Lucia Berlin: A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

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.”

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.