A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

by Lucia Berlin

Jon arrived the next night, then Joe and Ben. Ben was pleased that we weren’t drinking. We hadn’t decided not to, just hadn’t. Of course they all asked about the tulips.

  “Place needed some fucking color,” Jesse said.

  We decided to get Flint’s Barbeque and go to the Berkeley Marina.

  “I wish we could take them to our boat,” I said.

  “I have a boat,” Jon said. “Let’s go out on my boat.”

  His boat was smaller than La Cigale, but it was still nice. We went out, using the engine, went all around the bay in the sunset. It was beautiful, the cities, the bridge, the spray. We went back to the pier and had dinner on deck. Solly walked past, looked scared when he saw us. We introduced him to Jon, told him he had taken us out on the water.

  Solly grinned, “Boy, you two must have loved that. A boat ride!”

  Joe and Ben were laughing. They had loved it, being out in the bay, the smell and freedom of it. They were talking about getting a boat and living on it. Planning it all out.

  “What’s the matter with you guys?” Joe asked us. It was true. The three of us were quiet, just sitting there.

  “I’m depressed,” Jon said. “I’ve had this boat for a year, and this is the third time I’ve been out on it. Never have sailed the damn thing. My priorities are all out of whack. My life is a mess.”

  “I’m…” Jesse shook his head, didn’t finish. I knew he was sad for the same reason I was. This was a real boat.

  * * *

  Jesse said he didn’t want to go to court. I told Carlotta I would be by for her really early. It was the time of gas rationing, so you never knew how long the lines would be. I picked her up on the corner by Sears. Jesse was with her, looking pale, hungover.

  “Hey, man. Don’t worry. It’ll be fine,” I said. He nodded.

  She put a scarf over her hair. She was clear-eyed and apparently calm, wearing a dusty-rose dress, patent leather pumps, a little bag.

  “Jackie O goes to court! The dress is perfect,” I said.

  They kissed good-bye.

  “I hate that dress,” he said. “When you get back I get to burn it.” They stood looking at each other.

  “Come on, get in the car. You’re not going to jail, Carlotta, I promise.”

  We did have a long wait for gas. We talked about everything but the trial. We talked about Boston. The Grolier Book Shop. Lochober’s restaurant. Truro and the dunes. Cheryl and I had met in Provincetown. I told her Cheryl was having an affair. That I didn’t know what I felt. About the affair, about our marriage. Carlotta put her hand over mine, on the gearshift.

  “I’m so sorry, Jon,” she said. “The hardest part is not knowing how you feel. Once you do, well, then, everything will be clear to you. I guess.”

  “Thanks a lot.” I smiled.

  Both the policemen were in the courtroom. She sat across from them in the spectator section. I spoke with the prosecutor and the judge and we went to his chambers. The two of them looked hard at her before we went in.

  It went like clockwork. I had page after page of documentation about the police, the paperwork from the security check that did not find marijuana. The judge got the idea about the police report even before I really got into it.

  “Yes, yes, so what do you propose?”

  “We propose to sue the San Francisco Police Department unless all charges are dismissed.” He thought about it, but not for long.

  “I think it appropriate to dismiss the charges.”

  The prosecutor had seen it coming, but I could tell he hated facing the policemen.

  We got back into the courtroom, where the judge said that because of a lawsuit pending against the San Francisco Police Department he felt it appropriate to drop all charges against Carlotta Moran. If the policemen had had flashlights, they would have bludgeoned Carlotta to death right there in the courtroom. She couldn’t resist an angelic smile.

  I felt let down. It had been so quick. And I had expected her to be happier, more relieved. If the other lawyer had handled the case, she’d be locked up now. I even said this to her, fishing for compliments.

  “Hey, how about a little elation, er, gratitude?”

  “Jon, forgive me. Of course I’m elated. Of course we’re grateful. And I know what you charge. We really owe you thousands and thousands of dollars. More than that was that we got to know you, and you liked us. And we love you now.” She gave me a warm hug then, a big smile.

  I was ashamed, told her to forget the money, that it had gone beyond a case. We got into the car.

  “Jon, I need a drink. We both need breakfast.”

