A Manual for Cleaning Women (31 page)

Torture is everywhere. In the wrestling matches, Aztec temples, racks of nails in the old convents, bloody thorns on Christ’s heads in all the churches. Lord, now all the cookies and candies are made like skulls, since soon it will be the Day of the Dead.

That’s the day Mama died, in California. My sister Sally was here, in Mexico City, where she lives. She and her children made an
ofrenda
to our mother.

Ofrendas
are fun to make. Offerings to the dead. You make them as pretty as you can. Cascading and brilliant with marigolds and magenta velvets, a flower that looks like brains, and tiny purple
sempiternas
. The main idea about death here is to make it beautiful and festive. Sultry bleeding Christs, the elegance, the ultimate beautiful deadliness of bullfights, elaborately carved tombs, headstones for the graves.

On the
ofrendas
you place everything the dead person might be wishing for. Tobacco, pictures of his family, mangos, lottery tickets, tequila, postcards from Rome. Swords and candles and coffee. Skulls with friends’ names on them. Candy skeletons to eat.

On our mother’s
ofrenda
my sister’s children had put dozens of Ku Klux Klan figures. She hated them for being the children of a Mexican. Her
ofrenda
had Hershey bars, Jack Daniel’s, mystery books, and many, many dollar bills. Sleeping pills and guns and knives, since she was always killing herself. No noose … she said she couldn’t get the hang of it.

I am in Mexico now. This year we made a lovely
ofrenda
, for my sister Sally, who is dying of cancer.

We had masses of flowers, orange, magenta, purple. Many white votive candles. Statues of saints and angels. Tiny guitars and Paris paperweights. Cancún and Portugal. Chile. All the places she had been. Dozens and dozens of skulls with names and pictures of her children, of all of us who have loved her … A picture of Daddy in Idaho, holding her as a baby. Poems from the children who were her students.

*   *   *

Mama, you weren’t in the
ofrenda.
We didn’t omit you on purpose. We have, in fact, been saying affectionate things about you these past months.

For years, when Sally and I got together we ranted obsessively about how crazy and cruel you were. But these few months … well, I guess it is natural when one is dying to sort of sum up what has mattered, what has been beautiful. We have remembered your jokes and your way of looking, never missing a thing. You gave us that. Looking.

Not listening though. You’d give us maybe five minutes, to tell you about something, and then you’d say, “Enough.”

I can’t figure out why our mother hated Mexicans so much. I mean, well beyond the given prejudice of all her Texan relatives. Dirty, lying, thieving. She hated smells, any smells, and Mexico smells, even above the exhaust fumes. Onions and carnations. Cilantro, piss, cinnamon, burning rubber, rum, and tuberoses. The men smell in Mexico. The whole country smells of sex and soap. That’s what terrified you, Mama, you and old D. H. Lawrence too. It’s easy to get sex and death mixed up here, since they both keep pulsating away. A two-block stroll wafts sensuality, is fraught with peril.

Although today nobody is supposed to go outside at all, because of the pollution level.

My husband and sons and I lived for many years in Mexico. We were very happy during those years. But we always lived in villages, by the sea or in the mountains. There was such an affectionate ease, a passive sweetness there. Or then, as this was many years ago.

Mexico City now … fatalistic, suicidal, corrupt. A pestilential swamp. Oh, but there is a graciousness. There are flashes of such beauty, of kindness and of color, you catch your breath.

I went home two weeks ago, for a week, at Thanksgiving, back to the USA where there is honor and integrity and Lord knows what else, I thought. I got confused. President Bush and Clarence Thomas and antiabortion and AIDS and Duke and crack and homelessness. And everywhere, MTV, cartoons, ads, magazines—just war and sexism and violence. In Mexico, at least a can of cement falls off a scaffold on your head, no Uzis or anything personal.

What I mean is I’m here for an indefinite period. But then what, where will I go?

Mama, you saw ugliness and evil everywhere, in everyone, in each place. Were you crazy or a seer? Either way I can’t bear to become like you. I am terrified, I am losing all sense of what is … precious, true.

Now I’m feeling like you, critical, nasty. What a dump. You hated places with the same passion you hated people … All the mining camps we lived in, the U.S., El Paso, your home, Chile, Peru.

