Lucia Berlin: A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

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 had 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.

Lazy sweet afternoons on Sally’s floor, sorting photographs, reading letters, poems, gossiping, telling stories. The phone and doorbell rang all day. I screened the calls and visitors, was the one who cut them short if she was tired, or didn’t if she was happy, like with Gustavo always.

When someone is first diagnosed with a fatal illness, they are deluged with calls and letters and visits. But as the months go by and the time turns into hard time, fewer people come. That’s when the illness is growing and time is slow and loud. You heard the clocks and the church bells and vomiting and each raspy breath.

Sally’s ex-husband Miguel and Andrés came every day, but at different times. Only once did the visits coincide. I was surprised by how the ex-husband was automatically deferred to. He had remarried long ago, but there still was his pride to consider. Andrés had been in Sally’s room only a few minutes. I brought him in a coffee and pan dulce. Just as I set it on the table, Mirna came in to say, “The señor is coming!”