by Lucia Berlin
Laura spills some of a freshly poured drink down her shirt-front. “He did that to you?” Decca passes her a towel to dry herself with.
“Bucket-Butt, you think you’ve got the only ear lobe in the world?” She grins, enjoying this now. “Then he’d brush your breast with the palm of his hand, right? You’d groan and turn toward him. Then he’d catch your head in…”
“Stop it!”
They’re both depressed now. They smoke and drink with the elaborately careful slow motion of the very drunk. Cats come near them, weaving but they both absentmindedly kick them away.
“At least there weren’t any before me,” Decca said.
“Elinor. She still calls him, middle of the night. Cries a lot.”
“She doesn’t count. She was his student at Brandeis. One rainy intense weekend at Truro. Her family called the dean. End of romance and teaching career.”
“Sarah?”
“You mean Sarah? His sister Sarah? You’re not so dumb, B.B. Sarah is our biggest rival of all. I never said it out loud though. Do you think they ever actually made love?”
“No, of course not. But they are so close. Fiercely close. I don’t think anybody could adore him like she does.”
“I was jealous of her. God, I was jealous of her.”
“Decca. Listen! Oh, wait a minute. I’ve got to pee.” Laura stands, totters, reels across the room into the bathroom. Decca hears her fall, the crack of head against porcelain.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
Laura returns, crawling on all fours to her chair.
“Life is fraught with peril,” she giggles. There is already a big blue goose bump on her forehead.
“Listen, Decca. There is nothing to worry about. He’ll never marry Camille. Maybe he said that to get her down there. But he won’t. I’ll bet you a billion dollars. And you know why?”
“Yep. I’ve got it. Sister Sarah! She’ll never get past old Sarah.”
Decca had been tying her hair up with an elastic, high on top of her head so it looked like a crooked palm tree. Laura’s hair had come loose from her chignon, so a hunk just flops out of one side of her head. They sit smiling stupidly at one another in their burned wet clothes.
“That’s right. Sarah really likes you and me. You know why?”
“Because we are well-bred.”
“Because we are ladies.” They toast each other with a fresh drink, laughing uproariously, kicking the floor.
“It’s true,” Decca says. “Although perhaps at this moment we’re not quite at our best. So, tell me, were you jealous of Sarah too?”
“No,” Laura says. “I never had a real family. She helped me feel part of one. Still does, and she loves the boys. No, I was jealous of the dope dealers. Juni, Beto, Willy, Nacho.”
“Yeah, all the pretty punks.”
“They always found us. A year and a half clean. Beto found us in Chiapas, at the foot of the church on the hill. San Cristobal. Streaks of rain on his mirror sunglasses.”
“You ever know Frankie?”
“I knew Frankie. He was the sickest.”
“I saw his dog die, once when he got busted. He even had his toy poodle strung out on junk.”
“I once stabbed a connection, in Yelapa. I didn’t even hurt him, really. But I felt the blade go in, saw him bleed.”
Decca is crying now. Sad sobs, like a child’s. She puts on Charlie Parker with Strings. “April in Paris.”
“Max and I were in Paris in April. Rained the whole damn time. We were both pretty lucky, Laura, and drugs ruined it all. I mean for a short time we had everything a woman could want. Well, I knew him in his golden years. Italy and France and Spain. Mallorca. Everything he did turned to gold. He could write, play saxophone, fight bulls, race cars.” She pours them more rum.
Laura can’t express herself. “I knew him when, when he was…”
“You almost said happy, didn’t you. He was never happy.”
“Yes, he was. We were. No one ever was so happy as we were.”
Decca sighs, “That might be true. I thought it, seeing you all together. But it wasn’t enough for him.”
“Once we were in Harlem. Max and a musician friend went into the bathroom to fix. The man’s wife looked at me, across the kitchen table, and she said, ‘There our men go, to the lady in the lake.’ Maybe we were wrong, Decca. Hubris or something, wanting to mean too much to him. Maybe this girl, what’s her name? Maybe she’ll just be there.”
