A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

A Love Affair

It was hard to tend to the front and back offices alone. I had to change dressings, take temperatures and blood pressures, and still try to greet new patients and answer the phones. A big nuisance because to do an EKG or assist in a wound stitching or a Pap smear I’d have to tell the answering service to take calls. The waiting room would be full, with people feeling neglected, and I’d hear the phones ringing ringing.

Most of Dr. B.’s patients were very old. Often the women who got Pap smears were obese, with difficult access, so it took even longer.

I think there was a law that said I had to be present when he was with a female patient. I used to think this was an outdated precaution. Not at all. Amazing how many of those old ladies were in love with him.

I would hand him the speculum and, later, the long stick. After he had the scrapings from the cervix he would smear them on the glass slide I held, which I would then spray with a protective film. I would cover the slide with another one, put it in a box and label it for the lab.

My main job was to get the women’s legs high up into the stirrups and their buttocks moved down to the end of the table where they would be even with his eyes. Then I draped a sheet over their knees and was supposed to help the women relax. Chat and make jokes until he came in. That was easy, the chatting part. I knew the patients and they were all pretty nice.

The hard part was when he came in. He was a painfully shy man, with a serious tremor of his hands that occasionally manifested itself. Always when he signed checks or did Pap smears.

He squatted on a stool, eyes level with their vagina, with a light on his forehead. I handed him the (warmed) speculum and, after a few minutes, with the patient gasping and sweating, the long cotton-tipped stick. He held it, waving it like a baton, as he disappeared beneath the sheet, toward the woman. At last his hand emerged with the stick, now a dizzy metronome aimed at my waiting slide. I still drank in those days, so my hand, holding the slide, shook visibly as it tried to meet his. But in a nervous up-and-down tremble. His was back and forth. Slap, at last. This procedure took so long that he often missed important phone calls, and of course the people in the waiting room got very impatient. Once Mr. Larraby even knocked on the door and Dr. B. was so startled he dropped the stick. We had to start all over. He agreed then to hire a part-time receptionist.

If I ever look for another job, I’ll ask for an enormous salary. If anyone works for as little as Ruth and I did, something is very suspicious.

Ruth had never had a job and she didn’t need a job, which was suspicious enough. She was doing this for fun.

This was so fascinating to me that I asked her to lunch after the interview. Tuna melts at the Pill Hill Café. I liked her right off the bat. She was unlike anybody I had ever met.

Ruth was fifty, married for thirty years to her childhood sweetheart, an accountant. They had two children and three cats. Her hobbies, on the job application, were “cats.” So Dr. B. always asked her how her cats were. My hobbies were “reading,” so he’d say to me, “On the shores of Itchee Gumee” or “Nevermore, quoth the raven.”

Every time there was a new patient he would write a few sentences on the back of the chart. Something he could use for conversation when he entered the exam room. “Thinks Texas is God’s country.” “Has two toy poodles.” “Has five-hundred-dollar-a-day heroin habit.” So when he went in to see them he’d say things like “Good morning! Been up to God’s country lately?” or “You’re out of luck if you think you can get drugs from me.”

Over lunch Ruth told me that she had started to feel old and in a rut so she had joined a support group. The Merry Pranksters, or M.P., which really stood for Meno Pause. Ruth always said this like it was two words. The group was dedicated to putting more zip into women’s lives. They focused on the members themselves. The last one had been Hannah. The group convinced her to go to Weight Watchers, to Rancho del Sol spa, take bossa nova lessons and then to get liposuction and a face-lift. She looked wonderful but was in two new groups now. One for women who had face-lifts but were still depressed and another for “Women Who Love Too Much.” Ruth sighed, “Hannah’s always been the kind of woman who has affairs with stevedores.”

Stevedores! Ruth used some surprising words, like heretofore and hullabaloo. Said things like she missed having “That Time of the Month.” It always was such a warm and cozy time.

The M.P. group had Ruth take flower arranging, join a theater group, a Trivial Pursuit club, and get a job. She was supposed to have a love affair but she hadn’t thought about that yet. She already had zip in her life. She loved flower arranging, and now they were working on making bouquets with weeds and grasses. She had a bit part, nonsinging, in Oklahoma!.

