by Lucia Berlin
While we cleaned the brushes, he explained that the woman was a whore, that Mamie figured that out by the way she was dressed and painted. He ended up explaining a lot of things that had bothered me. I understood more about my parents and Grandpa and movies and dogs. He forgot to tell me that whores charged money, so I was still confused about whores.
“Mecha was nice. I hate Mamie,” I said.
“Don’t say that word! Anyhow you don’t hate her. You’re mad because she doesn’t like you. She sees you out wandering the streets, hanging out with Syrians and Uncle John. She figures you’re a lost cause, a born Magruder. You want her to love you, that’s all. Anytime you think you hate somebody, what you do is pray for them. Try it, you’ll see. And while you’re busy praying for her, you might try helping her once in a while. Give her some kinda reason to like a surly brat like you.”
On weekends sometimes he’d take me to the dog track in Juarez, or to gambling games around town. I loved the races and was good at picking winners. The only time I liked going to card games was when he played with railroad men, in a caboose at the train yards. I climbed the ladder to the roof and watched all the trains coming in and going out, switching, coupling. It got to be that most of the card games were in the back of Chinese laundries. I’d sit in the front reading for hours while somewhere in back he played poker. The heat and the smell of cleaning solvent mixed with singed wool and sweat was nauseating. A few times he left out the back way and forgot me, so that only when the laundryman came to close up did he find me asleep in the chair. I’d have to go home, far, in the dark, and most of the time nobody would be there. Mamie took Sally to choir practice and to the Eastern Star and to make bandages for servicemen.
About once a month we’d go to a barber shop. A different one each time. He’d ask for a shave and a haircut. I’d sit on a chair reading Argosy while the barber cut his hair, just waiting for the shave part. Uncle John would be tilted way back in the chair and just as the barber was finishing the shave he’d ask, “Say, do you happen to have any eyedrops?” which they always did. The barber would stand over him and put drops in his eyes. The green glass eye would start spinning around and the barber would scream bloody murder. Then everybody’d laugh.
If only I had understood him half as much as he always understood me, I could have found out how he hurt, why he worked so hard to get laughs. He did make everybody laugh. We ate in cafés all over Juarez and El Paso that were like people’s houses. Just a lot of tables in one room of a regular house, with good food. Everybody knew him and the waitresses always laughed when he asked if it was warmed-over coffee.
“Oh, no!”
“Well, how’d you get it so hot?”
I could usually tell just how drunk he was and if it was a lot I’d make some excuse and walk or ride the trolley home. One day though, I had been sleeping in the cab of the truck, woke after he got in and started off. We were on Rim Road going faster faster. He had a bottle between his thighs, was driving with his elbows as he counted the money he held in a fan over the steering wheel.
“Slow down!”
“I’m in the money, honey!”
“Slow down! Hold on to the wheel!”
The truck thumped, shuddered high up and then thumped down. Money flew all over the cab. I looked out the back window. A little boy was standing in the street, his arm bleeding. A collie was lying next to him, really bloody, trying to get up.
“Stop. Stop the truck. We have to go back. Uncle John!”
“I can’t!”
“Slow down. You have to turn around!” I was sobbing hysterically.
At home he reached across and opened my door. “You go on in.”
I don’t know if I stopped speaking to him. He never came home. Not that night, not for days, weeks, months. I prayed for him.
The war ended and my father came home. We moved to South America.
Uncle John ended up on skid row in Los Angeles, a really hopeless wino. Then he met Dora, who played trumpet in the Salvation Army band. She had him go into the shelter and have some soup and she talked to him. She said later that he made her laugh. They fell in love and were married and he never drank again. When I was older I went to visit them in Los Angeles. She was working as a riveter at Lockheed and he had an Antique Repair Shop in his garage. They were maybe the sweetest two people I ever knew, sweet together, I mean. We went to Forest Lawn and the La Brea tarpits and the Grotto restaurant. Mostly I helped Uncle John in the shop, sanding furniture, polishing with the turpentine and linseed oil rag. We talked about life, told jokes. Neither of us ever mentioned El Paso. 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.
A Love Affair
It was hard to tend to the front and back offices alone. I had to change dressings, take temperatures and blood pressures and still try to greet new patients and answer the phones. A big nuisance because to do an EKG or assist in a wound stitching or a Pap smear I’d have to tell the answering service to take calls. The waiting room would be full, with people feeling neglected, and I’d hear the phones ringing ringing.
Most of Dr. B’s patients were very old. Often the women who got Pap smears were obese, with difficult access, so it took even longer.
I think there was a law that said I had to be present when he was with a female patient. I used to think this was an outdated precaution. Not at all. Amazing how many of those old ladies were in love with him.
I would hand him the scapula and, later, the long stick. After he had the scrapings from the cervix he would smear them on the glass slide I held, which I would then spray with a protective film. I would cover the slide with another one, put it in a box and label it for the lab.
My main job was to get the women’s legs high up into the stirrups and their buttocks moved down to the end of the table where they would be even with his eyes. Then I draped a sheet over their knees and was supposed to help the women relax. Chat and make jokes until he came in. That was easy, the chatting part. I knew the patients and they were all pretty nice.
