A Manual for Cleaning Women (33 page)

But it made me feel good, to know my parents were right there. And now they were at the railings as the ship sailed out to sea. My father was sunburned and wore a floppy white hat. My mother smoked. Ben and Keith just kept riding faster and faster around the cement track, calling to each other, and to us … Look at me!

Today there was a big gas explosion in Guadalajara, hundreds of people killed, their homes destroyed. Max called to see if I was all right. I told him how everybody in Mexico thinks it’s funny now to go around asking, “Say … do you smell gas?”

In Acapulco we made friends at the hotel. Don and Maria, who had a six-year-old daughter, Lourdes. In the evenings the children would color on their terrace until they fell asleep.

We stayed very late, until the moon grew high and pale. Don and Max played chess by the light of a kerosene lantern. Caress of moths. Maria and I lay crosswise on a big hammock, talking softly about silly things like clothes, about our children, love. She and Don had been married only six months. Before she met him she had been very alone. I told her how in the morning I said Max’s name before I even opened my eyes. She said her life had been like a dreary record over and over each day and now in a second the record was turned over, music. Max overheard her and he smiled at me. See,
amor
, we’re the flip side now.

We had some other friends too. Raúl the diver and his wife, Soledad. One weekend the six of us steamed clams on the terrace of our hotel. All the children had been sent to take naps. But one by one different children would pop up, wanting to watch what was going on. Back to bed! Another would want water, another just plain couldn’t sleep. Back to bed. Keith came out and said he saw a giraffe! Now go back to bed, we’ll wake you soon. Ben came out and said there were tigers and elephants. Oh for God’s sake. But there it was in the street beneath us. A circus parade. We woke all the children then. One of the circus men thought Max was a movie star so they gave us free tickets. We all went to the circus that night. It was magical, but the children fell asleep before the end of the trapeze act.

There was an earthquake in California today. Max called to say that it wasn’t his fault and he can’t find his cat.

It was the ghostly setting moon that shone upon us as we made love that night. We lay next to each other then under the wooden revolving fan, hot, sticky. Max’s hand on my wet hair. Thank you, I whispered, to God, I think …

In the mornings when I woke his arms would be around me, his lips against my neck, his hand on my thigh.

One day I woke before the sun came up and he wasn’t there. The room was silent. He must be swimming, I thought. I went into the bathroom. Max was sitting on the toilet, cooking something in a blackened spoon. A syringe was on the sink.

“Hello,” he said.

“Max, what is that?”

“It’s heroin,” he said.

*   *   *

That sounds like the end of a story, or the beginning, when really it was just a part of the years that were to come. Times of intense technicolor happiness and times that were sordid and frightening.

We had two more sons, Nathan and Joel. We traveled all over Mexico and the United States in a Beechcraft Bonanza. We lived in Oaxaca, finally settled in a village on the coast of Mexico. We were happy, all of us, for a long time and then it became hard and lonely because he loved heroin much more.

Not detox … Max says on the phone … Retox, that’s what everybody needs. And Just say no? You should say No, thank you. He is joking, he hasn’t been on drugs for many years now.

For months Sally and I worked hard trying to analyze our lives, our marriages, our children. She never even drank or smoked like I did.

Her ex-husband is a politician. He stops by almost every day, in a car with two bodyguards, and two escort cars with men in them. Sally is as close to him as I am with Max. So what is marriage anyway? I never figured it out. And now it is death I don’t understand.

Not just Sally’s death. My country, after Rodney King and the riots. All over the world, the rage and despair.

Sally and I write rebuses to each other so she doesn’t hurt her lung talking. Rebus is where you draw pictures instead of words or letters. Violence, for example, is a viola and some ants. Sucks is somebody drinking through a straw. We laugh, quietly, in her room, drawing. Actually, love is not a mystery for me anymore. Max calls and says hello. I tell him that my sister will be dead soon. How are you? he asks.

A Love Affair

It was hard to tend to the front and back offices alone. I had to change dressings, take temperatures and blood pressures, and still try to greet new patients and answer the phones. A big nuisance because to do an EKG or assist in a wound stitching or a Pap smear I’d have to tell the answering service to take calls. The waiting room would be full, with people feeling neglected, and I’d hear the phones ringing ringing.

