A Manual For Cleaning Women
(This is the first in an occasional series on individual short stories. ‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’ can be read online on the Short Story Project here. Berlin’s collection of stories in the book of the same title is widely available).
Lucia Berlin knew how to start a story. The voices of her narrators come across instantly and vibrantly, crackling at us as if from a Tom Waits song:
You never hear sirens in the emergency room - the drivers turn them off on Webster Street (‘Emergency Room Notebook 1977’).
A nun stood in each classroom door, black robes floating into the hall with the wind (‘El Tim’).
Loretta met Anna and Sam the day she saved Sam’s life (‘Friends’).
502 was the clue for 1-Across in this morning’s Times. Easy. That’s the police code for Driving While Intoxicated, so I wrote in DW1. Wrong. I guess all those Connecticut commuters knew you were supposed to put in Roman numerals.’ (502).
‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’ (a hook of a title - she will play ironically with the idea of a ‘manual’, and it’s ‘women’, definitely not ‘ladies’), starts:
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 29th, where all the letters have fallen from the sign NATIONAL PRODUCTS BY THE BLIND except for BLIND.
So this is a story about journeys, as the narrator goes by bus from home to home. She sees people in their homes through an extraordinarily intimate lens, and yet is often unregarded, passing through. It is also a story about a journey, her own one in life which has been derailed by the death of her husband Ter. She is holding herself together for the sake of her jobs (she has never worked before) and her four children (who are scarcely mentioned at all). At the end she will let out her pain in a single sentence, and we will weep with her.
The voice is wonderful - sharp, wise-cracking, observant. She feels sorry for Mrs Jessel, who forgets everything, even her ailments and leaves misspelt notes around the house:
I keep saying I’ll quit but I feel sorry for her … 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.
What she does want, and is steadily and surreptitiously collecting, is sleeping pills (saving up for a rainy day as she says in a breezy cliché).
There are brilliant moments throughout:
Terry was a young cowboy, from Nebraska. He wouldn’t go to foreign movies. I just realized it’s because he couldn’t read fast enough. / Whenever Ter read a book, rarely - he would rip each page off and throw it away. I would come home, to where the windows were always open or broken and the whole room would be swirling with pages, like Safeway lot pigeons.
I have thirty pills now, from Jessel, Burns, Mcintyre, Horwitz and Blum. These people I work for each have enough uppers or downers to put a Hell’s Angel away for twenty years.
(Cleaning Women: Let them know you are thorough. The first day put all the furniture back wrong … five to ten inches off, or facing the wrong way. When you dust reverse the Siamese cats, put the creamer to the left of the sugar. Change the toothbrushes all round).
Funny though it often is, in the end this is a story coloured through by sadness and pain. Underlying everything is the true subject of her story, grief, but this is a masterclass in allowing such a distressing theme come through incrementally and subtly. She does speak about it directly on occasion, and it is this infrequency which breaks our hearts (we know Ter is always in her head):
I can’t handle you being dead, Ter. But you know that.
And there is this, as she gives herself a break:
Thank God they always have at least one TV show that they are addicted to. I flip the vacuum on for half an hour (a soothing sound), lie down under the piano with an Enddust rag clutched in my hand, just in case. I just lie there and hum and think. I refused to identify your body, Ter, which caused a lot of hassle. I was afraid I would hit you for what you did. Died.
In his superb recent book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (in which four Russians give a master class on writing, reading and life), which I reviewed here, George Saunders shows us how great stories move along by a series of ‘escalations’. Read Lucia Berlin’s and see how she manages these escalations, in what at first might seem to be a disconnected series of anecdotes. For instance, check out the story of the missing jigsaw piece close to the end, at Mrs Johansen’s:
I found the piece, way across the room from the puzzle table. It was sky, with a little bit of maple.
“I found it!” she cried. “I knew it was missing!”
“I found it!” I cried.
Then I could vacuum, which I did as she finished the puzzle with a sigh. As I was leaving I asked her when she thought she might need me again.
“Who knows?” she said.
“Well… anything goes,” I said, and we both laughed.
Ter, I don’t want to die at all, actually.
This is a marvellous short story: tender, sad, funny, memorable.