A Manual for Cleaning Women (3 page)

Lucia’s “Panteón de Dolores” is a wide-ranging story with great emotional depth. But it also has her alacrity. Read the passage that begins “Not listening though” and continues through “because of the pollution level.”
*

Or this: “Mama, you saw ugliness and evil everywhere, in everyone, in each place. Were you crazy or a seer?”

The last story Lucia wrote, “B.F. and Me,” is a small one. It has no wallop or big themes, no infanticides, no smuggling, no mother-daughter or reconciliation. In a way, that’s why its art is so remarkable. It’s gentle; but it’s fast.

She introduces the creaky old handyman who comes to work on her trailer, as follows:

[B.F. was] 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.

That “I liked him right away.” It’s nearly a non sequitur. And in the near non sequitur lies the speed. And the wit. (Just look what it tells us about “I.”)

With a writer of this caliber, you can often recognize the work in one sentence. Here is a sentence from that same, final story, still on B.F. and his aroma:

Bad smells can be nice.

It is pure
Lucia Berlin
. It’s so corny (“nice”), so close to being just dumb. But it’s true, and it’s deep. Beyond that, set off against her generally urbane voice, the sentence is almost disingenuous. Which is part of why it’s fast. The shift in tone, and even voice, sends us, just like that, into new terrain.

Too, the sentence is dry. (How could a bad smell really be “nice.”) Dryness, it so happens—where things are more, and other, than they seem—is fast.

It’s five words, all monosyllables.

Of B.F.’s stench—no, she can’t call it a stench. Reek? No. She has to reach over to British slang to find a term that’s strong enough but still has neutrality, still makes no judgment.

“Pong.” His pong. Which brings us to—Proust.

“The pong of him was madeleine-like for me.”

Who but
Lucia Berlin
would write that? The pong was madeleine-like.

*   *   *

Compiling the stories for this book has been a joy in countless ways. One was discovering that in the years since her last book and her death, the work had
grown
in stature.

Black Sparrow and her earlier publishers gave her a good run, and certainly she’s had one or two thousand dedicated readers. But that is far too few. The work will reward the most acute of readers, but there is nothing rarefied about it. On the contrary, it is inviting.

Still, the constraints of a small-press audience may, at the time, have been inevitable. After all, Lucia’s whole existence occurred, pretty much,
outside
.

West Coast bohemia, clerical and blue-collar work, laundromats, “meetings,” stores that sell “one-shoes,” and dwellings like that trailer were the backdrop of much of her adult life (throughout which, her genteel demeanor never flagged).

And it was, in fact, “outside” that gave her work its special strength.

From Boulder, she wrote to me (and here she alludes to her constant later companion, the oxygen tank):

Bay Area, New York and Mexico City [were the] only places I didn’t feel I was an other. I just got back from shopping and everybody kept on saying have a great day now and smiling at my oxygen tank as if it were a poodle or a child.

Myself, I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t want to read her.

Angel’s Laundromat

A tall old Indian in faded Levi’s and a fine Zuni belt. His hair white and long, knotted with raspberry yarn at his neck. The strange thing was that for a year or so we were always at Angel’s at the same time. But not at the same times. I mean some days I’d go at seven on a Monday or maybe at six thirty on a Friday evening and he would already be there.

Mrs. Armitage had been different, although she was old too. That was in New York at the San Juan Laundry on Fifteenth Street. Puerto Ricans. Suds overflowing onto the floor. I was a young mother then and washed diapers on Thursday mornings. She lived above me, in 4-C. One morning at the laundry she gave me a key and I took it. She said that if I didn’t see her on Thursdays it meant she was dead and would I please go find her body. That was a terrible thing to ask of someone; also then I had to do my laundry on Thursdays.

She died on a Monday and I never went back to the San Juan. The super found her. I don’t know how.

For months, at Angel’s, the Indian and I did not speak to each other, but we sat next to each other in connected yellow plastic chairs, like at airports. They skidded in the ripped linoleum and the sound hurt your teeth.

He used to sit there sipping Jim Beam, looking at my hands. Not directly, but into the mirror across from us, above the Speed Queen washers. At first it didn’t bother me. An old Indian staring at my hands through the dirty mirror, between yellowing
IRONING $1.50 A DUZ
and orange Day-Glo serenity prayers.
GOD GRANT ME THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE
. But then I began to wonder if he had something about hands. It made me nervous, him watching me smoke and blow my nose, leaf through magazines years old. Lady Bird Johnson going down the rapids.

