Lucia Berlin: A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

These are pointless questions. The only reason I have lived so long is that I let go of my past. Shut the door on grief on regret on remorse. If I let them in, just one self-indulgent crack, whap, the door will fling open gales of pain ripping through my heart blinding my eyes with shame breaking cups and bottles knocking down jars shattering windows stumbling bloody on spilled sugar and broken glass terrified gagging until with a final shudder and sob I shut the heavy door. Pick up the pieces one more time.

Maybe this is not so dangerous a thing to do, to let the past in with the preface “What if?” What if I had spoken with Paul before he left? What if I had asked for help? What if I had married H? Sitting here, looking out the window toward the tree where now there are no branches or crows, the answers to each “what if” are strangely reassuring. They could not have happened, this what if, that what if. Everything good or bad that has occurred in my life has been predictable and inevitable, especially the choices and actions that have made sure I am now utterly alone.

But what if I were to go way back, to before we moved to South America? What if Dr. Mock had said I couldn’t leave Arizona for a year, that I needed extensive therapy and adjustments to my brace, possibly surgery for my scoliosis? I would have joined my family the following year. What if I had lived with the Wilsons in Patagonia, went weekly to the orthopedist’s in Tucson, reading Emma or Jane Eyre on the hot bus ride?

The Wilsons had five children, all of them old enough to work at the General Store or the Sweet Shop the Wilsons owned. I worked before and after school at the Sweet Shop with Dot, and shared the attic room with her. Dot was seventeen, the oldest child. Woman, really. She looked like a woman in the movies the way she put on pancake makeup and blotted her lipstick, blew smoke out of her nose. We slept together on the hay mattress covered with old quilts. I learned not to bother her, to lie quiet, thrilled by her smells. She tamed her curly red hair with Wildroot oil, smeared Noxzema on her face at night, and always put Tweed on her wrists and behind her ears. She smelled of cigarettes and sweat and Mum deodorant and what I later would learn was sex. We both smelled like old grease because we cooked hamburgers and fries at the Sweet Shop until it closed at ten. We walked home across the main street and the train tracks quickly past the Frontier saloon and down the street to her folks’ house. The Wilson house was the prettiest in town. A big two-story white house with a picket fence and a garden and a lawn. Most of the houses in Patagonia were small and ugly. Transient mining town houses painted that weird train station mining camp butterscotch brown. Most of the people worked up the mountain at the Trench and Flux mines where my father had been superintendent. Now he was an ore buyer in Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. He hadn’t wanted to go, didn’t want to leave the mines, working down in the mines. My mother had convinced him to go, everybody had. It was a big opportunity and we would be very rich.

He paid the Wilsons for my room and board, but they all decided it would be good for my character for me to work just like the other kids. We all worked hard, too, especially Dot and me, because we worked so late and then got up at five a.m. We opened up for the three buses of miners going from Nogales to the Trench. The buses arrived within fifteen minutes of one another; the miners had just enough time for one or two coffees and some doughnuts. They’d thank us and wave on their way out, Hasta luego! We’d finish washing up, make ourselves sandwiches for lunch. Mrs. Wilson got there to take over and we’d go to school. I was still in the grade school up on the hill. Dot was a junior.

When we got home at night she’d sneak back out to see her boyfriend, Sextus. He lived on a ranch in Sonoita, had left school to help his dad. I don’t know what time she got back in. I was asleep the minute my head was on my pillow. The minute I hit the hay! I loved the idea of a hay mattress like in Heidi . The hay felt good and smelled good. It always seemed like I had just closed my eyes when Dot was shaking me to wake up. She would already have washed or showered and dressed, and while I did she brushed her hair into a pageboy and made up her face. “What are you staring at? Fix up the bed if you got nothing else to do.” She really didn’t like me, but I didn’t like her back so I didn’t care. On the way to the Sweet Shop, she’d tell me over and over I better keep quiet about her seeing Sextus, her daddy would kill her. Everybody in town knew about her and Sextus already or I would have told somebody, not her folks, but somebody, just because she was so mean. She was just mean on principle. She figured she should hate this kid they put up in her own room. The truth was we got along well otherwise, grinning and laughing, good teamwork, slicing onions, making sodas, flipping burgers. Both of us fast and efficient, both of us enjoyed people, the kind Mexican miners mostly, who joked and teased us in the mornings. After school, kids from school and town people came in, for sodas or sundaes, to play the jukebox and the pinball machine. We served hamburgers, chili dogs, grilled cheese. We had tuna and egg salad and potato salad and coleslaw Mrs. Wilson made. The most popular dish though was the chili Willie Torres’s mother brought over every afternoon. Red chili in the winter, pork and green chilis in summer. Stacks of flour tortillas we’d warm on the grill.

One reason Dot and I worked so hard and so fast was we had an unspoken agreement that after we did all the dishes and cleaned the grill, she’d go out back with Sextus and I’d handle the few pie and coffee orders between nine and ten. Mostly I did homework with Willie Torres.

Willie worked until nine at the assayer’s office next door. We had been in the same grade together at school and I had made friends with him there. On Saturday mornings I’d come down with my dad in the pickup to get groceries and mail for the four or five families that lived on the mountain by the Trench mine. After he did all the buying and loading, Daddy would stop by Mr. Wise’s Assay Office. They’d drink coffee and talk about ore, mines, veins? I’m sorry, I didn’t pay attention. I know it was about minerals. Willie was a different person in the office. He was shy at school, had come from Mexico when he was eight, so even though he was smarter than Mrs. Boosinger, he had trouble reading and writing sometimes. His first valentine to me was “Be my sweat-hart.” Nobody made fun of him though, like they did of me and my back brace, yelling, “Timber!” when I came in because I was so tall. He was tall too, had an Indian face, high cheekbones and dark eyes. His clothes were clean but shabby and too small, his straight black hair long and raggedy, cut by his mother. When I read Wuthering Heights , Heathcliff looked like Willie, wild and brave.

In the Assay Office he seemed to know everything. He was going to be a geologist when he grew up. He showed me how to spot gold and fool’s gold and silver. That first day my father asked what we were talking about. I showed him what I had learned. “This is copper. Quartz. Lead. Zinc.”

“Wonderful!” he said, really pleased. During the drive home I got a geological lecture on the land all the way up to the mine.

On other Saturdays Willie showed me more rocks. “This is mica. This rock is shale, this is limestone.” He explained mining maps to me. We’d paw through boxes filled with fossils. He and Mr. Wise went out looking for them. “Hey, this one! Look at this leaf!” I didn’t realize I loved Willie since our closeness was so quiet, had nothing to do with the love girls talked about all the time, not like romance or crushes or ooh Jeeny loves Marvin.