Music for Chameleons (20 page)

Mary Sanchez is a professional cleaning woman who works by the hour, at five dollars an hour, six days a week. She works approximately nine hours a day, and visits on the average twenty-four different domiciles between Monday and Saturday: generally her customers require her services just once a week.

Mary is fifty-seven years old, a native of a small South Carolina town who has “lived North” the past forty years. Her husband, a Puerto Rican, died last summer. She has a married daughter who lives in San Diego, and three sons, one of whom is a dentist, one who is serving a ten-year sentence for armed robbery, a third who is “just gone, God knows where. He called me last Christmas, he sounded far away. I asked where are you, Pete, but he wouldn’t say, so I told him his daddy was dead, and he
said good, said that was the best Christmas present I could’ve given him, so I hung up the phone, slam, and I hope he never calls again. Spitting on Dad’s grave that way. Well, sure, Pedro was never good to the kids. Or me. Just boozed and rolled dice. Ran around with bad women. They found him dead on a bench in Central Park. Had a mostly empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s in a paper sack propped between his legs; never drank nothing but the best, that man. Still, Pete was way out of line, saying he was
glad
his father was dead. He owed him the gift of life, didn’t he? And I owed Pedro something too. If it wasn’t for him, I’d still be an ignorant Baptist, lost to the Lord. But when I got married, I married in the Catholic church, and the Catholic church brought a
shine
to my life that has never gone out, and never will, not even when I die. I raised my children in the Faith; two of them turned out fine, and I give the church credit for that more than me.”

Mary Sanchez is muscular, but she has a pale round smooth pleasant face with a tiny upturned nose and a beauty mole high on her left cheek. She dislikes the term “black,” racially applied. “I’m not black. I’m brown. A light-brown colored woman. And I’ll tell you something else. I don’t know many other colored people that like being called blacks. Maybe some of the young people. And those radicals. But not folks my age, or even half as old. Even people who really are black, they don’t like it. What’s wrong with Negroes? I’m a Negro, and a Catholic, and proud to say it.”

I’ve known Mary Sanchez since 1968, and she has worked for me, periodically, all these years. She is conscientious, and takes far more than a casual interest in her clients, many of whom she has scarcely met, or not met at all, for many of them are unmarried working men and women who are not at home when she arrives to clean their apartments; she communicates with them,
and they with her, via notes: “Mary, please water the geraniums and feed the cat. Hope this finds you well. Gloria Scotto.”

Once I suggested to her that I would like to follow her around during the course of a day’s work, and she said well, she didn’t see anything wrong with that, and in fact, would enjoy the company: “This can be kind of lonely work sometimes.”

Which is how we happen to be walking along together on this showery April morning. We’re off to her first job: a Mr. Andrew Trask, who lives on East Seventy-third Street.

TC:
What the hell have you got in this sack?

MARY:
Here, give it to me. I can’t have you cursing.

TC:
No. Sorry. But it’s heavy.

MARY:
Maybe it’s the iron.

TC:
You iron their clothes? You never iron any of mine.

MARY:
Some of these people just have no equipment. That’s why I have to carry so much. I leave notes: get this, get that. But they forget. Seems like all my people are bound up in their troubles. Like this Mr. Trask, where we’re going. I’ve had him seven, eight months, and I’ve never seen him yet. But he drinks too much, and his wife left him on account of it, and he owes bills everywhere, and if ever I answered his phone, it’s somebody trying to collect. Only now they’ve turned off his phone.

(We arrive at the address, and she produces from a shoulder-satchel a massive metal ring jangling with dozens of keys. The building is a four-story brownstone with a midget elevator.)

TC
(after entering and glancing around the Trask establishment—one fair-sized room with greenish arsenic-colored walls, a kitchenette, and a bathroom with a broken, constantly flowing toilet): Hmm. I see what you mean. This guy has problems.

MARY
(opening a closet crammed and clammy with sweat-sour
laundry): Not a clean sheet in the house! And look at that bed! Mayonnaise! Chocolate! Crumbs, crumbs, chewing gum, cigarette butts. Lipstick! What kind of woman would subject herself to a bed like that? I haven’t been able to change the sheets for weeks. Months.

