A Manual for Cleaning Women (48 page)

Every evening after the news, Sally would cry. Weep. It probably wasn’t for long but in the time warp of her illness it went on and on, painful and hoarse. I can’t even remember if at first my niece Mercedes and I cried with her. I don’t think so. Neither of us are criers. But we would hold her and kiss her, sing to her. We tried joking, “Maybe we should watch Tom Brokaw instead.” We made her
aguas
and teas and cocoa. I can’t remember when she stopped crying, soon before her death, but when she did stop it was truly horrible, the silence, and it lasted a long time.

When she cried sometimes she’d say things like “Sorry, it must be the chemo. It’s sort of a reflex. Don’t pay any attention.” But other times she would beg us to cry with her.

“I can’t,
mi Argentina
,” Mercedes would say. “But my heart is crying. Since we know it is going to happen we automatically harden ourselves.” This was kind of her to say. The weeping simply drove me crazy.

Once while she was crying, Sally said, “I’ll never see donkeys again!” which struck us as hilariously funny. She became furious, smashed her cup and plates, our glasses and ashtray against the wall. She kicked over the table, screaming at us. Cold calculating bitches. Not a shred of compassion or pity.

“One
pinche
tear. You don’t even look sad.” She was smiling by now. “You’re like police matrons. ‘Drink this. Here’s a tissue. Throw up in the basin.’”

At night I would get her ready for bed, give her pills, an injection. I’d kiss her and tuck her in. “Good night. I love you, my sister,
mi cisterna
.” I slept in a little room, a closet, next to her, could hear her through the plywood wall, reading, humming, writing. Sometimes she would cry then and those were the worst times, because she tried to muffle these silent sad weepings with her pillow.

At first I would go in and try to comfort her, but that seemed to make her cry more, become more anxious. The sleeping medicine would turn around and wake her up, get her agitated and nauseous. So I would just call out to her, “Sally. Dear Sal
y pimienta
, Salsa, don’t be sad.” Things like that.

“Remember in Chile how Rosa put hot bricks in our beds?”

“I’d forgotten!”

“Want me to find you a brick?”

“No,
mi vida
, I’m falling asleep.”

*   *   *

She had had a mastectomy and radiation and then for five years she was fine. Really fine. Radiant and beautiful, wildly happy with a kind man, Andrés. She and I became friends, for the first time since our hard childhood. It had felt like falling in love, the discovery of each other, how much we shared. We went to the Yucatán and to New York together. I’d go to Mexico or she would come up to Oakland. When our mother died, we spent a week in Zihuatanejo, where we talked all day and all night. We exorcised our parents and our own rivalries and I think we both grew up.

I was in Oakland when she called. The cancer was in her lungs now. Everywhere. There was no time left.
Apúrate.
Come right now!

It took me three days to quit my job, pack up, and move out. On the plane to Mexico City, I thought about how death shreds time. My ordinary life had vanished. Therapy, laps at the Y. What about lunch on Friday? Gloria’s party, dentist tomorrow, laundry, pick up books at Moe’s, cleaning, out of cat food, babysit grandsons Saturday, order gauze and gastrostomy buttons at work, write to August, talk to Josee, bake some scones, C.J. coming over. Even eerier was a year later clerks in the grocery or bookstore or friends I ran into on the street had not noticed that I had been gone at all.

I called Pedro, her oncologist, from the airport in Mexico, wanting to know what to expect. It had sounded like a matter of weeks or a month. “
Ni modo
,” he said. “We’ll continue chemo. It could be six months, a year, perhaps more.”

“If you had just told me, ‘I want you to come now,’ I would have come,” I said to her later that night.

“No, you wouldn’t!” she laughed. “You are a realist. You know I have servants to do everything, and nurses, doctors, friends. You’d think I didn’t need you yet. But I want you now, to help me get everything in order. I want you to cook so Alicia and Sergio will eat here. I want you to read to me and take care of me. Now is when I’m alone and scared. I need you now.”

We all have mental scrapbooks. Stills. Snapshots of people we love at different times. This one is Sally in deep green running clothes, cross-legged on her bed. Skin luminescent, her green eyes limned with tears as she spoke to me. No guile or self-pity. I embraced her, grateful for her trust in me.

