path toward the pond, got into the green rowboat and shoved herself away from the bank. She laughed at herself when the dragonflies reminded her of Oakland police helicopters.

  Dixon strode down the path to the pond, walked out into the water, and pulled himself into the boat. He kissed her, pinned her down into the watery bed of the boat while he entered her. They clashed wildly into each other and the boat bobbed and spun until it finally moored itself in the reeds. They lay there, rocking in the hot sun. She wondered if so much passion had come from simple rage or from a sense of loss. They made love wordlessly most of the night, in the sun porch to the sound of the rain. Before the rain they had heard the cry of a coyote, the squawk of the chickens as they roosted in the trees.

  They rode to the airport in silence, past the miles of bluebonnets and primrose. Just drop me off, she said, not that much time.

  Maria took a cab home from the airport to her high-rise apartment in Oakland. Hello to the security guard, check the mail. The elevator was empty, as were the halls during the day. She put down her suitcase inside her door and turned on the air. She took off her shoes, as everyone did when they walked on her carpet. She went into the bedroom and lay down on her own bed.

  La Vie en Rose

  The two girls lie facedown upon towels that say GRAN HOTEL PUCÓN. The sand is black and fine; the water in the lake is green. Deeper sweet green the pines that edge the lake. Villarica volcano towers white above the lake and the trees, the hotel, the village of Pucón. Spumes of smoke rise from the volcano’s cone and vanish into the clear blue of the sky. Blue beach cabanas. Gerda’s cap of red hair, a yellow beach ball, the red sashes of huasos cantering among the trees.

  Once in a while one of Gerda’s or Claire’s tan legs waves languidly in the air, shaking off sand, a fly. Sometimes their young bodies quiver with the helpless giggle of adole
scent girls.

  “And the look on Conchi’s face! All she could think of to say was ‘Ojala.’ What nerve!”

  Gerda’s laugh is a short Germanic bark. Claire’s is high, rippling.

  “She won’t admit how silly she was either.”

  Claire sits up to put oil on her face. Her blue eyes scan the beach. Nada. The two handsome men haven’t reappeared.

  “There she is … the Anna Karenina woman…”

  On a red-and-white canvas chair beneath the pines.

  The melancholy Russian lady in a panama hat, with a white silk parasol.

  Gerda groans. “Oh, she’s lovely. Her nose. Gray flannel in summer. And she looks so miserable. She must have a lover.”

  “I’m going to cut my hair like hers.”

  “On you it would look like you put a bowl on your head. She just has style.”

  “She’s the only one here who does. All these tacky Argentines and Americans. There don’t seem to be any Chileans at all, not even on the staff. The whole village was speaking German.”

  “When I wake up I think at first that I’m a little girl in Germany or Switzerland. I can hear the maids whispering in the hall, singing from the kitchen.”

  “Nobody’s smiling but those Americans, not even those children, so serious with their pails.”

  “Only Americans smile all the time. You’re speaking in Spanish but your silly grin gives you away. Your father laughs all the time too. The bottom just dropped out of the copper market, ha-ha.”

  “Your father laughs a lot too.”

  “Only when something is stupid. Look at him. He must have swum to that raft a hundred times this morning.”

  Gerda and Claire always go places with one of their fathers. To movies and horse races with Mr. Thompson, to the symphony or to play golf with Herr von Dessaur. In contrast, their Chilean friends are invariably with mothers and aunts, grandmothers and sisters.

  Gerda’s mother was killed in Germany during the war; her stepmother is a physician, rarely at home. Claire’s mother drinks, is in bed or sanatoriums most of the time. After school the two friends go home to tea, to read or study. Their friendship began over books, in their empty houses.