A Manual for Cleaning Women (43 page)

“What are you doing there for hours and hours?” Lupe asked me.

“Thinking. About Manolo. About my
pueblo
.”

“Start thinking about moving out of here.”

Ramón had to work on the court day so Lupe took me. She could be nice sometimes. In the court we sat in the front. I almost didn’t know him when he came in, handcuffed and with chains tying his legs together. Such a cruel thing to do to Manolo, who is a sweet man. He stood under the judge and then the judge said something and two polices took him away. He looked back at me, but I didn’t know him with that face of anger. My Manolo. On the way home Lupe said it didn’t look good. She didn’t understand the charges either but it wasn’t just possession of drugs, because they would’ve sent him to Santa Rita. Eight years in Soledad prison is bad.

“Eight years?
Cómo que
eight years!”

“Don’t you go lose it now. I’ll put you out right here in the street. I’m serious.”

Lupe told me I had to go to the clinica because I was pregnant. I didn’t know she meant I should have an
aborto
. “No,” I told the lady doctor, “no, I want my baby,
mijito
. His daddy is gone, my baby is all I have.” She was nice at first but then she got mad, said I was just a child I couldn’t work, how could I care for him? That I was selfish,
porfiada
. “It’s a sin,” I told her. “I won’t do it. I want my baby.” She threw her notebook down on the table.

“
Válgame diós.
At least come in for checkups before the baby is born.”

She gave me a card with the day and time to come but I never went back. The months went by slow. I kept waiting to hear from Manolo. Willie and Tina just watched the tele and were no trouble. I had the baby at Lupe’s house. She helped but Ramón hit her when he got home and hit me too. He said bad enough I showed up. Now a kid too.

I try to keep out of their way. We have our little corner in the kitchen. Little Jesus is beautiful and he looks like Manolo. I got pretty things for him at the Goodwill and at Payless. I still don’t know what Manolo did to go to jail or when we will hear from him. When I asked Ramón he said, “Kiss Manolo good-bye. See if you can get some work.”

I watch Lupe’s kids while she works and keep their house clean. I do all the wash in the laundromat downstairs. But I get so tired. Jesus cries and cries
no importa
what I do. Lupe told me I had to take him to the clinica. The buses scare me. The
mayates
grab at me and scare me. I think they’re going to take him from me.

In the clinica they got mad at me again, said I should have had prenatal care, that he needed shots and was too small. He was seven pounds I said, my uncle weighed him. “Well, he’s only eight now.” They gave him a shot, said I had to come back. The doctor said Jesus had a hernia, which could be dangerous. He had to see a surgeon. A woman there gave me a map and wrote down the bus and BART train to get to the surgeon’s office, told me where to stand even to get the bus and BART back. She called and made me an appointment.

Lupe had taken me, she was outside in the car with the kids when I got in. I told her what they said and then I began to cry. She stopped the car and shook me.

“You’re a woman now! Face it. We’ll give you some time till Jesus is okay, then you’re going to have to figure out your own life. The apartment is too small. Ramón and I are dead tired and your kid cries day and night, or you do, worse. We’re sick of it.”

“I’m trying to help out,” I said.

“Yeah, thanks a lot.”

We were all up early the day I took him to the surgeon’s. Lupe had to take the kids to day care. It’s free and they like it better than staying home with just me so they were happy. But Lupe was mad because she had to drive so far to child care and now Ramón had to take the subway. It was scary, the bus, and then the BART and then another bus. I was too nervous to eat so I was hungry and dizzy from being frightened. But then I saw the big sign like they told me and I knew it was the right place. We had to wait so long. I left home at six in the morning and the doctor didn’t see Jesus until three. I was so hungry. They explained everything real clear and the nurse told me about feeding him different to make more milk. The doctor was nice with Jesus and said he was
bonito
but he thought I hurt him, showed her blue spots on his arms. I didn’t see the spots before. It’s true. I hurt my baby,
mijito
. It was me who made them last night when he cried and cried. I had him under the blankets with me. I held him tight, “Hush hush stop crying, stop it stop it.” I never grabbed him like that before. He didn’t cry any less or any more.

