A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

Dear Conchi

Dear Conchi,

The University of New Mexico, not how we imagined it at all. Secondary school in Chile was harder than college here. I live in a dorm, hundreds of girls, all outgoing and confident. I still feel strange, ill at ease.

I love the place itself. The campus has many old adobe buildings. The desert is beautiful and there are mountains here. Not like the Andes of course, but big on a different scale. Rugged and rocky. Dumb-dumb … that’s what they are called, the Rocky Mountains. Clear clean air, cold at night with millions of stars.

My clothes are all wrong. A girl even told me that nobody here “dresses up” like I do. I have to get white sox I guess and huge circular skirts, blue jeans. I mean, the women look really horrible. It’s nice on the men, though, casual clothes and boots.

I’ll never get used to the food. Cereal for breakfast and coffee as weak as tea. And when I’m ready for tea in the afternoon that’s when dinner is served here. When I’m ready for dinner it’s lights-out time at the dorm.

I couldn’t get a class with Ramon Sender until next semester. I saw him in the hall, though! I told him Cronica del Alba was my favorite book. He said, “Yes, but then, you are very young.” He is how I imagined him, only real old. Very Spanish and arrogant, dignified …

* * *

Dear Conchi,

I have a job, can you imagine? Part time, but still. It’s proofreading the college paper, The Lobo, which comes out once a week. I work three nights in the journalism building, right next to the dorm. I even have a key to the dorm, since it’s locked at ten and I work until eleven. The printer is an old Texan called Jonesy, who works on a linotype machine. A wonderful machine with about a thousand parts and gears. Boiling lead that makes the letters. He puts the words in and they clank and sing and clatter, come out in lines of hot lead. It makes each line seem important.

He teaches me things, about writing headlines, which stories are good, and why. He teases me a lot, plays tricks to keep me on my toes. In the middle of a story about a basketball game he’ll slip in something like “Down upon the Swanee River.”

Sometimes a man called Joe Sanchez comes in and brings copy and a beer for Jonesy. He’s a sports and feature writer. He’s a student, but much older than the boys in my classes, because he is a veteran, here on the GI bill. He tells us about Japan, where he was a medic. He looks like an Indian, has shiny black hair, long, combed in a ducktail.

Sorry, I’m already using expressions you’ve never heard. Most of the boys here wear crew cuts, which is practically shaven heads. Some have longer hair, combed back in what looks like a duck’s tail.

I miss you and Quena a lot. I haven’t made a friend yet. I am different, coming from Chile. I think people think I’m stuck up because I’m not open. I don’t understand the humor yet, get embarrassed because there’s a lot of joking and hinting about sex. Strangers will tell you their whole life story, but they aren’t emotional or affectionate like Chileans, so I still don’t feel I know them.

All those years in South America I wanted to return to my country the USA because it was a democracy, not with just two classes like Chile. There are definitely classes here. Girls who were nice to me in the beginning snub me now because I didn’t go through rush, live in the dorm and not a sorority. And some sororities are “better” than others. Richer.

I mentioned to my roommate Ella that Joe, the reporter, was funny and nice and she said, “Yes, but he’s Mexican.” He’s not from Mexico, that’s what they call anybody of Spanish descent here. There aren’t that many Mexicans at the university, when you consider the population here, and only about ten Negroes.

My journalism classes are going well, great teachers, they even look like reporters in old movies. I’m starting to get a weird feeling though. I majored in journalism because I wanted to be a writer, but the whole point of journalism is to cut out all the good stuff …

* * *

Dear Conchi,

… I have been out several times with Joe Sanchez. He gets free tickets to events so he’ll do stories on them. I like him because he never says things just because they are the right thing to say. It’s very cool to like Dave Brubeck, a jazz musician, but in his review Joe called him a wimp. People got really mad. And Billy Graham. Hard to explain to you, being Catholic, what an Evangelist is. He talks, hollers, about God and sin and tries to get people to turn their lives over to Jesus. Everybody I know thinks the guy is crazy, money hungry and hopelessly corny. The column Joe wrote was about the man’s skill and power. It turned into a column about faith.

We don’t go to student hangouts afterward but to little restaurants in the south valley or to Mexican bars or cowboy bars. It’s like being in another country. We drive up into the mountains or out into the desert, walk or climb for miles. He doesn’t try to “make out” (atracar) like all the other boys do, relentlessly, here. When he says good-bye he just touches my cheek. Once he kissed my hair.

He doesn’t talk about things, or events or books. He reminds me of my uncle John. He tells stories, about his brothers, or his grandfather, or geisha girls in Japan.

