A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

I’m having a hard time writing about Sunday. Getting the long hollow feeling of Sundays. No mail and faraway lawn mowers, the hopelessness.

The only reason I have lived so long is that I let go of my past. Shut the door on grief on regret on remorse. If I let them in, just one self-indulgent crack, whap, the door will fling open gales of pain ripping through my heart blinding my eyes with shame breaking cups and bottles knocking down jars shattering windows stumbling bloody on spilled sugar and broken glass terrified gagging until with a final shudder and sob I shut the heavy door. Pick up the pieces one more time.

I exaggerate a lot and I get fiction and reality mixed up, but I don't actually ever lie.

Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar. You aren't at your desk or on the subway or fixing dinner for the children. You're reading People in a surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. you stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with the lobe on the desk... The bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. all is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid relentlessness of time.

The Campus laundry has a sign, like most laundries do, POSITIVELY NO DYEING. I drove all over town with a green bedspread until I came to Angel’s with his yellow sign, YOU CAN DIE HERE ANYTIME.

The world just goes along. Nothing much matters, you know? I mean really matters. but then sometimes, just for a second, you get this grace, this belief that it does matter, a whole lot.

My legs! Lord Jesus stop the pain in my legs!” “Hush John,” Florida said. “That’s only phantom pain.” “Is it real?” I asked her. She shrugged. “All pain is real.

But what bothers me is that I only accidentally noticed them. What else have I missed? How many times in my life have I been, so to speak, on the back porch, not the front porch? What would have been said to me that I failed to hear? What love might there have been that I didn't feel?

Anybody says he knows just how someone else feels is a fool.

God sends drunks blackouts because if they knew what they had done they would surely die of shame.

I've never understood how so many barely literate people read the Bible so much. It's hard. In the same way it surprises me that uneducated seamstresses all over the world can figure out how to put in sleeves and zippers.

Everything good or bad that has occurred in my life has been predictable and inevitable, especially the choices and actions that have made sure I am now utterly alone.

Death is healing, it tells us to forgive, it reminds us that we don’t want to die alone.

I pity you. All your life you are going to be paralyzed by What Is Done, by what people tell you you should think or do... The best thing that could happen to you would be for you to be uncomfortable once in a while.

I don't think I ever really liked the world until I met him.

One thing I do know about death. The “better” the person, the more loving and happy and caring, the less of a gap that person’s death makes.

As a rule, never work for friends. Sooner or later they resent you because you know so much about them. Or else you’ll no longer like them, because you do.)

The people who were content with each other spoke as little as those who bristled with resentment or boredom; it was the rhythm of their speech that differed, like a lazy tennis ball batted back and forth or the quick swattings of a fly. *

It has been seven years since you died. Of course what I'll say next is that time has flown by. I got old. All of a sudden, de repente. I walk with difficulty. I even drool. I leave the door unlocked in case I die in my sleep, but it's more likely I'll go endlessly on until I get put away someplace. I am already dotty.... It's not so strange that I talk to my cat but I feel silly because he is totally deaf.

When your parents are dead your own death faces you.

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.

El problema es que cuando vuelves a la vida normal, todas las rutinas, las marcas del día a día parecen mentiras sin sentido. Todo es sospechoso, una trampa para adormecernos, para volver a arroparnos en la plácida inexorabilidad del tiempo.

Her smile, though, no, it was her laugh, a dusky, deep cascading laughter that caught the joy, implied and mocked the sorrow in every joy.

Women’s voices always rise two octaves when they talk to cleaning women or cats.

Fear, poverty, alcoholism, loneliness are terminal illnesses. Emergencies, in fact.

I'll bet the Catholic Church lost out on a lot of would-be nuns when they started dressing like ordinary meter maids.

What if our bodies were transparent, like a washing machine window? How wondrous to watch ourselves. Joggers would job even harder, blood pumping away. Lovers would love more. God damn! Look at that old semen go! Diets would improve-- kiwi fruit and strawberries, borscht with sour cream.

I smoked while they compared booty. Things they took … nail polish, perfume, toilet paper. Things they were given … one-earrings, twenty hangers, torn bras. (Advice to cleaning women: Take everything that your lady gives you and say Thank you. You can leave it on the bus, in the crack.)