A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

by Lucia Berlin

  “We can’t,” Kim said. “We promised Willie we were going to use his title, Through a Cat’s Eye.”

  “Okay, so what I want is two or three pages leading up to a dead body. Don’t show us the actual body. Don’t tell us there’s going to be a body. End the story with us knowing there is going to be a dead body. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Time to go, gentlemen,” the guard said, opening the door. “Come here, Vee.” She blasted him with perfume before sending him back up. The homosexual tier was pretty miserable. Half of it was old senile winos, the rest were gays.

  I wrote a great story. It came out in the magazine and I still read it over and over. It was about Al, my best friend. He’s dead now. Only she said I didn’t do the assignment right because I told about me and the landlady finding Al’s body.

  Kim and Casey wrote the same horrible story. Kim’s was about her old man beating her, Casey’s about a sadistic john. You knew that they would end up murdering the guys. Dixie wrote a fine story about a woman in solitary. She has an asthma attack really bad but no one can hear her. The terror and pitch-black darkness. Then there is an earthquake. The end.

  You can’t imagine what it is like to be in prison during an earthquake.

  CD wrote about his brother. Most of CD’s stories had been about him when they were little. The years they were lost to each other in different foster homes. How they found each other by chance, in Reno. This story took place in the Sunnyvale district. He read it in a quiet voice. None of us moved. It was about the afternoon and evening leading up to the Chink’s death. The details about the meeting of two gangs. It ended with Uzi fire and CD turning the corner.

  The hairs were standing up on my arm. Mrs. Bevins was pale. Nobody had told her CD’s brother was dead. There wasn’t a word about his brother in the story. That’s how good it was. The story was so shimmering and taut there could only be one end to it. The room was silent until finally Shabazz said, “Amen.” The guard opened the door. “Time to go, gentlemen.” The other guards waited for the women while we filed out.

  CD was set to get out of jail two days after the last day of class. The magazines would be out the last day and there was going to be a big party. An art exhibit and music by the prisoners. Casey, CD, and Shabazz were going to read. Everybody would get copies of Through a Cat’s Eye.

  We had been excited about the magazine but none of us had known how it would feel. To see our work in print. “Where is CD?” she asked. We didn’t know. She gave each of us twenty copies. We read our pieces out loud, applauding one another. Then we just sat there, reading our own work over and over to ourselves.

  The class was short because of the party. A mess of deputies came in and opened the doors between our room and the art class. We helped set up tables for the food. Stacks of our magazines looked beautiful. Green on the purple paper tablecloth. Guys from horticulture brought in big bouquets of flowers. Student paintings were on the walls, sculptures on stands. One band was setting up.

  First one band played, then came our reading and then the other band. The reading went fine and the music was great. Kitchen dudes brought in food and soft drinks and everybody got in line. There were dozens of guards but they all seemed to be having a good time too. Even Bingham was there. Everybody was there except CD.

  She was talking with Bingham. He is so cool. I saw him nod and call a guard over. I knew Bingham had said to let her go up on the tier.

  She wasn’t gone long, even after all the stairs and six locked steel gates. She sat down, looking sick. I took her a can of Pepsi.

  “Did you talk with him?”

  She shook her head. “He was lying under a blanket, wouldn’t answer me. I slid the magazines through the bars. It’s horrible up there, Chaz. His window is broken, rain coming through it. The stink. The cells are so small and dark.”

  “Hey, it’s heaven up there now. Nobody’s there. Imagine those cells with six dudes in them.”

  “Five minutes, gentlemen!”

  Dixie and Kim and Casey hugged her good-bye. None of us guys said good-bye. I couldn’t even look at her. I heard her say, “Take care, Chaz.”

  I just realized that I’m doing that last assignment again. And I’m still doing it wrong, mentioning the body, telling you that they killed CD the day he got out of County.

  B.F. and Me

  I liked him right away, just talking to him on the phone. Raspy, easygoing voice with a smile and sex in it, you know what I mean. How is it that we read people by their voices anyway? The phone company information lady is officious and patronizing and she isn’t even a real person. And the guy at the cable company who says our business means a lot to them and they want to please us, you can hear the sneer in his tone.

