by Lucia Berlin
Elsa said that had been the happiest day of her life.
After work the sisters took the bus home. They did grocery shopping in the neighborhood. They did not ever go out, but watched TV in Spanish at home. Every night before they went to sleep they talked about their mother, remembered her and prayed for her.
“And then our mother died. She. I. Ai ai!” Elsa cried out, convulsed with pain, buckling under the damp sheet. Lola and Inocencia came in. Lola gave her a shot. Clarissa told them that Elsa had been talking about her mother’s death.
“When Mama died, Ivan called us from El Salvador. The minute she heard it, Elsa became paralyzed. We had to call the ambulance. She was in the hospital for several months. This was three years ago. She has not been able to walk since.”
“Is the paralysis real, physical?”
“Oh yes. Her X-rays show deterioration, huge swellings in all her joints. It is very real. I believe that the pain is always there but that only sometimes, to punish herself, she allows herself to feel it.”
Clarissa looked down at Elsa, in a morphine sleep now on the bed. Salty tears had dried like tiny pressed flowers on her cheeks.
Inocencia asked Clarissa to join her and Lola at the table. They ate soup and good hot bread. Clarissa loved sitting there, listening to the birds. It was hard to tell them that she was leaving.
“Talking about her past is too hard on her. It is just the opposite of what we mean to do in our program. I’m going to have Angela come with her guitar tomorrow. You’ll see, this will make her happy, all of you happy, even the birds.”
On the way home to Oakland on BART, Clarissa decided to have Angela see Mr. Ramirez too. They would both like music much better.
As the train rumbled beneath the bay, Clarissa leafed through the notebook titled, “Elsa.” Almost nothing was written down. One page was blank except for, “I always liked oranges.” It was so pitiful that when the train arrived at her station she threw the notebook into the trash.
Several months later, the staff got together to bring one another up to date. Clarissa was glad to hear how good Angela was with Elsa and Sr. Ramirez. She and Elsa sang boleros for the entire hour of her visit. Every week, Mr. Ramirez played to Angela on the accordion.
Shortly after this, Clarissa left the program and went to work full time in the East Bay. She was very busy, and gave little thought to the old people, except for Mr. Ramirez, whenever she saw a map.
Over a year had gone by when Clarissa got a phone call from Will Marks, the director of Luna. He told her that Elsa was in San Francisco General, that she was dying. Clarissa said she was was very sorry, that she would go to visit her.
“Well, no,” Will said. “Actually she doesn’t want visitors. The slightest movement or effort is excruciatingly painful for her. But she keeps talking about one thing, obsessively. She says you promised to write her life story. She wants it before she dies. She probably has about another week, the doctor said. I was surprised, I must confess. It wasn’t like you to promise something and not do it.”
“Oh,” Clarissa said.
“This is vitally important to her. She feels she must have something to leave behind. Whenever she talks about it, she gets very ill.”
“Oh.”
Clarissa giggled, her hand over the mouthpiece. I’m talking just like her, she thought. He. When. Oh.
“Will, the first day I did say something about writing her life story. But it was incredibly hard to get material. For the last thirty years she went to work and came home. There is very little to work with.”
Like, nothing, she remembered. But she said, “I’ll bring you her story as soon as I can. In Spanish for her, because that’s how she told it. An English one for you. I do want to see her, though.”
Clarissa called in sick at work the next day, and the day after that.
She opened a computer file called “Elsa’s Life.” Damn, that’s it. Tabula rasa. The worst part was that she had forgotten details like which saints were given festivals, what food the mother cooked to sell on the street.
What Clarissa did remember was only conjecture. All she carried with her, all her “material” was her own fiction. What she imagined about the actual mother with the plucked eyebrows. What she suspected about the brother Ivan.
The details which were vividly clear to Clarissa, the children walking along the railway tracks in the moonlight, the men fighting in the kitchen her first night in the US, were things Elsa wouldn’t want in the story at all, had even said, “Don’t write that down!”
Clarissa went to the library, looked in atlases and travel books to get names of trees and birds. The name of the beach where the sisters must have gone. Twice. She looked in books of saints. She called the Salvadoran consulate. She bought international cookbooks and went to record stores in the Mission district. She went to the Mark Hopkins Hotel and asked to see the manager. She told him she was a mystery writer, got permission to look at the laundry.
She called in sick another day and still another, as she desperately worked on page one, then page two. Three and four were Christmas in El Salvador. Five, six and seven were Elsa’s mother. Expressions she used. How she french-braided their hair every morning. The dishes, with ingredients, she had taught them to cook, how she made them kneel to pray at night. Page eight was the beach and what they saw from the streetcar. Nine and ten were neighborhood festivals and New Year’s Eve, with details Clarissa got from questioning waitresses and busboys in Salvadoran restaurants.
