A Manual for Cleaning Women, by Lucia Berlin

Between Two Worlds (film)

The Help (another film)

Audiobook

Written by Elisa Sola

About A Manual for Cleaning Women

The story is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator, a white and well-educated mother of four children who is profoundly grieving the recent death of her husband, Ter. Because of that, she has to clean houses in the San Francisco Bay Area, around Oakland and Berkeley.The narrative doesn’t follow a traditional linear plot; instead, it is structured around the transit routes of the public buses she takes to travel between the homes of her various wealthy employers.

The characters

The employers for whom she works show a decadent social mosaic:
Mrs Jessel: an incredibly forgetful woman who has a lot of ailments and feels loneliness.
Linda and Bob: friends of the narrator who are very chaotic and messy.
The Blums: a couple of psychiatrists that are incapable of managing their lives and have to take pills (“She has uppers and he has downers”).
Mrs Burke: a meticulously scientist woman who feels guilty about being wealthy and idle.
Mrs Johanssen: an elderly employer who spends her days completing picture puzzles.

The perspective of this cleaning woman, who has access to the private lives of her employers and who is treated like a ghost, gradually paints a picture of a sick American upper-class society. This detachment grants the narrator an intellectual superiority, which shapes the story’s point of view: “Cleaning women know everything”, or “Doing everything wrong only reassures them that you are thorough; it gives them the chance to be assertive and to act as the boss”.
The literary device Berlin uses is to write a manual for other cleaning women to help them learn practical things, such as which households offer the best lunches (“Jewish people and Black people are the only ones who give you lunch”) or how to handle their employers’ pets.
A sense of humour is one of the most characteristic ingredients of the story. For instance, when it mentions the traps employers set to catch cleaning women in the act of stealing, like as leaving loose change in the ashtrays, her advice is: “add a few pennies, even a dime”.
However, her sense of humour takes a bitter turn when she reveals that she steals pills “for a rainy day”. From this point, she unfolds her plan for suicide. Throughout the day, the narrative is spotted with memories of her late husband and the pain they evoke. These thoughts surface intermittently and repeatedly –like a stream of consciousness– and draw the two stories’ central themes: the expression of grief over loss and the awareness of class.
Nevertheless, as a narrative shifts, she experiences a quiet change of heart and decides not to kill herself. The story closes on a cold January day with the narrator watching the buses pass away (the passage of time in life) and finally allowing herself to weep and accept the heavy reality of her grief to carry on with her life.

Other themes of the story:

The invisibility of the working class and its living conditions. Berlin highlights how domestic workers become like ghosts or pieces of furniture to the wealthy. Employers talk around them oblivious to their inner lives, education or thoughts (the same point of view as in the film The Help). Moreover, Berlin expresses how they live: “people in cars never look at people on the street, at all. Poor ones all do... Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency room, jails...”
The routine of precarious living: “Every Wednesday I climb the stairs like Sisyphus into their living room”, a good image of the nature of domestic work!
Humour as a survival mechanism. Despite dealing with heavy themes such as poverty, addiction and intense grief, the tone is never purely tragic. Berlin uses a sharp and detached perspective to keep the story grounded as a shield to maintain her dignity and power. A little piece of humour in the story: “women’s voices always raise two octaves when they talk cleaning women or cats”. About pets: “never make friends with cats... The ladies will get jealous”. About psychiatrists: “never work for psychiatrists, either. You'll go crazy”.
In short, perhaps what I liked most about the story is the perspective: a subversion of reality where power shifts from the wealthy to the poor, accompanied by the intellectual superiority of a lucid observer, like an anthropologist, who watches without being seen. Moreover, her portrayal of the working class is human and avoids clichés: “cleaning women do steal. Not the things the people we work for are so nervous about...”

A good story!

QUESTIONS

-Have you had any experiences hiring a cleaning woman or being a cleaning woman?
-What job would / woulnd't you take in a desperate situation?
-According to your personal point of view, what is the most degrading job? Why do you think so?

VOCABULARY
quarter, phenobarbital, cukcoo, dime, curb, transfer, come, racing forms, coke, filmily, boarded up, arraignment, frosted wig, elevator shoes, crissake, sultry, flurry, swooping, fly swatter, dumb, wallowing, shoot-out, Marina, posts, stove, creamer, waffle iron, hassle, to boot, cockeyed, long hair, flurries, rasty

Buckets of Blood, by Tessa Hadley

 

SUMMARY AND OPINION, by Begoña Devis

Hilary and Sheila are two sisters, both daughters of a vicar's large and poor orthodox family. The memories of their childhood and youth are not exactly happy: endless queues to use the bathroom, scant food, a heater that hardly heats up, fear of his belongings being stolen by his brothers, and, especially, the figure of their mother, overwhelmed, permanently dishevelled, pregnant and with a wild appearance that made people look at her in the street.
For all these reasons, when they both confess to each other that they no longer believe in God, they decide that, in no way, they are going to follow the family model, to have a conventional family, or pregnancies, or children, or anything that remotely reminds them of how their childhood has been. As escaping from this pattern is not so easy, because of their status as women, they decide that Sheila, always more courageous and determined (and probably the older one) will be the one to lead the way by going to the university, so that, later on, Hilary would be also able to move away from the place where they still reside.

