Once a Dancer, and: Other People's Dirt: A Housecleaner's Curious Adventures, and: A Match to the Heart (review)

Book Reviews173 ing, and living a centered, reflective life. Like the herons and owls he discovers nesting within the sound of the gravel trucks, the author has learned to live deliberately in an unexpected and commonplace locale. This modest, affecting collection models the journal keeping that, in Annie Dillard's phrase, "makes life accumulate and not merely pass" and suggests that the quiedy observed life can create quietly absorbing essays. Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin's Echo and theAnasazi, by Reg Saner. University of Utah Press, 1998. 203 pages, $14.95. These essays on the Four Corners area of the Southwest, vividly recount Reg Saner's travels amongAnasazi ruins and give readers both a sense ofplace and a sense of connection across time, space, and culture. Investigating such Anasazi sites as MesaVerde, Hovenweep, and Keet Seel, observing the summer solstice in Chaco Canyon, he reflects Anasazi relationships to the natural world and to other cultures past and present (ancient Hebrews and modern Hopis). Throughout the book, in lyrical, insightful prose, he examines the compelling sense ofspiritual presence that theAnasazi inspire as well as his own attraction to their abandoned ruins. His feeling that "through Anasazi vestiges we perhaps pay our respects to what's missing in us, thus honoring ... a people able to five out lives undivided from themselves." Alys Culhane As a writer-teacher ofautobiographical writing, I'm always on the lookout for good books for me and my students. Here are three I've particularly enjoyed—Allegra Kent's Once a Dancer, Louise Rafkin's Other People's Dirt, and Gretel Erlich's A Match to the Heart—because these writers allowed me to enter worlds that are so far removed from my own. Once a Dancer, by Allegra Kent. St. Martin's Press, 1997. 340 pages, paperback , $16.95; cloth, $26.95. Kent's account, which spans sixty years, tells a Cinderella-like story of a ballerina whose actions center around attempting to please others who, in the end, fail her. At an early age, Kent becomes obsessed with something she is good at: ballet. By fifteen, her future appears to be assured when she's hired by George Balanchine to dance for the New York City Ballet. She works hard, becomes a principal dancer, but life proves difficult, in part 174Fourth Genre because she errs to appease a demanding mother who pushes her into a bad marriage, and Balanchine who pushes her beyond her physical limits. Kent keeps doing what she is asked until things fall apart: her ten-year marriage fails and Kent is fired from the company. Nearly destitute, she struggles to support herselfand her three children, but in the process learns to make her own good decisions. She marries filmmaker Aram Avakian and resumes dancing, having discovered that professional and personal happiness depends on acting in one's own best interests. Other People's Dirt: A Housecleaner's Curious Adventures, by Louise Rafkin. Algonquin Books of Chapel HiU, 1988. 138 pages, paperback $11.95; cloth $17.95. Louise Rafkin gives us an insiders view of the world of housecleaning, a profession she says she took up because she was good at cleaning and liked to spy on people. Rafkin works for the Happy Maid Cleaning Agency, attends a meeting of Messies Anonymous (a support group for those who have a difficult time cleaning up behind themselves), participates in a dumpster party, and meets with employees ofan "exotic" housecleaning service. In these overviews, the more comic aspects ofthe relationships between housecleaners and clients are revealed. We laugh, I think, because Rafkin s close examination ofwhat is most intimate—our cleaning habits (or lack thereof)—makes us nervous. Rafkin also introduces us, through interviews, to others who clean houses. We meet Lupita, a Mexican immigrant employed by her family when she was a child and Claudette, aJamaican woman who cleans the UpperWest Side apartment of one of Rafkin s summer clients. What we learn from these women is that they clean for a living because they have no other options—and seldom make decent wages for their hard work. In the final chapter of her book, "A Yen for Cleaning," Rafkin writes about spending time at...