A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

So Long

I love to hear Max say hello.

I called him when we were new lovers, adulterers. The phone rang, his secretary answered and I asked for him. Oh, hello, he said. Max? I was faint, dizzy, in the phone booth.

We’ve been divorced for many years. He is an invalid now, on oxygen, in a wheelchair. When I was living in Oakland he used to call me five or six times a day. He has insomnia: once he called at three a.m. and asked if it was morning yet. Sometimes I’d get annoyed and hang up right away or else I wouldn’t answer the phone.

Most of the time we talked about our children, our grandson, or Max’s cat. I’d file my nails, sew, watch the A’s game while we talked. He’s funny, and a good gossip.

I have lived in Mexico City for almost a year now. My sister Sally is very ill. I take care of her house and children, bring her food, give her injections, baths. I read to her, wonderful books. We talk for hours, cry and laugh, get mad at the news, worry about her son out late.

It is uncanny, how close we have become. We have been together all day for so long. We see and hear things the same way, know what the other is going to say …

I rarely leave the apartment. None of the windows look out onto the sky, just onto air shafts or the apartments next door. You can see the sky from Sally’s bed, but I only see it when I open and close her curtains. I speak Spanish with her and her children, everybody.

Actually Sally and I don’t talk that much anymore. It hurts her lung to talk. I read, or sing, or we just lie together in the dark, breathing in unison.

I feel I have vanished. Last week in the Sonora market I was so tall, surrounded by dark Indians, many of them speaking in Nahuatl. Not only was I vanished, I was invisible. I mean for a long time I believed I wasn’t there at all.

Of course I have a self here, and a new family, new cats, new jokes. But I keep trying to remember who I was in English.

* * *

That’s why I’m so glad to hear from Max. He calls a lot, from California. Hello, he says. He tells me about hearing Percy Heath, about protesting the death penalty at San Quentin. Our son Keith made him eggs benedict on Easter Sunday. Nathan’s wife, Linda, told Max not to phone her so much. Our grandson Nikko said he was falling asleep in spite of himself.

Max tells me the traffic and weather reports, describes the clothes on the Elsa Klensch show. He asks me about Sally.

In Albuquerque, when we were young, before I met him, I had listened to him play saxophone, watched him race Porsches at Fort Sumter. Everybody knew who he was. He was handsome, rich, exotic. Once I saw him at the airport, saying good-bye to his father. He kissed his father good-bye, with tears in his eyes. I want a man who kisses his father good-bye, I thought.

When you are dying it is natural to look back on your life, to weigh things, to have regrets. I have done this, too, along with my sister these last months. It took a long time for us both to let go of anger and blame. Even our regret and self-recrimination lists get shorter. The lists now are of what we’re left with. Friends. Places. She wishes she were dancing danzón with her lover. She wants to see the parroquia in Veracruz, palm trees, lanterns in the moonlight, dogs and cats among the dancers’ polished shoes. We remember one-room schoolhouses in Arizona, the sky when we skied in the Andes.

She has stopped worrying about her children, what will become of them when she dies. I will probably resume worrying about mine after I leave here, but now we simply drift slowly through the patterns and rhythms of each new day. Some days are full of pain and vomit, others are calm, with a marimba playing far away, the whistle of the camote man at night …

I don’t regret my alcoholism anymore. Before I left California my youngest son, Joel, came to breakfast. The same son I used to steal from, who had told me I wasn’t his mother. I cooked cheese blintzes; we drank coffee and read the paper, muttering to each other about Rickey Henderson, George Bush. Then he went to work. He kissed me and said So long, Ma. So long, I said.

All over the world mothers are having breakfast with their sons, seeing them off at the door. Can they know the gratitude I felt, standing there, waving? The reprieve.

I was nineteen when my first husband left me. I married Jude then, a thoughtful man with a dry sense of humor.

He was a good person. He wanted to help me bring up my two baby sons.

Max was our best man. After the wedding, in the backyard, Jude went off to work, where he played piano at Al Monte’s bar. My best friend Shirley, the other witness, left almost without speaking. She was very upset about me marrying Jude, thinking I had done it out of desperation.

Max stayed. After the children went to bed we sat around eating wedding cake and drinking champagne. He talked about Spain; I talked about Chile. He told me about the years in Harvard with Jude and Creeley. About playing saxophone when bebop began. Charlie Parker and Bud Powell, Dizzy Gillespie. Max had been a heroin addict during those bebop days. I didn’t know what that meant then, actually. Heroin to me had a nice connotation … Jane Eyre, Becky Sharp, Tess.

