A Manual for Cleaning Women (21 page)

When she had finished that drink she felt better, and she went into the laundry room and started a load of wash. Taking the bottle with her, she went to the bathroom then. She showered and combed her hair, put on clean clothes. Ten more minutes. She checked to see if the door was locked, sat on the toilet and finished the vodka. This last drink didn’t just get her well but got her slightly drunk.

She moved the laundry from the washer to the dryer. She was mixing orange juice from frozen concentrate when Joel came into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. “No socks, no shirt.”

“Hi, honey. Have some cereal. Your clothes will be dry by the time you finish breakfast and shower.” She poured him some juice, another glass for Nicholas who stood silent in the doorway.

“How in the hell did you get a drink?” He pushed past her and poured himself some cereal. Thirteen. He was taller than she.

“Could I have my wallet and keys?” she asked.

“You can have your wallet. I’ll give you the keys when I know you’re okay.”

“I’m okay. I’ll be back at work tomorrow.”

“You can’t stop anymore without a hospital, Ma.”

“I’ll be fine. Please don’t worry. I’ll have all day to get well.” She went to check the clothes in the dryer.

“The shirts are dry,” she told Joel. “The socks need about ten more minutes.”

“Can’t wait. I’ll wear them wet.”

Her sons got their books and backpacks, kissed her good-bye and went out the door. She stood in the window and watched them go down the street to the bus stop. She waited until the bus picked them up and headed up Telegraph Avenue. She left then, for the liquor store on the corner. It was open now.

Electric Car, El Paso

Mrs. Snowden waited for my grandmother and me to get into her electric car. It looked like any other car except that it was very tall and short, like a car in a cartoon that had run into a wall. A car with its hair standing on end. Mamie got in front and I got into the back.

It was the zone where nails scrape on a blackboard. The windows were covered with a film of yellow dust. The walls and seats were mildewed dusty velvet. Taupe. I bit my nails a lot then and the touch of the moldy dusty velvet on the raw ends of my fingers, on my scratched elbows and knees … it was anguish. My teeth ached, my hair hurt. I shuddered as if I had touched a matted dead cat, accidentally. Crouching, I reached up and hung on to the carved gold flowerpots above the dirty windows. The straps for holding on were rotted and stringy, dangled beneath the flowerpots like old wigs. Hanging on this way I was suspended high in the air, swayed above the backseats of other cars where I could see bags of groceries, babies playing in ashtrays, Kleenex boxes.

The car made such a faint whirring sound it didn’t seem as if we were moving. Were we? Mrs. Snowden wouldn’t, or she couldn’t, go over 15 miles an hour. So slow we went that I saw things in a way I never had before. Through time, like watching someone sleep, all night. A man on the sidewalk deciding to go into a café, he changed his mind, walked to the corner, turned back again and went in, put the napkin in his lap and looked expectant before we were even at the end of the block.

If I ducked my head, like a swing seat beneath my dangling arms, when I looked up all I could see of tiny Mamie and Mrs. Snowden was their straw hats, as if they were just two straw hats perched on the dashboard. I giggled hysterically every time I did this. Mamie turned around to smile as if she didn’t notice. We weren’t even downtown yet, not even at the Plaza.

She and Mrs. Snowden talked about friends who had died or were sick or who had lost a husband. They ended everything they said with a quote from the Bible.

“Well, I think she was
very
unwise to…”

“Oh mercy yes. ‘Yet count on him not as an enemy but admonish him as a brother.’”

“Thessalonians Three!” Mamie said. This was sort of a game.

Finally I couldn’t hang on to the flowerpots any longer. I lay down on the floor. Mildewed rubber. Dust. Mamie turned around to smile. Mercy! Mrs. Snowden pulled over to the side of the road. They thought I had fallen out. Much later, hours later, I had to go to the bathroom. All the clean restrooms were on the other side of the road, on the left side. Mrs. Snowden couldn’t make left turns. It took us about ten blocks of right turns and one-way streets before we got to a restroom. I had already wet my pants by then but didn’t tell them, drank from the cool cool Texaco faucet. It took even longer to get back on the right side again because we had to go all the way back to the overpass on Wyoming Avenue.

