A Manual for Cleaning Women (2 page)

This is exhilarating writing.

Another story begins with a typically straightforward and informative statement that I can easily believe is drawn directly from Berlin’s own life: “I’ve worked in hospitals for years now and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that the sicker the patients are the less noise they make. That’s why I ignore the patient intercom.” Reading that, I’m reminded of the stories of William Carlos Williams when he wrote as the family doctor he was—his directness, his frank and knowledgeable details of medical conditions and treatment, his objective reporting. Even more than Williams, she also saw Chekhov (another doctor) as a model and teacher. In fact, she says in a letter to Stephen Emerson that what gives life to their work is their physician’s detachment, combined with compassion. She goes on to mention their use of specific detail and their economy—“No words are written that aren’t necessary.” Detachment, compassion, specific detail, and economy—and we are well on the way to identifying some of the most important things in good writing. But there is always a little more to say.

*   *   *

How does she do it? It’s that we never know quite what is going to come next. Nothing is predictable. And yet everything is also natural, true to life, true to our expectations of psychology and emotion.

At the end of “Dr. H. A. Moynihan,” the mother seems to soften a bit toward her drunk and mean, bigoted old father: “‘He did a good job,’ my mother said.” This is the tail end of the story, and so we think—having been trained by all our years of reading stories—that now the mother will relent, people in troubled families can be reconciled, at least for a while. But when the daughter asks, “‘You don’t still hate him, do you Mama?’” the answer, brutally honest, and in some way satisfying, is: “‘Oh yes … Yes I do.’”

Berlin is unflinching, pulls no punches, and yet the brutality of life is always tempered by her compassion for human frailty, the wit and intelligence of that narrating voice, and her gentle humor.

In a story called “Silence,” the narrator says: “I don’t mind telling people awful things if I can make them funny.” (Though some things, she adds, just weren’t funny.)

Sometimes the comedy is broad, as in “Sex Appeal,” where the pretty cousin Bella Lynn sets off in an airplane toward what she hopes will be a Hollywood career, her bust enhanced by an inflatable bra—but when the airplane reaches cruising altitude, the bra explodes.

Usually the humor is more understated, a natural part of the narrative conversation—for instance, about the difficulty of buying alcoholic beverages in Boulder: “The liquor stores are gigantic Target-size nightmares. You could die from DTs just trying to find the Jim Beam aisle.” She goes on to inform us that “the best town is Albuquerque where the liquor stores have drive-through windows, so you don’t even have to get out of your pajamas.”

As in life, comedy can occur in the midst of tragedy: the younger sister, dying of cancer, wails, “I’ll never see donkeys again!” and both sisters eventually laugh and laugh, but the poignant exclamation stays with you. Death has become so immediate—no more donkeys, no more of so many things.

*   *   *

Did she learn her fantastic ability to tell a story from the storytellers she grew up with? Or was she always attracted to storytellers, did she seek them out, learn from them? Both, no doubt. She had a natural feel for the form, the structure of a story. Natural? What I mean is that a story of hers has a balanced, solid structure and yet moves with such an illusion of naturalness from one subject to another, or, in some stories, from present into past—even within a sentence, as in the following:

“I worked mechanically at my desk, answering phones, calling for oxygen and lab techs, drifting away into warm waves of pussywillows and sweet peas and trout pools. The pulleys and riggings of the mine at night, after the first snow. Queen Anne’s lace against the starry sky.”

About the way a story develops, Alastair Johnston has this insight: “Her writing was cathartic but instead of building to an epiphany, she would evoke the climax more circumspectly, let the reader sense it. As Gloria Frym said in the
American Book Review
, she would ‘underplay it, surround it and let the moment reveal itself.’”

And then, her endings. In so many stories, Wham! comes the end, at once surprising and yet inevitable, resulting organically from the material of the story. In “Mama,” the younger sister finds a way to sympathize, finally, with the difficult mother, but the last few words of the older sister, the narrator—talking to herself, now, or to us—take us by surprise: “Me … I have no mercy.”

*   *   *

How did a story come into being, for
Lucia Berlin
? Johnston has a possible answer: “She would start with something as simple as the line of a jaw, or a yellow mimosa.” She herself goes on to say: “But the image has to connect to a specific intense experience.” Elsewhere, in a letter to August Kleinzahler, she describes how she goes forward: “I
get
started, & then it’s just like writing this to you, only more legible…” Some part of her mind, at the same time, must always have been in control of the shape and sequence of the story, and the end of it.

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 airport 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.