Lucia Berlin was a cleaning woman, a switchboard operator, a physician’s assistant and a nurse. She was an alcoholic with three failed marriages, too. But the onetime University of Colorado associate professor was also a powerful writer whose 76 short stories draw on her own life, her personal relationships, her failures and her addictions. More than half of those stories are included in “A Manual for Cleaning Women.”
The writing is troubling, but it is also human and empowering.
Take the title story “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” the tale of a jaundiced domestic who observes more about her employers than they might think. “Women’s voices always rise two octaves when they talk to cleaning women or cats,” she observes.
Her advice: “Never work for friends. Sooner or later they resent you because you know so much about them.” Open the Comet tab to three holes instead of six. Put back the furniture wrong so they’ll know you’ve moved it. And “Never make friends with cats. … The ladies will get jealous.”
Cleaning women get their revenge. They steal, Berlin wrote, but not jewelry or coins left out in ashtrays. They take sleeping pills or nail polish, toilet paper or a bottle of Spice Island sesame seeds.
“Cleaning women know everything,” the domestic says. After reading the story, you may be a little more circumspect around whomever cleans your house.
Berlin, who died in 2004, drew on her employment as a domestic for “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” but it is her life, not her jobs, that formed the basis for most of the short stories. Her father worked in the mining industry in the U.S. and Chile. She grew up in privilege, but a back brace made her life difficult. She was married to musicians, succumbed to and eventually beat her addiction to alcohol, and cared for a sister who died of cancer. All that figures into her writing.
Berlin’s relationship with her sister inspired the most poignant short stories. In “Grief,” two women at a resort spy on two sisters and try to figure out their lives. The busybodies know the mother has died and decide that Sally, the younger sister, who cries incessantly, cared for the mother for years, while Dolores, the older one ignored the mother and now is overwhelmed with guilt. But the truth is the mother turned against Sally 20 years earlier for marrying a Mexican. Sally is crying because she is dying of cancer, and her husband has left her for a younger woman.
Berlin carried on the sisters’ story, clearly based on her own life, in subsequent short stories, as the elder, an alcoholic, moves to Mexico to care for the younger. Their lives become more complicated and more challenging, but their devotion to each other never wavers.
Only one story is set in Boulder, where Berlin taught from 1994 to 2000: “This is the first place I ever lived that didn’t have a liquor store on every corner. … Whenever I looked in the rearview mirror I’d go, ‘Oh no,’ but it was just the ski racks everyone has on their cars. Have never actually seen a police car in pursuit. … This must be the healthiest town on the country. … No one smokes or eats red meat or glazed donuts.” Nonetheless, Berlin’s character is a drunk who gets into trouble with a cop.
Berlin’s writing is a look into a world we may not want to see, a world filled with alcohol and drugs, with desertion and abortions and meanness. But in Berlin’s stories, humanity shines through. If the characters are flawed, they are rarely broken.
There may be despair, but there is always hope.
