A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

by Lucia Berlin

  “Hey, Maggie, let me see your smile.”

  We kissed. The guard pulled my head away and slapped me. “Filthy bitch!” he said. Just then there was a lot of yelling and Joe got thrown in with us. They had arrested him for using obscene language in front of women and children. He had been angry when they wouldn’t tell him anything about us.

  “This one is old enough for Redwood City.”

  Since his arms were cuffed behind him, he couldn’t hug us, so he kissed us both. Far as I remember he had never kissed either of us on the lips before. He said later it was because our mouths were so bloody it made him feel sad. The police called me a pervert again, seducing young boys.

  I was disgusted by then. I didn’t get it yet, didn’t understand the way everyone would see me. I had no idea that my charges were adding up. One of the policemen read them to me from the counter across the room. “Drunk in public, interfering with arrest, assaulting a police officer, assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, resisting arrest. Lewd and lascivious behavior, sexual acts upon a minor (licking his eyes), contributing to the delinquency of minors, possession of marijuana.”

  “Hey, no way!” Joe said.

  “Don’t say anything,” Jesse whispered. “This will work for us. Must have been planted. We had all just been searched, right?”

  “Shit yeah,” Joe said. “Plus we would have smoked it if we had it.”

  They took Jesse away. They put Joe and me in the back of a squad car. We drove miles and miles to the Redwood City jail. All I could think of was that Jesse was gone. I figured they would send him to Albuquerque and then he’d go to London.

  Two nasty butch cops gave me a vaginal and rectal exam, a cold shower. They washed my hair with lye soap, getting it in my eyes. They left me without a towel or a comb. All they gave me to wear was a short short gown and some tennis shoes. I had a black eye and a swollen lip, from when they hit me after they took the flashlight away. The cop who took me downstairs had kept twisting the cuffs so there were open bloody cuts on both wrists, like stupid suicides.

  They didn’t let me have my cigarettes. The two whores and one wino with me let me have their last wet drags at least. Nobody slept or spoke. I shook all night from cold, from needing a drink.

  In the morning we went in a bus to the courthouse. I talked through a window, by phone, to a fat red lawyer who read the report to me. The report was distorted and false all the way through.

  “Advised of three suspicious characters in airport lobby. Woman with two Hell’s Angels, one Indian. All armed and potentially dangerous.” I kept telling him that things said in the report were total lies. The lawyer ignored me, just kept asking me if I was fucking the kid.

  “Yes!” I finally said. “But that’s just about the only thing I’m not charged with.”

  “You would have been if I had written it. Statutory rape.”

  I was so tired I got the giggles, which made him madder. Statutory rape. I get visions of Pygmalion or some Italian raping the Pietà.

  “You’re a sicko,” he said. “You are charged with performing sexual acts upon a minor in public.”

  I told him I was trying to get the blood off Jesse’s eyes so he could see.

  “You actually licked it off?” he sneered.

  I can imagine what hell prison must be. I could really understand how prisoners just learn to be worse people. I wanted to kill him. I asked him what was going to happen. He said I’d be arraigned and a court date would be set. I’d come in, plead innocent, hope that when we went to court we got a judge who was halfway lenient. Getting a jury in this town is a problem too. Far-right, religious people out here, hard on drugs, sex crimes. Hell’s Angels were Satan to them and marijuana, forget it.

  “I didn’t have marijuana,” I said. “The cop put it there.”

  “Sure he did. To thank you for sucking his dick?”

  “So, are you going to defend me or prosecute me?”

  “I’m your appointed defense lawyer. See you in court.”

  Joe was in court too, chained to a string of other men in orange. He didn’t look at me. I was black and blue, my hair curled wild around my face and the shift barely covered my underpants. Later Joe actually admitted I looked so sleazy he had pretended he didn’t know me. We both got assigned court dates in January. When his case got to court the judge just laughed and dropped the charges.