  I used to be a switchboard operator in a hospital, spent all day talking to different doctors that I never saw. We all had favorites and ones that we couldn’t stand. None of us had ever seen Dr. Wright but his voice was so smooth and cool we were in love with him. If we had to page him we’d each put a dollar down on the board, would race to answer calls and be the one to get his, win the money and say, “Hell-oh there, Dr. Wright. ICU is paging you, sir.” Never did see Dr. Wright in real life but when I got a job working in Emergency I got to know all the other doctors I had talked to on the phone. I soon learned that they were just as we imagined them. The best physicians were the ones who were prompt to answer, clear and polite, the worst were those who used to yell at us and say things like “Do they hire the handicapped at the switchboard?” They were the ones who let the ER see their patients, who had the Medicaid patients sent to County. Amazing how the ones with sexy voices were just as sexy in real life. But no, I can’t describe how people get the quality into their voice of just waking up or of wanting to go to bed. Check out Tom Hanks’s voice. Forget it. Okay, now Harvey Keitel’s. And if you don’t think Harvey is sexy just close your eyes.

  Now I have a really nice voice. I’m a strong woman, mean even, but everyone thinks I’m really gentle because of my voice. I sound young even though I’m seventy years old. Guys at the Pottery Barn flirt with me. “Hey. I’ll bet you’re really gonna enjoy lying on this rug.” Stuff like that.

  I’ve been trying to get somebody to lay tiles in my bathroom. People who put ads in the paper for odd jobs, painting, etc., they don’t really want to work. They all are pretty booked up right now or a machine answers with Metallica in the background and they don’t return your call. After six tries B.F. was the only one who said he’d come over. He answered the phone, Yeah, this is B.F., so I said, Hey this is L.B. And he laughed, real slow. I told him I had a floor job and he said he was my man. He could come anytime. I figured he was a smart-aleck in his twenties, good-looking, with tattoos and spiky hair, a pickup truck and a dog.

  He didn’t show on the day he said he would but he called the next day, said something had come up, could he make it that afternoon. Sure. Later that day I saw the pickup, heard him banging on my door, but it took me a while to get there. I’ve got bad arthritis and also I get tangled up in my oxygen hose. Hold your horses! I yelled.

  B.F. was holding on to the wall and to the banister, gasping and coughing after he climbed the three steps. He was an enormous man, tall, very fat and very old. Even when he was still outside, catching his breath, I could smell him. Tobacco and dirty wool, rank alcoholic sweat. He had bloodshot baby-blue eyes that smiled. I liked him right away.

  He said he could probably use some of that air of mine. I told him he should get him a tank but he said he was afraid he’d blow himself up smoking. He came on in and headed for the bathroom. It’s not like I needed to show him where it was. I live in a trailer and there aren’t too many places it could be. But he just stomped off shaking the place as he walked. I watched him measure for a while then went to sit in the kitchen. I could still smell him. The pong of him was madeleine-like for me, bringing back Grandpa and Uncle John, for starters.

  Bad smells can be nice. A faint odor of
skunk in the woods. Horse manure at the races. One of the best parts about the tigers in zoos is the feral stench. At bullfights I always liked to sit high up, in order to see it all, like at the opera, but if you sit next to the barrera you can smell the bull.

  B.F. was exotic to me simply because he was so dirty. I live in Boulder, where there is no dirt. No dirty people. Even all the runners look like they just got out of the shower. I wondered where he drank, because I have also never seen a dirty bar in Boulder. He seemed the kind of man who liked to talk when he drank.

  He was talking to himself in the bathroom, groaning and panting as he got down on the floor to measure the linen closet. When he heaved himself back up, with a God DAMN, I swear the whole house swayed back and forth. He came out, told me I needed forty-four square feet. Can you believe it? I said. I bought forty-six! Well, you got a good eye. Two good eyes. He grinned with brown false teeth.

  “You can’t walk on it for seventy-two hours,” he said.

  “That’s crazy. I never heard of such a thing.”

