Lucia Berlin - A Manual for Cleaning Women - Selected Stories

In the Sweet Shop we’d close the blinds, sit at the counter doing our homework for that last hour, eating hot fudge sundaes. He could trip the jukebox to keep playing “Slow Boat to China,” “Cry,” and “Texarkana Baby” over and over. He was good at arithmetic and algebra and I was good with words so we helped each other. We leaned against each other, our legs hooked around the stools. He even hooked his elbow onto the part of my back brace that stuck out and I didn’t mind. Usually if I saw that anybody even noticed the brace under my clothes I’d feel sick with embarrassment.

More than anything else we shared being sleepy. We never said, “Gee, I’m sleepy. Aren’t you sleepy?” We were just tired together, leaned yawning together at the Sweet Shop. Yawned and smiled across the room at school.

His father was killed in a cave-in at the Flux mine. My father had been trying to get it shut down ever since we got to Arizona. That was his job for years, checking on mines to see if the veins were running out or if they were unsafe. They called him “Shut-’em-down Brown.” I waited in the pickup truck when he went to tell Willie’s mother. This was before I knew Willie. My father cried all the way home from town, which frightened me. It was Willie who later told me my father had fought to get pensions for the miners and their families, how much that helped his mother. She had five other children, did washing and cooking for people.

Willie was up as early as I was, chopping wood, getting his brothers and sisters breakfast. Civics class was the worst, impossible to stay awake, to be interested. It came at three o’clock. One endless hour. In the winter the woodstove steamed up the windows and our cheeks would be blazing red. Mrs. Boosinger blazed under her two purple spots of rouge. In summer with the windows open and flies buzzing around, bees humming and the clock ticking so drowsy so hot, she’d be talking talking about the First Amendment and whap! bang her ruler on the table. “Wake up! Wake up! You two jellyfish have no backbone! Sit up! Open your eyes. Jellyfish!” She once thought I was asleep but I was only resting my eyes. She said, “Lulu, who is the secretary of state?”

“Acheson, ma’am.” That surprised her.

“Willie, who is the secretary of agriculture?”

“Topeka and Santa Fe?”

I think we both were drunk with sleepiness. Every time she’d whack us on the head with the civics book we’d laugh harder. She sent him to the hall and me to the cloakroom, found us both curled up fast asleep after class.

A few times Sextus climbed up to Dot’s room. I’d hear him whisper, “The kid asleep?”

“Out like a light.” And it was true. No matter how hard I tried to stay awake to watch what they did, I’d fall asleep.

* * *

A weird thing happened to me this week. I could see these small quick crows flying just past my left eye. I’d turn but they would be gone. And when I closed my eyes, lights would flash past like motorcycles on the highway zooming by. I thought I was hallucinating or had cancer of the eye, but the doctor said they were floaters, that lots of people get them.

“How can there be lights in the dark?” I asked, as confused as I used to be about the refrigerator. He said that my eye told the brain there was light so my brain believed it. Please don’t laugh. This merely exacerbated the crow situation. It brought up the tree falling in the forest all over again too. Maybe my eyes just told my brain about crows in the maple tree.

One Sunday morning I woke up and Sextus was sleeping on the other side of Dot. I might have been more interested if they had been a more attractive couple. He had a buzz cut and pimples, white eyebrows and a huge Adam’s apple. He was a champion roper and barrel rider though, and his hog had won three years in a row at 4-H. Dot was homely, just plain homely. All the paint she put on didn’t even make her look cheap, it only accentuated her little brown eyes and big mouth that prominent eyeteeth kept open in a permanent semi-snarl. I shook her gently and pointed to Sextus. “Oh Jesus wept,” she said and woke him up. He was out the window, down the cottonwood and gone in seconds. Dot pinned me against the hay, made me swear not to say a word. “Hey, Dot, I haven’t so far, have I?”

“You do, I’ll tell on you and the Mexkin.” I was shaken, she sounded like my mother.

It was nice not worrying about my mother. I was a nicer person now. Not surly or sullen. Polite and helpful. I didn’t spill or break or drop things like at home. I never wanted to leave. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson kept saying I was a sweet girl, a good worker, and how they felt I was one of the family. We had family dinners on Sundays. Dot and I worked until noon while they went to church, then we closed up, went home, and helped make dinner. Mr. Wilson said grace. The boys poked each other and laughed, talked about basketball, and we all talked about, well, I don’t remember. Maybe we didn’t actually talk much, but it was friendly. We said, “Please pass the butter.” “Gravy?” My favorite part was that I had my own napkin and napkin ring that went on the sideboard with everyone else’s.

On Saturdays I got a ride to Nogales and then a bus to Tucson. The doctors put me in a medieval painful traction for hours, until I couldn’t take it anymore. They measured me, checked for nerve damage by sticking pins in me, hitting my legs and feet with hammers. They adjusted the brace and the lift on my shoe. It looked like they were coming to a decision. Different doctors squinted at my X-rays. The famous one they had been waiting for said my vertebrae were too close to my spinal cord. Surgery could cause paralysis, shock to all the organs that had compensated for the curvature. It would be expensive, not just the surgery, but during recovery I would have to lie immobile on my stomach for five months. I was glad they didn’t seem to want surgery. I was sure that if they straightened my spine I would be eight feet tall. But I didn’t want them to stop checking me; I didn’t want to go to Chile. They let me have one of the X-rays that showed a silver heart Willie gave me. My S-shaped spine, my heart in the wrong place and his heart right in the center. Willie put it up in a little window in the back of the Assay Office.

Some Saturday nights there were barn dances, way out in Elgin or Sonoita. In barns. Everybody from miles and miles would go, old people, young people, babies, dogs. Guests from dude ranches. All of the women brought things to eat. Fried chicken and potato salad, cakes and pies and punch. The men would go out in bunches and hang around their pickups, drinking. Some women too, my mother always did. High school kids got drunk and threw up, got caught necking. Old ladies danced with each other and children. Everybody danced. Two-step mostly, but some slow dances and jitterbug. Some square dances and Mexican dances like La Varsoviana . In English it’s “Put your little foot, put your little foot right there,” and you skip skip and whirl around. They played everything from “Night and Day” to “Detour, There’s a Muddy Road Ahead,” “ Jalisco no te Rajes ” to “Do the Hucklebuck.” Different bands every time but with the same kind of mix. Where did those ragtag wonderful musicians come from? Pachuco horn and guiro players, big-hatted country guitarists, bebop drummers, piano players that looked like Fred Astaire. The closest I ever heard anything come to those little bands was at the Five Spot in the late fifties. Ornette Coleman’s “Ramblin’.” Everybody raving how new and far-out he was. Sounded Tex-Mex to me, like a good Sonoita hoedown.

The staid pioneer-type housewives got all dressed up for the dances. Toni permanents and rouge, high heels. The men were leathery hardworking ranchers or miners, brought up in the Depression. Serious God-fearing workers. I loved to see the faces of the miners. The men I’d see coming off a shift dirty and drawn now red-faced and carefree, belting out an “Ah-hah, San Antone!” or an “ Aí, Aí, Aí, ” because not only did everybody dance, everybody sang and hollered too. At intervals Mr. and Mrs. Wilson would slow down to pant, “Have you seen Dot?”