Lucia Berlin: A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

I had a terrible thought, pulled from my pocket my four Saint cards. Every time we got a perfect score in reading or arithmetic we got a star. On Fridays the pupil with the most stars was given a Saint card, similar to a baseball card except the halo had glitter on it. May I keep my Saints? I asked her, sick at heart.

“Of course you may, and I hope that you will be earning many more.” She smiled at me and did me another favor. “You can still pray, dear, for guidance. Let us say a Hail Mary together.” I closed my eyes and prayed fervently to our Mother, who will always have Sister Cecilia’s face.

Whenever a siren sounded outside in the streets, near or far, Sister Cecilia had us stop whatever we were doing, lay our heads down on our desks, and say a Hail Mary. I still do that. Say a Hail Mary, I mean. Well, also I lay my head down on wooden desks, to listen to them, because they do make sounds, like branches in the wind, as if they were still trees. A lot of things were really bothering me in those days, like what gave life to the candles and where the sound came from in the desks. If everything in God’s world has a soul, even the desks, since they have a voice, there must be a heaven. I couldn’t go to heaven because I was Protestant. I’d have to go to limbo. I would rather have gone to hell than limbo, what an ugly word, like dumbo, or mumbo jumbo, a place without any dignity at all.

I told my mother I wanted to become a Catholic. She and my grandpa had a fit. He wanted to put me back in Vilas school but she said no, it was full of Mexicans and juvenile delinquents. I told her there were lots of Mexicans at St. Joseph’s but she said they came from nice families. Were we a nice family? I didn’t know. What I still do is look in picture windows where families are sitting around and wonder what they do, how do they talk to one another?

Sister Cecilia and another nun came to our house one afternoon. I don’t know why they came and they didn’t get a chance to say. Everything was a mess. My mother crying and Mamie, my grandma, crying, Grandpa was drunk and went lunging at them calling them crows. The next day I was afraid Sister Cecilia would be mad at me and not say “Good-bye, dear” when she left me alone in the room at recess. But before she left she handed me a book called Understood Betsy and said she thought I would like it. It was the first real book I ever read, the first book I fell in love with.

She praised my work in class, and commented to the other students every time I got a star, or on Fridays when I was given a Saint card. I did everything to please her, carefully scrolling A.M.D.G. at the top of every paper, rushing to erase the board. My prayers were the loudest, my hand the first to go up when she asked a question. She continued to give me books to read and once she gave me a paper bookmark that said “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” I showed it to Melissa Barnes in the cafeteria. I had foolishly believed that since Sister Cecilia liked me the girls would begin to like me too. But now instead of laughing at me they hated me. When I stood up to answer in class they would whisper Pet, pet, pet. Sister Cecilia chose me to collect the dimes and pass out the medals for lunch and when each girl took her medal she whispered Pet.

Then one day out of the clear blue sky my mother got mad at me because my father wrote me more than he did her. It’s because I write to him more. No, you’re his pet. One day I got home late. I had missed the bus from the plaza. She stood at the top of the stairs with a blue airmail letter from my father in one hand. With the other she lit a kitchen match on her thumbnail and burned the letter as I raced up the stairs. That always scared me. When I was little I didn’t see the match, thought she lit her cigarettes with a flaming thumb.

I stopped talking. I didn’t say, Well now I’m not going to talk anymore, I just gradually stopped and when the sirens passed I laid my head down on the desk and whispered the prayer to myself. When Sister Cecilia called on me I shook my head and sat back down. I stopped getting Saints and stars. It was too late. Now they called me dumb-dumb. She stayed in the classroom after they had left for gym. “What is wrong, dear? May I help you? Please talk to me.” I locked my jaws and refused to look at her. She left and I sat there in the hot semidarkness of the classroom. She came back, later, with a copy of Black Beauty that she placed before me. “This is a lovely book, only it’s very sad. Tell me, are you sad about something?”

I ran away from her and the book into the cloakroom. Of course there were no cloaks since it was so hot in Texas, but boxes of dusty textbooks. Easter decorations. Christmas decorations. Sister Cecilia followed me into the tiny room. She spun me around and forced me to my knees. “Let us pray,” she said.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus … Her eyes were filled with tears. I could not bear their tenderness. I wrenched away from her grasp, accidentally knocking her down. Her headdress caught in a coat hook and was yanked off. Her head wasn’t shaved like the girls said. She cried out and ran from the room.

I was sent home that same day, expelled from St. Joseph’s for striking a nun. I don’t know how she could have thought that I would hit her. It wasn’t like that at all.

42–PIEDMONT. Slow bus to Jack London Square. Maids and old ladies. I sat next to an old blind woman who was reading Braille, her finger gliding across the page, slow and quiet, line after line. It was soothing to watch, reading over her shoulder. The woman got off at Twenty-ninth, where all the letters have fallen from the sign NATIONAL PRODUCTS BY THE BLIND except for BLIND.

Twenty-ninth is my stop too, but I have to go all the way downtown to cash Mrs. Jessel’s check. If she pays me with a check one more time I’ll quit. Besides she never has any change for carfare. Last week I went all the way to the bank with my own quarter and she had forgotten to sign the check.

She forgets everything, even her ailments. As I dust I collect them and put them on her desk. 10 AM. NAUSEEA (sp) on a piece of paper on the mantel. DIARREEA on the drainboard. DIZZY POOR MEMORY on the kitchen stove. Mostly she forgets if she took her phenobarbital or not, or that she has already called me twice at home to ask if she did, where her ruby ring is, etc.

She follows me from room to room, saying the same things over and over. I’m going as cuckoo as she is. I keep saying I’ll quit but I feel sorry for her. I’m the only person she has to talk to. Her husband is a lawyer, plays golf and has a mistress. I don’t think Mrs. Jessel knows this, or remembers. Cleaning women know everything.

Cleaning women do steal. Not the things the people we work for are so nervous about. It is the superfluity that finally gets to you. We don’t want the change in the little ashtrays.

Some lady at a bridge party somewhere started the rumor that to test the honesty of a cleaning woman you leave little rosebud ashtrays around with loose change in them, here and there. My solution to this is to always add a few pennies, even a dime.

The minute I get to work I first check out where the watches are, the rings, the gold lamé evening purses. Later when they come running in all puffy and red-faced I just coolly say, “Under your pillow, behind the avocado toilet.” All I really steal is sleeping pills, saving up for a rainy day.

Today I stole a bottle of Spice Islands sesame seeds. Mrs. Jessel rarely cooks. When she does she makes Sesame Chicken. The recipe is pasted inside the spice cupboard. Another copy is in the stamp and string drawer and another in her address book. Whenever she orders chicken, soy sauce, and sherry she orders another bottle of sesame seeds. She has fifteen bottles of sesame seeds. Fourteen now.