I like him because he talks to everybody. He really wants to know what everyone is up to.

* * *

Dear Conchi,

I’m going out with a really sophisticated man, Bob Dash. We went to a play, Waiting for Godot, and to an Italian movie, I forget the title. He looks like a handsome author on a book jacket. A pipe, patches on his elbows. He lives in an adobe house filled with Indian pots and rugs and modern art. We drink gin and tonics with lime in them, listen to music like Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. He talks a lot about books I have never heard of, and has lent me a dozen books … Sartre, Keerkegard (sp?), Beckett and T. S. Eliot, many more. I like a poem called “The Hollow Men.”

Joe told me it was Dash who was a hollow man. He has been unreasonably upset about me going out with Bob, or even having coffee with him. He says he’s not jealous but that he can’t bear the idea of me becoming an intellectual. Says I have to listen to Patsy Cline and Charlie Parker as an antidote. Read Walt Whitman and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel.

Actually I liked Camus’s The Stranger better than Look Homeward, Angel. But I like Joe because he likes that book. He’s not afraid to be corny. He loves America, and New Mexico, the barrio where he lives, the desert. We go for long hikes in the foothills. Once a huge dust storm came up. Tumbleweeds whipping through the air and blizzards of yellow dust howling. He was dancing around in it. I could barely hear him hollering how wonderful it was, the desert. We saw a coyote, heard it yelping.

He’s corny with me, too. He remembers things, and listens to me go on and on. Once I was crying for no reason, just missing you and Quena and home. He didn’t try to cheer me up, just held me and let me be sad. We speak Spanish when we’re talking about sweet things, or when we’re kissing. We’ve been kissing a lot.

* * *

Dear Conchi,

I wrote a short story, “Apples.” It’s about an old man who rakes apples. Bob Dash red-penciled about a dozen adjectives and said it was “an acceptable little story.” Joe said it was precious and false. That I should only write about what I feel, not make up something about an old man I never knew. It doesn’t bother me what they said. I read it over and over.

Of course it bothers me.

Ella, my roommate, said she would prefer not to read it. I wish we got along better. Her mother mails her her Kotex from Oklahoma every month. She’s a drama major. God, how can she ever play Lady Macbeth if she can’t relax about a little blood?

I’m seeing more of Bob Dash. He’s like having a personal seminar. Today we went to coffee and talked about Nausea. But I’m thinking more about Joe. I see him between classes and when I’m working. He and Jonesy and I laugh a lot, eat pizza and drink beer. Joe has a little room that’s sort of his office, that’s where we kiss. I don’t think about him exactly, but about kissing him. I was thinking about it in Copy Editing I, and even groaned or said something out loud and the professor looked at me and said, “Yes, Miss Gray?”

* * *

Dear Conchi,

… I’m reading Jane Austen. Her writing is like chamber music, but it’s real and funny at the same time. There are a thousand books I want to read, don’t know where to start. I’m changing my major to English next semester …

* * *

Dear Conchi,

An old couple work as janitors in the journalism building. One night they took us up on the roof for a beer after work. The roof is overhung with cottonwood trees and you can just sit under the trees and look at the stars. If you want you can look over and watch the cars on Route 66, or on the other side, into the windows of the dorm where I live. They gave us an extra key to the broom closet, where the ladder to the roof is. Nobody else knows about this place. We go up there between classes and after work. Joe brought a grill and a mattress and candles. It’s like our own island or tree house …

* * *

Dear Conchi,

I am happy. When I wake up in the morning my face is sore from smiling.

When I was little I think I felt peace sometimes, in the woods or a meadow, and in Chile I was always having fun. I felt joy when I skied. But I had never felt happiness like I do with Joe. Never felt that I was me, and loved for that.

I sign out for the weekends to his house, with his father responsible for me. Joe lives with his father, who is very old, a retired schoolteacher. He loves to cook, makes awful greasy food. He drinks beer all day. The only effect it seems to have is to make him sing things like “Minnie the Mermaid” and “Rain on the Roof,” over and over while he cooks. He tells stories too, about everybody in Armijo, the neighborhood. He had most of them in school.

* * *

Dear Conchi,

Most weekends we go to the Jemez Mountains and climb all day, camp out at night. There are some hot springs up there. So far nobody has been there when we have. Deer and owls, big-horned sheep, blue jays. We lie in the water, talk or read out loud. Joe loves to read Keats.

My classes and job are going fine, but I always can’t wait until they are over so I can be with Joe. He’s a sports reporter for the Tribune, too, so it’s hard to find time. We go to track meets and high school basketball games, stock car races. I don’t like football, miss soccer and rugby games.