Mullan, Idaho, in the Coeur d’Alene mountains. You hated that mining town the most, because there was actually a little town. “A cliché of a small town.” A one-room school, a soda fountain, a post office, a jail. A whorehouse, a church. A little lending library at the general store. Zane Grey and Agatha Christie. There was a town hall, with meetings about blackouts and air raids.

You’d rant about the ignorant tacky Finns all the way home. We would stop for a
Saturday Evening Post
and a big Hershey bar before we climbed up the mountain to the mine, with Daddy holding our hands. Dark because the war just started and the windows in the town were blacked out, but the stars and snow were so bright we could see our way perfectly … At home Daddy would read to you until you fell asleep. If it was a really good story you would cry, not because it was sad, just so lovely and everything else in the world was tawdry.

My friend Kentshereve and I would be digging under the lilac bush while you were at the bridge game on Mondays. The three other women would wear housedresses, sometimes even stayed in socks and slippers. It was so cold in Idaho. Often they wore their hair in pin curls and a turban, getting their hair ready for—what? This still is an American custom. You see women everywhere in pink hair rollers. It’s some sort of philosophical or fashion statement. Maybe there will be something better, later.

You always dressed carefully. Garter belt. Stockings with seams. A peach satin slip you let show a little on purpose, just so those peasants would know you wore one. A chiffon dress with shoulder pads, a brooch with tiny diamonds. And your coat. I was five years old and even then knew that it was a ratty old coat. Maroon, the pockets stained and frayed, the cuffs stringy. It was a wedding present from your brother Tyler ten years before. It had a fur collar. Oh the poor matted fur, once silver, yellowed now like the peed-on backsides of polar bears in zoos. Kentshereve told me everybody in Mullan laughed at your clothes. “Well, she laughs at all theirs worse, so there.”

You’d come teetering up the hill in cheap high heels, your collar turned up around your carefully waved and marcelled bob. A gloved hand grasped the railing of the rickety wooden walk that rose past the mine and the mill. Inside in the living room you’d light the coal stove, kick off your shoes.

You sat in the dark, smoking, sobbing with loneliness and boredom. My mama, Madame Bovary. You read plays. You wished you had been an actress. Noel Coward.
Gaslight.
Anything the Lunts were in, memorizing the lines and saying them out loud while you washed the dishes. “
Oh!
I thought it was your step behind me, Conrad … No. Oh, I
thought
it was your step behind me, Conrad…”

*   *   *

When Daddy got home, filthy, in heavy miner’s boots, a hat with a lamp, he would shower and you’d make cocktails from a little table, with an ice bucket and a seltzer shaker. (This seltzer bottle caused a lot of trouble. Daddy had to remember to buy the cartridges during his rare trips to Spokane. And most visitors resented it. “No, none of that there noisy water. Real water for me.”) But that’s what they used in plays, and in the
Thin Man
movies.

In
Mildred Pierce
Joan Crawford had a daughter called Sherry, and while the bad guy was spritzing his drink with seltzer he asked Joan Crawford what she wanted to drink.

“I’ll take Sherry. Home,” she said.

“What a wonderful line!” you said to me as we left the movie theater. “I think I’ll change your name to Sherry, so I can use it.”

“How about Cold Beer?” I asked. It was my first witticism. Anyway, it was the first time I made you laugh.

The other time was when Earl the delivery boy had brought a box of groceries from the store. I was helping to put them away. Our house was, in fact, a tar-paper shack, just like you said, and the kitchen floor sloped away to the bottom of the room in undulating waves of rotten linoleum and warped boards. I took out three cans of tomato soup and was going to put them in the cupboard but dropped them. They rolled down the floor and crashed against the wall. I looked up, thought you were going to yell, or hit me, but you were laughing. You took some more cans out of the cupboard and sent them rolling down too.

“Here, let’s race!” you said. “My canned corn against your peas!”

We were squatting there, laughing, sailing cans down the room crashing them into the others when Daddy came home.