The hard part was when he came in. He was a painfully shy man, with a serious tremor of his hands that occasionally manifested itself. Always when he signed checks or did Pap smears.
He squatted on a stool, eyes level with their vagina, with a light on his forehead. I handed him the (warmed) scapula and, after a few minutes, with the patient gasping and sweating, the long cotton-tipped stick. He held it, waving it like a baton, as he disappeared beneath the sheet, toward the woman. At last his hand emerged with the stick, now a dizzy metronome aimed at my waiting slide. I still drank in those days, so my hand, holding the slide, shook visibly as it tried to meet his. But in a nervous up and down tremble. His was back and forth. Slap, at last. This procedure took so long that he often missed important phone calls, and of course the people in the waiting room got very impatient. Once Mr. Larraby even knocked on the door and Dr. B. was so startled he dropped the stick. We had to start all over. He agreed then to hire a part-time receptionist.
If I ever look for another job, I’ll ask for an enormous salary. If anyone works for as little as Ruth and I did, something is very suspicious.
Ruth had never had a job and she didn’t need a job, which was suspicious enough. She was doing this for fun.
This was so fascinating to me that I asked her to lunch after the interview. Tuna melts at the Pill Hill Café. I liked her right off the bat. She was unlike anybody I had ever met.
Ruth was fifty, married for thirty years to her childhood sweetheart, an accountant. They had two children and three cats. Her hobbies, on the job application, were “cats.” So Dr. B. always asked her how her cats were. My hobbies were “reading,” so he’d say to me, “On the shores of Itchee Goomee” or “Nevermore quoth the raven.”
Every time there was a new patient he would write a few sentences on the back of the chart. Something he could use for conversation when he entered the exam room. “Th
inks Texas is God’s country.” “Has two toy poodles.” “Has five hundred dollar a day heroin habit.” So when he went in to see them he’d say things like, “Good morning! Been up to God’s country lately?” or “You’re out of luck if you think you can get drugs from me.”
Over lunch Ruth told me that she had started to feel old and in a rut so she had joined a support group. The Merry Pranksters, or M.P., which really stood for Meno Pause. Ruth always said this like it was two words. The group was dedicated to putting more zip into women’s lives. They focused on different members at a time. The last one had been Hannah. The group convinced her to go to Weight Watchers, to Rancho del Sol spa, take bossa nova lessons and then to get liposuction and a face lift. She looked wonderful but was in two new groups now. One for women who had face lifts but were still depressed and another for “Women Who Love Too Much.” Ruth sighed, “Hannah’s always been the kind of woman who has affairs with stevedores.”
Stevedores! Ruth used some surprising words, like “heretofore” and “hulabaloo.” Said things like she missed having “That Time of the Month.” It always was such a warm and cozy time.
The M.P. group had Ruth take flower arranging, join a theater group, a Trivial Pursuit club and get a job. She was supposed to have a love affair but she hadn’t thought about that yet. She already had zip in her life. She loved flower arranging, and now they were working on making bouquets with weeds and grasses. She had a bit part, non-singing, in Oklahoma.
I liked having Ruth in the office. We joked a lot with the patients and talked about them as if they were our relatives. She even thought filing was fun, singing, “Abcdefg hi jk lmnop lmnopqrst uvwxyZ!” until I’d say, “Stop, let me file.”
It was easier now when I was with patients. But, in fact, she did very little work. She studied her pursuit cards and called her friends a lot, especially Hannah, who was having an affair with the dance instructor.
On lunch hour I’d go with Ruth to collect weed bouquets, scrambling hot and sweaty up the freeway embankment for Queen Anne’s lace and tobacco weed. Rocks in our shoes. She seemed like an ordinary pretty middle-aged Jewish lady but there was a wildness and freedom about her. Her shout when she spied a pink rocket flower in the alley behind the hospital.
She and her husband had grown up together. Their families were very close, some of the few Jews in a small Iowa town. She couldn’t remember when everybody didn’t expect her and Ephraim to marry. They fell in love for real in high school. She studied home economics in college and waited for him to graduate in business and accounting. Of course they had saved themselves for marriage. They moved into his family home and cared for his invalid mother. She had come with them to Oakland, was still living with them, eighty-six years old now.
I never heard Ruth complain, not about the sick old lady or her children or Ephraim. I was always complaining about my kids or my ex-husband or a daughter-in-law and especially about Dr. B. He had me open all his packages in case there were bombs in them. If a bee or a wasp came in, he went outside until I killed it. These are just the silly things. He was mean. Especially mean to Ruth, saying things like, “This is what I get for hiring the handicapped?” He called her “Dyslexia,” because she transposed phone numbers. She did that a lot. About every other day he told me to fire her. I’d tell him we couldn’t. There was no cause. She really helped me and the patients liked her. She cheered the place up.
“I can’t stand cheeriness,” he said. “Makes me want to slap the grin off her face.”
She continued to be nice to him. She thought he was like Heathcliff or Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, only little. “Yeah, real little,” I said. But Ruth never heard negative remarks. She believed that someone, at some time, must have broken Dr. B.’s heart. She brought him kugel and ruguleh and hamentaschen, was always thinking of excuses to go into his office. I hadn’t figured out that she had chosen him to be the love affair until he came into my office and closed the door.
