A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories Read online

  She said the story had to be real—whatever that meant for her. I think it meant not contrived, not incidental or gratuitous: it had to be deeply felt, emotionally important. She told a student of hers that the story he had written was too clever—don’t try to be clever, she said. She typeset one of her own stories in hot metal on a Linotype machine, and after three days of work threw all the slugs back into the melting pot, because, she said, the story was “false.”

  * * *

  What about the difficulty of the (real) material?

  “Silence” is a story she tells about some of the same real events she also mentions more briefly to Kleinzahler, in a kind of pained shorthand: “Fight with Hope devastating.” In the story, the narrator’s uncle John, who is an alcoholic, is driving drunk with his little niece in the truck. He hits a boy and a dog, injuring both, the dog badly, and doesn’t stop. Lucia Berlin says, of the incident, to Kleinzahler: “The disillusion when he hit the kid and the dog was Awful for me.” The story, when she turns it into fiction, has the same incident, and the same pain, but there is a resolution of sorts. The narrator knows Uncle John later in his life, when, in a happy marriage, he is mild, gentle, and no longer drinking. Her last words, in the story, are: “Of course by this time I had realized all the reasons why he couldn’t stop the truck, because by this time I was an alcoholic.”

  About handling the difficult material, she comments: “Somehow there must occur the most imperceptible alteration of reality. A transformation, not a distortion of the truth. The story itself becomes the truth, not just for the writer but for the reader. In any good piece of writing it is not an identification with a situation, but this recognition of truth that is thrilling.”

  A transformation, not a distortion of the truth.

  * * *

  I have known Lucia Berlin’s work for more than thirty years—ever since I acquired the slim beige 1981 Turtle Island paperback called Angels Laundromat. By the time of her third collection, I had come to know her personally, from a distance, though I can’t remember how. There on the flyleaf of the beautiful Safe & Sound (Poltroon Press, 1988) is her inscription. We never did meet face-to-face.

  Her publications eventually moved out of the small-press world and into the medium-press world of Black Sparrow and then, later, of Godine. One of her collections won the American Book Award. But even with that recognition, she had not yet found the wide readership she should have had by then.

  * * *

  I had always thought another story of hers included a mother and her children out picking the first wild asparagus of early spring, but I have found it only, so far, in another letter she wrote to me in 2000. I had sent her a description of asparagus by Proust. She replied:

  Only ones I ever saw growing were the thin crayon-green wild ones. In New Mexico, where we lived outside of Albuquerque, by the river. One day in spring they’d be up beneath the cotton woods. About six inches tall, just right to snap off. My four sons and I would gather dozens, while down the river would be Granma Price and her boys, up river all of the Waggoners. No one ever seemed to see them as one or two inch high, only at the perfect height. One of the boys would run in and shout “Asparagus!” just as somebody was doing the same at the Prices’ and Waggoners’.

  * * *

  I have always had faith that the best writers will rise to the top, like cream, sooner or later, and will become exactly as well known as they should be—their work talked about, quoted, taught, performed, filmed, set to music, anthologized. Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves.

  * * *

  I could quote almost any part of any story by Lucia Berlin, for contemplation, for enjoyment, but here is one last favorite:

  So what is marriage anyway? I never figured it out. And now it is death I don’t understand.

  Introduction

  Stephen Emerson

  Birds ate all the hollyhock and larkspur seeds I planted … sitting together all in a row like at a cafeteria.

  —Letter to me, May 21, 1995

  Lucia Berlin was as close a friend as I’ve ever had. She was also one of the most signal writers I’ve ever encountered.

  The latter fact is what I want to write about here. Her extraordinary life—its color, its afflictions, and the heroism she showed especially in the fight against a brutal drinking habit—is evoked in the biographical note at the back.

  * * *

  Lucia’s writing has got snap. When I think of it, I sometimes imagine a master drummer in motion behind a large trap set, striking ambidextrously at an array of snares, tom-toms, and ride cymbals while working pedals with both feet.

  It isn’t that the work is percussive, it’s that there’s so much going on.

  The prose claws its way off the page. It has vitality. It reveals.