I liked having Ruth in the office. We joked a lot with the patients and talked about them as if they were our relatives. She even thought filing was fun, singing, “Abcdefg hi jk lmnop lmnopqrst uvwxyZ!” until I’d say, “Stop, let me file.”

It was easier now when I was with patients. But, in fact, she did very little work. She studied her Pursuit cards and called her friends a lot, especially Hannah, who was having an affair with the dance instructor.

On lunch hour I’d go with Ruth to collect weed bouquets, scrambling hot and sweaty up the freeway embankment for Queen Anne’s lace and tobacco weed. Rocks in our shoes. She seemed like an ordinary pretty middle-aged Jewish lady but there was a wildness and freedom about her. Her shout when she spied a pink rocket flower in the alley behind the hospital.

She and her husband had grown up together. Their families were very close, some of the few Jews in a small Iowa town. She couldn’t remember when everybody didn’t expect her and Ephraim to marry. They fell in love for real in high school. She studied home economics in college and waited for him to graduate in business and accounting. Of course they had saved themselves for marriage. They moved into his family home and cared for his invalid mother. She had come with them to Oakland, was still living with them, eighty-six years old now.

I never heard Ruth complain, not about the sick old lady or her children or Ephraim. I was always complaining about my kids or my ex-husband or a daughter-in-law and especially about Dr. B. He had me open all his packages in case there were bombs in them. If a bee or a wasp came in, he went outside until I killed it. These are just the silly things. He was mean. Especially mean to Ruth, saying things like “This is what I get for hiring the handicapped?” He called her “Dyslexia,” because she transposed phone numbers. She did that a lot. About every other day he told me to fire her. I’d tell him we couldn’t. There was no cause. She really helped me and the patients liked her. She cheered the place up.

“I can’t stand cheeriness,” he said. “Makes me want to slap the grin off her face.”

She continued to be nice to him. She thought he was like Heathcliff, or Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, only little. “Yeah, real little,” I said. But Ruth never heard negative remarks. She believed that someone, at some time, must have broken Dr. B.’s heart. She brought him kugel and rugelach and hamantaschen, was always thinking of excuses to go into his office. I hadn’t figured out that she had chosen him to be the love affair until he came into my office and closed the door.

“You have to fire her! She is actually flirting with me! It is unseemly.”

“Well, strange as it may seem, she finds you wildly attractive. I still need her. It’s hard to find someone easy to work with. Be patient. Please, sir.” The “sir” did it, as usual.

“All right,” he sighed.

She was good for me, put zip in my life. Instead of spending my lunch hour brooding and smoking in the alley I’d get dirty and have fun picking bouquets with her. I even started cooking, using some of the hundreds of recipes she xeroxed all day. Baked pearl onions with a dash of brown sugar. She brought in clothes from Schmatta used clothing store and I bought them. A few times when Ephraim was too tired I went with her to the opera.

She was wonderful to go to the opera with, because at intermission she didn’t just stand around looking bored like everybody does. She’d lead me around the main foyer so we could admire the clothes and jewels. I wept with her at La Traviata. Our favorite scene was the old woman’s aria in The Queen of Spades.

One day Ruth asked Dr. B. to go to the opera with her. “No! What an inappropriate request!” he said.

“That asshole,” I said when he went out the door. All she said was that doctors were just too busy to have love affairs so she guessed it would have to be Julius.

Julius was a retired dentist who had been in the cast of Oklahoma!. He was a widower and he was fat. She said fat was good, fat was warm and comfortable.

I asked her if it was because Ephraim was not so interested in sex anymore. “Au contraire!” she said. “It’s the first thing he thinks of every morning and the last at night. And if he’s home in the day he chases me around then too. Really…”

I saw Julius at Ephraim’s mother’s funeral at the Chapel of the Valley. The old woman had died quietly in her sleep.

Ruth and her family were on the steps of the funeral home. Two lovely children, handsome, gracious, comforting their parents, Ruth and Ephraim. Ephraim was darkly handsome. Lean, brooding, soulful. Now he looked like Heathcliff. His sad and dreamy eyes smiled into mine. “Thank you for your kindness to my wife.”

“There he is!” Ruth whispered, pointing at red-faced Julius. Gold chains, a too-tight single-breasted blue suit. He must have been chewing Clorets gum, his teeth were green.