  I had called home. It was hard enough telling Ben where I was. I was too ashamed to ask anyone to post bail, so I waited another day for them to let me out on my own recognizance. Stupidly I got that by having them call the principal where I taught. She was a woman who liked me, respected me. I still had no idea how people were going to judge me. It baffles me now how blind I was, but now I’m sober.

  The police told me that Joe needed me to put up bond for him, so when I got out I went to a bondsman. It must not have been much, since I wrote him a check.

  We figured out how to get to the airport. But it’s like seeing Mount Everest. It just looked close. We walked in the rain, freezing cold, miles and miles. It took us most of the day. We laughed a lot, even after we tried to take a shortcut through a dog kennel. Climbing a fence with Dobermans barking and snarling beneath us. Abbott and Costello. No one would pick us up when we got to the freeway. Not true, some guy in a truck finally did, but we were almost there, waved him on.

  This was the worst part of the entire situation. I’m serious. Trying to find the damn car. We went all the way around every vast level, up and up and then back down around and around then back up around and around until we both were crying. Just bawling away from being so tired and hungry and cold. An elderly black man saw us, and we didn’t scare him even though we were soaked through and crying like fools. He didn’t even mind us getting mud and water in his spotless old Hudson car. He drove up and down and around over and over saying that the good Lord would help us, surely. And when we found the car we all said, “Praise the Lord.” When we got out he said to us, “God bless you.” “God bless you and thank you,” Joe and I said in unison, like a response in church.

  “That dude is a fucking angel.”

  “He really is one,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I just said. A for-real angel.”

  There was more than half a pint of Jim Beam in the glove compartment. We sat there with the heater on and the windows steamed up, eating Cheerios and croutons from the bag for feeding ducks and finishing the bottle of whiskey.

  “I’ll admit it,” he said. “Nothing ever tasted so good.”

  We were quiet all the way home in the rain. He drove. I kept wiping the steam off the windows. I asked him not to tell my kids or Jesse about all the charges or about the cop. It was a disturbing-the-peace problem, okay? Cool, he said. We didn’t speak after that. I didn’t feel guilty or ashamed, didn’t worry about the trouble I was in or what I was going to do. I thought about Jesse being gone.

  * * *

  I tried to call Cheryl before I went to Jesse’s, but she hung up on me, tried again but the machine was on. I was going to drive but worried about parking in their neighborhood. I was worried about walking in their neighborhood too. I guess it says something that I left my Porsche in the office garage, walked the seven or eight blocks to their apartment.

  The downstairs door was graffitied plywood behind metal bars. They buzzed me into a dusty marble foyer, lit from a star-shaped skylight four stories up. It was still a beautiful tile-and-marble building, with a sweep of stairs, faded mirrors in art deco frames. Someone slept against an urn; figures with their faces averted passed me on the stairs, all vaguely familiar from the courthouse or jail.

  By the time I got to their apartment I was out of breath, sickened by smells of urine, cheap wine, stale oil, dust. Carlotta opened the door. “Come in,” she smiled. I stepped into their technicolor world that smelled of corn bread and red chili, limes and cilantro and her perfume. The room had high ceilings, tall windows. There were oriental rugs on the polished wood f
loors. Huge ferns, banana plants, birds of paradise. The only furniture in this room was a bed with red satin sheets. Outside in the late sun was the golden dome of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, a grove of tall, old palm trees, the curve of the BART train. The view was like a vista in Tangiers. She let me absorb this for a minute, then she shook my hand.

  “Thank you for helping us, Mr. Cohen. Eventually I’ll be able to pay you.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’m glad to do it,” I said, “especially now that I’ve read the report. It’s an obvious distortion.”

  Carlotta was tall and tanned, in a soft white jersey dress. She looked around thirty, had what my mother used to call bearing. She was even more of a surprise than the apartment, than Jesse, well maybe not Jesse. I could see how the combination of them would be disturbing. I kept staring at her. She was a lovely woman. I don’t mean pretty, although she was. Gracious. If we did end up going to trial, she would look terrific in court.