Two weeks went past. I marked the days on the calendar. I told Lupe I had to go to the pre-op one day and for the surgery the next day.

“No way, José,” Lupe said. The car was in the shop. She couldn’t take her Willie and Tina to child care. So I didn’t go.

Ramón stayed home. He was drinking beer and watching an A’s game. The kids were taking a nap and I was feeding Jesus in the kitchen. “Come on in and watch the game,
prima
,” he said so I went in. Jesus was still drinking but I had him covered with a blanket. Ramón got up for more beer. He hadn’t seemed drunk until he got up but then he was falling around, then he was on the floor by the sofa. He pulled the blanket down and my T-shirt up. “Gimme some of that
chichi
,” he said and was sucking on my other breast. I shoved him away and he hit the table but Jesus fell too and the table scratched his shoulder. There was blood running down his little arm. I was washing it with a paper towel and the phone rang.

It was Pat the lady from surgery real mad because I didn’t call and didn’t go. “I’m sorry,” I told her in English.

She said there was a cancellation tomorrow. I could get the pre-op on the same day if I for sure took him real early. Seven in the morning. She was mad at me. She said he could get real sick and die, that if I kept missing surgeries the state could take him away from me. “Do you understand this?”

I said yes, but I didn’t believe they could take my baby away from me.

“Are you coming tomorrow?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. I told Ramón that the next day I had to take Jesus for surgery, could he watch Tina and Willie.

“So I suck your tit you think you get something back? Yeah, I’ll be here. I’m out of work anyways. Don’t get any ideas about telling Lupe nothing. Your ass would be out of here in five minutes. Which would be fine with me, but as long as it’s here I mean to get me some.”

He took me in the bathroom then, with Jesus in the living room crying on the floor and the kids hitting on the door. He bent me over the sink and banged and banged into me but he was so drunk it didn’t last long. He slid to the floor passed out. I went out. I told the kids that he was sick. I was shaking so bad I had to sit down, rocked
mijito
Jesus and watched cartoons with the kids. I didn’t know what to do. I said an Ave Maria but it seemed like there was so much noise everywhere how could a prayer ever get heard?

When Lupe got home he came out. I could tell the way he looked at me he knew he had done something bad but he didn’t remember what. He said he was going out. She said terrific.

She opened the refrigerator. “Asshole drank all the beer. Go to the Seven-Eleven, Amelia, will you? Oh Christ, you can’t even buy beer. What good are you? Have you even looked for a job or a place?”

I told her I had been watching the kids, how could I go anywhere? I said tomorrow was Jesus’s surgery.

“Well, as soon as you can, you get started. They have ads for jobs and houses on billboards in groceries, the pharmacy.”

“I can’t read.”

“They have ads in Spanish.”

“I can’t read Spanish
tampoco
.”

“Fuck a duck.”

I said it too. “Fuck a duck.” It made her laugh, at least. Oh how I miss my pueblo, where the laughter is soft like breezes.

“Okay, Amelia. Tomorrow I’ll look for you, I’ll call around. Do me a favor and watch the kids now. I need a drink. I’ll be at the Jalisco.”

She must have run into Ramón, they came back together really late. There was only beans and Kool-Aid for the kids and me to eat. No bread, no flour for tortillas. Jesus was fast asleep in our corner in the kitchen but the minute I lay down he started to cry. I fed him. I could tell he was getting more now but after he slept awhile he was crying again. I tried to give him a pacifier but he just pushed it out. I was doing it again, holding him so tight whispering, “Hush hush,” but then I stopped when I realized that I was hurting him but also I didn’t want the doctor to see blue marks. The shoulder was bad enough all scraped and bruised,
pobrecito
. I prayed again to our mother Mary to help me, please to tell me what to do.

It was dark when I left the next morning. I found people who helped me get the right bus and BART and another bus. At the hospital they showed me where to go. They took blood from Jesus’s arm. A doctor examined him but he didn’t speak Spanish. I don’t know what he was writing down. I know he wrote about the shoulder because he measured it with his thumb and then wrote. He looked at me with a question. “Children’s push,” I said in English and he nodded. They told me the surgery would be at eleven so I had fed him at eight. But hours and hours went by until it was one o’clock. Jesus was screaming. We were in a space with a bed and a chair. I was sitting in the chair but then the bed looked so good I got on it and held him to me. My breasts were dripping with milk. It’s like they heard him crying. I couldn’t bear it and I thought just a few seconds of milk wouldn’t hurt.