“You’re crazy!” I whispered back to her.

Ruth had picked the Chapel of the Valley because the undertakers were our favorites. Dr. B.’s patients died often so almost every day some mortician came to get him to sign the death certificate. In black ink, the law required, but Dr. B. persisted in signing them with a blue pen, so the morticians had to drink coffee and hang around until he came back and signed them in black.

I waited in the rear of the chapel, wondering where to sit. Many Hadassah women had come; it was crowded. One of the chapel’s morticians appeared next to me. “How lovely you look in gray, Lily,” he said. The other one, with a boutonniere, came up the aisle and said in a low mournful voice, “How good of you to come, dear. Do let me find you a nice seat.” I followed the two men down the aisle, feeling rather smug, like being known in a restaurant.

It was a beautiful service. The rabbi read the part in the Bible about the good wife being more precious than rubies. Nobody would have thought that about the old woman, I don’t think. But I believed the eulogy was about Ruth and so did Ephraim and Julius, the way they were both gazing at her.

On Monday I tried to reason with her. “You are a woman who has everything. Health, looks, humor. A house in the hills. A cleaning woman. A garbage compactor. Wonderful children. And Ephraim! He is handsome, brilliant, rich. He obviously adores you!”

I told her the group was steering her in the wrong direction. She shouldn’t do anything to upset Ephraim. Thank her lucky stars. The M.P. were just jealous. They probably had alcoholic husbands, football-watching husbands, impotent or unfaithful ones. Their children carried beepers, were pierced, bulimic, drugged, tattooed.

“I think you’re embarrassed to be so happy, are going to do this so you can share with the M.P.s. I understand. When I was eleven an aunt gave me a diary. All I wrote in it was: ‘Went to school, Did homework.’ So I started to do bad things in order to have something to write in it.”

“It’s not going to be a serious affair,” she said. “It’s just to pep things up.”

“How about me having an affair with Ephraim? That would pep me up. You’d be jealous and fall madly in love with him again.”

She smiled. An innocent smile, like a child’s.

“Ephraim would never do that. He loves me.”

I thought she had dropped the affair idea until one Friday she brought in a newspaper.

“I’m going out with Julius tonight. But I’m telling Ephraim that I’m going out with you. Have you seen any of these movies, to tell me about them?”

I told her all about Ran, especially when the woman pulls out the dagger, and when the fool weeps. The blue banners in the trees, the red banners in the trees, the white banners in the trees. I was really getting into it, but she said, “Stop!” and asked where we would go after the movie. I took us, them, to Café Roma in Berkeley.

She and Julius went out every Friday. Their romance was good for me. Usually I got home from work, read novels and drank 100-proof vodka until I fell asleep, day in day out. During the Love Affair I began to actually go to string quartets, movies, to hear Ishiguro or Leslie Scalapino while Ruth and Julius went to the Hungry Tiger and the Rusty Scupper.

They went out for almost two months before they did You Know What. This event was going to occur in Big Sur, on a three-day trip. What to tell Ephraim?

“Oh, that’s easy,” I said. “You and I will go to a Zen retreat. No phones! Nothing to tell because we’re just going to be silent and meditate. We’ll sit in the hot springs under the stars. In the lotus position on cliffs overlooking the ocean. Endless waves. Endless.”

It was annoying not to be able to go out freely those days, to screen my phone calls. But it worked. Ephraim took the children out to dinner, fed the cats, watered the plants, and missed her. Very very much.

On the Monday after the trip there were three big bouquets of roses in the office. One card said, “To my cherished wife with love.” Another was from “Your secret admirer,” and one card said, “She Walks in Beauty.” Ruth confessed that she had sent that last one to herself. She adored roses. She had hinted to both men that she loved roses, but never dreamed they’d actually send any.

“Get rid of the funeral arrangements right now,” Dr. B. said, on his way to the hospital. Earlier he had asked me again to fire her and again I had refused. Why did he dislike her so?

“I told you. She’s too cheerful.”

“I usually feel the same way about cheerful people. But hers is genuine.”

“Christ. That’s really depressing.”

“Please, give her a chance. Anyway, I have a feeling she’s going to be miserable soon.”

“I hope so.”