(She turns on several lamps with awry shades; and while she labors to organize the surrounding disorder, I take more careful note of the premises. Really, it looks as though a burglar had been plundering there, one who had left some drawers of a bureau open, others closed. There’s a leather-framed photograph on the bureau of a stocky swarthy macho man and a blond hoity-toity Junior League woman and three tow-headed grinning snaggle-toothed suntanned boys, the eldest about fourteen. There is another unframed picture stuck in a blurry mirror: another blonde, but definitely not Junior League—perhaps a pickup from Maxwell’s Plum; I imagine it is her lipstick on the bed sheets. A copy of the December issue of
True Detective
magazine is lying on the floor, and in the bathroom, stacked by the ceaselessly churning toilet, stands a pile of girlie literature—
Penthouse, Hustler, Oui;
otherwise, there seems to be a total absence of cultural possessions. But there are hundreds of empty vodka bottles everywhere—the miniature kind served by airlines.)

TC:
Why do you suppose he drinks only these miniatures?

MARY:
Maybe he can’t afford nothing bigger. Just buys what he can. He has a good job, if he can hold on to it, but I guess his family keeps him broke.

TC:
What does he do?

MARY:
Airplanes.

TC:
That explains it. He gets these little bottles free.

MARY:
Yeah? How come? He’s not a steward. He’s a pilot.

TC:
Oh, my God.

(A telephone rings, a subdued noise, for the instrument is submerged under a rumpled blanket. Scowling, her hands soapy with dishwater, Mary unearths it with the finesse of an archeologist.)

MARY:
He must have got connected again. Hello? (Silence) Hello?

A WOMAN’S VOICE:
Who
is
this?

MARY:
This is Mr. Trask’s residence.

WOMAN’S VOICE:
Mr. Trask’s
residence
? (Laughter; then, hoity-toity) To whom am I speaking?

MARY:
This is Mr. Trask’s maid.

WOMAN’S VOICE:
So Mr. Trask has a maid, has he? Well, that’s more than
Mrs
. Trask has. Will Mr. Trask’s maid please tell Mr. Trask that Mrs. Trask would like to speak to him?

MARY:
He’s not home.

MRS. TRASK:
Don’t give me that. Put him on.

MARY:
I’m sorry, Mrs. Trask. I guess he’s out flying.

MRS. TRASK
(bitter mirth): Out flying? He’s always flying, dear. Always.

MARY:
What I mean is, he’s at work.

MRS. TRASK:
Tell him to call me at my sister’s in New Jersey. Call the instant he comes in, if he knows what’s good for him.

MARY:
Yes, ma’am. I’ll leave that message. (She hangs up) Mean woman. No wonder he’s in the condition he’s in. And now he’s out of a job. I wonder if he left me my money. Uh-huh. That’s it. On top of the fridge.

(Amazingly, an hour or so afterward she has managed to somewhat camouflage the chaos and has the room looking not altogether shipshape but reasonably respectable. With a pencil, she scribbles a note and
props it against the bureau mirror: “Dear Mr. Trask yr. wive want you fone her at her sistar place sinsirly Mary Sanchez.” Then she sighs and perches on the edge of the bed and from her satchel takes out a small tin box containing an assortment of roaches; selecting one, she fits it into a roach-holder and lights up, dragging deeply, holding the smoke down in her lungs and closing her eyes. She offers me a toke.)

TC:
Thanks. It’s too early.

MARY:
It’s never too early. Anyway, you ought to try this stuff.
Mucho cojones
. I get it from a customer, a real fine Catholic lady; she’s married to a fellow from Peru. His family sends it to them. Sends it right through the mail. I never use it so’s to get high. Just enough to lift the uglies a little. That heaviness. (She sucks on the roach until it all but burns her lips) Andrew Trask. Poor scared devil. He could end up like Pedro. Dead on a park bench, nobody caring. Not that I didn’t care none for that man. Lately, I find myself remembering the good times with Pedro, and I guess that’s what happens to most people if ever they’ve once loved somebody and lose them; the bad slips away, and you linger on the nice things about them, what made you like them in the first place. Pedro, the young man I fell in love with, he was a beautiful dancer, oh he could tango, oh he could rumba, he taught me to dance and danced me off my feet. We were regulars at the old Savoy Ballroom. He was clean, neat—even when the drink got to him his fingernails were always trimmed and polished. And he could cook up a storm. That’s how he made a living, as a short-order cook. I said he never did anything good for the children; well, he fixed their lunch-boxes to take to school. All kinds of sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Ham, peanut butter and jelly, egg salad, tuna fish, and fruit, apples, bananas, pears, and a thermos filled with warm milk mixed with honey. It hurts now to think of him there in the park, and
how I didn’t cry when the police came to tell me about it; how I never did cry. I ought to have. I owed him that. I owed him a sock in the jaw, too.