  An odd little electric car, circa 1950: “It looked like any other car except that it was very tall and short, like a car in a cartoon that had run into a wall. A car with its hair standing on end.”

  The car was tall and short. Elsewhere, outside Angel’s Laundromat, where the travelers go:

  Dirty mattresses, rusty high chairs tied to the roofs of dented old Buicks. Leaky oil pans, leaky canvas water bags. Leaky washing machines. The men sit in the cars, shirtless.

  And the mother (ah, the mother):

  You always dressed carefully … Stockings with seams. A peach satin slip you let show a little on purpose, just so those peasants would know you wore one. A chiffon dress with shoulder pads, a brooch with tiny diamonds. And your coat. I was five years old and even then knew that it was a ratty old coat. Maroon, the pockets stained and frayed, the cuffs stringy.

  What her work has, is joy. A precious commodity, not encountered all that often. Balzac, Isaac Babel, García Márquez come to mind.

  When prose fiction is as expansive as hers, the result is that the world gets celebrated. Out through the work, a joy radiating off the world. It is writing continuous with the irrepressibility of—humanity, place, food, smells, color, language. The world seen in all its perpetual motion, its penchant to surprise and even delight.

  It has nothing to do with whether the author is pessimistic or not, whether the events or feelings evoked are cheerful. The palpability of what we’re shown is affirmative:

  People in cars around us were eating sloppy things. Watermelons, pomegranates, bruised bananas. Bottles of beer spurted on ceilings, suds cascaded on the sides of cars … I’m hungry, I whined. Mrs. Snowden had foreseen that. Her gloved hand passed me fig newtons wrapped in talcumy Kleenex. The cookie expanded in my mouth like Japanese flowers.

  About this “joy”: no, it is not omnipresent. Yes, there are stories of unalloyed bleakness. What I have in mind is the overriding effect.

  Consider “Strays.” Its ending is as poignant as a Janis Joplin ballad. The addict-girl, ratted out by a ne’er-do-well lover who’s a cook and trustee, has stuck to the program, gone to group, and been good. And then she flees. In a truck, alongside an old gaffer from a TV production crew, she heads toward the city:

  We got to the rise, with the wide valley and the Rio Grande below us, the Sandia Mountains lovely above.

  “Mister, what I need is money for a ticket home to Baton Rouge. Can you spare it, about sixty dollars?”

  “Easy. You need a ticket. I need a drink. It will all work out.”

  Also like a Janis Joplin ballad, that ending has lilt.

  * * *

  Of course, at the same time, a riotous humor animates Lucia’s work. To the topic of joy, it is germane.

  Example: the humor of “502,” which is an account of drunk driving that occurs—with no one behind the wheel. (The driver is asleep upstairs, drunk, as the parked car rolls down the hill.) Fellow drunk Mo says, “Thank the Lord you wasn’t in it, sister … First thing I did, I opened the door and said, ‘Where she be?’”

  In another story, the mother: “‘She hated children. I met her once at an airpo
rt when all four of my kids were little. She yelled “Call them off!” as if they were a pack of Dobermans.’”

  Unsurprisingly, readers of Lucia’s work have sometimes used the term “black humor.” I don’t see it that way. Her humor was too funny, and it had no axe to grind. Céline and Nathanael West, Kafka—theirs is a different territory. Besides, Lucia’s humor is bouncy.

  But if her writing has a secret ingredient, it is suddenness. In the prose itself, shift and surprise produce a liveliness that is a mark of her art.

  Her prose syncopates and hops, changes cadences, changes the subject. That’s where a lot of its crackle is.

  Speed in prose is not something you hear much about. Certainly not enough.

  Lucia’s “Panteón de Dolores” is a wide-ranging story with great emotional depth. But it also has her alacrity. Read the passage that begins “Not listening though” and continues through “because of the pollution level.”*

  Or this: “Mama, you saw ugliness and evil everywhere, in everyone, in each place. Were you crazy or a seer?”

  The last story Lucia wrote, “B.F. and Me,” is a small one. It has no wallop or big themes, no infanticides, no smuggling, no mother-daughter or reconciliation. In a way, that’s why its art is so remarkable. It’s gentle; but it’s fast.