It was dry at the airport, cars grinding in and out on the gravel. Tumbleweeds caught in the fence. Asphalt, metal, a haze of dusty dancing atoms that reflected dazzling from the wings and windows of the airplanes. People in cars around us were eating sloppy things. Watermelons, pomegranates, bruised bananas. Bottles of beer spurted on ceilings, suds cascaded on the sides of cars. I wanted to suck on an orange. I’m hungry, I whined.

Mrs. Snowden had foreseen that. Her gloved hand passed me fig newtons wrapped in talcumy Kleenex. The cookie expanded in my mouth like Japanese flowers, like a burst pillow. I gagged and wept. Mamie smiled and passed me a sachet-dusted handkerchief, whispered to Mrs. Snowden, who was shaking her head.

“Don’t pay her no mind … just showing off.”

“For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.”

“John?”

“Hebrews, Eleven.”

A few planes took off and one landed. Well, best we be getting back home. She didn’t see so well at night, the lights and all, so she slowed down on the way home, drove far from the parked cars at the curbs. All the Sunday drivers were honking at us. I stood up on the seat, propped myself away from the velvet with my hands against the rear window, watching the necklace of headlights stuck behind us all the way back to the airport.

“Cops!” I hollered. A red light, a siren. Mrs. Snowden signaled, pulled slowly over to let him pass, but he stopped next to us. She buzzed her window halfway down to listen to him.

“Lady, the lights are geared for forty miles an hour. Also, you are driving in the middle of the road.”

“Forty is much too fast.”

“Speed up or I’ll have to give you a ticket.”

“They can simply go around me.”

“Sweetie, they wouldn’t dare!”

“Well!”

She buzzed the electric window up in his face. He banged on it with his fist, red-faced. Horns were bleating behind us and the people just in back of us were laughing. Furious, the policeman stomped around and got into the patrol car, gunned his engine, and roared off, sirens wailing right through a red light, crash into the tan end of an Oldsmobile and then crash again, into the front end of a pickup truck. Glass tinkled. Mrs. Snowden buzzed down her window. She drove carefully past the back of the wrecked truck.

“Let he who think he standeth take heed lest he fall.”

“Corinthians!” Mamie said.

Sex Appeal

Bella Lynn was my cousin, and just about the prettiest girl in West Texas. She had been a drum majorette at El Paso High and Miss Sun Bowl in 1946 and 1947. Later she went to Hollywood to become a starlet. That didn’t work out. The trip started off badly because of her brassiere. It didn’t have falsies in it, but you blew it up, like a balloon. Two balloons.

Uncle Tyler, Aunt Tiny and I went to see her off. In a twin-engine DC-6. None of us had ever been in an airplane before. She said that she was a nervous wreck, but she didn’t look it. She looked just lovely in a pink angora sweater. Her breasts were very big.

The three of us watched her plane, waving at it, until it was way off toward California and Hollywood and then it disappeared. Apparently at about that time it also reached a certain altitude, and because of the pressure in the cabin Bella Lynn’s brassiere blew up. Exploded, I mean. Fortunately, no one in El Paso heard about it. She didn’t even tell me about it for twenty years. But I don’t think that’s why she never became a starlet.

Her picture was always coming out in the El Paso paper. Once it was in it every day for a week … when she was dating Rickie Evers. Rickie Evers had just divorced a famous movie star. His daddy was a millionaire hotel owner and lived on top of the Hotel del Norte in El Paso.

Rickie Evers was in town for the National Golf Open, and Bella Lynn was bound and determined to go out with him. She made reservations for dinner at the Del Norte. She said I should come along, that eleven years old wasn’t too young for me to get some lessons in sex appeal.

I didn’t, in fact, know anything about sex appeal. Sex itself seemed to have something to do with being mad. Cats acted pretty mad about the whole thing, and all the movie stars seemed mad. Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck were downright mean. Bella Lynn and her friends would slouch in the Court Café under pompadours, blowing smoke from their nostrils like petulant dragons.

They were all excited about the National Golf Open. “A gold mine! An oil well right in our own backyard!”

Wilma, Bella Lynn’s best friend, wanted to come with us to the Del Norte Hotel, but Bella Lynn said Nix. A basic principle of sex appeal, she told me, was always work alone. No matter if the other woman was pretty or ugly … it simply delayed and complicated any operation.