Jude played at night. He woke late in the afternoon, then he would practice or he and Max would play duets for hours and then we’d have supper. He went off to work. Max would help me do the dishes and put the children to bed.

I couldn’t bother Jude at work. When there was a prowler, when the kids got sick, when I got a flat tire it was Max I called. Hello, he said.

Well, anyway, after a year we had an affair. It was intense and passionate, a big mess. Jude wouldn’t talk about it. I left him to live by myself with the children. Jude showed up and told me to get into the car. We were going to New York, where Jude would play jazz and we would save our marriage.

We never did discuss Max. We both worked hard in New York. Jude practiced and jammed, played Bronx weddings, strip shows in Jersey until he got into the union. I made children’s clothes that even sold at Bloomingdale’s. We were happy. New York was wonderful then. Allen Ginsberg and Ed Dorn read at the Y. The Mark Rothko show at MoMA, during the big snowstorm. The light was intense from the snow through the skylights; the paintings pulsated. We heard Bill Evans and Scott LaFaro. John Coltrane on soprano sax. Ornette’s first night at the Five Spot.

In the daytime, while Jude slept, the boys and I took the subway all over the city, getting off each day at new stops. We rode ferries, over and over. Once, when Jude was playing at Grossinger’s, we camped out in Central Park. That’s how nice New York was then, or how dumb I was … We lived on Greenwich Street down by the Washington Market, by Fulton Street.

Jude made a red toy box for the boys, hung swings from the pipes in our loft. He was patient and stern with them. At night when he got home we made love. All the anger and sadness and tenderness between us electric in our bodies. It was never spoken out loud.

At night when Jude was at work I read to Ben and Keith, sang them to sleep and then I sewed. I called the Symphony Sid program and asked him to play Charlie Parker and King Pleasure until he told me not to call so often. Summers were very hot and we slept on the roof. Winters were cold and there was no heat after five or on weekends. The boys wore earmuffs and mittens to bed. Steam came out of my mouth as I sang to them.

In Mexico now I sing King Pleasure songs to Sally. “Little Red Top.” “Parker’s Mood.” “Sometimes I’m Happy.”

It’s pretty horrible when there is nothing else you can do.

* * *

In New York when the phone rang at night it was Max.

Hello, he said.

He was racing in Hawaii. He was racing in Wisconsin. He was watching TV, thinking of me. Irises were blooming in New Mexico. Flash floods in arroyos in August. Cottonwoods turned yellow in the fall.

He came to New York often, to hear music, but I never saw him. He would call and tell me all about New York and I would tell him all about New York. Marry me, he said, give me a reason to live. Talk to me, I said, don’t hang up.

* * *

One night it was bitterly cold, Ben and Keith were sleeping with me, in snowsuits. The shutters banged in the wind, shutters as old as Herman Melville. It was Sunday so there were no cars. Below in the streets the sailmaker passed, in a horse-drawn cart. Clop clop. Sleet hissed cold against the windows and Max called. Hello, he said. I’m right around the corner in a phone booth.

He came with roses, a bottle of brandy, and four tickets to Acapulco. I woke up the boys and we left.

It’s not true, what I said about no regrets, although I felt not the slightest regret at the time. This was just one of the many things I did wrong in my life, leaving like that.

The Plaza Hotel was warm. Hot, in fact. Ben and Keith got into the steaming bath with an expression of awe, as if into a Texan baptism. They fell asleep on clean white sheets. In the adjoining room Max and I made love and we talked until morning.

We drank champagne over Illinois. We kissed while the boys slept across from us and clouds billowed outside the window. When we landed, the sky above Acapulco was streaked coral and pink.

The four of us swam and then ate lobster and swam some more. In the morning the sun shone through the wooden shutters making stripes on Max and Ben and Keith. I sat up in bed, looking at them, with happiness.

Max would carry each boy to bed and tuck him in. Kiss him sweet, the way he had kissed his father. Max slept as deeply as they. I thought he must be exhausted from what we were doing, his leaving his wife, taking on a family.

He taught them both to swim and to snorkel. He told them things. He told me things. Just things, about life, people he knew. We interrupted one another telling him things back. We lay on the fine sand on Caleta Beach, warm in the sun. Keith and Ben buried me in the sand. Max’s finger tracing my lips. Bursts of color from the sun against my closed sandy eyelids. Desire.

