Where I Live Now

by Lucia Berlin

  Kim didn’t write that much. A lot of remorse poems about the child that got taken away from her. Dixie wrote sardonic things to the theme of “Vice is so Nice.” Casey was fantastic. She wrote about heroin addiction. Really got to me. Most of the guys in here sold crack but either didn’t use it that much or were too young to know what years and years of voluntarily returning to hell can do to you. Mrs. Bevins knew. She didn’t talk that much about it, but enough to make it seem pretty cool that she had stopped.

  We all wrote some good things. “That’s great!” Mrs. Bevins said to Karate once. “You get better every week.”

  “No lie? So, Teach, am I as good as CD?”

  “Writing isn’t a contest. All you do is your own work better and better.”

  “But CD’s your favorite.”

  “I don’t have a pet. I have four sons. I have a different feeling for each one. It’s the same with you guys.”

  “But you don’t be telling us to go to school, get a scholarship. You’re always getting on him to change his life.”

  “She does that with all of us,” I said, “except Dixie. She’s subtle though. Who knows, I might sober up. Anyway, CD is the best. We all know that. First day I got here I saw him down in the yard. You know what I thought? I thought he looked like a god.”

  “I don’t know about god,” Dixie said. “But he has star quality. Right, Mrs. Bevins?”

  “Give me a break,” CD said.

  Mrs. Bevins smiled. “OK. I’ll cop. I think every teacher sees this sometimes. It’s not simply intelligence or talent. It’s a nobility of spirit. A quality which could make him great at whatever he wanted to do.”

  We were quiet then. I think we all agreed with her. But we felt sorry for her. We knew what it was he wanted to do, was going to do.

  We got back to work then, choosing pieces for our magazine. She was going to have it typeset and then the jail print shop would print it.

  She and Dixie were laughing. They both loved to gossip. Now they were rating some of the deputies. “He’s the kind leaves his socks on,” Dixie said. “Right. And flosses before.”

  “We need more prose. Let’s try this assignment for next week, see what you come up with.” She handed out a list of titles from Raymond Chandler’s notebook. We all had to choose one. I took We All Liked Al. Casey liked Too Late for Smiling. CD picked Here It Is Saturday. “In fact,” he said, “I think we should call our magazine that.”

  “We can’t,” Kim said. “We promised Willie we were going to use his title, Through a Cat’s Eye.”

  “OK, so what I want is two or three pages leading up to a dead body. Don’t show us the actual body. Don’t tell us there’s going to be a body. End the story with us knowing there is going to be a dead body. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Time to go, gentlemen,” the guard said, opening the door. “Come here, Vee.” She blasted him with perfume before sending him back up. The homosexual tier was pretty miserable. Half of it was old senile winos, the rest were gays.

  I wrote a great story. It came out in the magazine and I still read it over and over. It was about Al, my best friend. He’s dead now. Only she said I didn’t do the assignment right because I told about me and the landlady finding Al’s body.

  Kim and Casey wrote the same horrible story. Kim’s was about her old man beating her, Casey’s about a sadistic john. You knew that they would end up murdering the guys. Dixie wrote a fine story, about a woman in solitary. She has an asthma attack, really bad, but no one can hear her. The terror and pitch black darkness. Then there is an earthquake. The end.

  You can’t imagine what it is like to be in prison during an earthquake.

  CD wrote about his brother. Most of CD’s stories had been about him. When they were little. The years they were lost to each other in different foster homes. How they found each other by chance, in Reno. This story took place in the Sunnyvale district. He read it in a quiet voice. None of us moved. It was about the afternoon and evening leading up to the Chink’s death. The details about the meeting of two gangs. It ended with Uzi fire and CD turning the corner.

  The hairs were standing up on my arm. Mrs. Bevins was pale. Nobody had told her CD’s brother was dead. There wasn’t a word about his brother in the story. That’s how good it was. The story was so shimmering and taut there could only be one end to it. The room was silent until finally Shabazz said, “Amen.” The guard opened the door. “Time to go, gentlemen.” The other guards waited for the women while we filed out.

