A Manual for Cleaning Women (27 page)

“La Vie en Rose” the orchestra plays for a very long time as the young people dance around and around on the polished floor. The blue uniforms, the white chiffon dresses reflect in the dark mirrors. People smile, watching the beautiful dancers. Curtains billow like sails. Andrés speaks to Claire in the familiar tense. Roberto suggests that the girls come back downstairs after Herr von Dessaur goes to sleep. The dance is over.

Days go by. The men work on Roberto’s fundo, come to the hotel only in the evening. Gerda and Claire swim, climb the volcano. Hot sun, cool snow. They play golf and croquet with Herr von Dessaur. They row to their island. They ride horseback with Herr von Dessaur. Shoulders back, he says. Head up, he says to Claire. He holds her throat for a long time. Claire swallows. The girls play canasta with some ladies on the terrace. An Argentine woman reads their fortunes with cards. A cigarette in her mouth; she squints through the smoke. Gerda gets a new path and a strange, mysterious man. Claire gets a new path too and the two of hearts. A kiss from the gods.

Every night they dance with Roberto and Andrés to “La Vie en Rose” and finally one night the girls do go back downstairs after Herr von Dessaur is asleep. A honeymoon couple and some Americans are the only people left in the dining room. Roberto and Andrés stand and bow. The old men in the orchestra look shocked but they play “Adiós Muchachos,” a mournful, pulsating tango. The couples dance dreamily out the doors to the terrace, down the steps to the wet sand. Boots crunch on the sand like on new snow. They climb into a boat. They sit in the starlit night, holding hands, listening to the violins. The lights from the hotel and the white volcano splinter silver in the water. A breeze. It is cool. No, it is cold. The boat has come unmoored. There are no oars. The boat is moving fast, gliding like the wind, with the wind, out into the dark lake. Oh, no! Gerda gasps. The girls are kissed while there is still a chance. He put his whole tongue in my mouth, Gerda says, later. Claire is bumped on the forehead. A kiss catches the corner of her lips, grazes her nose before the girls dive like mercury into the black water of the lake.

Their shoes are gone. The girls are wet and cold, shivering outside the doorway to the hotel, shuttered now by iron gates. Let’s just wait, Claire says. What, until morning? You must be mad! Gerda shakes the metal gates until at last lights go on in the hotel.
Gerdalein!
her father says from a balcony, but suddenly he is in front of them, behind the gates. The mayordomo is in a bathrobe, with keys.

In their room the girls wrap themselves in blankets. Herr von Dessaur is pale. Did he touch you? Gerda shakes her head. No. We danced and then we sat in a boat but then the boat got loose so we … Did he kiss you? She doesn’t answer. I ask you. Did he kiss you? Gerda nods her head; her father slaps her in the mouth. Slut, he says.

The maid comes in the morning before it is light. She packs their bags. They leave before anyone is awake, wait a long time at the railway station in Temuco. Herr von Dessaur sits across from Claire and Gerda. The girls are reading, silently, the book held between them.
Sonata de Otoño.
The woman dies in his arms, in a distant wing of the castle. He has to carry her body back to her own bed, through the passages. Her long black hair catches on the stones. No candle.

“You will see no one, and especially not Claire, for the rest of the summer.”

Finally Herr von Dessaur goes out to smoke and for just a short blessed time the friends can laugh. A joyous splutter of laughter. By the time he returns they are reading quietly.

Macadam

When fresh it looks like caviar, sounds like broken glass, like someone chewing ice.

I’d chew ice when the lemonade was finished, swaying with my grandmother on the porch swing. We gazed down upon the chain gang paving Upson Street. A foreman poured the macadam; the convicts stomped it down with a heavy rhythmic beat. The chains rang; the macadam made the sound of applause.

The three of us said the word often. My mother because she hated where we lived, in squalor, and at least now we would have a macadam street. My grandmother just so wanted things clean—it would hold down the dust. Red Texan dust that blew in with gray tailings from the smelter, sifting into dunes on the polished hall floor, onto her mahogany table.

I used to say
macadam
out loud, to myself, because it sounded like the name for a friend.

Dear Conchi

Dear Conchi,

The University of New Mexico, not how we imagined it at all. Secondary school in Chile was harder than college here. I live in a dorm, hundreds of girls, all outgoing and confident. I still feel strange, ill at ease.