  She introduces the creaky old handyman who comes to work on her trailer, as follows:

  [B.F. was] gasping and coughing after he climbed the three steps. He was an enormous man, tall, very fat and very old. Even when he was still outside catching his breath, I could smell him. Tobacco and dirty wool, rank alcoholic sweat. He had bloodshot baby-blue eyes that smiled. I liked him right away.

  That “I liked him right away.” It’s nearly a non sequitur. And in the near non sequitur lies the speed. And the wit. (Just look what it tells us about “I.”)

  With a writer of this caliber, you can often recognize the work in one sentence. Here is a sentence from that same, final story, still on B.F. and his aroma:

  Bad smells can be nice.

  It is pure Lucia Berlin. It’s so corny (“nice”), so close to being just dumb. But it’s true, and it’s deep. Beyond that, set off against her generally urbane voice, the sentence is almost disingenuous. Which is part of why it’s fast. The shift in tone, and even voice, sends us, just like that, into new terrain.

  Too, the sentence is dry. (How could a bad smell really be “nice.”) Dryness, it so happens—where things are more, and other, than they seem—is fast.

  It’s five words, all monosyllables.

  Of B.F.’s stench—no, she can’t call it a stench. Reek? No. She has to reach over to British slang to find a term that’s strong enough but still has neutrality, still makes no judgment.

  “Pong.” His pong. Which brings us to—Proust.

  “The pong of him was madeleine-like for me.”

  Who but Lucia Berlin would write that? The pong was madeleine-like.

  * * *

  Compiling the stories for this book has been a joy in countless ways. One was discovering that in the years since her last book and her death, the work had grown in stature.

  Black Sparrow and her earlier publishers gave her a good run, and certainly she’s had one or two thousand dedicated readers. But that is far too few. The work will reward the most acute of readers, but there is nothing rarefied about it. On the contrary, it is inviting.

  Still, the constraints of a small-press audience may, at the time, have been inevitable. After all, Lucia’s whole existence occurred, pretty much, outside.

  West Coast bohemia, clerical and blue-collar work, laundromats, “meetings,” stores that sell “one-shoes,” and dwellings like that trailer were the backdrop of much of her adult life (throughout which, her genteel demeanor never flagged).

  And it was, in fact, “outside” that gave her work its special strength.

  From Boulder, she wrote to me (and here she alludes to her constant later companion, the oxygen tank):

  Bay Area, New York and Mexico City [were the] only places I didn’t feel I was an other. I just got back from shopping and everybody kept on saying have a great day now and smiling at my oxygen tank as if it were a poodle or a child.

  Myself, I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t want to read her.

  Angel’s Laundromat

  A tall old Indian in faded Levi’s and a fine Zuni belt. His hair white and long, knotted with raspberry yarn at his neck. The strange thing was that for a year or so we were always at Angel’s at the same time. But not at the same times. I mean some days I’d go at seven on a Monday or maybe at six thirty on a Friday evening and he would already be there.

  Mrs. Armitage had been different, although she was old too. That was in New York at the San Juan Laundry on Fifteenth Street. Puerto Ricans. Suds overflowing onto the floor. I was a young mother then and washed diapers on Thursday mornings. She lived above me, in 4-C. One morning at the laundry she gave me a key and I took it. She said that if I didn’t see her on Thursdays it meant she was dead and would I please go find her body. That was a terrible thing to ask of someone; also then I had to do my laundry on Thursdays.

  She died on a Monday and I never went back to the San Juan. The super found her. I don’t know how.

  For months, at Angel’s, the Indian and I did not speak to each other, but we sat next to each other in connected yellow plastic chairs, like at airports. They skidded in the ripped linoleum and the sound hurt your teeth.

  He used to sit there sipping Jim Beam, looking at my hands. Not directly, but into the mirror across from us, above the Speed Queen washers. At first it didn’t bother me. An old Indian staring at my hands through the dirty mirror, between yellowing IRONING $1.50 A DUZ and orange Day-Glo serenity prayers. GOD GRANT ME THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE. But then I began to wonder if he had something about hands. It made me nervous, him watching me smoke and blow my nose, leaf through magazines years old. Lady Bird Johnson going down the rapids.