In the evenings we went to a park by the docks where they rented tricycles. Max and I held hands as the boys raced furiously around the park, flashing past pink bougainvillea, red canna lilies. Beyond them ships were being loaded on the docks.

One afternoon my mother and father, chatting away, walked up the gangplank to the S.S. Stavangerfjord, a Norwegian ship. My sister had written to me that they were traveling from Tacoma to Valparaíso. My parents weren’t speaking to me then, because of my marriage to Jude. I couldn’t call out to them and say, Hi Mama! Hi Daddy! Isn’t this a coincidence? This is Max.

But it made me feel good, to know my parents were right there. And now they were at the railings as the ship sailed out to sea. My father was sunburned and wore a floppy white hat. My mother smoked. Ben and Keith just kept riding faster and faster around the cement track, calling to each other, and to us … Look at me!

Today there was a big gas explosion in Guadalajara, hundreds of people killed, their homes destroyed. Max called to see if I was all right. I told him how everybody in Mexico thinks it’s funny now to go around asking, “Say … do you smell gas?”

In Acapulco we made friends at the hotel. Don and Maria, who had a six-year-old daughter, Lourdes. In the evenings the children would color on their terrace until they fell asleep.

We stayed very late, until the moon grew high and pale. Don and Max played chess by the light of a kerosene lantern. Caress of moths. Maria and I lay crosswise on a big hammock, talking softly about silly things like clothes, about our children, love. She and Don had been married only six months. Before she met him she had been very alone. I told her how in the morning I said Max’s name before I even opened my eyes. She said her life had been like a dreary record over and over each day and now in a second the record was turned over, music. Max overheard her and he smiled at me. See, amor, we’re the flip side now.

We had some other friends too. Raúl the diver and his wife, Soledad. One weekend the six of us steamed clams on the terrace of our hotel. All the children had been sent to take naps. But one by one different children would pop up, wanting to watch what was going on. Back to bed! Another would want water, another just plain couldn’t sleep. Back to bed. Keith came out and said he saw a giraffe! Now go back to bed, we’ll wake you soon. Ben came out and said there were tigers and elephants. Oh for God’s sake. But there it was in the street beneath us. A circus parade. We woke all the children then. One of the circus men thought Max was a movie star so they gave us free tickets. We all went to the circus that night. It was magical, but the children fell asleep before the end of the trapeze act.

There was an earthquake in California today. Max called to say that it wasn’t his fault and he can’t find his cat.

It was the ghostly setting moon that shone upon us as we made love that night. We lay next to each other then under the wooden revolving fan, hot, sticky. Max’s hand on my wet hair. Thank you, I whispered, to God, I think …

In the mornings when I woke his arms would be around me, his lips against my neck, his hand on my thigh.

One day I woke before the sun came up and he wasn’t there. The room was silent. He must be swimming, I thought. I went into the bathroom. Max was sitting on the toilet, cooking something in a blackened spoon. A syringe was on the sink.

“Hello,” he said.

“Max, what is that?”

“It’s heroin,” he said.

* * *

That sounds like the end of a story, or the beginning, when really it was just a part of the years that were to come. Times of intense technicolor happiness and times that were sordid and frightening.

We had two more sons, Nathan and Joel. We traveled all over Mexico and the United States in a Beechcraft Bonanza. We lived in Oaxaca, finally settled in a village on the coast of Mexico. We were happy, all of us, for a long time and then it became hard and lonely because he loved heroin much more.

Not detox … Max says on the phone … Retox, that’s what everybody needs. And Just say no? You should say No, thank you. He is joking, he hasn’t been on drugs for many years now.

For months Sally and I worked hard trying to analyze our lives, our marriages, our children. She never even drank or smoked like I did.

Her ex-husband is a politician. He stops by almost every day, in a car with two bodyguards, and two escort cars with men in them. Sally is as close to him as I am with Max. So what is marriage anyway? I never figured it out. And now it is death I don’t understand.

Not just Sally’s death. My country, after Rodney King and the riots. All over the world, the rage and despair.

Sally and I write rebuses to each other so she doesn’t hurt her lung talking. Rebus is where you draw pictures instead of words or letters. Violence, for example, is a viola and some ants. Sucks is somebody drinking through a straw. We laugh, quietly, in her room, drawing. Actually, love is not a mystery for me anymore. Max calls and says hello. I tell him that my sister will be dead soon. How are you? he asks.