When Sheila is already at the University of Bristol, Hilary embarks on a hopeful bus trip to visit her. It is her first time away from home, she is shy and rather unfriendly with people because she doesn't know how to interact with them, and the trip makes her sick, but, despite this, she feels happy. She hopes to meet her sister waiting for her at the station, and then to go together to the Manor Hill residence, where she will be happily ensconced.

But nothing goes as she expected. Instead of her sister, a young man who seems ugly, short and very inattentive, comes to pick her up at the station. She is forced to follow him through innumerable streets, leaving behind the tower of the University, to reach a filthy building, poorly lit, with hardly any water, where her sister and a group of friends live illegally. Sheila is suffering great pains at this time, and everywhere there are small buckets of blood, because she is having a miscarriage. The discovery that her sister has had sexual relations, has become pregnant (by Neil, the ugly boy who has been waiting for her in the

station, and who is not helping at all in that situation) makes Hilary to be in shock, and changes their relationship forever. On the other hand, her classmates seem to her unattractive, and more concerned with drinking in pubs and consuming joints than studying. Hilary has a great disappointment. She can’t understand how people who are on the lucky side of life can behave so rudely and inappropriately, and she can even less understand the attitude of her sister, always willing to please Neil, despite the fact that he did nothing for her during her miscarriage, and that he is always arrogant and pretentious. Hilary can’t recognize in Sheila the girl who had always been her sister.

Finally, after a few days, Sheila accompanies her sister to the station for the trip back home. They have made it very clear that the family will never know anything about what happened, and they won’t ever talk about it again.

On her way home, Hilary thinks that her life will never change as much as her sister’s has, and she feels bewildered. Suddenly, the landscape that she sees from the window seems beautiful to her, and she is saddened by thinking that, when she'll die, she will stop seeing it; then she thinks that she is already dead, and she cannot see it any more, but somehow she is allowed to return to life, and so she decides to enjoy everything while she has the opportunity to do it, down to the smallest detail.

 

PERSONAL OPINION

I think that Hilary and Sheila are very different, even though they are sisters.

The only thing that unites them is the fact of not wanting to form a family that follows the pattern of which they belong, and the need to flee from there.

When Hilary visits Sheila at the University, her hopes are dashed and her wishes changed. That was not the kind of life she expected there, and much less the life she wanted for herself. For this reason, during her trip back home, she suddenly finds herself appreciating the present: she doesn’t like the past, and the future is uncertain, so she decides to appreciate every second and every opportunity that the present offers to her.

QUESTIONS

-“She worried that she smelled of home.” Does every house / home have a different smell? Why does she say “home” and not “house”?

-What do you think of priest getting married and having a family? (Have you seen the film “Keeping the Faith”, “Más que amigos” in Spanish)

-How can you notice that someone has dressed up to be admired?

-Why did both sisters want to get far away from their home and not to become like their mother?

-But Sheila is studying Classics, a bit as her father. What kind of relationship is there between her and her father?

-Has religion or your opinions of the existence of God to be a private question? Why do you think so?

-Do you think there is trust in a family when the children don’t tell one another?

-In your opinion, why is their mother so disarranged?

-Why their mother’s pregnancies were humiliating for both sisters?

-How can you define “provincial”?

-Why does the author describe the hospital as something “sobering and impassive”?

-What do you think of the squatter movement?

-What do you know about Bluebeard story?

-Did you feel a difference between secondary school and university in the students’ attitudes in front of subjects and exams?

-To go to university is being in the “lucky side”?

-What is for you the event that changes a child or a teenager into an adult?

-In the story, Neil seems to be the “alpha male” because of his intellectual power or his coolness? Is this kind of rank going to disappear in the future?

-What do you know about the Oresteia? Do you think it’s a kind of symbol in our story?

-When Hilary goes back home, the weather is cheerful. What is the use of this for the story?

 

VOCABULARY

drawstring, navy school, school mac, Mothballs, Germolene, spots, dribbled out, remonstrated with, fleshpots, flaunt, surreptitious, reading, permed, hand-me-down, wellingtons, paltry, picked, palsy, entrist, beach rounders, twin-tub washing machine, playpen, dun, larked, ropy, maimed, pinstriped suit jacket, blue-rinsed, embossed, Brownie belt, squeak, dogged, daunting, quaint, racked, bundling, toppling, leering, shifty, Hills, Shuggs, kicked out, mould, reel, buckings, the halls, fractious, potties, tummy bug, studded, jug ears, lumpish, duffel coat, perfunctory, estate, fumy, slum, debunking, beeting, harrowed, heaved over, Brummie, small talk, shrank, gawky, lectures, skeins, haze, hummocky