Most of Dr. B.’s patients were very old. Often the women who got Pap smears were obese, with difficult access, so it took even longer.

I think there was a law that said I had to be present when he was with a female patient. I used to think this was an outdated precaution. Not at all. Amazing how many of those old ladies were in love with him.

I would hand him the speculum and, later, the long stick. After he had the scrapings from the cervix he would smear them on the glass slide I held, which I would then spray with a protective film. I would cover the slide with another one, put it in a box and label it for the lab.

My main job was to get the women’s legs high up into the stirrups and their buttocks moved down to the end of the table where they would be even with his eyes. Then I draped a sheet over their knees and was supposed to help the women relax. Chat and make jokes until he came in. That was easy, the chatting part. I knew the patients and they were all pretty nice.

The hard part was when he came in. He was a painfully shy man, with a serious tremor of his hands that occasionally manifested itself. Always when he signed checks or did Pap smears.

He squatted on a stool, eyes level with their vagina, with a light on his forehead. I handed him the (warmed) speculum and, after a few minutes, with the patient gasping and sweating, the long cotton-tipped stick. He held it, waving it like a baton, as he disappeared beneath the sheet, toward the woman. At last his hand emerged with the stick, now a dizzy metronome aimed at my waiting slide. I still drank in those days, so my hand, holding the slide, shook visibly as it tried to meet his. But in a nervous up-and-down tremble. His was back and forth. Slap, at last. This procedure took so long that he often missed important phone calls, and of course the people in the waiting room got very impatient. Once Mr. Larraby even knocked on the door and Dr. B. was so startled he dropped the stick. We had to start all over. He agreed then to hire a part-time receptionist.

If I ever look for another job, I’ll ask for an enormous salary. If anyone works for as little as Ruth and I did, something is very suspicious.

Ruth had never had a job and she didn’t need a job, which was suspicious enough. She was doing this for fun.

This was so fascinating to me that I asked her to lunch after the interview. Tuna melts at the Pill Hill Café. I liked her right off the bat. She was unlike anybody I had ever met.

Ruth was fifty, married for thirty years to her childhood sweetheart, an accountant. They had two children and three cats. Her hobbies, on the job application, were “cats.” So Dr. B. always asked her how her cats were. My hobbies were “reading,” so he’d say to me, “On the shores of Itchee Gumee” or “Nevermore, quoth the raven.”

Every time there was a new patient he would write a few sentences on the back of the chart. Something he could use for conversation when he entered the exam room. “Thinks Texas is God’s country.” “Has two toy poodles.” “Has five-hundred-dollar-a-day heroin habit.” So when he went in to see them he’d say things like “Good morning! Been up to God’s country lately?” or “You’re out of luck if you think you can get drugs from me.”

Over lunch Ruth told me that she had started to feel old and in a rut so she had joined a support group. The Merry Pranksters, or M.P., which really stood for Meno Pause. Ruth always said this like it was two words. The group was dedicated to putting more zip into women’s lives. They focused on the members themselves. The last one had been Hannah. The group convinced her to go to Weight Watchers, to Rancho del Sol spa, take bossa nova lessons and then to get liposuction and a face-lift. She looked wonderful but was in two new groups now. One for women who had face-lifts but were still depressed and another for “Women Who Love Too Much.” Ruth sighed, “Hannah’s always been the kind of woman who has affairs with stevedores.”

Stevedores! Ruth used some surprising words, like
heretofore
and
hullabaloo.
Said things like she missed having “That Time of the Month.” It always was such a warm and cozy time.

The M.P. group had Ruth take flower arranging, join a theater group, a Trivial Pursuit club, and get a job. She was supposed to have a love affair but she hadn’t thought about that yet. She already had zip in her life. She loved flower arranging, and now they were working on making bouquets with weeds and grasses. She had a bit part, nonsinging, in
Oklahoma!
.