Finally he got me staring at my hands. I saw him almost grin because he caught me staring at my own hands. For the first time our eyes met in the mirror, beneath
DON’T OVERLOAD THE MACHINES.

There was panic in my eyes. I looked into my own eyes and back down at my hands. Horrid age spots, two scars. Un-Indian, nervous, lonely hands. I could see children and men and gardens in my hands.

His hands that day (the day I noticed mine) were on each taut blue thigh. Most of the time they shook badly and he just let them shake in his lap, but that day he was holding them still. The effort to keep them from shaking turned his adobe knuckles white.

The only time I had spoken with Mrs. Armitage outside of the laundry was when her toilet had overflowed and was pouring down through the chandelier on my floor of the building. The lights were still burning while the water splashed rainbows through them. She gripped my arm with her cold dying hand and said, “It’s a miracle, isn’t it?”

His name was Tony. He was a Jicarilla Apache from up north. One day I hadn’t seen him but I knew it was his fine hand on my shoulder. He gave me three dimes. I didn’t understand, almost said thanks, but then I saw that he was shaky-sick and couldn’t work the dryers. Sober, it’s hard. You have to turn the arrow with one hand, put the dime in with the other, push down the plunger, then turn the arrow back for the next dime.

He came back later, drunk, just as his clothes were starting to fall limp and dry. He couldn’t get the door open, passed out in the yellow chair. My clothes were dry, I was folding.

Angel and I got Tony back onto the floor of the pressing room. Hot. Angel is responsible for all the AA prayers and mottoes.
DON’T THINK AND DON’T DRINK.
Angel put a cold wet one-sock on Tony’s head and knelt beside him.

“Brother, believe me … I’ve been there … right down there in the gutter where you are. I know just how you feel.”

Tony didn’t open his eyes. Anybody says he knows just how someone else feels is a fool.

Angel’s Laundromat is in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Fourth Street. Shabby shops and junkyards, secondhand stores with army cots, boxes of one-socks, 1940 editions of
Good Hygiene.
Grain stores and motels for lovers and drunks and old women with hennaed hair who do their laundry at Angel’s. Teenage Chicana brides go to Angel’s. Towels, pink shortie nighties, bikini underpants that say
Thursday.
Their husbands wear blue overalls with names in script on the pockets. I like to wait and see the names appear in the mirror vision of the dryers.
Tina
,
Corky
,
Junior.

Traveling people go to Angel’s. Dirty mattresses, rusty high chairs tied to the roofs of dented old Buicks. Leaky oil pans, leaky canvas water bags. Leaky washing machines. The men sit in the cars, shirtless, crush Hamm’s cans when they’re empty.

But it’s Indians who go to Angel’s mostly. Pueblo Indians from San Felipe and Laguna and Sandia. Tony was the only Apache I ever met, at the laundry or anywhere else. I like to sort of cross my eyes and watch the dryers full of Indian clothes blurring the brilliant swirling purples and oranges and reds and pinks.

I go to Angel’s. I’m not sure why, it’s not just the Indians. It’s across town from me. Only a block away is the Campus, air-conditioned, soft rock on the Muzak.
New Yorker
,
Ms.
, and
Cosmopolitan.
Wives of graduate assistants go there and buy their kids Zero bars and Cokes. The Campus laundry has a sign, like most laundries do,
POSITIVELY NO DYEING
. I drove all over town with a green bedspread until I came to Angel’s with his yellow sign,
YOU CAN DIE HERE ANYTIME
.

I could see it wasn’t turning deep purple but a darker muddy green, but I wanted to come back anyway. I liked the Indians and their laundry. The broken Coke machine and the flooded floor reminded me of New York. Puerto Ricans mopping, mopping. Their pay phone was always out of order, like Angel’s. Would I have gone to find Mrs. Armitage’s body on a Thursday?

“I am chief of my tribe,” the Indian said. He had just been sitting there, sipping port, looking at my hands.

He told me that his wife worked cleaning houses. They had had four sons. The youngest one had committed suicide, the oldest had died in Vietnam. The other two were school bus drivers.

“You know why I like you?” he asked.

“No, why?”

