A Manual for Cleaning Women – Lucia Berlin
by Petronella Mill and Tamino Kuny
Nice to meet you, Lucia. Our names are Petronella and Tamino, we are two architecture students interested in Care Work. We have read some stories in your book ‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’ that was posthumously published in 2015. Now we would like to ask you some questions.
The cleaning woman and the housewife. Is it an unequal pair? It’s like an impossible equation. Theoretically, the housewife who is home already, and has time, could clean the house that she lives in. (And then earn money?) And the cleaning (woman) then loses her job. At the same time the cleaning (woman) cleans the housewife’s house (paid) and her own house (unpaid).
You were born in Alaska, and ever since you were a child, you have been moving around a lot. And working as a cleaning woman, also moving around, in between the places that you clean. Are there places that you remember more than others?
Yes. Angel’s Laundromat is in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Fourth Street. Shabby shops and junkyards, second hand stores with army cots, boxes of one-socks, 1940 editions of Good Hygiene. Grain stores and motels for lovers and drunks and old women with hennaed hair who do their laundry at Angel’s. Teenage Chicana brides go to Angel’s. Towels, pink shortie nighties, bikini underpants that say Thursday. Their husbands wear blue overalls with names in script on the pockets. I like to see the names appear in the mirror vision of the dryers. Tina, Corky, Junior. (1)
How did you end up in Angel’s Laundromat?
I drove all over town with a green bedspread until I came to Angel’s with his yellow sign, YOU CAN DIE HERE ANYTIME. (2)
What did other laundry signs say?
POSITIVELY NO DYEING. (3)
In a laundry, you normally need to wait for the wash cycles to finish. Have you ever had any memorable encounters during your waiting time there?
A tall old Indian in faded Levi’s and a fine Zuni belt. His name was Tony. He a was a Jicarilla Apache from up north. For four years or so, we were always at Angel’s at the same time. But not at the same times. I mean, some days I’d go at seven on a Monday or maybe at six thirty on a Friday evening and he would already be there. One day, he had just been sitting there, next to me, sipping port, looking at my hands, and then he said ‘I am chief of my tribe’. He told me that his wife worked cleaning houses. They had four sons. He asked ‘You know why I like you?’ I said I didn’t. He said ‘because you’re a redskin’. He pointed at my face in the mirror. I do have red skin, and no, I never had seen a red-skinned Indian. He liked my name, pronounced it in Italian. Lu-chee-a. Once he suggested that we go lie down in his camper and rest together. I pointed to the lime-green Day-Glo sign, NEVER LEAVE THE MACHINES UNATTENDED.
You lived in Mexico and then in Albuquerque for many years. What about all this border crossing?
Say you’re looking for your maid, she hasn’t shown, she owes you money, something like that. (4)
Lucia, how did it come about that you started working as a cleaning woman?
Because I’m ‘educated’ it is hard to get cleaning jobs too. Sure as hell couldn’t find any other jobs at that time. I learned to tell the ladies right away that my alcoholic husband just died, leaving me and the four kids. I had never worked before, raising the children and all. (5)
I also worked as a high-school teacher, switchboard operator, hospital ward clerk, and physician’s assistant. (luciaberlin.com)
Do you keep a record of the houses you have cleaned?
We lived in an old farmhouse, down by the river. Marty and I had just divorced, I was in my first year of teaching, my first job. The house was hard to take care of alone. Leaky roof, burned-out pump, but it was big, a beautiful house. (6)
If you could give an advice to cleaning women, what would it be? Any advice.
Let them know you are thorough. The first day put all the furniture back wrong… five to ten inches off, or facing the wrong way. When you dust, reverse the Siamese cats, put the creamer to the left of the sugar. Change the toothbrushes all around. (7)
Then you also worked in Emergency. What is your first memory of it?
I get the jockeys because I speak Spanish and most are Mexican. The first jockey I met was Muñoz. God. I undress people all the time and it’s no big deal, takes a few seconds, Muñoz lay there, unconscious, a miniature Aztec god. Because his clothes were so complicated it was as if I were performing an elaborate ritual. Unnerving, because it took so long, like in Mishima where it takes three pages to take off the lady’s kimono. His magenta satin shirt had many buttons along the shoulder and at each tiny wrist, his pants were fastened with intricate lacings, pre-Columbian knots. His boots smelled of manure and sweat, but were as soft and dainty as Cinderella’s. He slept on, an enchanted prince. I liked working in Emergency – you meet men there, anyway. Real men, heroes. Firemen and jockeys. (8)
Your jockey, how did he react to your care taking?
He began to call for his mother even before he woke. Mamacita! (9)
While writing, raising your four sons, drinking, and finally, prevailing over alcoholism. What do you remember mostly from your daily routine back then? How did your day look like?
42-Piedmont, 43-Shattuck-Berkeley, 18-Park-Montclair, 40-Telegraph-Berkeley, or 58-College-Almeda, everyone on this bus is young and black or old and white, including the drivers. (10)
We care for those close to us, but also for more. You seem to care for more too, in your work and in private. Why? Is it natural human behaviour to care for everyone, even for people we don’t know?
Tony. One day I hadn’t seen him but I knew it was his fine hand on my shoulder. He gave me three dimes. I didn’t understand, almost said thanks, but then I saw that he was shaky-sick and couldn’t work the dryers. Sober, it’s hard. You have to turn the arrow with one hand, put the dime in with the other, push down the plunger, then turn the arrow back for the next dime. He came back later, drunk, just as his clothes were starting to fall limp and dry. He couldn’t get the door open, passed out in the yellow chair. My clothes were dry, I was folding. Angel and I got him back onto the floor of the pressing room. Angel put a cold wet one-sock on Tony’s head and knelt beside him. Believe me… I’ve been there… right down there in the gutter where he was. I know just how he felt. (11)
You care out of love, we believe…
Well, the only reason I have lived so long is that I let go of my past. (12)
You speak really openly about your past. Like about the one time you went to Mexico to pick up drugs for your husband, Noodles, and then had to go directly to the hospital to give birth to your child, where it was born dead.
There had been a big bust in town and a bigger one in Culiacán, so there was no heroin in Albuquerque. He was shaking so bad I had to pour the cough syrup into his mouth. The whole trailer smelled of rotten oranges from the syrup. At first we had plans to start building our adobe house, plant vegetables, but just as we got the land Noodles got strung out again. I wanted him to be clean when the baby came. So I finally agreed to go. As I got back I watched him pour the contents of the rubber into a film canister. I had a strong contraction. Hot water gushed down my legs onto the table, his rubber tube fell from his arm. He leaned back against the pillow. I got an other contraction. I called 911. Noodles had nodded out. She was born too early. (13)
Thank you for this interview, Lucia. One last question. How much is autobiographical? Is writing for you a way to break down the reality that you are in? Or is it all fiction? To make it ambiguous for the reader what has really taken place and what has not?
These are several questions now, not only one.
1. Lucia Berlin. 2016. A Manual for Cleaning Women: selected stories ed. Stephen Emerson. New York: Picador, 5.
2. Berlin, 6.
3. Berlin, 6.
4. Berlin, 313.
5. Berlin, 28.
6. Berlin, 164.
7. Berlin, 35.
8. Berlin, 38.
9. Berlin, 38.
10. Berlin, 34
11. Berlin, 5.
12. Berlin, 389.
13. Berlin, 317.