  I stopped and bought her a half-pint of Jim Beam. She took some big gulps before we got to Denny’s.

  “What a morning. We could be in Cleveland. Look around us.” Denny’s in Redwood City was like being in the heartland of America.

  I realized that she was trying hard to show me she was happy. She asked me to tell her everything that happened, what I said, what the judge said. On the way home, she asked me about other cases, what were my favorites. I didn’t understand what was going on until we were on the Bay Bridge and I saw the tears. When we got off the bridge, I pulled over and stopped, gave her my handkerchief. She fixed her face in the mirror, looked at me with a rictus of a smile.

  “So, I guess the party’s over now,” I said. I put the car top up just in time. It started to rain hard as we drove on toward Oakland.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What do you advise, Counselor?”

  “Don’t be sarcastic, Carlotta. It’s not like you.”

  “I’m very serious. What would you do?”

  I shook my head. I thought about her face, reading Nathan’s letter. I remembered Jesse holding her throat.

  “Is it clear to you? What you are going to do?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, “it’s clear.”

  He was waiting on the corner by Sears. Soaking wet.

  “Stop! There he is!”

  She got out. He came over, asked how it went.

  “Piece of cake. It was great.”

  He reached in and shook my hand. “Thank you, Jon.”

  I turned the corner and pulled over to the curb, watched them walk away in the drenching rain, each of them deliberately stomping in puddles, bumping gently into each other.

  Mama

  “Mama knew everything,” my sister Sally said. “She was a witch. Even now that she’s dead I get scared she can see me.”

  “Me too. If I’m doing something really lame, that’s when I worry. The pitiful part is that when I do something right I’ll hope she can. ‘Hey Mama, check it out.’ What if the dead just hang out looking at us all, laughing their heads off? God, Sally, that sounds like something she’d say. What if I am just like her?”

  Our mother wondered what chairs would look like if our knees bent the other way. What if Christ had been electrocuted? Instead of crosses on chains, everybody’d be running around wearing chairs around their necks.

  “She told me, ‘Whatever you do, don’t breed,’” Sally said. “And if I were dumb enough to ever marry, be sure he was rich and adored me. ‘Never, ever marry for love. If you love a man you’ll want to be with him, please him, do things for him. You’ll ask him things like “Where have you been?” or “What are you thinking about?” or “Do you love me?” So he’ll beat you up. Or go out for cigarettes and never come back.’”

  “She hated the word love. She said it the way people say the word slut.”

  “She hated children. I met her once at an airport when all four of my kids were little. She yelled ‘Call them off!’ as if they were a pack of Dobermans.”

  “I don’t know if she disowned me because I married a Mexican or because he was Catholic.”

  “She blamed the Catholic church for people having so many babies. She said popes had started the rumor that love made people happy.”

  “Love makes you miserable,” our mama said. “You soak your pillow crying yourself to
sleep, you steam up phone booths with your tears, your sobs make the dog holler, you smoke two cigarettes at once.”

  “Did Daddy make you miserable?” I asked her.

  “Who, him? He couldn’t make anybody miserable.”

  But I used Mama’s advice to save my own son’s marriage. Coco, his wife, called me, crying away. Ken wanted to move out for a few months. He needed his space. Coco adored him; she was desperate. I found myself giving her advice in Mama’s voice. Literally, with her Texan twang, with a sneer. “Jes’ you give that fool a little old taste of his own med’cine.” I told her never to ask him back. “Don’t call him. Send yourself flowers with mysterious cards. Teach his African gray parrot to say, ‘Hello, Joe!’” I advised her to stock up on men, handsome, debonair men. Pay them if necessary, just to hang out at their place. Take them to Chez Panisse for lunch. Be sure different men were sitting around whenever Ken was likely to show up, to get clothes or visit his bird. Coco kept calling me. Yes she was doing what I told her, but he still hadn’t come home. She didn’t sound so miserable though.

  Finally one day Ken called me. “Yo, Mom, get this … Coco is such a sleaze. I go to get some CDs at our apartment, right? And here is this jock. In a purple Lycra bicycle suit, probably sweaty, lying on my bed, watching Oprah on my TV, feeding my bird.”