I love the place itself. The campus has many old adobe buildings. The desert is beautiful and there are mountains here. Not like the Andes of course, but big on a different scale. Rugged and rocky. Dumb-dumb … that’s what they are called, the Rocky Mountains. Clear clean air, cold at night with millions of stars.

My clothes are all wrong. A girl even told me that nobody here “dresses up” like I do. I have to get white sox I guess and huge circular skirts, blue jeans. I mean, the women look really horrible. It’s nice on the men, though, casual clothes and boots.

I’ll never get used to the food. Cereal for breakfast and coffee as weak as tea. And when I’m ready for tea in the afternoon that’s when dinner is served here. When I’m ready for dinner it’s lights-out time at the dorm.

I couldn’t get a class with Ramon Sender until next semester. I saw him in the hall, though! I told him
Cronica del Alba
was my favorite book. He said, “Yes, but then, you are very young.” He is how I imagined him, only real old. Very Spanish and arrogant, dignified …

*   *   *

Dear Conchi,

I have a job, can you imagine? Part time, but still. It’s proofreading the college paper,
The Lobo
, which comes out once a week. I work three nights in the journalism building, right next to the dorm. I even have a key to the dorm, since it’s locked at ten and I work until eleven. The printer is an old Texan called Jonesy, who works on a linotype machine. A wonderful machine with about a thousand parts and gears. Boiling lead that makes the letters. He puts the words in and they clank and sing and clatter, come out in lines of hot lead. It makes each line seem important.

He teaches me things, about writing headlines, which stories are good, and why. He teases me a lot, plays tricks to keep me on my toes. In the middle of a story about a basketball game he’ll slip in something like “Down upon the Swanee River.”

Sometimes a man called Joe Sanchez comes in and brings copy and a beer for Jonesy. He’s a sports and feature writer. He’s a student, but much older than the boys in my classes, because he is a veteran, here on the GI bill. He tells us about Japan, where he was a medic. He looks like an Indian, has shiny black hair, long, combed in a ducktail.

Sorry, I’m already using expressions you’ve never heard. Most of the boys here wear crew cuts, which is practically shaven heads. Some have longer hair, combed back in what looks like a duck’s tail.

I miss you and Quena a lot. I haven’t made a friend yet. I am different, coming from Chile. I think people think I’m stuck up because I’m not open. I don’t understand the humor yet, get embarrassed because there’s a lot of joking and hinting about sex. Strangers will tell you their whole life story, but they aren’t emotional or affectionate like Chileans, so I still don’t feel I know them.

All those years in South America I wanted to return to my country the USA because it was a democracy, not with just two classes like Chile. There are definitely classes here. Girls who were nice to me in the beginning snub me now because I didn’t go through rush, live in the dorm and not a sorority. And some sororities are “better” than others. Richer.

I mentioned to my roommate Ella that Joe, the reporter, was funny and nice and she said, “Yes, but he’s Mexican.” He’s not from Mexico, that’s what they call anybody of Spanish descent here. There aren’t that many Mexicans at the university, when you consider the population here, and only about ten Negroes.

My journalism classes are going well, great teachers, they even look like reporters in old movies. I’m starting to get a weird feeling though. I majored in journalism because I wanted to be a writer, but the whole point of journalism is to cut out all the good stuff …

*   *   *

Dear Conchi,

 … I have been out several times with Joe Sanchez. He gets free tickets to events so he’ll do stories on them. I like him because he never says things just because they are the right thing to say. It’s very cool to like Dave Brubeck, a jazz musician, but in his review Joe called him a wimp. People got really mad. And Billy Graham. Hard to explain to you, being Catholic, what an Evangelist is. He talks, hollers, about God and sin and tries to get people to turn their lives over to Jesus. Everybody I know thinks the guy is crazy, money hungry and hopelessly corny. The column Joe wrote was about the man’s skill and power. It turned into a column about faith.

We don’t go to student hangouts afterward but to little restaurants in the south valley or to Mexican bars or cowboy bars. It’s like being in another country. We drive up into the mountains or out into the desert, walk or climb for miles. He doesn’t try to “make out” (
atracar
) like all the other boys do, relentlessly, here. When he says good-bye he just touches my cheek. Once he kissed my hair.