Decca had been talking to herself. Aloud she said, “No one could ever ever mean so much to me. Have you met any man who can touch him? His mind? His wit?”
“No. And none of them are so kind or sweet, like how he cries at music, kisses his sons goodnight.”
Both women are sobbing now, blowing their noses. “I get really lonesome. I try to meet men,” Laura says. “I even joined the ACLU.”
“You what?”
“I even went to the Sundowner for Happy Hour. But all the men just got on my nerves.”
“That’s it. Other men jar after Max. They say ‘you know’ too much or repeat the same stories, laugh too loud. Max never bored, Max never jarred.”
“I went out with this pediatrician. A sweet guy who wears bow ties, flies kites. The perfect man. Loves children, healthy, handsome, rich. He jogs, drinks rosé wine coolers.” The women roll their eyes. “OK, so I have it all set up. The children are asleep. I’m in white chiffon. We’re at the table on the terrace. Candles. Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto Bossa Nova. Lobster. Stars. Then Max shows up, drives up on the lawn in a Lamborghini. Wearing a white suit. He gives us a little wave, goes in to see the kids, says something idiotic like he loves to look at them when they’re sleeping. I lost it. Smashed the rosé wine cooler pitcher on the bricks, threw the plates of lobster, smash, smash, salad plates, smash. Told the guy to hit the road.”
“Which he did, right?”
“Right.”
“See, Laura, Max would never have left. He’d have said something like, ‘Honey, you need some loving,’ or he’d start throwing plates and dishes too until you were both laughing.”
“Yeah. Actually he sort of did when he came out. He smashed some glasses and a vase of freesia but he rescued the lobster and we ate it. Sandy. He just grinned and said, ‘That pediatrician is hardly an improvement.’”
“There’s never been a man like him. He never farted or belched.”
“Yes, he did, Decca. A lot.”
“Well, it never got on my nerves. You just came over to upset me. Go home!”
“Last time you told me to go home you were in my house.”
“I did? Hell, I’ll go home then.”
Laura gets up to leave. She lurches toward the bed to get her coat, stands there, getting her bearings. Decca comes up behind her, embraces her, touches her neck with her lips. Laura holds her breath, doesn’t move. Sonny Rollins is playing “In Your Own Sweet Way.” Decca leans, kisses Laura on the ear.
“Then he brushes your nipple with the palm of his hand.”
She does this to Laura. “Then you turn to him and he holds your head in both hands and kisses you on the mouth.” But Laura doesn’t move.
“Lie down, Laura.”
Laura stumbles, slides down onto the mink-covered bed. Decca blows out the lantern and lies down too. But the women are facing away from each other. Each is waiting for the other to touch her the way Max did. There is a long silence. Laura weeps, softly, but Decca laughs out loud, whacks Laura on the buttock.
“Good night, you fat-assed sap.”
In just a short time, Decca is asleep. Laura leaves quietly, arrives home and showers, dresses before her children wake up.
Sometimes in Summer
Hope and I were both seven. I don’t think we knew what month it was or even what day it was unless it was Sunday. Summer had already been so hot and long with every day just like the other that we didn’t remember that it had rained the year before. We asked Uncle John to fry a
n egg on the sidewalk again, so at least we remembered that.
Hope’s family had come over from Syria. It wasn’t likely that they would sit around and talk about weather in Texas in the summertime. Or explain how the days are longer in summer, but then they start getting shorter. My family didn’t talk to each other at all. Uncle John and I ate together sometimes. My grandma Mamie ate in the kitchen with my little sister Sally. My mother and Grandpa, if they ever ate, ate in their own rooms, or out somewhere.
Sometimes everybody would be in the living room. To listen to Jack Benny or Bob Hope or Fibber McGee and Molly. But even then nobody talked. Each laughed alone and stared at the green eye on the radio the way people stare at the television now.