Ephraim stopped by to take Ruth to coffee. She had done nothing all morning, had been on the phone to Hannah. I could tell the main reason he had come was to see how she liked the roses. He was very upset about the other ones. She told him one was from a patient called Anna Fedaz, but then just giggled about the secret admirer. Poor guy. I watched jealousy hit him smack in the face, in the heart. Left hook to the gut.

He asked me how I had liked the retreat. I hate to lie, really can’t stand lying. Not for moral reasons. It’s so hard, figuring it out. Remembering what you have said.

“Well, it was a lovely place. Ruth is very serene and seemed to adapt perfectly to the atmosphere there. I find it hard to meditate. I just worry, or go back over every mistake I ever made in my whole life. But it was, er, centering. Serene. You and Ruth run along now. Have a nice lunch!”

Later I got the scoop. Big Sur had been the adventure of Ruth’s life. She knew she wouldn’t be able to tell the M.P.s about doing You Know What. Oral S. for the first time! Well, yes, she had done Oral S. to Ephraim, but never had it done to her. And M-A-R … “I know it has a J in it somewhere.”

“Marijuana?”

“Hush! Well, mostly it made me cough and get nervous. Yes, that was very nice, Oral S. But the way he kept asking, ‘Are you ready?’ made me imagine we were going somewhere and ruined the mood.”

They were going to Mendocino in two weeks. The story was that she and I were going to a writers’ workshop and book fair in Petaluma. Robert Haas was to be the writer-in-residence.

One night in the middle of the week, she called and asked if she could come over. Like a fool I expected her, didn’t understand that it was a cover, that she had gone to meet Julius. So when Ephraim phoned I could honestly sound cross because she still hadn’t arrived, was even crosser the next time. “I’ll have her call you the minute she gets here.” After a while he called again, this time furious because she was home now and said I had not given her the message.

The next day I told her I wouldn’t do this for her anymore. She said that was fine, that they were starting play practice on Monday.

“You and I are in a flower-arranging class on Fridays, at Laney. That’s it.”

“Well, that’s the last one. You’ve been so lucky he hasn’t asked any specifics.”

“Of course he wouldn’t. He trusts me. But my conscience is clear now. Julius and I don’t do You Know What anymore.”

“Then what do you do? Why go to all this secrecy and trouble to not do You Know What anymore?”

“We found out that neither one of us is a swinger type. I like You Know What with Ephraim much more, and Julius isn’t that interested. I like the sneaking around part. He likes buying me presents and cooking for me. My favorite thing is to knock on a motel door in Richmond or somewhere and then he opens the door and I rush in. My heart beating away.”

“So what do you do then?”

“We play Trivial Pursuit, watch videos. Sometimes we sing. Duets, like ‘Bali Hai’ or ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.’ We go for midnight walks in the rain!”

“Walk in the rain on your own time!” Dr. B. shouted. We hadn’t noticed him come in.

He was serious. He stood there while she packed up all her Bon Appétit magazines and Trivial Pursuit cards and her knitting. He told me to write her a check for two weeks’ pay, plus what we owed her.

After Dr. B. left she called Julius, told him to meet her at Denny’s right away.

“My career is ruined!” she sobbed.

She hugged me good-bye and left. I moved out to her desk, where I could see the waiting room.

Ephraim came in the door. He walked slowly toward me and shook my hand. “Lily,” he said, in his deep enveloping voice. He told me that Ruth was supposed to have met him at the Pill Hill Café for lunch, but she never showed up. I told him that Dr. B. had fired her, for no reason. She probably had completely forgotten lunch, had gone home. Or shopping, maybe.

Ephraim continued to stand there.

“She can find much better jobs. I’m the office manager, and of course I’ll give her a good recommendation. I’ll really miss her.”

He stood there, looking at me.

“And she will miss you.” He leaned in the little window above my desk.

“This is for the best, my dear. I want you to know that I understand. Believe me, I feel for you.”

“What?”

“There are many things I don’t share with her as you do. Literature, Buddhism, the opera. Ruth is a very easy woman to love.”

“What are you saying?”

He held my hand then, looked deep into my eyes as his soft brown ones filled with tears.

“I miss my wife. Please, Lily. Let her go.”

Tears began to slide down my cheeks. I felt really sad. Our hands were a warm wet little pile on the ledge.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Ruth loves only you, Ephraim.”