![]() ![]() A Manual for Cleaning Women, a selection of Berlin’s stories published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, is most poignant in its portrayal of disappointments like this one. Instead, it’s a story about characters who are at once good and bad-characters who set out to be present for, but end up disappointing, each other. Nor is it the story of the failure of such a transformation. “Good and Bad” is not the story of a bad person who becomes the good person her teacher sees in her. ![]() But the plan goes awry, partly because the girl, during a conversation with her father, exposes Miss Dawson’s communist affiliations (the story takes place in 1952, at the height of McCarthyism), and partly because Miss Dawson’s maladroit, immersive pedagogy eventually puts the two women in a dangerous position. Miss Dawson convinces her student to accompany her to the city dump every Saturday, for a month. ![]() “I think you are a good person,” Miss Dawson tells the student, who is, at least superficially, enamored of the kind of the frivolous, high-society lifestyle accessible to the families of Americans working in Chile after World War II. In Lucia Berlin’s story “Good and Bad,” Miss Dawson, an American teacher working in Chile, seeks to sensitize an American student whose father is a mining engineer to the reality of poverty in Santiago. ![]()
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