What I mean is there was no way Hope or I would have heard about summer solstice, or how it always rained in El Paso in the summer. No one at my house ever talked about stars, probably didn’t even know that in summer there were sometimes meteor showers in the northern sky.
Heavy rains overflowed the arroyos and the drainage ditches, destroyed houses in Smeltertown and carried away chickens and cars.
When the lightning and thunder came we reacted in primitive terror. Crouched on Hope’s front porch, covered in blankets, listening to the cracks and rumbles with awe and fatalism. We couldn’t not watch, though, huddled shivering and made each other look when the arrows lit up all along the Rio Grande and cracked into the cross of Mount Cristo Rey, zigzagged into the smelter smoke-stack crack crack. Boom. At the same time the trolley on Mundy Street shorted out in a cascade of sparks and all the passengers came running out just as it began to rain.
It rained and rained. It rained all night. The phones went out and the lights went out. My mother didn’t come home and Uncle John didn’t come home. Mamie started a fire in the wood stove and when Grandpa got home he called her an idiot. The electricity is out, fool, not the gas, But she shook her head. We understood perfectly. Nothing was to be trusted.
We slept on cots on Hope’s porch. We did sleep although we both swore we were up all night watching the sheets of rain come down like a big glass brick window.
We had breakfast in both houses. Mamie made biscuits and gravy; at Hope’s house we had kibbe and Syrian bread. Her grandma braided our hair into tight French braids so that the rest of the morning our eyes slanted back as if we were Asian. We spent the morning spinning around in the rain and then shivering drying off and going back out. Both of our grandmothers came to watch as their gardens washed completely away, down the walls, out into the street. Red caliche clay water quickly rose above the sidewalks and up to the fifth step of the concrete stairways of our houses. We jumped into the water which was warm and thick like cocoa and carried us along for blocks, fast, our pigtails floating. We’d get out, run back in the cold rain, back past our houses all the way up the block and then jump back into the river of the street and become swept away some more over and over.
The silence gave this flood a particularly eerie magic. The trolleys couldn’t run and for days there were no cars. Hope and I were the only children on the block. She had six brothers and sisters, but they were bigger, either had to help in the furniture store or were just gone somewhere always. Upson Avenue was mostly retired smelter workers or Mexican widows who spoke little English, went to mass at Holy Family in the morning and the evening.
Hope and I had the street all to ourselves. For skating and hopscotch and jacks. Early in the morning or in the evening the old women would water their plants but the rest of the time they all stayed inside with the windows and blinds shut tight to keep out the terrible Texan heat but most of all the caliche red dust and the smoke from smelter.
Every night they burned at the smelter. We would sit outside where the stars would be shining and then the flames would shoot out of the stack, followed by massive sick convulsions of black smoke that darkened the sky and veiled everything around us. It was quite lovely really, the billows and undulations in the sky, but it would sting our eyes and the smell of sulfur was so strong we would even gag. Hope always did but she was just pretending. To give you an idea of how scary it was every night, when the newsreel of the first atom bomb was shown at the Plaza theater some Mexican joker hollered, “Mira, the esmelter!”
There was a break in the rains and that’s when the second thing happened. Our grandmothers shoveled the sand away and swept their sidewalks. Mamie was a terrible housekeeper. She always used to have colored help, that’s why, my mother said.
“And you had Daddy!”
She didn’t think that was funny. “I’m not going to waste my time cleaning this roach-infested dump.”
But Mamie took trouble with the yard, sweeping the steps and sidewalk, watering her little garden. Sometimes she’d be right on the other side of the fence from Mrs. Abraham but they ignored one another completely. Mamie did not trust foreigners and Hope’s grandmother hated Americans. She liked me because I made her laugh. One day all the children were lined up at the stove and she was giving them kibbe on fresh hot bread. I just got in line and she served me before she realized it. That’s how I got my hair brushed and braided every morning too. The first time she pretended she didn’t notice, told me in Syrian to hold still, hit me on the head with the brush.
