a manual for cleaning women selected stories

The agonizing moments relived here are often rooted in the physical. The narrator is sometimes a cleaning woman (as in the title story) or an emergency-room nurse, two jobs that require constant contact with the messier aspects of being human: blood, vomit, colostomy bags, hemorrhoids. It’s no accident that one of her alter egos is named Dolores. “All pain is real.”Īll pain is real could be Berlin’s mantra, the motto of this collection. “Is it real?” the narrator asks the nurse, who shrugs. The nurse tells him to hush - it’s only phantom pain. In one story, a man in a nursing home, a double amputee, screams constantly of the pain in his legs. What they all have in common is their rawness, as in knuckles rubbed raw, exposed. Sometimes they share the author’s name, or a variation of it sometimes they have different names or go unnamed. Nearly all the stories are told in the first person when third-person protagonists surface, they tend to be a version of the first-person narrator. The stories in “A Manual for Cleaning Women” are all linked, in that they’re connected by the sensibility of the person who tells them, who has lived them. Many of them might be the same person at different stages in her life. More often than not, they are alcoholics. Their characters are friendless children, pregnant teenagers, unmarried women past middle age in search of connection or just a bottle of vodka. They take place in the ragged borderlands on the outermost fringes of American life: West Texas (“the Holy Land,” one character calls it), inner-city Albuquerque, the slums of Oakland - all dust and buses and late-night laundromats.

But why would you make me do that, darlin’?īerlin’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. You will listen to me if I have to force you, her stories growl.

Lucia Berlin spins you around, knocks you down and grinds your face into the dirt. Some short story writers - Chekhov, Alice Munro, William Trevor - sidle up and tap you gently on the shoulder: Come, they murmur, sit down, listen to what I have to say.

A manual for cleaning women selected stories