“Stop that this instant! Put those cans away!” There were lots of cans. (You hoarded them, because of the war, which was a bad thing to do, he said.) It took us a long time to get them all back in the cupboard, both giggling, in whispers, and singing “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” as you handed cans to me on the floor. It was the best time I ever had with you. We had just got them put away when he came to the door and said, “Go to your room.” I went. But he meant for you to go to your room too! It didn’t take long after that for me to see that when he sent you to your room it was because you had been drinking.

After that, for as long as I knew you, you were mostly in your room. Deerlodge, Montana; Marion, Kentucky; Patagonia, Arizona; Santiago, Chile; Lima, Peru.

*   *   *

Sally and I are in her bedroom now in Mexico, have been here most of the time for the last five months. We go out, sometimes, to the hospital for X-rays and lab tests, to have liquid aspirated from her lungs. Twice we have gone out to the Café Paris for coffee, and once to her friend Elizabeth’s for breakfast. But she gets very tired. Even her chemo treatments are done in her room now.

We talk and read, I read out loud to her, people come to visit. The sun hits the plants for a little bit in the afternoon. About half an hour. She says that in February there is a lot of sun. None of the windows face the sky so the light is not direct, actually, but reflected from the wall next door. In the evening when it gets dark I close the curtains.

Sally and her children have lived here for twenty-five years. Sally isn’t like our mother at all, in fact almost annoyingly the opposite, in that she sees beauty and goodness everywhere, in everyone. She loves her room, all the souvenirs on the shelves. We’ll sit in the living room and she’ll say, “That’s my favorite corner, with the fern and the mirror.” Or another time she’ll say, “That’s my favorite corner, with the mask and the basket of oranges.”

Me, now, all the corners have me stir-crazy.

Sally adores Mexico, with the fervor of a convert. Her husband, her children, her house, everything about her is Mexican. Except her. She’s very American, old-fashioned American, wholesome. In a way I am the more Mexican, my nature is dark. I have known death, violence. Most days I don’t even notice that period when the room has sunlight in it.

*   *   *

When our father went to war Sally was just a baby. We went by train from Idaho to Texas to live with our grandparents for the Duration.
Duro
=
Hard.

One thing that made Mama the way she was was that when she was little their life was very easy and gracious. Her mother and father were from the best Texan families. Grandpa was a wealthy dentist; they had a beautiful home with servants, a nanny for Mama, who spoiled her, as did three older brothers. Then wham bam she got run over by a Western Union boy and was in the hospital almost a year. During that year everything got worse. The Depression, Grandpa’s gambling, his drinking. She got out of the hospital to find her world changed. A shabby house down by the smelter, no car, no servants, no room of her own. Her mother, Mamie, working as Grandpa’s nurse, no longer playing mah-jongg and bridge. Everything was grim. And scary probably, if Grandpa did to her what he did to both Sally and me. She never said anything about it, but he must have, since she hated him so much, would never let anybody touch her, not even shake hands …

The train neared El Paso as the sun came up. It was awesome to see, the space, the wide-open spaces, coming from the dense pine forests. As if the world were uncovered, a lid taken off. Miles and miles of brightness and blue, blue sky. I ran back and forth from windows on each side of the club car that had finally opened, thrilled by this whole new face of the earth.

“It’s just the desert,” she said. “Deserted. Empty. Arid. And pretty soon we’ll be pulling into the hellhole I used to call home.”

Sally wanted me to help her get her house on Calle Amores in order. Sort photographs, clothes, and papers, fix shower curtain rods, windowpanes. Except for the front door, none of the doors had doorknobs; you had to use a screwdriver to get in the closets and prop the bathroom door shut with a basket. I called some workmen to come and put in doorknobs. They came and that was okay except they came on a Sunday afternoon while we were having a family dinner and they stayed until about ten at night. What happened was that they put on the doorknobs but didn’t tighten any screws, so each doorknob that any of us tried fell off in our hands and then you couldn’t open the closet doors at all. Also many screws rolled off and disappeared. I called the men the next day and a few days later they came in the morning, just when my sister had fallen asleep after a bad night. The three of them made so much noise I said forget it, my sister is sick, grave, and you’re too loud. Come back another time. I went back into her room but later began to hear some huffing and panting and muffled thuds. They were taking all the doors off the hinges so they could carry them up to the roof to fix them without making any noise.