A Manual for Cleaning Women (25 page)

Dolores wanted to point out that Amazons had only one breast, but she bit her tongue. She and César smiled as Sally continued to talk about the beauty of the dive. She’d come back, soon, spend a week diving! Oh, the coral and the anemones, the colors, the brilliant schools of fish.

César asked them to lunch. It was three o’clock. “I’m afraid I need a siesta,” Dolores said. Sally was disappointed.

“You’ll be back, Sally. I just showed you the way.”

“Thank you both,” Sally said. Her joy and gratitude were pure, innocent. César and her sister kissed her glowing cheeks.

They were at the cab stand on the beach. César held Dolores’s hand tightly. “So,
mi vieja
, will you ever come back?” She shook her head.

“Stay with me tonight.”

“
No puedo
.”

César kissed her lips. She tasted the desire and salt of their past. The last night she had spent with him he had bitten all her fingernails to the quick. “Think of me,” he said.

Sally talked excitedly all the way into town, an hour’s drive. How vital she had felt, how free.

“I knew you would like that part. Your body disappears, because you are so weightless, but at the same time you become intensely aware of it.”

“He is wonderful. Wonderful. I can just imagine having a love affair with him! You are so lucky!”

“Can you imagine, Sally. That whole stretch of beach, where the Club Med is? It was pure empty beach. Up in the jungle there was an artesian well. There were deer, almost tame. We spent days there without seeing another soul. And the island. It was just an island, wild jungle. No dive shops or restaurants. Not a single other boat but ours. Can you imagine?”

No. She couldn’t.

*   *   *

“It’s uncanny,” Mrs. Wacher said, as the sisters got down from their cab. “It’s as if they have totally reversed roles. Now the younger one is absolutely gorgeous and radiant and the other is haggard and disheveled. Look at her … she who never used to have a hair out of place!”

*   *   *

The night was stormy. Black clouds swept across the full moon so that the beach was bright and then dark, like a hotel room with a neon sign blinking outside. Sally’s face shone like a child’s when the moonlight lit her.

“But did Mama never, ever, speak of me?”

No, matter of fact. Except to mock your sweetness, to say your docility proved that you were a fool.

“Yes, she did, a lot,” Dolores lied. “One of her favorite memories of you was how you loved that Dr. Bunny book. You would pretend to read it, turning the pages, real serious. And you got every word perfect, except when Dr. Bunny would say, ‘Case dismissed!’ you said ‘Smith to Smith!’”

“I remember that book! The rabbits were all furry!”

“At first. But you wore the fur out petting them. She liked to remember you and that red wagon, too, when you were around four. You’d put Billy Jameson in the wagon, and all your dolls, and Mabel, the dog, and the two cats, and then you’d say ‘All aboard!’ but the cats and dog would have gotten out and Billy too, and the dolls fell out. You’d spend all morning packing them up and saying ‘All aboard.’”

“I don’t remember that at all.”

“Oh, I do, it was in the path by Daddy’s hyacinths, and the climbing rose by the gate. Can you remember the smell?”

“Yes!”

“She used to ask me if I remembered you in Chile, going off to school on your bicycle. Every single morning you’d look up to the hall window and wave, and your straw hat would fly off.”

Sally laughed. “True. I remember. But, Dolores, it was you in the hall window. You I was waving good-bye to.”

True. “Well, I guess she used to see you from the window by her bed.”

“Silly how good that makes me feel. I mean even if she didn’t ever say good-bye. That she even watched me go off to school. I’m so glad you told me about that.”

“Good,” Dolores whispered, to herself. The sky was black now and huge raindrops were falling cold. The sisters ran together in the rain to their room.

*   *   *

Sally’s plane left the next morning; Dolores would leave the following day. At breakfast, before she left, Sally said good-bye to everyone, thanked the waiters, thanked Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Wacher for being so kind.

“We’re glad that you two had such a good visit. What a comfort to have a sister!” Mrs. Lewis said.

“It really is a comfort,” Sally said when she kissed Dolores good-bye at the airport.

“We’re just beginning to know each other,” Dolores said. “We will be there now, always, for each other.” Her heart ached to see the sweetness, the trust in her sister’s eyes.

On the way back to the hotel she had the cab stop at a liquor store. In her room she drank and she slept and then she sent out for another bottle. In the morning, on the way to her plane for California she bought a half-pint of rum, to cure her shakes and headache. By the time the taxi reached the airport she was, like they say, feeling no pain.

