Lucia Berlin - A Manual for Cleaning Women - Selected Stories

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.

Everybody hated Grandpa but Mamie, and me, I guess. Every night he got drunk and mean. He was cruel and bigoted and proud. He had shot my uncle John’s eye out during a quarrel and had shamed and humiliated my mother all her life. She wouldn’t speak to him, wouldn’t even get near him because he was so filthy, slopping food and spitting, leaving wet cigarettes everywhere. Plaster from teeth molds covered him with white specks, like he was a painter or a statue.

He was the best dentist in West Texas, maybe in all of Texas. Many people said so, and I believed it. It wasn’t true that his patients were all old winos or Mamie’s friends, my mother said that. Distinguished men came even from Dallas or Houston because he made such wonderful false teeth. His false teeth never slipped or whistled, and they looked completely real. He had invented a secret formula to color them right, sometimes even made them chipped or yellowed, with fillings and caps on them.

He wouldn’t let anyone in his workshop — just the firemen, that once. It hadn’t been cleaned in forty years. I went in when he went to the bathroom. The windows were caked black with dirt and plaster and wax. The only light came from two flickering blue Bunsen burners. Huge sacks of plaster stacked against the walls, sifted over onto a floor lumpy with chunks of broken tooth molds, and jars of various single teeth. Thick pink and white globs of wax hung on the walls, trailing cobwebs. Shelves were crammed with rusty tools and rows of dentures, grinning, or upside down, frowning, like theater masks. He chanted while he worked, his half-smoked cigarettes often igniting gobs of wax or candy bar wrappers. He threw coffee on the fires, staining the plaster-soft floor a deep cave brown.

The workshop opened into a small office with a rolltop desk where he pasted in scrapbooks and wrote checks. After he signed his name, he always flicked the pen, splashing black across his signature, sometimes obliterating the amount so that the bank would have to call to verify it.

There was no door between the room where he worked on patients and the waiting room. While he worked, he would turn around to talk to people in the waiting room, waving his drill. The extraction patients would recover on a chaise longue; the rest sat on windowsills or radiators. Sometimes someone sat in the phone booth, a big wooden booth with a pay phone, a fan, and a sign, “I never met a man I didn’t like.”

There weren’t any magazines. If someone brought one and left it there, Grandpa would throw it away. He just did this to be contrary, my mother said. He said it was because it drove him crazy, people sitting there turning the pages.

When his patients weren’t sitting, they wandered around the room fooling with things on the two safes. Buddhas, skulls with false teeth wired to open and close, snakes that bit you if you pulled their tails, domes you turned over and it snowed. On the ceiling was a sign, WHAT THE HELL YOU LOOKING UP HERE FOR? The safes contained gold and silver for fillings, stacks of money, and bottles of Jack Daniel’s.

On all the windows, facing the main street of El Paso, were large gold letters that read, “Dr. H. A. Moynihan. I Don’t Work for Negroes.” The signs were reflected in the mirrors that hung on the remaining three walls. The slogan was written on the door to the hall. I never sat facing the door because I was afraid Negroes would come and look in over the sign. I never saw a Negro in the Caples Building though, except for Jim, the elevator man.

When people called for appointments, Grandpa had me tell them he was no longer taking patients, so as summer went on, there was less and less to do. Finally, just before Mamie died, there were no patients at all. Grandpa just stayed locked in his workshop or office. I used to go up on the roof sometimes. You could see Juárez and all of downtown El Paso from there. I would pick out one person in the crowd and follow him with my eyes until he disappeared. But mostly I just sat inside on the radiator, looking down at Yandell Drive. I spent hours decoding letters from Captain Marvel Pen Pals, although that was really boring; the code was just A for Z, B for Y, etc.

Nights were long and hot. Mamie’s friends stayed even when she slept, reading from the Bible, singing sometimes. Grandpa went out, to the Elks, or to Juárez. The 8–5 cabdriver helped him up the stairs. My mother went out to play bridge, she said, but she came home drunk, too. The Mexican kids played outside until very late. I watched the girls from the porch. They played jacks, squatting on the concrete under the streetlight. I ached to play with them. The sound of the jacks was magical to me, the toss of the jacks like brushes on a drum or like rain, when a gust of wind shimmers it against the windowpane.

One morning when it was still dark, Grandpa woke me up. It was Sunday. I dressed while he called the cab. To call a cab he asked the operator for 8–5 and when they answered, he said, “How about a little transportation?” He didn’t answer when the cabdriver asked why we were going to the office on Sunday. It was dark and scary in the lobby. Cockroaches clattered across the tiles and magazines grinned at us behind bars of grating. He drove the elevator, maniacally crashing up and then down and up again until we finally stopped above the fifth floor and jumped down. It was very quiet after we stopped. All you heard were church bells and the Juárez trolley.

At first I was too frightened to follow him into the workshop, but he pulled me in. It was dark, like in a movie theater. He lit the gasping Bunsen burners. I still couldn’t see, couldn’t see what he wanted me to. He took a set of false teeth down from a shelf and moved them close to the flame on the marble block. I shook my head.

“Keep lookin’ at them.” Grandpa opened his mouth wide and I looked back and forth between his own teeth and the false ones.

“They’re yours!” I said.

The false teeth were a perfect replica of the teeth in Grandpa’s mouth, even the gums were an ugly, sick pale pink. The teeth were filled and cracked, some were chipped or worn away. He had changed only one tooth, one in front that he had put a gold cap on. That’s what made it a work of art, he said.

“How did you get all those colors?”

“Pretty dang good, eh? Well … is it my masterpiece?”

“Yes.” I shook his hand. I was very happy to be there.

“How do you fit them?” I asked. “Will they fit?”

Usually he pulled out all the teeth, let the gums heal, then made an impression of the bare gum.

“Some of the new guys are doing it this way. You take the impression before you pull the teeth, make the dentures and put them in before the gums have a chance to shrink.”

“When are you getting your teeth pulled?”

“Right now. We’re going to do it. Go get things ready.”