“Because you are a redskin.” He pointed to my face in the mirror. I do have red skin, and no, I never had seen a red-skinned Indian.

He liked my name, pronounced it in Italian.
Lu-chee-a.
He had been in Italy in World War II. Sure enough there was a dog tag with his beautiful silver and turquoise necklaces. It had a big dent in it. “A bullet?” No, he used to chew it when he got scared or horny.

Once he suggested that we go lie down in his camper and rest together.

“Eskimos say laugh together.” I pointed to the lime-green Day-Glo sign,
NEVER LEAVE THE MACHINES UNATTENDED
. We both giggled, laughing together on our connected plastic chairs. Then we sat, quiet. No sound but the sloshy water, rhythmic as ocean waves. His Buddha hand held mine.

A train passed. He nudged me: “Great big iron horse!” and we started giggling all over again.

I have a lot of unfounded generalizations about people, like all blacks are bound to like Charlie Parker. Germans are horrible, all Indians have a weird sense of humor like my mother’s. One favorite of hers is when this guy is bending down tying his shoe and another comes along and beats him up and says, “You’re always tying your shoe!” The other one is when a waiter is serving and he spills beans in somebody’s lap and says, “Oh, oh, I spilled the beans.” Tony used to repeat these to me on slow days at the laundry.

Once he was very drunk, mean drunk, got into a fight with some Okies in the parking lot. They busted his Jim Beam bottle. Angel said he’d buy him a half-pint if he would listen to him in the pressing room. I moved my clothes from the washer to the dryer while Angel talked to Tony about One Day at a Time.

When Tony came out he shoved his dimes into my hand. I put his clothes into a dryer while he struggled with the Jim Beam bottle cap. Before I could sit down he hollered at me.

“I am a chief! I am a chief of the Apache tribe! Shit!”

“Shit yourself, Chief.” He was just sitting there, drinking, looking at my hands in the mirror.

“How come you do the Apache laundry?”

I don’t know why I said that. It was a horrible thing to say. Maybe I thought he would laugh. He did, anyway.

“What tribe are you, redskin?” he said, watching my hands take out a cigarette. “You know my first cigarette was lit by a prince? Do you believe that?”

“Sure I believe it. Want a light?” He lit my cigarette and we smiled at each other. We were very close and then he passed out and I was alone in the mirror.

There was a young girl, not in the mirror but sitting by the window. Her hair curled in the mist, wispy Botticelli. I read all the signs.
GOD GIVE ME THE COURAGE
.
NEW CRIB NEVER USED—BABY DIED
.

The girl put her clothes into a turquoise basket and she left. I moved my clothes to the table, checked Tony’s, and put in another dime. I was alone in Angel’s with Tony. I looked at my hands and eyes in the mirror. Pretty blue eyes.

Once I was on a yacht off Viña del Mar. I borrowed my first cigarette and asked Prince Aly Khan for a light. “Enchanté,” he said. He didn’t have a match, actually.

I folded my laundry, and when Angel came back I went home.

I can’t remember when it was that I realized I never did see that old Indian again.

Dr. H. A. Moynihan

I hated St. Joseph’s. Terrified by the nuns, I struck Sister Cecilia one hot Texas day and was expelled. As punishment, I had to work every day of summer vacation in Grandpa’s dental office. I knew the real reason was they didn’t want me to play with the neighborhood children. Mexicans and Syrians. No Negroes, but that was only a matter of time, my mother said.

I’m sure they also wanted to spare me Mamie’s dying, her moaning, her friends’ praying, the stench and the flies. At night, with the help of morphine, she would doze off and my mother and Grandpa would each drink alone in their separate rooms. I could hear the separate gurgles of bourbon from the porch where I slept.

Grandpa barely spoke to me all summer. I sterilized and laid out his instruments, tied towels around the patients’ necks, held the Stom Aseptine mouthwash cup and told them to spit. When there weren’t any patients, he went into his workshop to make teeth or into his office to paste. I wasn’t allowed in either room. He pasted Ernie Pyle and FDR; had different scrapbooks for the Japanese and German wars. He had scrapbooks for Crime and Texas and Freak Accidents: Man gets mad and throws a watermelon out of a second-story window. It hits his wife on the head and kills her, bounces off, hits the baby in the buggy, kills it too, and doesn’t even break.