  CD was set to get out of jail two days after the last day of class. The magazines would be out the last day and there was going to be a big party. An art exhibit and music by the prisoners. Casey, CD and Shabazz were going to read. Everybody would get copies of Through a Cat’s Eye.

  We had been excited about the magazine but none of us had known how it would feel. To see our work in print. “Where is CD?” she asked. We didn’t know. She gave each of us twenty copies. We read our pieces out loud, applauding each other. Then we just sat there, reading our own work over and over to ourselves.

  The class was short because of the party. A mess of deputies came in and opened the doors between our room and the art class. We helped set up tables for the food. Stacks of our magazines looked beautiful. Green on the purple paper tablecloth. Guys from horticulture brought in big bouquets of flowers. Student paintings were on the walls, sculptures on stands. One band was setting up.

  First one band played, then came our reading and then the other band. The reading went fine and the music was great. Kitchen dudes brought in food and soft drinks and everybody got in line. There were dozens of guards but they all seemed to be having a good time too. Even Bingham was there. Everybody was there except CD.

  She was talking with Bingham. He is so cool. I saw him nod and call a guard over. She went and got twenty copies of the magazine and followed the guard out. I knew Bingham had said to let her go up on the tier.

  She wasn’t gone long, even after all the stairs and six locked steel gates. She sat down, looking sick. I took her a can of Pepsi.

  “Did you talk with him?”

  She shook her head. “He was lying under a blanket, wouldn’t answer me. I slid the magazines through the bars. It’s horrible up there, Chaz. His window is broken, rain coming through it. The stink. The cells are so small and dark.”

  “Hey, it’s heaven up there now. Nobody’s there. Imagine those cells with six dudes in them.”

  “Five minutes, gentlemen!”

  Dixie and Kim and Casey hugged her goodbye. None of us guys said goodbye. I couldn’t even look at her. I heard her say, “Take care, Chaz.”

  I just realized that I’m doing that last assignment again. And I’m still doing it wrong, mentioning the body, telling you that they killed CD the day he got out of county.

  Elsa’s Life

  Luna was a state-funded art project where painters, musicians and writers worked with the elderly.

  The artists took turns evaluating the new clients, deciding what kind of project they would most enjoy. Clarissa, the writer, was sorry to realize how few of the old people wanted to do oral histories or to write stories. Painting and music were what they liked the most.

  Clarissa was assigned two people simply because she could speak Spanish with them. But she was sure Mr. Ramirez had a wonderful story. A Spaniard. Eighty years old, still fit and muscular, with black hair and moustache, broody brown eyes. He had been a sailor and had traveled all over the world.

  Every Tuesday morning she would show up at nine. They sat in front of the window that faced the bay. Clarissa opened a world atlas and made them strong coffees with milk and then they would begin.

  “Where were we?” he would ask.

  “Valparaiso.”

  “Muy bien. Copper. Next port Arequipa. Callao. Guayaquil. Buenaventura. Balboa. Colón.”

  And that was it. Week after week. Names of every port, with an occasional reference to cargo. Sewing machines
, olives, oranges, wire cables. Clarissa and Sr. Ramirez had already been around the world several times.

  He was handsome but never had a girl in any port. He never went ashore. He stayed on board in Madagascar, Rio, Marseilles. In every port, all over the world. When asked why, he said it was because he didn’t drink. The only romance he told Clarissa of was a three-day affair he had with a whore off a sampan in Singapore. He was alone on the ship, everyone else had gone on leave. She climbed up a rope onto the deck and she refused to leave. She wanted him to marry her and take her to the USA, didn’t understand that he wasn’t American. It wasn’t an American ship. He remembered her fondly. They cooked, just the two of them, in the galley. They danced to music from the shortwave radio. Artie Shaw’s “Frenesi.” At night they slept on a mattress on the deck, beneath the stars. At last, weeping, she slid down the rope onto a sampan which lay low in the water. The sampan was crowded with her family, all visibly disappointed in her.

  Elsa lived in the Mission district, in a small house only blocks from the 16th Street BART. A shabby grey building on a car-lined street, dwarfed by graffitied buildings. The windows and doors had metal bars on them. Inocencia, Elsa’s sister, opened the door only wide enough to peer over a metal chain.

