A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

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.