A Manual for Cleaning Women (15 page)

He had to pee, got the idea that if he aimed just next to Sextus it would warm him and cheer him up. That’s what he was doing when my father came in and screamed. I got so scared I fell off the rafter. That’s how I broke my arm the first time. Then Red, Kentshereve’s father, came in and grabbed up the baby. Nobody got Kentshereve down or even noticed the miracle of the ladder missing the baby on all four sides. From the car, shivering with pain, I saw Red beating up Kentshereve. He didn’t cry. He nodded at me across the yard and his eyes told me it had been worth it.

I spent one night with him, the night my baby sister had her tonsils out. Red sent me and my blankets up the ladder to the loft where the five older children slept on straw. There was no window, just an opening in the eaves covered with black oilcloth. Kentshereve poked a hole in it with an ice pick and there was a jet of air like on airplanes only icy cold. If you put your ear to it you could hear icicles in the pines, chandeliers, the creaking of the mine shaft, ore cars. It smelled of cold and wood smoke. When I put my one eye to the tiny hole I saw the stars as if for the first time, magnified, the sky, dazzling and vast. If I so much as blinked my eye it all disappeared.

We stayed awake waiting to hear his parents doing it but they never did. I asked him what he thought it was like. He held his hand up to mine so our fingers were all touching, had me run my thumb and forefinger over our touching ones. You can’t tell which is which. Must be something like that he said.

*   *   *

I didn’t go to the cafeteria on my break, but went outside the fourth floor onto the terrace. Cold January night, but already there were Japanese plum blossoms lit by the streetlamps. Californians defend their seasons by saying they are subtle. Who wants a subtle spring? Give me an Idaho thaw any old day with Kentshereve and me sliding down muddy hills on a flattened cardboard box. Give me the blatant blast of lilac, of a surviving hyacinth. I smoked on the terrace, the metal chair making cold stripes on my thighs. I yearned for love, for whispers on a clear winter night.

We fought only at the movies, on Saturdays in Wallace. He could read the credits but wouldn’t tell me what they said. I was jealous, as I was to be later of one husband’s music, another’s drugs. The lady in the lake. When the first title appeared he would whisper, “Now! Quiet!” The writing slipped up the screen as he squinted, nodding. Sometimes he’d shake his head or chuckle or say, “Hmmph!” I know now that the hardest thing the titles ever say is cinematographic but I’m still sure I’m missing something. Then I would writhe, frantic, shaking his arm. Come on. What’s it say? Hush! He’d fling my arm away and lean forward in his seat, covering his ears, his lips moving as he read. I longed to go to school, for second grade to hurry up and come. (He said first was a waste of time.) Nothing then, between us, would not be shared.

4420, Bed Two’s bell rang. I went into his room. His roommate’s visitors had accidentally moved the curtain over his TV as they left. I pulled it back and he nodded at me. Anything else? I asked and he shook his head. The credits for
Dallas
were floating up the screen.

“You know, I finally learned to read, you dirty rat,” I said and his BB eyes glittered as he laughed. You couldn’t tell really—it was just a wheezing rusty pipe sound that shook his zigzag bed, but I’d know that laugh anywhere.

Carpe Diem

Most of the time I feel all right about getting old. Some things give me a pang, like skaters. How free they seem, long legs gliding, hair streaming back. Other things throw me into a panic, like BART doors. A long wait before the doors open, after the train comes to a stop. Not very long, but it’s too long. There’s no time.

And laundromats. But they were a problem even when I was young. Just too long, even the Speed Queens. Your entire life has time to flash before your eyes while you sit there, a drowner. Of course if I had a car I could go to the hardware store or the post office and then come back and put things into the dryer.

The laundries with no attendants are even worse. Then it seems I’m always the only person there at all. But all of the washers and dryers are going … everybody is at the hardware store.

So many laundromat attendants I have known, the hovering Charons, making change or who never have change. Now it is fat Ophelia who pronounces No Sweat as No Thwet. Her top plate broke on beef jerky. Her breasts are so huge she has to turn sideways and then kitty-corner to get through doors, like moving a kitchen table. When she comes down the aisle with a mop everybody moves and moves the baskets too. She is a channel hopper. Just when we’ve settled in to watch
The Newlywed Game
she’ll flick it to
Ryan’s Hope
.

