Lucia Berlin: A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

I plugged in the rusty sterilizer. The cord was frayed; it sparked. He started toward it. “Never mind the—” but I stopped him. “No. They have to be sterile,” and he laughed. He put his whiskey bottle and cigarettes on the tray, lit a cigarette, and poured a paper cup full of Jack Daniel’s. He sat down in the chair. I fixed the reflector, tied a bib on him, and pumped the chair up and back.

“Boy, I’ll bet a lot of your patients would like to be in my shoes.”

“That thing boiling yet?”

“No.” I filled some paper cups with Stom Aseptine and got out a jar of smelling salts.

“What if you pass out?” I asked.

“Good. Then you can pull them. Grab them as close as you can, twist and pull at the same time. Gimme a drink.” I handed him a cup of Stom Aseptine. “Wise guy.” I poured him whiskey.

“None of your patients get a drink.”

“They’re my patients, not yours.”

“Okay, it’s boiling.” I drained the sterilizer into the spitting bowl, laid out a towel. Using another one, I placed the instruments in an arc on the tray above his chest.

“Hold the little mirror for me,” he said and took the pliers.

I stood on the footrest between his knees, to hold the mirror close. The first three teeth came out easy. He handed them to me and I tossed them into the barrel by the wall. The incisors were harder, one in particular. He gagged and stopped, the root still stuck in his gum. He made a funny noise and shoved the pliers into my hand. “Take it!” I pulled at it. “Scissors, you fool!” I sat down on the metal plate between his feet. “Just a minute, Grandpa.”

He reached over above me for the bottle, drank, then took a different tool from the tray. He began to pull the rest of his bottom teeth without a mirror. The sound was the sound of roots being ripped out, like trees being torn from winter ground. Blood dripped onto the tray, plop, plop, onto the metal where I sat.

He started laughing so hard I thought he had gone mad. He fell over on top of me. Frightened, I leaped up so hard I pushed him back into the tilted chair. “Pull them!” he gasped. I was afraid, wondered quickly if it would be murder if I pulled them and he died.

“Pull them!” He spat a thin red waterfall down his chin.

I pumped the chair way back. He was limp, did not seem to feel me twist the back top teeth sideways and out. He fainted, his lips closing like gray clamshells. I opened his mouth and shoved a paper towel into one side so I could get the three back teeth that remained.

The teeth were all out. I tried to bring the chair down with the foot pedal, but hit the wrong lever, spinning him around, spattering circles of blood on the floor. I left him, the chair creaking slowly to a stop. I wanted some tea bags, he had people bite down on them to stop the bleeding. I dumped Mamie’s drawers out: talcum, prayer cards, thank you for the flowers. The tea bags were in a canister behind the hot plate.

The towel in his mouth was soaked crimson now. I dropped it on the floor, shoved a handful of tea bags into his mouth and held his jaws closed. I screamed. Without any teeth, his face was like a skull, white bones above the vivid bloody throat. Scary monster, a teapot come alive, yellow and black Lipton tags dangling like parade decorations. I ran to phone my mother. No nickel. I couldn’t move him to get to his pockets. He had wet his pants; urine dripped onto the floor. A bubble of blood kept appearing and bursting in his nostril.

The phone rang. It was my mother. She was crying. The pot roast, a nice Sunday dinner. Even cucumbers and onions, just like Mamie. “Help! Grandpa!” I said and hung up.

He had vomited. Oh good, I thought, and then giggled because it was a silly thing to think oh good about. I dropped the tea bags into the mess on the floor, wet some towels and washed his face. I opened the smelling salts under his nose, smelled them myself, shuddered.

“My teeth!” he yelled.

“They’re gone!” I called, like to a child. “All gone!”

“The new ones, fool!”

I went to get them. I knew them now, they were exactly like his mouth had been inside.

He reached for them, like a Juárez beggar, but his hands shook too badly.

“I’ll put them in. Rinse first.” I handed him the mouthwash. He rinsed and spat without lifting his head. I poured peroxide over the teeth and put them in his mouth. “Hey, look!” I held up Mamie’s ivory mirror.

“Well, dad gum!” He was laughing.

“A masterpiece, Grandpa!” I laughed too, kissed his sweaty head.

“Oh my God.” My mother shrieked, came toward me with her arms outstretched. She slipped in the blood, and slid into the teeth barrels. She held on to get her balance.

“Look at his teeth, Mama.”

She didn’t even notice. Couldn’t tell the difference. He poured her some Jack Daniel’s. She took it, toasted him distractedly, and drank.

“You’re crazy, Daddy. He’s crazy. Where did all the tea bags come from?”

His shirt made a tearing sound coming unstuck from his skin. I helped him wash his chest and wrinkled belly. I washed myself, too, and put on a coral sweater of Mamie’s. The two of them drank, silent, while we waited for the 8–5 cab. I drove the elevator down, landed it pretty close to the bottom. When we got home, the driver helped Grandpa up the stairs. He stopped at Mamie’s door, but she was asleep.

In bed, Grandpa slept too, his teeth bared in a Bela Lugosi grin. They must have hurt.

“He did a good job,” my mother said.

“You don’t still hate him, do you Mama?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes I do.”

Wait. Let me explain …

My whole life I’ve run into these situations, like that morning with the psychiatrist. He was staying in the cottage behind my house while his new house was being remodeled. He looked really nice, handsome too, and of course I wanted to make a good impression, would have taken over brownies but didn’t want him to think I was aggressive. One morning, just at dawn, as usual, I was drinking coffee and looking out the window at my garden, which was wonderful then, the sweet peas and delphiniums and cosmos. I felt, well, I felt full of joy … Why do I hesitate to tell you this? I don’t want you to think I’m sappy, I want to make a good impression. Anyway I was happy, and I tossed a handful of birdseed out onto the deck, sat there smiling to myself as dozens of mourning doves and finches flew down to eat the seeds. Then flash, two big cats leaped onto the deck and began chomping away on birds, feathers flying, just at the very moment the psychiatrist came out his door. He looked at me, aghast, said “How terrible!” and fled. He avoided me completely after that morning, and it wasn’t my imagination. There was no way I could explain that it had all happened so fast, that I wasn’t smiling away at the cats chewing the birds. It was that my happiness about the sweet peas and the finches hadn’t had time to fade.

As far back as I can remember I have made a very bad first impression. That time in Montana when all I was trying to do was get Kent Shreve’s socks off so we could go barefoot but they were pinned to his drawers. But what I really want to talk about is St. Joseph’s School. Now, psychiatrists (please don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not obsessed by psychiatrists or anything) — it seems to me psychiatrists concentrate entirely too much upon the primal scene and preoedipal deprivation and they ignore the trauma of grade school and other children, who are cruel arid ruthless.

I won’t even go into what happened at Vilas, the first school I went to in El Paso. A big misunderstanding all around. So two months into the year, of third grade, there I was in the playground outside of St. Joseph’s. My new school. Absolutely terrified. I had thought that wearing a uniform would help. But I had this heavy metal brace on my back, for what was called the curvature, let’s face it, a hunchback, so I had to get the white blouse and plaid skirt way too big to go over it, and of course my mother didn’t think to at least hem up the skirt.