He doesn’t talk about things, or events or books. He reminds me of my uncle John. He tells stories, about his brothers, or his grandfather, or geisha girls in Japan.

I like him because he talks to everybody. He really wants to know what everyone is up to.

*   *   *

Dear Conchi,

I’m going out with a really sophisticated man, Bob Dash. We went to a play,
Waiting for Godot
, and to an Italian movie, I forget the title. He looks like a handsome author on a book jacket. A pipe, patches on his elbows. He lives in an adobe house filled with Indian pots and rugs and modern art. We drink gin and tonics with lime in them, listen to music like Bartok’s
Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion.
He talks a lot about books I have never heard of, and has lent me a dozen books … Sartre, Keerkegard (sp?), Beckett and T. S. Eliot, many more. I like a poem called “The Hollow Men.”

Joe told me it was Dash who was a hollow man. He has been unreasonably upset about me going out with Bob, or even having coffee with him. He says he’s not jealous but that he can’t bear the idea of me becoming an intellectual. Says I have to listen to Patsy Cline and Charlie Parker as an antidote. Read Walt Whitman and Thomas Wolfe’s
Look Homeward, Angel.

Actually I liked Camus’s
The Stranger
better than
Look Homeward, Angel.
But I like Joe because he likes that book. He’s not afraid to be corny. He loves America, and New Mexico, the barrio where he lives, the desert. We go for long hikes in the foothills. Once a huge dust storm came up. Tumbleweeds whipping through the air and blizzards of yellow dust howling. He was dancing around in it. I could barely hear him hollering how wonderful it was, the desert. We saw a coyote, heard it yelping.

He’s corny with me, too. He remembers things, and listens to me go on and on. Once I was crying for no reason, just missing you and Quena and home. He didn’t try to cheer me up, just held me and let me be sad. We speak Spanish when we’re talking about sweet things, or when we’re kissing. We’ve been kissing a lot.

*   *   *

Dear Conchi,

I wrote a short story, “Apples.” It’s about an old man who rakes apples. Bob Dash red-penciled about a dozen adjectives and said it was “an acceptable little story.” Joe said it was precious and false. That I should only write about what I feel, not make up something about an old man I never knew. It doesn’t bother me what they said. I read it over and over.

Of course it bothers me.

Ella, my roommate, said she would prefer not to read it. I wish we got along better. Her mother mails her her Kotex from Oklahoma every month. She’s a drama major. God, how can she ever play Lady Macbeth if she can’t relax about a little blood?

I’m seeing more of Bob Dash. He’s like having a personal seminar. Today we went to coffee and talked about
Nausea.
But I’m thinking more about Joe. I see him between classes and when I’m working. He and Jonesy and I laugh a lot, eat pizza and drink beer. Joe has a little room that’s sort of his office, that’s where we kiss. I don’t think about him exactly, but about kissing him. I was thinking about it in Copy Editing I, and even groaned or said something out loud and the professor looked at me and said, “Yes, Miss Gray?”

*   *   *

Dear Conchi,

 … I’m reading Jane Austen. Her writing is like chamber music, but it’s real and funny at the same time. There are a thousand books I want to read, don’t know where to start. I’m changing my major to English next semester …

*   *   *

Dear Conchi,

An old couple work as janitors in the journalism building. One night they took us up on the roof for a beer after work. The roof is overhung with cottonwood trees and you can just sit under the trees and look at the stars. If you want you can look over and watch the cars on Route 66, or on the other side, into the windows of the dorm where I live. They gave us an extra key to the broom closet, where the ladder to the roof is. Nobody else knows about this place. We go up there between classes and after work. Joe brought a grill and a mattress and candles. It’s like our own island or tree house …

*   *   *

Dear Conchi,

I am happy. When I wake up in the morning my face is sore from smiling.

When I was little I think I felt peace sometimes, in the woods or a meadow, and in Chile I was always having fun. I felt joy when I skied. But I had never felt happiness like I do with Joe. Never felt that I was me, and loved for that.

I sign out for the weekends to his house, with his father responsible for me. Joe lives with his father, who is very old, a retired schoolteacher. He loves to cook, makes awful greasy food. He drinks beer all day. The only effect it seems to have is to make him sing things like “Minnie the Mermaid” and “Rain on the Roof,” over and over while he cooks. He tells stories too, about everybody in Armijo, the neighborhood. He had most of them in school.