In Texas, when I was eight and she was three, I hated her, envied her with a violent hissing in my heart. Our grandma let me run wild, at the mercy of the other adults, but she guarded little Sally, brushed her hair and made tarts just for her, rocked her to sleep and sang “Way Down in Missoura.” But I have snapshots of her even then, smiling, offering me a mud pie with an undeniable sweetness that she never lost.

In Mexico City the first months passed in a flash, like in old movies when the calendars flip up the days. Speeded-up Charlie Chaplin carpenters pounded in the kitchen, plumbers banged in the bathroom. Men came to fix all the doorknobs and broken windows, sand the floors. Mirna, Belen and I tore into the storeroom, the
topanco
, the closets, the bookcases and drawers. We tossed out shoes and hats, dog collars, Nehru jackets. Mercedes and Alicia and I brought out all Sally’s clothes and jewelry, labeled them to give to different friends.

Lazy sweet afternoons on Sally’s floor, sorting photographs, reading letters, poems, gossiping, telling stories. The phone and doorbell rang all day. I screened the calls and visitors, was the one who cut them short if she was tired, or didn’t if she was happy, like with Gustavo always.

When someone is first diagnosed with a fatal illness, they are deluged with calls and letters and visits. But as the months go by and the time turns into hard time, fewer people come. That’s when the illness is growing and time is slow and loud. You heard the clocks and the church bells and vomiting and each raspy breath.

Sally’s ex-husband Miguel and Andrés came every day, but at different times. Only once did the visits coincide. I was surprised by how the ex-husband was automatically deferred to. He had remarried long ago, but there still was his pride to consider. Andrés had been in Sally’s room only a few minutes. I brought him in a coffee and pan dulce. Just as I set it on the table, Mirna came in to say, “The señor is coming!”

“Quick, into your room!” Sally said. Andrés rushed into my room, carrying his coffee and pan dulce. I had just shut him in when Miguel arrived.

“Coffee! I need coffee!” he said, so I went into my room, took the coffee and pan dulce from Andrés, and carried them in to Miguel. Andrés disappeared.

*   *   *

I got very weak, and had trouble walking. We thought it was
estress
(no word in Spanish for stress), but finally I fainted on the street and was taken to an emergency room. I was critically anemic from a bleeding esophageal hernia. I was there several days for blood transfusions.

I felt much stronger when I got back, but my illness had frightened Sally. Death reminded us it was still there. Time got speeded up again. I’d think she was asleep and would get up to go to bed.

“Don’t go!”

“I’m just going to the bathroom, be right back.” At night if she choked or coughed, I’d wake up, go in to check on her.

She was on oxygen now and rarely got out of bed. I bathed her in her room, gave her injections for pain and nausea. She drank some broth, ate crackers sometimes. Crushed ice. I put ice in a towel and smashed it smashed it smashed it against the concrete wall. Mercedes lay with her and I lay on the floor, reading to them. I’d stop when they seemed to be asleep, but they’d both say, “Don’t stop!”

Bueno
. “I defy anyone to say that our Becky, who has certainly some vices, has not been presented to the public in a perfectly genteel and inoffensive manner…”

Pedro aspirated her lung, but it still became more and more difficult for her to breathe. I decided we should really clean her room. Mercedes stayed with her in the living room while Mirna and Belen and I swept and dusted, washed the walls and windows and floors. I moved her bed so that it lay horizontally beneath the window; now she could see the sky. Belen put clean ironed sheets and soft blankets on the bed and we carried her back in. She leaned back on her pillow, the springtime sun full on her face.

“
El sol
,” Sally said. “I can feel it.”

I sat against the other wall and watched her look out her window. Airplane. Birds. Jet trail. Sunset!

Much later I kissed her good night and went to my little room. The humidifier on her oxygen tank bubbled like a fountain. I waited to hear the breathing that meant she slept. Her mattress creaked. She gasped, and then moaned, breathing heavily. I listened and waited and then I heard the clink clink of curtain rings above her bed.

“Sally? Salamander, what are you doing?”

“I’m looking at the sky!”

Near her I looked out my own little window.

“
Oye
, sister…”

“Yes,” I said.