  Finally he got me staring at my hands. I saw him almost grin because he caught me staring at my own hands. For the first time our eyes met in the mirror, beneath DON’T OVERLOAD THE MACHINES.

  There was panic in my eyes. I looked into my own eyes and back down at my hands. Horrid age spots, two scars. Un-Indian, nervous, lonely hands. I could see children and men and gardens in my hands.

  His hands that day (the day I noticed mine) were on each taut blue thigh. Most of the time they shook badly and he just let them shake in his lap, but that day he was holding them still. The effort to keep them from shaking turned his adobe knuckles white.

  The only time I had spoken with Mrs. Armitage outside of the laundry was when her toilet had overflowed and was pouring down through the chandelier on my floor of the building. The lights were still burning while the water splashed rainbows through them. She gripped my arm with her cold dying hand and said, “It’s a miracle, isn’t it?”

  His name was Tony. He was a Jicarilla Apache from up north. One day I hadn’t seen him but I knew it was his fine hand on my shoulder. He gave me three dimes. I didn’t understand, almost said thanks, but then I saw that he was shaky-sick and couldn’t work the dryers. Sober, it’s hard. You have to turn the arrow with one hand, put the dime in with the other, push down the plunger, then turn the arrow back for the next dime.

  He came back later, drunk, just as his clothes were starting to fall limp and dry. He couldn’t get the door open, passed out in the yellow chair. My clothes were dry, I was folding.

  Angel and I got Tony back onto the floor of the pressing room. Hot. Angel is responsible for all the AA prayers and mottoes. DON’T THINK AND DON’T DRINK. Angel put a cold wet one-sock on Tony’s head and knelt beside him.

  “Brother, believe me … I’ve been there … right down there in the gutter where you are. I know just how you feel.”

  Tony didn’t open his eyes. Anybody says he knows just how someone else feels is a fool.

  Angel’s Laundromat is in Albuqu
erque, New Mexico. Fourth Street. Shabby shops and junkyards, secondhand stores with army cots, boxes of one-socks, 1940 editions of Good Hygiene. Grain stores and motels for lovers and drunks and old women with hennaed hair who do their laundry at Angel’s. Teenage Chicana brides go to Angel’s. Towels, pink shortie nighties, bikini underpants that say Thursday. Their husbands wear blue overalls with names in script on the pockets. I like to wait and see the names appear in the mirror vision of the dryers. Tina, Corky, Junior.

  Traveling people go to Angel’s. Dirty mattresses, rusty high chairs tied to the roofs of dented old Buicks. Leaky oil pans, leaky canvas water bags. Leaky washing machines. The men sit in the cars, shirtless, crush Hamm’s cans when they’re empty.

  But it’s Indians who go to Angel’s mostly. Pueblo Indians from San Felipe and Laguna and Sandia. Tony was the only Apache I ever met, at the laundry or anywhere else. I like to sort of cross my eyes and watch the dryers full of Indian clothes blurring the brilliant swirling purples and oranges and reds and pinks.

  I go to Angel’s. I’m not sure why, it’s not just the Indians. It’s across town from me. Only a block away is the Campus, air-conditioned, soft rock on the Muzak. New Yorker, Ms., and Cosmopolitan. Wives of graduate assistants go there and buy their kids Zero bars and Cokes. The Campus laundry has a sign, like most laundries do, POSITIVELY NO DYEING. I drove all over town with a green bedspread until I came to Angel’s with his yellow sign, YOU CAN DIE HERE ANYTIME.

  I could see it wasn’t turning deep purple but a darker muddy green, but I wanted to come back anyway. I liked the Indians and their laundry. The broken Coke machine and the flooded floor reminded me of New York. Puerto Ricans mopping, mopping. Their pay phone was always out of order, like Angel’s. Would I have gone to find Mrs. Armitage’s body on a Thursday?

  “I am chief of my tribe,” the Indian said. He had just been sitting there, sipping port, looking at my hands.

  He told me that his wife worked cleaning houses. They had had four sons. The youngest one had committed suicide, the oldest had died in Vietnam. The other two were school bus drivers.