I liked having Ruth in the office. We joked a lot with the patients and talked about them as if they were our relatives. She even thought filing was fun, singing, “Abcdefg hi jk lmnop lmnopqrst uvwxyZ!” until I’d say, “Stop, let
me
file.”

It was easier now when I was with patients. But, in fact, she did very little work. She studied her Pursuit cards and called her friends a lot, especially Hannah, who was having an affair with the dance instructor.

On lunch hour I’d go with Ruth to collect weed bouquets, scrambling hot and sweaty up the freeway embankment for Queen Anne’s lace and tobacco weed. Rocks in our shoes. She seemed like an ordinary pretty middle-aged Jewish lady but there was a wildness and freedom about her. Her shout when she spied a pink rocket flower in the alley behind the hospital.

She and her husband had grown up together. Their families were very close, some of the few Jews in a small Iowa town. She couldn’t remember when everybody didn’t expect her and Ephraim to marry. They fell in love for real in high school. She studied home economics in college and waited for him to graduate in business and accounting. Of course they had saved themselves for marriage. They moved into his family home and cared for his invalid mother. She had come with them to Oakland, was still living with them, eighty-six years old now.

I never heard Ruth complain, not about the sick old lady or her children or Ephraim. I was always complaining about my kids or my ex-husband or a daughter-in-law and especially about Dr. B. He had me open all his packages in case there were bombs in them. If a bee or a wasp came in, he went outside until I killed it. These are just the silly things. He was mean. Especially mean to Ruth, saying things like “This is what I get for hiring the handicapped?” He called her “Dyslexia,” because she transposed phone numbers. She did that a lot. About every other day he told me to fire her. I’d tell him we couldn’t. There was no cause. She really helped me and the patients liked her. She cheered the place up.

“I can’t stand cheeriness,” he said. “Makes me want to slap the grin off her face.”

She continued to be nice to him. She thought he was like Heathcliff, or Mr. Rochester in
Jane Eyre
, only little. “Yeah, real little,” I said. But Ruth never heard negative remarks. She believed that someone, at some time, must have broken Dr. B.’s heart. She brought him kugel and rugelach and hamantaschen, was always thinking of excuses to go into his office. I hadn’t figured out that she had chosen him to be the love affair until he came into my office and closed the door.

“You have to fire her! She is actually flirting with me! It is unseemly.”

“Well, strange as it may seem, she finds you wildly attractive. I still need her. It’s hard to find someone easy to work with. Be patient. Please, sir.” The “sir” did it, as usual.

“All right,” he sighed.

She was good for me, put zip in my life. Instead of spending my lunch hour brooding and smoking in the alley I’d get dirty and have fun picking bouquets with her. I even started cooking, using some of the hundreds of recipes she xeroxed all day. Baked pearl onions with a dash of brown sugar. She brought in clothes from Schmatta used clothing store and I bought them. A few times when Ephraim was too tired I went with her to the opera.

She was wonderful to go to the opera with, because at intermission she didn’t just stand around looking bored like everybody does. She’d lead me around the main foyer so we could admire the clothes and jewels. I wept with her at
La Traviata
. Our favorite scene was the old woman’s aria in
The Queen of Spades
.

One day Ruth asked Dr. B. to go to the opera with her. “No! What an inappropriate request!” he said.

“That asshole,” I said when he went out the door. All she said was that doctors were just too busy to have love affairs so she guessed it would have to be Julius.

Julius was a retired dentist who had been in the cast of
Oklahoma!
. He was a widower and he was fat. She said fat was good, fat was warm and comfortable.

I asked her if it was because Ephraim was not so interested in sex anymore. “
Au contraire!
” she said. “It’s the first thing he thinks of every morning and the last at night. And if he’s home in the day he chases me around then too. Really…”

I saw Julius at Ephraim’s mother’s funeral at the Chapel of the Valley. The old woman had died quietly in her sleep.

Ruth and her family were on the steps of the funeral home. Two lovely children, handsome, gracious, comforting their parents, Ruth and Ephraim. Ephraim was darkly handsome. Lean, brooding, soulful. Now he looked like Heathcliff. His sad and dreamy eyes smiled into mine. “Thank you for your kindness to my wife.”