* * *

Dear Conchi,

Everyone is unreasonably upset about me and Joe. The housemother gave me a talk. Bob Dash was horrid, lectured me for about an hour, until I got up and left. Said Joe was vulgar and common, a hedonist with no sense of values and no intellectual scope. Among other things. Mostly people are worried because I’m so young. They think I’m going to throw away my education or career. Or that’s what they all say. I think they are jealous because we are so in love. And no matter what their arguments, from ruining my reputation to risking my future, they always bring up the fact that he is Mexican. It never occurs to anybody that coming from Chile I would naturally like a Latin person, someone who feels things. I don’t fit in here at all. I wish Joe and I could go home to Santiago …

* * *

Dear Conchi,

… Someone actually wrote to my parents, told them I was having an affair with a man much too old for me.

They called, hysterical, are coming all the way from Chile. They will arrive on New Year’s Eve. Apparently my mother started drinking again. My father says it’s all my fault.

When I’m with Joe none of this matters. I think he is a reporter because he likes to talk to people. Wherever we go we end up talking to strangers. And liking them.

I don’t think I ever really liked the world until I met him. My parents don’t like the world, or me, or they would trust me.

* * *

Dear Conchi,

They arrived on New Year’s Eve, but were exhausted from the trip so we only talked for a little while. They didn’t hear that I’m making straight As, that I love my job, that I was chosen queen of the Newsprint Ball that night. I have become a fallen woman, a common tart, etc. “With a greaser,” my mother said.

The dance was wonderful. We had dinner with friends from the department before the dance, laughed a lot. There was a ceremony where I got a newspaper crown and an orchid. For some reason I had never danced with Joe before. It was wonderful. Dancing with him.

We had agreed to see my parents the next day, at their motel. My father said he and Joe could watch the Rose Bowl game, that it would break the ice.

I am so dumb. I saw that they had been drinking martinis already, felt they would be more relaxed. Joe was great. At ease, warm, open. They were like stone.

Daddy relaxed a little when the game came on, both he and Joe enjoyed it. Mama and I sat there silent. Joe just drinks beer, so he really loosened up on my father’s martinis. Every time there was a field goal he’d holler “Fuckin’ A!” or “A la verga!” A few times he punched Daddy on the shoulder. Mama cringed and drank and didn’t say a word.

After the game Joe invited my parents out to dinner, but my father said that he and Joe should go get some Chinese food.

While they were gone Mama talked about the shame I had caused them by being immoral, how disgusted she was.

Conchi, I know we promised to tell the other about sex, the first time either of us made love. It’s hard to write about. What is fine about it is that it is between two people, the most naked and close you can get. And each time is different and a surprise. Sometimes we laugh the whole time. Sometimes it makes you cry.

Sex is the most important thing that ever happened to me. I could not understand what my mother was saying, that I was filthy.

Lord knows what Joe and Daddy talked about. They were both pale when they got back. Apparently my father said things like “statutory rape” and Joe said he would marry me tomorrow, which was the worst thing, for my parents, that he could have said.

After we had eaten, Joe said, “Well, we’re all pretty tired. I better be going. You coming, Lu?”

“No, she’s staying here,” my father said.

I stood there, frozen.

“I’m going with Joe,” I said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

I’m writing you now from the dorm. It’s eerily quiet. Most of the girls went home for Christmas.

Except for briefly telling me what my father said, Joe didn’t talk while he drove me home. I couldn’t talk either. When we kissed good-bye I thought my heart would break.

* * *

Dear Conchi,

My parents are taking me out of school at the end of the semester. They’ll wait for me in New York. I’m to go there and then we’re going to Europe until the fall semester.

I took a taxi to Joe’s house. We were going to Sandia Peak to talk, got into the car. I don’t know what I thought he would say, what I wanted.

I hoped he’d say he’d wait for me, that he’d still be here when I got back. But he said that if I really loved him I’d marry him right now. I reacted to that. He needs to graduate; he only works part-time. I didn’t say more of the truth which is that I don’t want to leave school. I want to study Shakespeare, the Romantic poets. He said we could live with his dad until we had enough money. We were crossing the bridge over the Rio Grande when I said I didn’t want to get married yet.

“You won’t know for a long time what it is you’re throwing away.”

I said I knew what we had, that it would still be there when I got back.

“It will, but you won’t. No, you’ll go on, have ‘relationships,’ marry some asshole.”

He opened the car door, shoved me out onto the Rio Grande bridge, the car still moving. He drove away. I walked all the way across town to the dorm. I kept thinking he’d pull up behind me, but he never did.