*   *   *

I dressed up in what I thought was the most wonderful dress I had ever seen. Lavender dotted swiss with puff sleeves and a crinoline. Aunt Tiny did my hair in French braids. I didn’t wear lipstick yet, but I put some Merthiolate on my mouth. Aunt Tiny made me wash it right off. She did pinch my cheeks. Bella Lynn wore a mean-looking brown crepe dress with big shoulders, mean dark makeup, and black high heels. We got to the hotel early. She sat in a high-backed chair in the lobby, wearing dark glasses. She crossed her legs. Black silk stockings. I told her that the seams were crooked, but she said slightly crooked seams had sex appeal. She gave me a quarter to go buy a soda, but instead I just went up and down the stairs. A beautiful wide curved staircase carpeted in red velvet, with a curved banister. I’d run to the top and stand beneath the chandelier, smiling regally. Then I’d walk very slowly and graciously to the bottom, my hand lightly brushing the mahogany rail. Then I’d run back up. I did this over and over until finally it seemed that surely it must be time to eat. She said she had postponed the reservation because Evers hadn’t shown up yet. I bought an Almond Hershey and sat down a few chairs away. She whispered to stop kicking the seat. She smoked Pall Malls, only she called them Pell Mells.

*   *   *

I recognized the famous Evers and his millionaire father the minute they came in. They went into the dining room with some other men. All in Stetsons and boots, except for Evers, who wore a pinstriped suit and no hat. But I would have known it was them just by how nasty Bella Lynn was looking, using a cigarette holder now. She took off her dark glasses and we went in. Bella Lynn told the head waiter that her escort had been unavoidably detained. That there would only be the two of us to dine.

I wanted chicken fried steak, but she said that was too tacky. She ordered us prime rib. A Manhattan for her and a Shirley Temple for me. Only she ended up with a Shirley Temple too, because she was only eighteen. She told the waiter she must have misplaced her driver’s license. How inconvenient.

The men had a bottle of bourbon on the table and except for Rickie Evers, were all smoking cigars.

“So how are you going to meet him?” I asked her.

“I told you. Sex appeal. Just as soon as I catch his eye I’ll have him over here and buying us our little old prime rib dinner.”

“So far he hasn’t even looked this way.”

“Yes he has, but he pretended not to … that’s
his
sex appeal. But he’ll look over again, and when he does I’ll just look at him as if he was the lowest-down, mangiest old hound dog I ever saw.”

Rickie Evers did, then, look over at her, and that’s exactly how she looked at him, like how did they ever let
him
in? In two seconds he was standing behind the empty chair.

“May I join you?”

“Well. My escort has been unavoidably detained. Perhaps for a few minutes.”

“What are you drinking?” he asked.

“Shirley Temples,” I said, but she said Manhattan. He told the waiter to bring me a Shirley Temple. Manhattans for him and the lady. The waiter didn’t say anything about her ID.

“I’m Bella Lynn and this is Little Lou, my cousin. Sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” she said, although she knew perfectly well what it was.

He told her his name and she said, “Your daddy and my daddy play golf together.”

“Will you be at the Golf Open tomorrow?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. The crowds are so excruciating. Little Lou has her heart set on it though.”

They ended up deciding to go to the golf tournament the next day so I wouldn’t be disappointed. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but by tomorrow they had forgotten how much I was supposed to want to go anyway.

They drank their Manhattans and then we had shrimp cocktails before our roast beef. Baked Alaska for dessert, which I thought was amazing.

After dinner they were going nightclubbing in Juárez, and there was the problem, over crème de menthe, of how to get me home. A taxi, Bella Lynn said, but he insisted that they could drop me off before they crossed the border.

Bella Lynn went to powder her nose. I didn’t go, didn’t know yet that you’re always supposed to go, to assess the situation.

*   *   *

When she was gone Rickie Evers dropped his gold cigarette lighter on the floor and when he reached down for it he ran his hand up my leg, stroked the inside of my knee.

I took a bite of the Baked Alaska and said I wondered how they ever managed to do it. He picked his lighter up and told me I had Baked Alaska on my chin. When he wiped it with the big linen napkin his arm brushed my breast. I was embarrassed, I still didn’t even wear a training bra.

Bella Lynn came back from the powder room sauntering in her crooked seams, pretending not to notice all the men staring at her. The whole dining room had been staring at Bella Lynn and Rickie Evers throughout the meal. I think the Mexican busboy saw what Evers did when he dropped his lighter.