  It was hot, summer, and they were ironing and cooking food and boiling laundry. The windows were steamed up. Ferns and banana plants and ivies dripped as if it were Veracruz in rainy season. Bright plastic flowers and real plants were everywhere. There were two or three bird cages in every room. Canaries, parrots, finches, macaws, love birds. Juan Gabriel singing “Noche de Ronda” could barely be heard above the cacophony of bird sings. Horns and sirens, pneumatic drills from the street sounded like faraway jungle noises.

  “Aaaiii!” wailed a blonde woman in a soap opera on top of the refrigerator. “Ai Diós mio, me está matando este amor!”

  “Ai, Ai, el dolor! Me está matando el dolor!” screamed Elsa from the bedroom.

  Elsa was fat and soft, with beautiful strong features. Distorted now with pain, her face resembled stone images of Coatlique giving birth to the world. She screamed in agony until her caregiver Lola gave her an injection. Almost instantly she stopped crying, lay panting, sweating under the sheet. The same soap opera flickered on a television set in Elsa’s room. She resumed watching it, her breast still heaving.

  Clarissa thought she’d give Elsa some time to feel better before she introduced herself. She went into the kitchen and talked with Inocencia and Lola.

  Clarissa explained the arts program to Elsa’s sister, told her what different things they had to offer. Inocencia was all for it.

  “Elsa is so sad, in so much pain. It will be nice for her to see a new face.”

  Elsa herself seemed to be depressed by the idea. “What can I tell you about my life? It is a boring story. Pain and loneliness and suffering.”

  “Suffer! Suffer! Suffer!” Lola said, handing Elsa three pills, spooning water into her mouth. Elsa’s arthritis was so painful she couldn’t lift her head or use her arms. Of course she couldn’t walk, had to be bathed and fed.

  “Maybe this lady will get your mind off your suffering!” Lola said. “Tell her all about El Salvador, about the ocean, the flowers.” Lola combed Elsa’s hair roughly. Elsa cringed. It hurt her to be touched.

  “You come,” Lola said to Clarissa. “Cheer her up, give me a break.”

  Elsa smiled weakly at Clarissa. Lola smoothed the bedding, cooled Elsa’s face with a damp cloth. She turned off the television, lowered the blind and left the room. Clarissa sat in the sweltering darkness, rocking quietly as Elsa drifted off to sleep. She too almost fell asleep, or rather she was awake but entered into a dream world in the tropical heat with food sizzling in hot lard in the kitchen and murmullos from the women, which even in English, murmurs, is a mesmerizing sound. Elsa slept peacefully except for an occasional moan. Tango music played and the parrot kept calling, “Vente, mijo! Vente!” Where exactly Clarissa drifted in her reverie isn’t clear, but it seemed a peaceful, painless place.

  The next time she came, Clarissa brought a notebook. She didn’t write much down. Elsa spoke very slowly. She seemed to enjoy describing the little house where they lived outside of San Salvador, at the end of the tram lines. Their father had been killed in a mill accident when Ivan was eight and the others all younger.

  “How terrible. What did your mother do then?”

  “Well…you see the woman we call our mother, she was really our aunt. She was a saint, a blessed person.” As Elsa spoke, her hands cramped into claws, her body arched in pain.

  “When our father died. When. When he died our mother left us. When. One day she was gone. We waited for her. A long time. Our aunt, our true mother, came and she fed us. She was our mother then. When.

  “We helped her cook food to sell on the street. My brother, Ivan. He. I made drinks from pineapple and mango and cucumber. Oh yes, cucumber makes a lovely drink.” Elsa rang her bell. “Bring me and Clarissa an agua of cucumber.”

  The life she described was hard. They went to a small school in the mornings. They worked the rest of the day, until late into the night. Elsa and her family weren’t Catholic. But her religion was one of the things that, when mentioned, caused her pain, literal pain. Her hands would curl up and she would thrash like a baby dragon in the bed.

  Clarissa’s notes were meager. It was painful to write the repetition of work work work. Clarissa asked Elsa if she had ever seen her birth mother. Elsa was silent and then she nodded.