I’m going to leave the lights on for Mr. Trask. No sense letting him come home to a dark room.

(When we emerged from the brownstone the rain had stopped, but the sky was sloppy and a wind had risen that whipped trash along the gutters and caused passers-by to clutch their hats. Our destination was four blocks away, a modest but modern apartment house with a uniformed doorman, the address of Miss Edith Shaw, a young woman in her mid-twenties who was on the editorial staff of a magazine. “Some kind of news magazine. She must have a thousand books. But she doesn’t look like no bookworm. She’s a very healthy kind of girl, and she has lots of boyfriends. Too many—just can’t seem to stay very long with one fellow. We got to be close because … Well, one time I came to her place and she was sick as a cat. She’d come from having a baby murdered. Normally I don’t hold with that; it’s against my beliefs. And I said why didn’t you marry this man? The truth was, she didn’t know who to marry; she didn’t know who the dad was. And anyway, the last thing she wanted was a husband or a baby.”)

MARY
(surveying the scene from the opened front door of Miss Shaw’s two-room apartment): Nothing much to do here. A little dusting. She takes good care of it herself. Look at all those books. Ceiling to floor, nothing but library.

(Except for the burdened bookshelves, the apartment was attractively spare, Scandinavianly white and gleaming. There was one antique: an old roll-top desk with a typewriter on it; a sheet of paper was rolled into the machine; and I glanced at what was written on it:

“Zsa Zsa Gabor is

305 years old

I know

Because I counted

Her Rings”

And triple-spaced below that, was typed:

“Sylvia Plath, I hate you

And your damn daddy.

I’m glad, do you hear,

Glad
you stuck your head

In a gas-hot oven!”

TC:
Is Miss Shaw a poet?

MARY:
She’s always writing something. I don’t know what it is. Stuff I see, sounds like she’s on dope to me. Come here, I want to show you something.

(She leads me into the bathroom, a surprisingly large and sparkling chamber. She opens a cabinet door and points at an object on a shelf: a pink plastic vibrator molded in the shape of an average-sized penis.)

Know what that is?

TC:
Don’t you?

MARY:
I’m the one asking.

TC:
It’s a dildo vibrator.

MARY:
I know what a vibrator is. But I never saw one like that. It says “Made in Japan.”

TC:
Ah, Well. The Oriental mind.

MARY:
Heathens. She’s sure got some lovely perfumes. If you like perfume. Me, I only put a little vanilla behind my ears.

(Now Mary began to work, mopping the waxed carpetless floors, flicking the bookshelves with a feather duster; and while she worked she kept her roach-box
open and her roach-holder filled. I don’t know how much “heaviness” she had to lift, but the aroma alone was lofting me.)

MARY:
You sure you don’t want to try a couple of tokes? You’re missing something.

TC:
You twisted my arm.

(Man and boy, I’ve dragged some powerful grass, never enough to have acquired a habit, but enough to judge quality and know the difference between ordinary Mexican weed and luxurious contraband like Thai-sticks and the supreme Maui-Wowee. But after smoking the whole of one of Mary’s roaches, and while halfway through another, I felt as though seized by a delicious demon, embraced by a mad marvelous merriment: the demon tickled my toes, scratched my itchy head, kissed me hotly with his red sugary lips, shoved his fiery tongue down my throat. Everything sparkled; my eyes were like zoom lenses; I could read the titles of books on the highest shelves:
The Neurotic Personality of Our Time by Karen Horney; Eimi by e.e. cummings; Four Quartets; The Collected Poems of Robert Frost
.)