Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

"Cleaning women do steal. Not the things the people we work for are so nervous about. It is the superfluity that finally gets to you. We don’t want the change in the little ashtrays.

Some lady at a bridge party somewhere started the rumor that to test the honesty of a cleaning woman you leave little rosebud ashtrays around with loose change in them, here and there. My solution to this is to always add a few pennies, even a dime.

The minute I get to work I first check out where the watches are, the rings, the gold lamé evening purses. Later when they come running in all puffy and red-faced I just coolly say 'Under your pillow, behind the avocado toilet.' All I really steal is sleeping pills, saving up for a rainy day."--Lucia Berlin, excerpt from "A Manual for Cleaning Women," a story in the collection with the same name.

That's a funny line, but later you learn Berlin's mother committed suicide, and Berlin herself was suicidal, an alcoholic who damaged herself and so many people through that, and you shudder.

I had had this on my list for awhile, but when the NY Times did their poll of 100 best books of the first quarter of the century, I began listening to it, though after three brilliant stories I ordered the book, since I want to underline half of the sentences. Made me laugh aloud many times because it is actually funny, but also just for the insight of it, the honesty about poverty, sex, abuse, alcoholism. 15 hours of listening to her best stories, 43 stories across three collections, and listening to it is wonderful, to have her voice in your head, but fiction this great you don't just listen to it, imho.

Berlin died on her birthday in 2004 when she was 68; I had just met her and miss/mourn her already. She grew up in mining camps in Alaska and the mid-west, she was an abused and lonely child in wartime Texas; she was for a time a rich and privileged young woman in Santiago; a bohemian loft-living hipster in 50s New York; and an ER nurse in 70s inner-city Oakland. She was in fact a cleaning woman, one of her most astonishing stories. By the age of 32 she had been married three times, had four sons and was battling a chronic alcohol addiction.

Since I am daily living a family addiction experience (not my own) every day now, sometimes in very real crisis, of course, it was hard to read "My First Detox" and related stories where she admitted she neglected her kids, left lovers, quit jobs. You think of Raymond Carver and his drunk stories, but these extend into life on the edge, working class job stories. Someone told me these are essentially her autobiography, and seem to be arranged somewhat chronologically, so as we say now, auto-fiction. Some are stylish, style-focused, like the title story, but most are stripped down, she's just talking to you in a bar, or on a porch, a survivor telling you the truth so now you tell yours.

Writing in The New York Times, Ruth Franklin said Berlin’s stories “are the kind a woman in a Tom Waits song might tell a man she’s just met during a long humid night spent drinking in a parking lot.”

And Chekhov. Who loves his flawed people.

Even the cruel, alcoholic mother who appears in several stories is not a demon. “She was witty”, the narrator’s sister says in "Mama." “You have to admit it. Like when she’d give panhandlers a nickel and say, ‘Excuse me, young man, but what are your dreams and aspirations?’ Or when a cab driver was surly she’d say, ‘You seem rather thoughtful and introspective today.'"

“She hated the word love. She said it the way people say the word slut.” Regretting that they didn’t make up before her mother’s suicide, the younger sister says: 'If only I could have been able to speak to her. If I had let her know how much I loved her.' Me, I have no mercy.”

In another story: "I don’t like Diane Arbus. When I was a kid in Texas there were freak shows and even then I hated the way people would point at the freaks and laugh at them. But I was fascinated too. I loved the man with no arms who typed with his toes. But it wasn’t the no arms that I liked. It was that he really wrote, all day. He was seriously writing something, liking what he was writing."

I bought the book and will take my sweet time reading it, story by story. And I warn you, they are not all sweet in content, but they great.

Here's a little gift for ya; Berlin worked in ER for years. Here is her story "My Jockey," a story in one page: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories...

You want to know more about her before you decide to read her? Lydia Davis writes the preface, a fan, and here is a piece Davis wrote for The New Yorker about her:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-...