Bluebonnets

“Ma, I can’t believe you are doing this. You never even go out with anybody, and here you are spending a week with some stranger. He could be an axe murderer for all you know.”

Maria’s son Nick was taking her to the Oakland airport. Lord, why hadn’t she taken a cab? Her sons, all grown now, could be worse than parents, more judgmental, more old-fashioned when it came to her.

“I haven’t met him, but he’s not exactly a stranger. He liked my poetry, asked me to translate his book to Spanish. We have written and spoken on the phone for years. We have a lot in common. He raised his four sons alone, too. I garden; he has a farm. I’m flattered that he invited me … I don’t think he sees many people.”

Maria had asked an old friend in Austin about Dixon. A genius. Total eccentric, Ingeborg had said. Never socializes. Instead of a briefcase he has a gunny sack. His students either idolize him or hate him. He’s in his late forties, quite attractive. Let me know everything …

“That was the weirdest book I ever read,” Nick said, “not that I could read it. Admit it … could you? Enjoy it, I mean.”

“The language was great. Clear and simple. Nice to translate. It is philosophy and linguistics, just very abstract.”

“I can’t imagine you doing this … having some kind of a fling … in Texas.”

“That’s what’s bothering you. The idea that your mother might have sex, or that somebody in her fifties might. Anyway he didn’t say, ‘Let’s have a fling.’ He said, ‘Why not come to my farm for a week? The bluebonnets have just begun to bloom. I can show you notes for my new book. We can fish, go for walks in the woods.’ Give me a break, Nick. I work in a county hospital, in Oakland. How do you think a walk in the woods sounds to me? Bluebonnets? I may as well be going to heaven.”

They pulled up in front of United and Nick got her bag from the trunk. He hugged her, kissed her cheek. “Sorry I gave you a hard time. Enjoy your trip, Ma. Hey, maybe you can get to a Rangers game.”

Snow on the Rocky Mountains. Maria read, listened to music, tried not to think. Of course, in the back of her mind, there was the idea of an affair.

She hadn’t taken off her clothes since she had stopped drinking, the idea was terrifying. Well, he sounded pretty stuffy himself, maybe he felt the same way. Take it a day at a time. Practice just being with a man, for Lord’s sake, enjoy the visit. You’re going to Texas.

The parking lot smelled like Texas. Caliche dust and oleander. He tossed her bag into the bed of an old Dodge pickup truck with dog scratches on the doors. “You know ‘Tennessee Border’?” Maria asked. “Sure do.” They sang it. “… Picked her up in a pickup truck and she broke that heart of mine.” Dixon was tall, lean, good laugh lines. Squint lines around open gray eyes. He was entirely at ease, asked her one personal question after another in a nasal drawl just like her uncle John’s. How did she know Texas, that old song? Why did she get divorced? What were her sons like? Why didn’t she drink? Why was she an alcoholic? Why did she translate other people’s work? The questions were embarrassing, buffeting, but soothing, the attention, like a massage.

He stopped at a fish market. Stay here, be right back. Then the freeway and hot gusts of air. Down onto a ribbon of macadam road where they never saw another car. One slow red tractor. Windmills, Hereford cattle knee deep in Indian paintbrush. In the small town of Brewster, Dixon parked across from the town square. Haircut. She followed him past the barber’s pole into a one-chair barbershop, sat listening while he and the old man cutting his hair discussed the heat, the rains, fishing, Jesse Jackson running for president, several deaths and a marriage. Dixon had just grinned at her when she asked if her bag would be all right in the back of the truck. She looked out the window at downtown Brewster. It was early afternoon and no one was walking in the streets. Two old men sat on the courthouse steps like extras in a southern movie, chewing tobacco, spitting.

The absence of noise was what was so evocative of her childhood, of another era. No sirens, no traffic, no radios. A horsefly buzzed against the window, snip of scissors, the rhythm of the two men’s voices, an electric fan with dirty ribbons flying rustled old magazines. The barber ignored her, not out of rudeness but from courtesy.

Dixon said “much obliged” when he left. As they walked across the square to the grocery store she told him about her Texan grandma, Mamie. Once an old woman had stopped by to visit. Mamie had served tea in a pot with a sugar bowl and creamer, little sandwiches, cookies and cut-up pieces of cake. “Mercy, Mamie, you shouldn’t go to so much trouble.” “Oh, yes,” Mamie had said, “one always should.”