  “Well, it’s a fact. The tiles need to set.”

  “My whole life I never heard anybody say, ‘We went to a motel while the tile set.’ Or ‘Can I stay at your place until my tile sets?’ Never once heard this mentioned.”

  “That’s because most people who have tile laid have two bathrooms.”

  “So what do people do who have one?”

  “Keep the carpet.”

  The carpet was in when I bought the trailer. Orange shag, stained.

  “I can’t stand that carpet.”

  “Don’t blame you. All I’m saying is you have to stay off the tiles for seventy-two hours.”

  “I can’t do that. I take Lasix for my heart. I’m in there twenty times a day.”

  “Well then you just go ahead on in there. But if the tiles shift don’t you be saying it was my fault, because I lay a good tile.”

  We settled on a price for the job and he said he’d come on Friday morning. He was obviously sore after bending down. Gasping for air, he limped out of the house, stopping to lean on the kitchen counter and then on the stove in the living room. I followed him to the door, making the same rest stops. At the foot of the stairs he lit up a cigarette and smiled up at me. Glad to meet you. His dog waited patiently in the truck.

  He never came on Friday. He didn’t call, so I tried his number on Sunday. No answer. I found the newspaper page with all the other numbers. None of them answered either. I imagined a western barroom filled with tile-setters, all holding bottles or cards or glasses, their heads lying asleep on the table.

  He called yesterday. I said hello and he said, “How you been, L.B.?”

  “Swell, B.F. Wondering if I’d ever see you again.”

  “How about I stop by tomorrow?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Around ten?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Any time.”

  Wait a Minute

  Sighs, the rhythms of our heartbeats, contractions of childbirth, orgasms, all flow into time just as pendulum clocks placed next to one another soon beat in unison. Fireflies in a tree flash on and off as one. The sun comes up and it goes down. The moon waxes and wanes and usually the morning paper hits the porch at six thirty-five.

  Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar. You aren’t at your desk or on the subway or fixing dinner for the children. You’re reading People in a surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. You stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with the globe on the desk. Persia, the Belgian Congo. The bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. All is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid relentlessness of time.

  When someone has a terminal disease, the soothing churn of time is shattered. Too fast, no time, I love you, have to finish this, tell him that. Wait a minute! I want to explain. Where is Toby, anyway? Or time turns sadistically slow. Death just hangs around while you wait for it to be night and then wait for it to be morning. Every day you’ve said good-bye a little. Oh just get it over with, for God’s sake. You keep looking at the Arrival and Departure board. Nights are endless because you wake at the softest cough or sob, then lie awake listening to her breathe so softly, like a child. Afternoons at the bedside you know the time by the passage of sunlight, now on the Virgin of Guadalupe, now on the charcoal nude, the mirror, the carved jewelry box, dazzle on the bottle of Fracas. The camote man whistles in the street below and then you help your sister into the sala to watch Mexico City news and then U.S. news with Peter Jennings. Her cats sit on her lap. She has oxygen but still their fur makes it hard to breathe. “No! Don’t take them away. Wait a minute.”

  Every evening after the news, Sally would cry. Weep. It probably wasn’t for long but in the time warp of her illness it went on and on, painful and hoarse. I can’t even remember if at first my niece Mercedes and I cried with her. I don’t think so. Neither of us are criers. But we would hold her and kiss her, sing to her. We tried joking, “Maybe we should watch Tom Brokaw instead.” We made her aguas and teas and cocoa. I can’t remember when she stopped crying, soon before her death, but when she did stop it was truly horrible, the silence, and it lasted a long time.

  When she cried sometimes she’d say things like “Sorry, it must be the chemo. It’s sort of a reflex. Don’t pay any attention.” But other times she would beg us to cry with her.

  “I can’t, mi Argentina,” Mercedes would say. “But my heart is crying. Since we know it is going to happen we automatically harden ourselves.” This was kind of her to say. The weeping simply drove me crazy.

  Once while she was crying, Sally said, “I’ll never see donkeys again!” which struck us as hilariously funny. She became furious, smashed her cup and plates, our glasses and ashtray against the wall. She kicked over the table, screaming at us. Cold calculating bitches. Not a shred of compassion or pity.