  This would turn out to be only my first visit. I came back every Friday after that, walking, no, rushing from my office to their place. It was as if I had taken some drink, like Alice, or was in a Woody Allen movie. Not where the actor climbs down from the screen. I climbed up into it.

  That first evening she led me into the other room, which had a fine Bokhara carpet, some saddlebags, a table set for three, with flowers and candles. “Angie” was playing on the stereo. These tall windows had bamboo blinds and the slight wind made shadows like banners on the walls.

  Jesse called hello from the kitchen, came out to shake my hand. He was in jeans and a white T-shirt. They both glowed with color, had been at the estuary all day.

  “How do you like our place? I painted it. Check out the kitchen. Baby-shit yellow, nice, no?”

  “It is fantastic, this apartment!”

  “And you like her. I knew you would.” He handed me a gin and tonic.

  “How did you…?”

  “I asked your secretary. I’m the cook tonight. You probably have questions to ask Maggie while I finish up.”

  She led me to the “terrace,” a space outside the windows, above the fire escape, big enough for two milk crates. I did have dozens of questions. The report said she claimed to be a teacher. She told me about losing her job at a Lutheran high school, about being evicted. She was frank. She said the neighbors had been complaining for a long time, because there were so many of them living there, because of loud music. This had just been the last straw. She was glad her ex-husband took the three youngest to Mexico.

  “I’m completely mixed up, messed up, right now,” she said. It was hard to believe her because of her beautiful calm voice.

  She briefly told me what happened at the airport, taking more blame for it than Jesse had given her. “As far as the charges, I am guilty of them, except the marijuana, they planted that. But the way they describe it is sick. Like Joe did kiss us both, but from friendship. I don’t have any sex ring with young boys. What was sick and wrong was how the cop was beating Jesse, and how others stood there watching it. Any normal person would have done what I did. Although, thank God, the cop didn’t die.”

  I asked her what she was going to do after the trial. She looked panicked, whispered what Jesse had told me in the office, that they had decided not to deal with it until the trial.

  “But I can get it together. Get myself together then.” She said she spoke Spanish, thought about applying at hospitals for jobs, or as a court translator. She had worked for almost a year on a trial in New Mexico, had good references. I knew the case, and the judge and lawyer she had worked with. Famous case … an addict who shot a narc five times in the back and got off with manslaughter. We talked about that brilliant defense for a while, and I told her where to write about court translating.

  Jesse came out with some guacamole and chips, a fresh drink for me, beers for them. She slid to the ground and he sat. She leaned back against his knees. He held her throat with one fine long-fingered hand, drank his beer with the other.

  I will never forget it, the way he held her throat. The two of them were never flirtatious or coy, never made erotic or even demonstrative gestures, but their closeness was electric. He held her throat. It wasn’t a possessive gesture; they were fused.

  “Of course, Maggie can get a dozen jobs. And she can find a house and her kids can all come home. Thing is they are better off without her. Sure they miss her and she misses them. She was a good mother. She raised them right, gave them character and values, a sense of who they are. They are confident and honest. They laugh a lot. Now they are with their daddy, who is very rich. He can send them to Andover and Harvard, where he went. Rest of the time they can sail and fish and scuba dive. If they come back to her, I’ll have to leave. And if I leave, she’ll drink. She won’t be able to stop and that will be a terrible thing.”

  “What will you do if you leave?”

  “Me? Die.”

  The setting sun was in her brilliant blue eyes. Tears filled her eyes, caught in the lashes and didn’t fall, reflected the green palms so that it looked like she was wearing turquoise goggles.

  “Don’t cry, Maggie,” he said. He tilted her head back and drank the tears.

  “How could you tell she was crying?” I asked.

  “He always knows,” she said. “At night, in the dark when I’m facing away from him, I can smile and he’ll say, ‘What’s so funny?’”

  “She’s the same. She can be out cold. Snoring. And I’ll grin. Her eyes will pop open and she’ll be smiling back at me.”