  What can I say? Ken and Coco have lived happily ever after. Just recently I was visiting them and the phone rang. Coco answered it, talked for a while, laughing occasionally. When she hung up Ken asked, “Who was that?” Coco smiled, “Oh, just some guy I met at the gym.”

  * * *

  “Mama ruined my favorite movie,” I told Sally. “The Song of Bernadette. I was going to school at St. Joseph’s then and planned to be a nun or, preferably, a saint. You were only about three years old then. I saw that movie three times. Finally she agreed to come with me. She laughed all through it. She said the beautiful lady wasn’t the Virgin Mary. ‘It’s Dorothy Lamour, for God’s sake.’ For weeks she made fun of the Immaculate Conception. ‘Get me a cup of coffee, will you? I can’t get up. I’m the Immaculate Conception.’ Or, on the phone to her friend Alice Pomeroy, she’d say, ‘Hi, it’s me, the sweaty conception.’ Or, ‘Hi, this is the two-second conception.’

  “She was witty. You have to admit it. Like when she’d give panhandlers a nickel and say, ‘Excuse me, young man, but what are your dreams and aspirations?’ Or when a cabdriver was surly she’d say, ‘You seem rather thoughtful and introspective today.’

  “No, even her humor was scary. Through the years her suicide notes, always written to me, were usually jokes. When she slit her wrists she signed it Bloody Mary. When she overdosed she wrote that she had tried a noose but couldn’t get the hang of it. Her last letter to me wasn’t funny. It said that she knew I would never forgive her. That she could not forgive me for the wreck I had made of my life.”

  “She never wrote me a suicide note.”

  “I don’t believe it. Sally, you’re actually jealous because I got all the suicide notes?”

  “Well, yes. I am.”

  When our father died Sally had flown from Mexico City to California. She went to Mama’s house and knocked on the door. Mama looked at her through the window but she wouldn’t let her in. She had disowned Sally years and years before.

  “I miss Daddy,” Sally called to her through the glass. “I am dying of cancer. I need you now, Mama!” Our mother just closed the venetian blinds and ignored the banging banging on her door.

  Sally would sob, replaying this scene and other sadder scenes over and over. Finally she was very sick and ready to die. She had stopped worrying about her children. She was serene, so lovely and sweet. Still, once in a while, rage grabbed her, not letting her go, denying her peace.

  So every night then I began to tell Sally stories, like telling fairy tales.

  I told her funny stories about our mother. How once she tried and tried to open a bag of Granny Goose potato chips, then gave up. “Life is just too damn hard,” she said and tossed the bag over her shoulder.

  I told her how Mama hadn’t spoken to her brother Fortunatus for thirty years. Finally he asked her to lunch at the Top of the Mark, to bury the hatchet. “In his pompous ol’ head!” Mama said. She got him though. He forced her to have pheasant under glass and when it came she said to the waiter, “Hey, boy, got any ketchup?”

  Most of all I told Sally stories about how our mother once was. Before she drank, before she harmed us. Once upon a time.

  “Mama is standing at the railing of the ship to Juneau. She’s going to meet Ed, her new husband. On her way to a new life. It is 1930. She has left the Depression behind, Grandpa behind. All the sordid poverty and pain of Texas is gone. The ship is gliding, close to land, on a clear day. She is looking at the navy-blue water and the green pines on the shore of this wild clean new country. There are icebergs and gulls.

  “The main thing to remember is how tiny she was, only five foot four. She just seemed huge to us. So young, nineteen. She was very beautiful, dark and thin. On the deck of the ship she sways against the wind. She is frail. She shivers with cold and excitement. Smoking. The fur collar pulled up around her heart-shaped face, her jet-black hair.

  “Uncle Guyler and Uncle John had bought Mama that coat for a wedding gift. She was still wearing it six years later, so I got to know it. Burying my face in the matted nicotine fur. Not while she was wearing it. She couldn’t bear to be touched. If you got too close she’d put her hand up as if to ward off a blow.