  “One pinche tear. You don’t even look sad.” She was smiling by now. “You’re like police matrons. ‘Drink this. Here’s a tissue. Throw up in the basin.’”

  At night I would get her ready for bed, give her pills, an injection. I’d kiss her and tuck her in. “Good night. I love you, my sister, mi cisterna.” I slept in a little room, a closet, next to her, could hear her through the plywood wall, reading, humming, writing. Sometimes she would cry then and those were the worst times, because she tried to muffle these silent sad weepings with her pillow.

  At first I would go in and try to comfort her, but that seemed to make her cry more, become more anxious. The sleeping medicine would turn around and wake her up, get her agitated and nauseous. So I would just call out to her, “Sally. Dear Sal y pimienta, Salsa, don’t be sad.” Things like that.

  “Remember in Chile how Rosa put hot bricks in our beds?”

  “I’d forgotten!”

  “Want me to find you a brick?”

  “No, mi vida, I’m falling asleep.”

  * * *

  She had had a mastectomy and radiation and then for five years she was fine. Really fine. Radiant and beautiful, wildly happy with a kind man, Andrés. She and I became friends, for the first time since our hard childhood. It had felt like falling in love, the discovery of each other, how much we shared. We went to the Yucatán and to New York together. I’d go to Mexico or she would come up to Oakland. When our mother died, we spent a week in Zihuatanejo, where we talked all day and all night. We exorcised our parents and our own rivalries and I think we both grew up.

  I was in Oakland when she called. The cancer was in her lungs now. Everywhere. There was no time left. Apúrate. Come right now!

  It took me three days to quit my job, pack up, and move out. On the plane to Mexico City, I thought about how death shreds time. My ordinary life ha
d vanished. Therapy, laps at the Y. What about lunch on Friday? Gloria’s party, dentist tomorrow, laundry, pick up books at Moe’s, cleaning, out of cat food, babysit grandsons Saturday, order gauze and gastrostomy buttons at work, write to August, talk to Josee, bake some scones, C.J. coming over. Even eerier was a year later clerks in the grocery or bookstore or friends I ran into on the street had not noticed that I had been gone at all.

  I called Pedro, her oncologist, from the airport in Mexico, wanting to know what to expect. It had sounded like a matter of weeks or a month. “Ni modo,” he said. “We’ll continue chemo. It could be six months, a year, perhaps more.”

  “If you had just told me, ‘I want you to come now,’ I would have come,” I said to her later that night.

  “No, you wouldn’t!” she laughed. “You are a realist. You know I have servants to do everything, and nurses, doctors, friends. You’d think I didn’t need you yet. But I want you now, to help me get everything in order. I want you to cook so Alicia and Sergio will eat here. I want you to read to me and take care of me. Now is when I’m alone and scared. I need you now.”

  We all have mental scrapbooks. Stills. Snapshots of people we love at different times. This one is Sally in deep green running clothes, cross-legged on her bed. Skin luminescent, her green eyes limned with tears as she spoke to me. No guile or self-pity. I embraced her, grateful for her trust in me.

  In Texas, when I was eight and she was three, I hated her, envied her with a violent hissing in my heart. Our grandma let me run wild, at the mercy of the other adults, but she guarded little Sally, brushed her hair and made tarts just for her, rocked her to sleep and sang “Way Down in Missoura.” But I have snapshots of her even then, smiling, offering me a mud pie with an undeniable sweetness that she never lost.

  In Mexico City the first months passed in a flash, like in old movies when the calendars flip up the days. Speeded-up Charlie Chaplin carpenters pounded in the kitchen, plumbers banged in the bathroom. Men came to fix all the doorknobs and broken windows, sand the floors. Mirna, Belen and I tore into the storeroom, the topanco, the closets, the bookcases and drawers. We tossed out shoes and hats, dog collars, Nehru jackets. Mercedes and Alicia and I brought out all Sally’s clothes and jewelry, labeled them to give to different friends.