Bertha is the woman who
empties my trash can at around 5:15 every weekday afternoon. That’s not all she
is, of course. She may be a poet, a painter, an inventor on the side. She might
have been an office worker like me in her native country, for all I know, not
that there’s any shame in being a member of a cleaning crew. She could well be
a wife and mother, and/or the glue that holds together an extended family that
spans continents. But Bertha and I have a circumscribed context and a limited vocabulary.
Her English is slow and uncertain, but it still trumps my Spanish.
Bertha is tall and sturdy,
with frizzy hair that usually is tied back. Her predecessor was short and
squat, and scared me. I never knew that other woman’s name, but I sensed her
visceral loathing of me. I might have been making it up, because I tend to
project onto cleaning-crew staff the distaste I imagine I would have for the likes of me, were I an immigrant working in a similarly
crappy-paying job. Were I forced daily to empty the trash can of a monolingual dweeb
whose windowsill is lined with an assortment of dust-catching tchotchkes—a
ballplayer bobblehead, a Charlie Brown Pez dispenser, two hockey pucks,
assorted seashells, etc—that bespeak a life of undeserved privilege and suggest
the owner is deeply smitten with his own quirkiness.
But I really do think that
woman hated me. I always imagined her rolling her eyes with disgust, like
Grammy Hall did at Woody Allen’s character in Annie Hall—seeing me not as a dreadlocked Orthodox rabbi, but as some
sort of Brahmin who no doubt stirred his tea with a silver spoon that was stashed in one
of his desk drawers. Her English was the equal of my Spanish. I would say
“Gracias” as she returned my emptied trash can to its place against the wall,
but the word always sounded pandering to me. She’d answer “De nada” in a tone
that suggested she’d think de nada of stuffing my lanky ass into that receptacle and
hurling me into a compactor.
It got to where I
transparently fled the scene whenever I heard her cart working its way up the
hall. Or else, sometimes I’d close my office door, as if to suggest I was busily
teleconferencing in there, or perhaps putting the finishing touches on that
troublesome Anderson Account. I doubt she was fooled. And so my trash would
accumulate for another day. But that was better than getting the stink eye.
Then, one day, this taller,
frizzy-haired woman appeared in the frightening woman’s stead. She wasn’t
exactly whistling while she worked, but neither did I sense any animus. Just
weariness, as if this new person might be on the third job of a 16-hour
workday. She had some grasp of English, and no discernible opinion about my guts. I
felt great relief. This moved me to make an effort to get on her good side, or
at least to cement my standing on her noncommittal side. If I didn’t act fast,
I feared, she soon would take note of the Godzilla and Gamera action figures
waging war atop my bookcase and bitterly conclude, “So, this is how the
juvenile gringo spends his money while I am killing myself to support a family
of 10.”
I made it a point not only to
say hello to her when she reached my door each day, and to thank her once she’d
emptied my trash can, but to reference things like the weather, the weekend, an
upcoming holiday. One afternoon she was wearing her hair down, and I told
her it looked pretty. (It did.) She seemed to accept my sincerity, and smiled.
Then, one day, I introduced
myself. This was when she told me her name was Bertha. I’m terrible at
remembering names, so I repeated it aloud. I pronounced the “h,” but then I doubted
myself. “Wait,” I said. “Bertha or Berta? How do you spell it?” As it happened,
I was asking two different questions. Yes, B-E-R-T-H-A. But the “h” is silent—“the
Spanish way,” she explained.
She said she has a brother
named Eric, except with a “k.” My parents, I noted, had considered that
spelling for me. That afternoon, Bertha and I wished each other a good evening
by name.
I really should’ve taken
advantage of that slight momentum and asked her, in the ensuing days, more about her
family. I could’ve introduced the subject, after all, by pointing to the photos
on my bookshelf of my wife, cat and dog. But somehow I didn’t do that. Some
days Bertha seemed to be in a hurry. Other days I was feeling distracted by
e-mails or other work that I wanted to finish before heading home. Also, I frankly
worried about being a bother. I tried to put myself in her place, and could
imagine her thinking, “Really? Must we make conversation in a language that’s a
struggle for me? I don’t even know you. ‘Hello’
would suffice. And anyway, my family is none of your business.’”
Sure, I was reading a lot
into the situation, but the class/cultural gulf inherent in the cleaner-cleanee
relationship makes me sufficiently uncomfortable that I’ve always filled in my
own blanks with worst-case projections. (Per the stink-eye woman.) The upshot was that even though Bertha and I now
knew each other’s names, I felt that our relationship had reached an impasse.
It wasn’t growing. Our minute or two together each afternoon seemed
increasingly awkward to me, sometimes even painful. I started wondering if Bertha
dreaded my opening my mouth. I sometimes dreaded opening it. Occasionally I hid
in the bathroom, just as I’d done with the scary cleaning lady.
But then, one day a couple of
weeks ago, something utterly unexpected and wonderful happened.
I’d walked down the street to
buy lottery tickets at this weird Filipino-run package-shipping store that also
sells everything from Washington Redskins paraphernalia to old movie posters
and foam “We’re Number One” fingers. I like the guys who work there because
they’re super-patient with senior citizens, always wish me luck after my millionth
consecutive losing week, and bring their little kids to work (who often can be
heard breaking things in the back room). On this particular day I’d exchanged waves
with one of the guys when I walked in. Then he’d resumed entering into his lottery
machine the numbers that the woman in front of me had given him.
Suddenly I realized that the other
lottery hopeful was Bertha. I called her name and waved my own filled-in entry cards
for Powerball and MegaMillions. “My retirement plan,” I explained, wondering if
she’d get the joke. She laughed and said, “Me, too!”
When I saw her back at the
office a few hours later we commiserated, as best we linguistically could,
about our maddening lack of success at Getting Rich Quick despite both of us clearly
playing the best numbers week after week.
On subsequent days, we’ve discussed how
often we buy tickets (weekend drawings
for me, weekends and midweek for her), and our desire for a life-changing score—none of
this penny-ante $100 scratch-off nonsense for us.
That single chance encounter
(no pun intended) has invigorated our micro-relationship. Even if our shared
goal of one day residing on Easy Street isn’t explicitly mentioned every day at
5:15, it’s there in the background—suggesting that she and I aren’t so
different after all, that Lady Luck truly is the great equalizer, and that, if
there really is a silver spoon in my desk drawer, the silver ain’t real.
So, OK, that’s my take. Bertha
may not be blogging about a life lesson we learned at the lottery outlet. What I do know,
though, is that I feel less self-conscious around her now, that I’m no longer
fleeing to the bathroom, and that I’m enthusiastically stockpiling conversational
fodder: Our favorite lottery game. Why the winners always are from, like, Iowa. Annual annuity
or lump payment? What we’ll do with the loot the day our ship—make that luxury liner—finally comes in.
The timing seems right, too,
to tell Bertha about my family and to ask her about hers. I mean, this won’t just
be our retirement nest egg when he hit the big money, right? The day the lottery gods
smile on us, we’ll surely be spreading our
MegaMillions around.