They put the groceries in the back of the truck and drove to the feed store, where Dixon got mash and chicken feed, two bales of hay, a dozen baby chicks. He smiled at her when he caught her staring at him and two farmers talking about alfalfa.

“What would you be doing now, in Oakland?” he asked when they got in the truck. Today was pediatric clinic. Crack babies, gunshot wounds, AIDS babies. Hernias and tumors, but mostly wounds of the city’s desperate and angry poor.

They were soon out of the town and on a narrow dirt road. The baby chicks chirped in the box on the floor.

“This is what I wanted you to see,” he said, “the road to my place this time of year.”

They drove along the empty road over gently rolling hills, fragrant and lush with flowers, pink, blue, magenta, red. Bursts of yellow and lavender. The hot, perfumed air enveloped the cab. Huge thunderclouds had formed and the light grew yellow, giving miles of flowers an iridescent luminosity. Larks and meadowlarks, red-winged blackbirds darted above the ditches by the road; the singing of the birds rose above the sound of the truck. Maria leaned out the window, her damp head resting on her arms. It was only April, but the heavy Texan heat suffused her, the perfume of the flowers lulled like a drug.

An old tin-roofed farmhouse with a rocking chair on the porch, a dozen or so kittens of different ages. They put the groceries away in a kitchen with fine Sarouk rugs in front of the sink and stove, another burned by sparks from a woodstove. Two leather chairs. Bookcases lined the walls, with books two-deep. A massive oak table covered with books. Columns of books were stacked on the floor. The old, rippled glass windows looked out onto a field of rich green pasture where kid goats suckled their mothers. Dixon put the food into the refrigerator, put the chicks in a larger box on the floor, with a lightbulb in it, even though it was so warm. His dog had just died, he said. And then for the first time seemed self-conscious. Need to water, he said, and she followed him past the chicken sheds and barns to a large field planted with corn, tomatoes, beans, squash, and other vegetables. She sat on the fence while he opened sluice gates to start the water into the furrows. A chestnut mare and colt galloped in the field of bluebonnets beyond.

It was late afternoon when they fed the animals by the barn, where in a dark corner dripped cloth bags filled with cheese, and more cats scampered along the rafters, indifferent to the birds that flitted in and out of the upper windows by the lofts. An old white mule, Homer, lumbered up when he heard the sound of the bucket. Lie down with me, Dixon said. But they’ll step on us. No, just lie down. A circle of goats blocked out the sun, their long-lashed eyes gazing down at her. Nuzzle of Homer’s velvety lips on Maria’s cheeks. The mare and the colt snorted, spraying hot breaths as they checked her out.

The other rooms in the farmhouse were not like the cluttered kitchen at all. One room with wooden plank floors, nothing in it but a Steinway grand. Dixon’s study, which was bare except for four large wooden tables covered with five-by-eight white cards. Each one of them had a paragraph or a sentence on it. She saw that he shuffled them around, the way other people move things in a computer. Don’t look at those now, he said.

His living room and bedroom were one large room with tall windows on two sides. Large lush paintings on the other two walls. Maria was surprised that they were done by Dixon. He was so quiet. The paintings were bold, lavish. He had painted a mural on his corduroy couch, figures, sitting there. A brass bed with an old patchwork quilt, exquisite chests and desks and tables, early American antiques that had belonged to his father. The floor in this room was painted glossy white under more priceless Persian rugs. Be sure and take off your shoes, he said.

Her room was a sun porch along the back of the house, with screens on three sides, of a meshed plastic that blurred the pink and green flowers, the new green of the trees, the flash of a cardinal. It was like the basement of L’Orangerie where you sit surrounded by Monet’s water lilies. He was filling the bathtub for her in the next room. You’ll probably want to lie down awhile. I’ve got some more chores to do.

Clean, tired, she lay surrounded by the soft colors that blurred when the rain began and the wind swirled the leaves in the trees. Rain on a tin roof. Just as she fell asleep Dixon came and lay down beside her, lay next to her until she woke and they made love, simple as that.

Dixon built a fire in the iron stove and she sat by it while he made crab gumbo. He cooked on a hot plate but had a dishwasher. They ate on the porch by lantern light while the rain abated and when the clouds cleared turned off the lantern to look at the stars.