Dr. Fritz was yelling at me. I took Jesus off my breast but he shook his head and nodded at me to go on ahead and feed him. A Latina nurse came in then to say they couldn’t do the surgery now. She said they had a big waiting list and I had screwed them over twice. “You call Pat, get another date. Go on now, go home. Call her tomorrow. That child needs the surgery, you hear me?”

In my whole life at home nobody ever got mad at me.

When I stood up I must have fainted. The nurse was sitting by me when I woke up.

“I ordered you a big lunch. You must be hungry. Did you eat today?”

“No,” I said. She fixed pillows behind me and a table over my lap. She held Jesus while I ate. I ate like an animal. Everything, soup, crackers, salad, juice, milk, meat, potatoes, carrots, bread, salad, pie; it was good.

“You need to eat well every day while you’re nursing the baby,” she said. “Will you be all right, going home?”

I nodded. Yes. I felt so good, the food was so good.

“Come on, now. Get ready to go. Here are some diapers for him. My shift was over an hour ago and I need to lock up.”

*   *   *

Pat has a hard job. Our office of six surgeons is in Children’s Hospital in Oakland. Every day each surgeon has a packed schedule. Also every day some get canceled, others put in their place and several emergencies added as well. One of our doctors is on call every day for the emergency room. All kinds of traumas, chopped-off fingers, aspirated peanuts, gunshot wounds, appendixes, burns, so there can be six or eight surprise surgeries a day.

Almost all of the patients are Medi-Cal and many are illegal aliens and don’t even have that, so none of our doctors are in this for the money. It’s an exhausting job for the office staff too. I work ten-hour days a lot. The surgeons are all different and for different reasons can be a pain in the butt sometimes. But even though we complain we respect them, are proud of them too, and we get a sense that we help. It is a rewarding job, not like working in a regular office. It has for sure changed the way I see things.

I have always been a cynical person. When I first started working here I thought it was a huge waste of taxpayers’ money to do ten, twelve surgeries on crack babies with weird anomalies just so they could be alive and disabled after a year spent in a hospital, then moved from one foster home to another. So many without mothers, much less fathers. Most of the foster parents are really great but some are scary. So many children who are disabled or with brain damage, patients who will never be more than a few years old. Many patients with Down’s syndrome. I thought that I could never keep a child like that.

Now I open the door to the waiting room and Toby who is all distorted and shaky, Toby who can’t talk, is there. Toby who pees and shits into bags, who eats through a hole in his stomach. Toby comes to hug me, laughing, arms open. It’s as if these kids are the result of a glitch God made answering prayers. All those mothers who don’t want their children to grow up, who pray that their child will love them forever. Those answered prayers got sent down as Tobys.

For sure Tobys can crack up a marriage or a family, but when they don’t it seems to have the reverse effect. It brings out the deepest good and bad feelings and the strengths and dignity that otherwise a man and a woman would never have seen in themselves or the other. It seems to me that each joy is savored more, that commitment has a deeper dimension. I don’t think I’m romanticizing either. I study them hard, because I saw those qualities and they surprised me. I’ve seen several couples divorce. It seemed inevitable. There was the martyr parent or the slacking parent, the blamer, the why-me or the guilty one, the drinker or the crier. I’ve seen siblings act out from resentment, cause even more havoc and anger and guilt. But much more often I have seen the marriage and the family grow closer, better. Everybody learns to deal, has to help, has to be honest and say it sucks. Everybody has to laugh, everybody has to feel grateful when whatever else the child can’t do he can kiss the hand that brushes his hair.

I don’t like Diane Arbus. When I was a kid in Texas there were freak shows and even then I hated the way people would point at the freaks and laugh at them. But I was fascinated too. I loved the man with no arms who typed with his toes. But it wasn’t the no arms that I liked. It was that he really wrote, all day. He was seriously writing something, liking what he was writing.