Free A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin Page A

come in costume. I lingered to watch the witches, the hundreds of devils who trembled their morning prayers. The bell had rung when I got to the door of the ninth grade. “Sacred Heart of Mary, pray for us,” they said. I stood at the door while Sister Lourdes took the roll. They rose as I entered the room, “Good morning.” Their chairs scraped as they sat down.
    The room became still. “El Tim!” someone whispered.
    He stood in the door, silhouetted like Sister Lourdes from the skylight in the hall. He was dressed in black, his shirt open to the waist, his pants low and tight on lean hips. A gold crucifix glittered from a heavy chain. He was half-smiling, looking down at Sister Lourdes, his eyelashes creating jagged shadows down his gaunt cheeks. His black hair was long and straight. He smoothed it back with long slender fingers, quick, like a bird.
    I watched the awe of the class. I looked at the young girls, the pretty young girls who whispered in the restroom not of dates or love but of marriage and abortion. They were tensed, watching him, flushed and alive.
    Sister Lourdes stepped into the room. “Sit here, Tim.” She motioned to a seat in front of my desk. He moved across the room, his broad back stooped, neck forward, tssch-tssch, tssch-tssch, the pachuco beat. “Dig the crazy nun!” he grinned, looking at me. The class laughed. “Silence!” Sister Lourdes said. She stood beside him. “This is Mrs. Lawrence. Here is your Spanish book.” He seemed not to hear her. Her beads rattled nervously.
    “Button your shirt,” she said. “Button your shirt!”
    He moved his hands to his chest, began with one to move the button in the light, with the other to inspect the buttonhole. The nun shoved his hands away, fumbled with his shirt until it was buttoned.
    “Don’t know how I ever got along without you, Sister,” he drawled. She left the room.
    It was Tuesday, dictation. “Take out a paper and pencil.” The class complied automatically. “You too, Tim.”
    “Paper,” he commanded quietly. Sheets of paper fought for his desk.
    “ Llegó el hijo, ” I dictated. Tim stood up and started toward the back of the room. “Pencil’s broken,” he said. His voice was deep and hoarse, like the hoarseness people have when they are about to cry. He sharpened his pencil slowly, turning the sharpener so that it sounded like brushes on a drum.
    “ No tenían fé. ” Tim stopped to put his hand on a girl’s hair.
    “Sit down,” I said.
    “Cool it,” he muttered. The class laughed.
    He handed in a blank paper, the name “EL TIM” across the top.
    *   *   *
    From that day everything revolved around El Tim. He caught up quickly with the rest of the class. His test papers and his written exercises were always excellent. But the students responded only to his sullen insolence in class, to his silent, unpunishable denial. Reading aloud, conjugating on the board, discussions, all of the things that had been almost fun were now almost impossible. The boys were flippant, ashamed to get things right; the girls embarrassed, awkward in front of him.
    I began to give mostly written work, private work that I could check from desk to desk. I assigned many compositions and essays, even though this was not supposed to be done in ninth-grade Spanish. It was the only thing Tim liked to do, that he worked on intently, erasing and recopying, thumbing the pages of a Spanish dictionary on his desk. His compositions were imaginative, perfect in grammar, always of impersonal things … a street, a tree. I wrote comments and praise on them. Sometimes I read his papers to the class, hoping that they would be impressed, encouraged by his work. Too late I realized that it only confused them for him to be praised, that he triumphed anyway with a sneer … “ Pues, la tengo…” I’ve got her pegged.
    Emiterio Perez repeated everything that Tim said. Emiterio was retarded, being kept in the ninth grade until he was old enough