I drove all over town with a green bedspread until I came to Angel’s with his yellow sign, YOU CAN DIE HERE ANYTIME. How did you end up in Angel’s Laundromat? I like to see the names appear in the mirror vision of the dryers. Their husbands wear blue overalls with names in script on the pockets. Towels, pink shortie nighties, bikini underpants that say Thursday. Grain stores and motels for lovers and drunks and old women with hennaed hair who do their laundry at Angel’s. Shabby shops and junkyards, second hand stores with army cots, boxes of one-socks, 1940 editions of Good Hygiene. Angel’s Laundromat is in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Are there places that you remember more than others? And working as a cleaning woman, also moving around, in between the places that you clean. You were born in Alaska, and ever since you were a child, you have been moving around a lot. At the same time the cleaning (woman) cleans the housewife’s house (paid) and her own house (unpaid). (And then earn money?) And the cleaning (woman) then loses her job. Theoretically, the housewife who is home already, and has time, could clean the house that she lives in. Is it an unequal pair? It’s like an impossible equation. Now we would like to ask you some questions. We have read some stories in your book ‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’ that was posthumously published in 2015. Our names are Petronella and Tamino, we are two architecture students interested in Care Work. Berlin, a highly influential writer despite having published little in her lifetime, conjures these women from California, Mexico, and beyond.Nice to meet you, Lucia. With the wit of Lorrie Moore and the grit of Raymond Carver, they navigate a world of jockeys, doctors, and switchboard operators. They are hitchhikers, hard workers, bad Christians. The women of Berlin's stories are lost, but they are also strong, clever, and extraordinarily real. With her trademark blend of humor and melancholy, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday-uncovering moments of grace in the cafeterias and Laundromats of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Northern California upper classes, and from the perspective of a cleaning woman alone in a hotel dining room in Mexico City. No mitigating conditions." -Paul Metcalf A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. "Stories from a lost American classic "in the same arena as Alice Munro" (Lydia Davis) "In the field of short fiction, Lucia Berlin is one of America's best kept secrets.
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