“You have to fire her! She is actually flirting with me! It is unseemly.”
“Well, strange as it may seem, she finds you wildly attractive. I still need her. It’s hard to find someone easy to work with. Be patient. Please, sir.” The “sir” did it, as usual.
“All right,” he sighed.
She was good for me, put zip in my life. Instead of spending my lunch hour brooding and smoking in the alley I’d get dirty and have fun picking bouquets with her. I even started cooking, using some of the hundreds of recipes she xeroxed all day. Baked pearl onions with a dash of brown sugar. She brought in clothes from Schmatta used clothing store and I bought them. A few times when Ephraim was too tired I went with her to the opera.
She was wonderful to go to the opera with, because at intermission she didn’t just stand around looking bored like everybody does. She’d lead me around the main foyer so we could admire the clothes and jewels. I wept with her at La Traviata. Our favorite scene was the old woman’s aria in The Queen of Spades.
One day Ruth asked Dr. B. to go to the opera with her. “No! What an inappropriate request!” he said.
“That asshole,” I said when he went out the door. All she said was that doctors were just too busy to have love affairs so she guessed it would have to be Julius.
Julius was a retired dentist who had been in the cast of Oklahoma. He was a widower and he was fat. She said fat was good, fat was warm and comfortable.
I asked her if it was because Ephraim was not so interested in sex anymore. “Au contraire!” she said. “It’s the first thing he thinks of every morning and the last at night. And if he’s home in the day he chases me around then too. Really…”
I saw Julius at Ephraim’s mother’s funeral at the Chapel of the Valley. The old woman had died quietly in her sleep.
Ruth and her family were on the steps of the funeral home. Two lovely children, handsome, gracious, comforting their parents, Ruth and Ephraim. Ephraim was darkly handsome. Lean, brooding, soulful. Now he looked like Heathcliff. His sad and dreamy eyes smiled into mine. “Thank you for your kindness to my wife.”
“There he is!” Ruth whispered, pointing at red-faced Julius. Gold chains, a too-tight single-breasted blue suit. He must have been chewing Clorets gum, his teeth were green.
“You’re crazy!” I whispered back to her.
Ruth had picked the Chapel of the Valley because the undertakers were our favorites. Dr. B.’s patients died often so almost every day some mortician came to get him to sign the death certificate. In black ink, the law required, but Dr. B. persisted in signing them with a blue pen, so the morticians had to drink coffee and hang around until he came back and signed them in black.
I waited in the rear of the chapel, wondering where to sit. Many Hadassah women had come; it was crowded. One of the chapel’s morticians appeared next to me. “How lovely you look in gray, Lily,” he said. The other one, with a boutonniere, came up the aisle and said in a low mournful voice, “How good of you to come, dear. Do let me find you a nice seat.” I followed the two men down the aisle, feeling rather smug, like being known in a restaurant.
It was a beautiful service. The rabbi read the part in the Bible about the good wife being more precious than rubies. Nobody would have thought that about the old woman, I don’t think. But I believed the eulogy was about Ruth and so did Ephraim and Julius, the way they were both gazing at her.
On Monday I tried to reason with her. “You are a woman who has everything. Health, looks, humor. A house in the hills. A cleaning woman. A garbage compactor. Wonderful children. And Ephraim! He is handsome, brilliant, rich. He obviously adores you!”
I told her the group was steering her in the wrong direction. She shouldn’t do anything to upset Ephraim. Thank her lucky stars. The M.P. were just jealous. They probably had alcoholic husbands, football-watching husbands, impotent or unfaithful ones. Their children carried beepers, were pierced, bulimic, drugged, tattooed.
“I think you’re embarrassed to be so happy, are going to do t
his so you can share with the M.P.s. I understand. When I was eleven an aunt gave me a diary. All I wrote in it was: ‘Went to school Did homework.’ So I started to do bad things in order to have something to write in it”
“It’s not going to be a serious affair,” she said. “It’s just to pep things up.”
“How about me having an affair with Ephraim? That would pep me up. You’d be jealous and fall madly in love with him again.”
She smiled. An innocent smile, like a child’s.
“Ephraim would never do that. He loves me.”
I thought she had dropped the affair idea until one Friday she brought in a newspaper.
“I’m going out with Julius tonight. But I’m telling Ephraim that I’m going out with you. Have you seen any of these movies, to tell me about them?”
I told her all about Ran, especially when the woman pulls out the dagger, and when the fool weeps. The blue banners in the trees, the red banners in the trees, the white banners in the trees. I was really getting into it, but she said, “Stop!” and asked where we would go after the movie. I took us, them, to Café Roma in Berkeley.
She and Julius went out every Friday. Their romance was good for me. Usually I got home from work, read novels and drank 100 proof vodka until I fell asleep, day in day out. During the Love Affair I began to actually go to string quartets, movies, to hear Ishiguro or Leslie Scaloppino while Ruth and Julius went to the Hungry Tiger and the Rusty Scupper.