Once, to be polite, I told her I got hot flashes too, so that’s what she associates me with … The Change. “How ya coming with the change?” she says, loud, instead of hello. Which only makes it worse, sitting there, reflecting, aging. My sons have all grown now, so I’m down from five washers to one, but one takes just as long.

I moved last week, maybe for the two hundredth time. I took in all my sheets and curtains and towels, my shopping cart piled high. The laundromat was very crowded; there weren’t any washers together. I put all my things into three machines, went to get change from Ophelia. I came back, put the money and the soap in, and started them. Only I had started up three wrong washers. Three that had just finished this man’s clothes.

I was backed into the machines. Ophelia and the man loomed before me. I’m a tall woman, wear Big Mama panty-hose now, but they were both huge people. Ophelia had a prewash spray bottle in her hand. The man wore cutoffs, his massive thighs were matted with red hair. His thick beard wasn’t like hair at all but a red padded bumper. He wore a baseball hat with a gorilla on it. The hat wasn’t too small but his hair was so bushy it shoved the hat high up on his head making him about seven feet tall. He was slapping a heavy fist into his other red palm. “Goddamn. I’ll be goddamned!” Ophelia wasn’t menacing; she was protecting me, ready to come between him and me, or him and the machines. She’s always saying there’s nothing at the laundry she can’t handle.

“Mister, you may’s well sit down and relax. No way to stop them machines once they’ve started. Watch a little TV, have yourself a Pepsi.”

I put quarters in the right machines and started them. Then I remembered that I was broke, no more soap and those quarters had been for dryers. I began to cry.

“What the fuck is
she
crying about? What do you think this does to my Saturday, you dumb slob? Jesus wept.”

I offered to put his clothes into the dryers for him, in case he wanted to go somewhere.

“I wouldn’t let you near my clothes. Like stay away from my clothes, you dig?” There was no place for him to sit except next to me. We looked at the machines. I wished he would go outside, but he just sat there, next to me. His big right leg vibrated like a spinning washer. Six little red lights glowed at us.

“You always fuck things up?” he asked.

“Look, I’m sorry. I was tired. I was in a hurry.” I began to giggle, nervously.

“Believe it or not, I am in a hurry. I drive a tow. Six days a week. Twelve hours a day. This is it. My day off.”

“What were you in a hurry for?” I meant this nicely, but he thought I was being sarcastic.

“You stupid broad. If you were a dude I’d wash you. Put your empty head in the dryer and turn it to cook.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“Damn right you’re sorry. You’re one big sorry excuse for a chick. I had you spotted for a loser before you did that to my clothes. I don’t believe this. She’s crying again. Jesus wept.”

Ophelia stood above him.

“Don’t you be bothering her, you hear? I happens to know she’s going through a hard time.”

How did she know that? I was amazed. She knows everything, this giant black Sybil, this Sphinx. Oh, she must mean The Change.

“I’ll fold your clothes if you’d like,” I said to him.

“Hush, girl,” Ophelia said. “Point is, what’s the big deal? In a hunnert years from now just who is gonna care?”

“A hunnert years,” he whispered. “A hunnert years.”

And I was thinking that too. A hundred years. Our machines were shimmying away, and all the little red spin lights were on.

“At least yours are clean. I used up all my soap.”

“I’ll buy you some soap for crissake.”

“It’s too late. Thanks anyway.”

“She didn’t ruin my day. She’s ruined my whole fuckin’ week. No soap.”

Ophelia came back, stooped down to whisper to me.

“I been spottin’ some. Doctor says it don’t quit I’ll need a D and C. You been spottin’?”

I shook my head.

“You will. Women’s troubles just go on and on. A whole lifetime of troubles. I’m bloated. You bloated?”

“Her head is bloated,” the man said. “Look, I’m going out to the car, get a beer. I want you to promise not to go near my machines. Yours are thirty-four, thirty-nine, forty-three. Got that?”

“Yeah. Thirty-two, forty, forty-two.” He didn’t think it was funny.

The clothes were in the final spin. I’d have to hang mine up to dry on the fence. When I got paid I’d come back with soap.

“Jackie Onassis changes her sheets every single day,” Ophelia said. “Now that is sick, you ask me.”

“Sick,” I agreed.