“I can hear you. You are crying for me!”

*   *   *

It has been seven years since you died. Of course what I’ll say next is that time has flown by. I got old. All of a sudden,
de repente
. I walk with difficulty. I even drool. I leave the door unlocked in case I die in my sleep, but it’s more likely I’ll go endlessly on until I get put away someplace. I am already dotty. I parked my car around the corner because there was someone in my usual spot. Later when I saw the empty spot I wondered where I had gone. It’s not so strange that I talk to my cat but I feel silly because he is totally deaf.

But there’s never enough time. “Real time,” like the prisoners I used to teach would say, explaining how it just seemed that they had all the time in the world. The time wasn’t ever theirs.

I teach in a pretty,
fresa
, mountain town now. The same Rocky Mountains Daddy used to mine, but a far cry from Butte or Coeur d’Alene. I’m lucky though. I have good friends here. I live in the foothills where deer walk dainty and modest past my window. I saw skunks mating in the moonlight; their jagged cries were like oriental instruments.

I miss my sons and their families. I see them maybe once a year and that’s always great, but I’m no longer really a part of their lives. Or of your children’s either. Although Mercedes and Enrique came here to get married!

So many others have gone. I used to think it was funny when someone said, “I lost my husband.” But that is how it feels. Someone is missing. Paul, Aunt Chata, Buddy. I understand how people believe in ghosts or have séances to call the dead. I go for months without thinking of anyone but the living, and then Buddy will come with a joke, or there you vividly are, evoked by a tango or an
agua de sandia
. If only you could speak to me. You’re as bad as my deaf cat.

You last arrived a few days after the blizzard. Ice and snow still covered the ground, but we had a fluke of a warm day. Squirrels and magpies were chattering and sparrows and finches sang on the bare trees. I opened all the doors and curtains. I drank tea at the kitchen table feeling the sun on my back. Wasps came out of the nest on the front porch, floated sleepily through my house, buzzing in drowsy circles all around the kitchen. Just at this time the smoke alarm battery went dead, so it began to chirp like a summer cricket. The sun touched the teapot and the flour jar, the silver vase of stock.

A lazy illumination, like a Mexican afternoon in your room. I could see the sun in your face.

Homing

I have never seen the crows leave the tree in the morning but every evening about a half an hour before dark, they start flying in from all over town. There may be regular herders who swoop around in the sky for blocks calling for the others to come home, or perhaps each one circles around gathering stragglers before it pops into the tree. I’ve watched enough, you’d think I could tell by now. But I only see crows, dozens of crows, flying in from every direction from far away and five or six circling like over O’Hare, calling calling, and then in a split second suddenly it is silent and no crows are to be seen. The tree looks like an ordinary maple tree. No way you’d know there were so many birds in there.

I happened to be on my front porch when I first saw them. I had been downtown and was on my portable oxygen tank, sitting on the porch swing to look at the evening light. Usually I sit out on the back porch where my regular hose reaches. Sometimes I watch the news at that time or fix dinner. What I mean is I could easily have no idea that that particular maple tree is filled with crows at sundown.

Do they all leave together then for still another tree to sleep in, higher up on Mount Sanitas? Maybe, because I’m up early, sitting at the window facing the foothills, and I have never seen them come out of the tree. I see deer though, going up into the hills of Mount Sanitas and Dakota Ridge, and the rising sun glowing pink against the rocks. If there is snow and it is very cold, there is alpenglow, when the ice crystals turn the color of the morning into stained glass pink, neon coral.

Of course it is winter now. The tree is bare and there are no crows. I’m just thinking about the crows. It’s hard for me to walk so the few blocks uphill would be too much for me. I could drive, I suppose, like Buster Keaton having his chauffeur drive him across the street. But I think it would be too dark then to see the birds inside the tree.

I don’t know why I even brought this up. Magpies flash now blue, green against the snow. They have a similar bossy shriek. Of course I could get a book or call somebody and find out about the nesting habits of crows. But what bothers me is that I only accidentally noticed them. What else have I missed? How many times in my life have I been, so to speak, on the back porch, not the front porch? What would have been said to me that I failed to hear? What love might there have been that I didn’t feel?