  We had dinner then. A fantastic meal. We talked about everything but the trial. I can’t remember how I got started on stories about my Russian grandmother, dozens of stories about her. I hadn’t laughed so hard in years. Taught them the word shonda. What a shonda!

  Carlotta cleared the table. The candles were halfway down. She came back with coffee and flan. As we were finishing, she said, “Jon, may I call you Counselor?”

  “God, no,” Jesse said. “That sounds like junior high. He’ll ask me where my anger comes from. Let’s call him Barrister. Barrister, have you given some thought to this lady’s plight?”

  “I have, my good man. Let me get my briefcase and I’ll show you just where we stand.”

  I said yes to a cognac. They both were drinking whiskey and water now. I was excited. I wanted to be matter-of-fact, but I was too pleased. I went through the document and compared it with a three-page list of untrue, misleading, libelous, or slanderous statements from the report. “Lewd,” “wanton behavior,” “lascivious manner,” “threatening,” “menacing,” “armed and dangerous.” Pages of statements that could prejudice a judge and jury against my client, which in fact had given me a distorted idea of her even after talking with Jesse.

  I had a copy from airport security saying that she and her clothing and bag had been thoroughly searched and no drugs or weapons had been found.

  “The best part, though, is that you were right, Jesse. Both these guys have long lists of serious violations. Suspensions for improper use of force, beating suspects. Two separate investigations for killing unarmed suspects. Many, many complaints of brutality, excessive force, false arrest, and manufacturing evidence. And this is only after a few days’ research! We do know that both these cops have had serious suspensions, were demoted, sent from beats in the city to South San Francisco. We will insist upon Internal Affairs investigations of the arresting officers, threaten to sue the San Francisco Police Department.”

  “So, let’s not just threaten them, let’s do it,” Jesse said.

  I would get to learn that drink gave him courage but it made her more fragile. She shook her head. “I couldn’t go through with it.”

  “Bad idea, Jesse,” I said. “But it is a good way to handle the case.”

  The court date wasn’t until the end of June. Although my aides continued to get more evidence against the policemen, there wasn’t much we needed to discuss. If the case wasn’t dismissed, then we’d have to
postpone the trial and, well, pray. But I still went over to the Telegraph apartment every Friday. It made my wife, Cheryl, furious and jealous. Except for handball games, this was the first time I ever went anywhere without her. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t come too. And I couldn’t explain, not even to myself. Once she even accused me of having an affair.

  It was like an affair. It was unpredictable and exciting. Fridays I would wait all day until I could go over there. I was in love with all of them. Sometimes Jesse, Joe, and Carlotta’s son Ben and I would play poker or pool. Jesse taught me to be a good poker player, and a good pool player. It made me feel childishly cool to go with them into downtown pool halls and not be afraid. Joe’s mere presence made us all safe anywhere.

  “He’s like having a pit bull, only cheaper to feed,” Jesse said.

  “He’s good for other things,” Ben said. “He can open bottles with his teeth. He’s the best laugher there is.” That was true. He rarely spoke, but caught humor immediately.

  Sometimes we walked with Ben in downtown Oakland while he took photographs. Carlotta got us to make frames with our hands, look at things as if through a lens. I told Ben it had changed my way of seeing.

  What Joe liked to do was to sneak into photographs. When the contacts were printed, there he’d be sitting on a stoop with some winos or looking lost in a doorway, arguing with a Chinese butcher about a duck.

  One Friday, Ben brought a Minolta, told me he’d sell it to me for fifty dollars. Sure. I was delighted. Later I noticed that he gave the money to Joe, which made me wonder.

  “Play with it before you get any film. Just walk around at first, looking through it. Half the time I don’t have any film in my camera.”

  The first photographs I took were at a store only a few blocks from my office. It sells one-shoes for a dollar each. One side of the room has piles of old left shoes, the right side has right shoes. Old men. Poor young men. The old shoe seller in a rocking chair putting the money in a Quaker Oats box.