I let the man put his clothes in a basket and go to the dryers before I took mine out. Some people were grinning but I just ignored them. I filled my cart with soggy sheets and towels. It was almost too heavy to push and, wet, not everything fit. I slung the hot-pink curtains over my shoulder. Across the room the man started to say something, then looked away.

It took a long time to get home. Even longer to hang everything, although I did find a rope. Fog was rolling in.

I poured some coffee and sat on the back steps. I was happy. I felt calm, unhurried. Next time I am on BART, I won’t even think about getting off until the train stops. When it does, I’ll make it out just in time.

Toda Luna, Todo Año

Toda luna, todo año

Todo día, todo viento

Camina, y pasa también.

También, toda sangre llega

Al lugar de su quietud.

(Books of Chilam-Balam)

Automatically, Eloise Gore began to translate the poem in her head.
Each moon, each year.
No.
Every moon, every year
gets the fricative sound.
Camina? Walks.
Shame that doesn’t work in English. Clocks walk in Spanish, don’t run.
Goes along, and passes away.

She snapped the book shut. You don’t read at a resort. She sipped her margarita, made herself take in the view from the restaurant terrace. The dappled coral clouds had turned a fluorescent pewter, crests of waves shattered silver on the gray-white beach below. All down the beach, from the town of Zihuatanejo, was a faint dazzle and dance of tiny green light. Fireflies, neon lime-green. Village girls placed them in their hair when they walked at dusk, strolling in groups of twos or threes. Some of the girls scattered the insects through their hair, others arranged them into emerald tiaras.

This was her first night here and she was alone in the dining room. Waiters in white coats stood near the steps to the pool and bar where most of the guests still danced and drank.
Mambo! Que rico el Mambo!
Ice cubes and maracas. Busboys lit flickering candles. There was no moon; it seemed the stars gave the metallic sheen to the sea.

Sunburned wildly dressed people began to come into the dining room. Texans or Californians she thought, looser, breezier than anyone from Colorado. They called across the tables to each other: “Go for it, Willy!” “Far fuckin’ out!”

What am I doing here? This was her first trip anywhere since her husband’s death three years before. Both Spanish teachers, they had traveled every summer in Mexico and Latin America. After he died she had not wanted to go anywhere without him, had signed up each June to teach summer school. This year she had been too tired to teach. In the travel office they had asked her when she needed to return. She had paused, chilled. She didn’t need to return, didn’t need to teach at all anymore. There was no place she had to be, no one to account to.

She ate her ceviche now, feeling painfully conspicuous. Her gray seersucker suit, appropriate in class, in Mexico City … it was dowdy, ludicrously the wrong thing. Stockings were tacky, and hot. There would probably even be a wet spot when she stood up.

She forced herself to relax, to enjoy langostinos broiled in garlic. Mariachis were strolling from table to table, passed hers by when they saw her frozen expression.
Sabor a tí.
The taste of you. Imagine an American song about how somebody tasted? Everything in Mexico tasted. Vivid garlic, cilantro, lime. The smells were vivid. Not the flowers, they didn’t smell at all. But the sea, the pleasant smell of decaying jungle. Rancid odor of the pigskin chairs, kerosene-waxed tiles, candles.

It was dark on the beach and fireflies played in the misty green swirls, on their own now. Out in the bay were red flares for luring fish.

“
Pues, cómo estuvo?
” the waiter asked.

“
Esquisito, gracias.
”

The hotel boutique was still open. She found two simple hand-woven dresses, one white and one rose. The dresses were soft and loose, unlike anything she had ever worn. She bought a straw bag and several combs with jade fireflies on them, for prizes for her students.

A nightcap? the manager suggested as she crossed the lobby. Well, why not? she thought and entered the now empty bar by the pool. She ordered Madero brandy with Kahlua, Mel’s favorite drink. She missed him acutely, wanted his hand on her hair. She closed her eyes to the sound of palms rippling, ice shaking in the mixer, the creak of oars.

In her room she looked at the poem again.
Thus all life arrives
/
at the place of its quietude.
No. And not
life
, anyway, the word is
sangre
, blood, all that pulsates and flows. The lamp was too dim, bugs clattered into the shade. As she shut off her light the music began again in the bar. Insistent thud of the bass. Her heart beat, was beating.
Sangre
.