  “But don’t write her down. She was not part of my life.”

  The mother had come in the night and had taken her three daughters. She had thin eyebrows and smelled of perfume and dry-cleaned clothes. They went on a train. Far. It was hot, midday, when they got to the town where she lived. As Elsa described this she began to writhe in pain and to cry.

  “Please stop. Never mind,” Clarissa said, although she did mind. “You didn’t stay there, no?”

  “No, Marta stayed. She wanted to stay. It was bad place, bad. She. Inocencia and I ran away in the night. We walked by the train tracks all night long. There was no moon. Just the boards and the shine of the track. In the morning I fell down. I was very sick. Typhus. I was asleep in the grass. Cool grass. A woman put me in a shed by her house. Inocencia kept on walking and walking day and night until she found our home in San Salvador. One day my mother, my aunt-mother, came with a man from the church. They took me home in a car.”

  “My brother, Ivan. He. He was very bad. He hit us. He hurt us. He. We stopped school because there was no money. We cooked food starting very early and took it by tram to sell outside factories. No, Ivan didn’t work. He.”

  “When I was fifteen my mother sent me here to live with an aunt and uncle. Inocencia stayed. She came much later. Ivan? No. He.”

  Clarissa saw that Elsa was in terrible pain. She rang the bell for Lola to come give her an injection.

  “Let’s listen to the radio for a while,” Clarissa said. “When you fall asleep I’ll leave.”

  It was easy for Clarissa to assume that painful memories exacerbated Elsa’s very real physical pain. But the stories she told about her difficult early years in the United States did not seem to upset her or cause her any physical distress, no matter how terrible they were. She slept on a cot in the kitchen of her relative’s apartment. It was hard to sleep as many people lived there and the men drank most of the night. Elsa worked in a laundry in the Mission district, on the mangle, doing sheets for $3.00 an hour, ten hours a day. After work she would come home, eat and go to bed, year in and year out for five years. She didn’t learn English or go out anywhere, had never been to Golden Gate Park or to the Wharf or even to movies in the neighborhood.

  “No, I never went anywhere after work. I wasn’t pretty. I was. I,” she said.

  It wasn’t that her sentences trailed off but simply as if that was all she could bear to say. “One day I closed my eyes because I felt sick. My boss shook me. Then he.
”

  Another day she was so tired she fell asleep standing up, burned her hand badly on the mangle. She was off work for weeks but didn’t get any disability. When her hand healed they didn’t give her back her job. Olivia, a woman in the Mission, got her another job ironing coveralls in another laundry, where she stayed for four years. But she began slowing down because of the arthritis in her neck and hands. Her knees hurt standing all day. She got fired for not doing enough coveralls in one day. This time though, the woman Olivia helped her get disability compensation. She taught her how to apply for medical insurance and food stamps, took her to the places she needed to go. In all those years Elsa had never been on a bus, had lived in the Mission as one would in an isolated mountain town. When Inocencia decided to move to the United States, Olivia helped the two of them find this little house that at first they shared with an old widower they cooked and cleaned for. He left them the house when he died.

  Olivia found them a wonderful job, working in the laundry of the Mark Hopkins Hotel, ironing sheets. How happy they had been! Their boss, Mr. Whipple, was kind to them, always made a special effort to speak to them. He called Elsa his canary because she sang so sweetly. A few times, when the laundry was short-handed, they were allowed to deliver towels or hand laundry to people’s rooms in the hotel. To ride in the beautiful elevator and knock on the doors. Smell the rooms. Once a man gave them a twenty-dollar bill. He laughed when they went back, said no, it wasn’t a mistake.

  Elsa was beginning to get very sick then. Inocencia worked even harder. She put sheets she had ironed on Elsa’s pile so she would not get fired. Mr. Whipple caught her doing that. The sisters had begun to cry, thinking they would both be fired. But he was a good man. He was a saint. He said, “Now, even sick as you are, Elsa, you work harder than most girls I’ve had here. I don’t want Inocensense knocking herself out and making herself sick too, got that? You two just do what you can. Long as you keep on singing, I won’t complain about your work.”