  “On the deck of the ship she feels pretty and grown-up. She had made friends on the voyage. She had been witty, charming. The captain flirted with her. He poured her more gin that gave her vertigo and made her laugh out loud when he whispered, ‘You’re breaking my heart, you dusky beauty!’

  “When the ship got into the harbor of Juneau her blue eyes filled with tears. No, I never once saw her cry either. It was sort of like Scarlett in Gone With the Wind. She swore to herself. No one is ever going to hurt me again.

  “She knew that Ed was a good man, solid and kind. The first time she let him bring her home, to Upson Avenue, she had been ashamed. It was shabby; Uncle John and Grandpa were drunk. She was afraid Ed wouldn’t ask her out again. But he held her in his arms and said, ‘I am going to protect you.’

  “Alaska was as wonderful as she had dreamed. They went in ski-planes into the wilderness and landed on frozen lakes, skied in the silence and saw elk and polar bears and wolves. They camped in the woods in summer and fished for salmon, saw grizzlies and mountain goats! They made friends; she was in a theater group and played the medium in Blithe Spirit. There were cast parties and potlucks and then Ed said she couldn’t be in the theater anymore because she drank too much, acted in a manner that was beneath her. Then I was born. He had to go to Nome for a few months and she was alone with a new baby. When he got back he found her drunk, stumbling around with me in her arms. ‘He ripped you from my breast,’ she told me. He completely took over my care, fed me from a bottle. An Eskimo woman came in to watch me while he was at work. He told Mama she was weak and bad, like all the Moynihans. He protected her from herself from then on, didn’t let her drive or have any money. All she could do was walk to the library and read plays and mysteries and Zane Grey.

  “When the war came you were born and we went to live in Texas. Daddy was a lieutenant on an ammunition ship, off Japan. Mama hated being back home. She was out most of the time, drinking more and more. Mamie stopped working at Grandpa’s office so that she could take care of you. She moved your crib into her room; she played with you and sang to you and rocked you to sleep. She didn’t let anybody near you, not even me.

  “It was terrible for me, with Mama, and with Grandpa. Or alone, most of the time. I got in trouble at school, ran away from one school, was expelled from two others. Once I didn’t speak for six months. Mama called me the Bad Seed. All her rage came down on me. It wasn’t until I grew up that I realized she and Grandpa probably didn’t e
ven remember what they did. God sends drunks blackouts because if they knew what they had done they would surely die of shame.

  “After Daddy got back from the war we lived in Arizona and they were happy together. They planted roses and gave you a puppy called Sam and she was sober. But already she didn’t know how to be with you and me. We thought she hated us, but she was only afraid of us. She felt it was we who had abandoned her, that we hated her. She protected herself by mocking us and sneering, by hurting us so we couldn’t hurt her first.

  “It seemed that moving to Chile would be a dream come true for Mama. She loved elegance and beautiful things, always wished they knew ‘the right people.’ Daddy had a prestigious job. We were wealthy now, with a lovely house and many servants, and there were dinners and parties with all the right people. She went out some at first but she was simply too scared. Her hair was wrong, her clothes were wrong. She bought expensive imitation antique furniture and bad paintings. She was terrified of the servants. She had a few friends that she trusted; ironically enough she played poker with Jesuit priests, but most of the time she stayed in her room. And Daddy kept her there.

  “‘At first he was my keeper, then he was my jailer,’ she said. He thought he was helping her, but year after year he rationed drinks to her and hid her, and never ever got her any help. We never went near her, nobody did. She’d fly into rages, cruel, irrational. We thought nothing we did was good enough for her. And she did hate to see us do well, to grow and accomplish things. We were young and pretty and had a future. Do you see? How hard it was for her, Sally?”

  “Yes. It was like that. Poor pitiful Mama. You know, I’m like her now. I get mad at everyone because they are working, living. Sometimes I hate you because you’re not dying. Isn’t that awful?”

  “No, because you can tell me this. And I can tell you I’m glad it’s not me that is dying. But Mama never had a soul to tell anything to. That day, on the ship, coming into port, she thought she would. Mama believed Ed would be there always. She thought she was coming home.”

  “Tell me about her again. On the boat. When she had tears in her eyes.”