There was a vacant lot next to the Haddad house. In summer it was overgrown with weeds, bad thistles so you wouldn’t even want to walk through it. In fall and winter you could see that the lot was carpeted with broken glass. Blue, brown, green. Mostly from Hope’s brother and his friends shooting BB guns at bottles but also just throwaways. Hope and I looked for bottles to turn in for refund, and the old women took bottles to the Sunshine Market in their faded Mexican baskets. But in those days most people would drink a soda and then just toss the bottle anywhere. Beer bottles would fly out from cars all the time making little explosions.
I understand now that it had to do with the sun setting so late, after we had both eaten dinner. We were back outside, squatting on the sidewalk playing jacks. For only a few days, from our position low on the ground, we could see beneath the weeds on the lot at the very moment when the sun lit the mosaic carpet of glass. At an angle, shining through the glass like a cathedral window. This magical display only lasted a few minutes, only happened for two days. “Look!” she said the first time. We sat there, frozen. I had the jacks clasped tightly in a sweaty palm. She held the golf ball up in the air, like the statue of Liberty. We watched the kaleidoscope of color spread out before us dazzling then soft and blurry then it vanished. The next day it happened again, but the day after that the sun just quietly turned to dusk.
Sometime soon after the glass or maybe it was before, they burned early at the smelter. Of course they burned at the same time. Nine P.M. but we didn’t realize that.
In the afternoon we had been sitting on my steps, taking off our skates when the big car pulled up. A shiny black Lincoln. A man sat in the driver’s seat wearing a hat. He made the window near us go down. “Electric windows,” Hope said. He asked who lived in the house. “Don’t tell him,” Hope said, but I told him, “Dr. Moynahan.”
“Is he home?”
“No. Nobody’s home but my mother.”
“Is that Mary Moynahan?”
“Mary Smith. My father is a lieutenant in the war. We’re here for the duration,” I said.
The man got out of the car. He wore a suit with a vest and a watch chain, had a stiff white shirt. He gave each of us a silver dollar. We had no idea what they were. He told us they were dollars.
“Will they take them for money in a store?” Hope asked.
He said yes. He went up the stairs and knocked on the door. When there was no answer he turned the metal crank that rang a raspy bell. After a while the door opened. My mother said angry things that we couldn’t hear and then she slammed the door.
When he came back down he gave each of us two more silver dollars.
“I apologize. I should have introduced myself. I’m F. B. Moynahan, your uncle.”
> “I’m Lu. This is Hope.”
He asked then where Mamie was. I told him she was at First Texan Baptist, across from the library downtown. “Thank you,” he said and drove off. We both put our dollars in our socks. Just in time, because my mother was running down the steps, her hair in pin curls.
“That was your uncle Fortunatus, the snake. Don’t you dare tell a soul he came. Do you hear me?” I nodded. She whacked me on the shoulder and the back.
“Don’t say a single word to Mamie. He broke her heart when he left. Left them all to starve. She’ll get all upset. Not a word. Understand?” I nodded again.
“Answer me!”
“I won’t say a word.”
She gave me another whack for good measure and went back upstairs.
Later everyone was at home, in their own rooms as usual. The house had four bedrooms to the left of a long hall, a bathroom at the end, with the kitchen dining and living room on the other side. The hall was always dark. Pitch black at night, blood red from the stained-glass transom during the day. I used to be terrified of going to the bathroom until Uncle John taught me to start at the front door, whisper over and over to myself, “God will take care of me. God will take care of me,” and run like hell. That day I tiptoed because in the front bedroom my mother was telling Uncle John that Fortie had come. Uncle John said he wished he’d been there so he could have shot him. I stopped then outside the door to Mamie’s room. She was singing Sally to sleep. So sweet. “Way down in Missoura when my mammy sung to me.” When I came out of the bathroom Uncle John was in Grandpa’s room. I listened there as Grandpa told Uncle John that Fortunatus had tried to come inside the Elks’ club. Grandpa had sent word for him to leave or else he’d call the police. They talked some more but I couldn’t hear. Just bourbon gurgling into glasses.