The story of Elsa’s life was finally finished. Twenty-two pages, as long as she could possibly stretch it. The last page was about the birds, with their names, in the little house in the Mission. How their song expressed the love of Inocencia for her sister Elsa, who used to sing like a canary.
Clarissa took the story to Elsa on a Sunday morning. She got to the hospital early but there were already many ambulances and police cars, crowds in the emergency room. Clarissa’s heart was beating, her mouth dry as she rode elevators and walked the maze to Elsa’s room. Inocencia sat by the bed, dozing. Elsa was asleep, thin and tiny on the bed. It was a special bed, with a sand mattress, which caused less pain to all her bones.
Clarissa embraced Inocencia, kissed Elsa lightly on her forehead. Elsa smiled but didn’t speak.
“Did you bring her story?” Inocencia whispered.
Clarissa nodded, frightened.
“Please, read it,” Inocencia said.
“Some things may not be quite right…you just tell me and I’ll change them right away.”
“Don’t worry. Please, read,” Inocencia said.
Elsa’s brown eyes did not move from Clarissa. She cried out in pain only once, when Clarissa read about the death of their mother.
Inocencia wept softly throughout the reading. “Que bonito,” she said about the festivals and the trips to the beach. She especially liked the parts about the laundry and Mr. Whipple, how he used to call her Inocensense.
When Clarissa finally finished reading, Inocencia embraced her, sobbing, “It is so beautiful! Thank you, thank you. I will cherish this forever!”
Clarissa was dizzy with relief. She bent over Elsa, brushed her lips with a kiss.
“I hope you liked it,” she said to Elsa.
Elsa’s eyes were closed now but she spoke to Clarissa.
“That was not the story of my life. No. My life.”
Wait a Minute
Sighs, the rhythms of our heartbeats, contractions of childbirth, orgasms, all flow into time just as pendulum clocks placed next to one another soon beat in unison. Fireflies in a tree flash on and off as one. The sun comes up and it goes down. The moon waxes and wanes and usually the morning paper hits the porch at six thirty-five.
Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar. You aren’t at your desk or on the subway or fixing
dinner for the children. You’re reading People in a surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. You stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with the globe on the desk. Persia, the Belgian Congo. The bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. All is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid relentlessness of time.
When someone has a terminal disease, the soothing churn of time is shattered. Too fast, no time, I love you, have to finish this, tell him that. Wait a minute! I want to explain. Where is Toby, anyway? Or time turns sadistically slow. Death just hangs around while you wait for it to be night and then wait for it to be morning. Every day you’ve said goodbye a little. Oh just get it over with, for God’s sake. You keep looking at the Arrival and Departure board. Nights are endless because you wake at the softest cough or sob, then lie awake listening to her breathe so softly, like a child. Afternoons at the bedside you know the time by the passage of sunlight, now on the Virgin of Guadalupe, now on the charcoal nude, the mirror, the carved jewelry box, dazzle on the bottle of Fracas. The camote man whistles in the street below and then you help your sister into the sala to watch Mexico City news and then U.S. news with Peter Jennings. Her cats sit on her lap. She has oxygen but still their fur makes it hard to breath. “No! Don’t take them away. Wait a minute.”
Every evening after the news, Sally would cry. Weep. It probably wasn’t for long but in the time warp of her illness it went on and on, painful and hoarse. I can’t even remember if at first my niece Mercedes and I cried with her. I don’t think so. Neither of us are cryers. But we would hold her and kiss her, sing to her. We tried joking, “Maybe we should watch Tom Brokaw instead.” We made her aguas and teas and cocoa. I can’t remember when she stopped crying, soon before her death, but when she did stop it was truly horrible, the silence, and it lasted a long time.
When she cried sometimes she’d say things like, “Sorry, it must be the chemo. It’s sort of a reflex. Don’t pay any attention.” But other times she would beg us to cry with her.
“I can’t, mi Argentina,” Mercedes would say. “But my heart is crying. Since we know it is going to happen we automatically harden ourselves.” This was kind of her to say. The weeping simply drove me crazy.
Once while she was crying, Sally said, “I’ll never see donkeys again!” which struck us as hilariously funny. She became furious, smashed her cup and plates, our glasses and ashtray against the wall. She kicked over the table, screaming at us. Cold calculating bitches. Not a shred of compassion or pity.
“One pinche tear. You don’t even look sad.” She was smiling by now. “You’re like police matrons. ‘Drink this. Here’s a tissue. Throw up in the basin.’”
At night I would get her ready for bed, give her pills, an injection. I’d kiss her and tuck her in. “Good night. I love you, my sister, mi cisterna.” I slept in a little room, a closet, next to her, could hear her through the plywood wall, reading, humming, writing. Sometimes she would cry then and those were the worst times, because she tried to muffle these silent sad weepings with her pillow.
At first I would go in and try to comfort her, but that seemed to make her cry more, become more anxious. The sleeping medicine would turn around and wake her up, get her agitated and nauseous. So I would just call out to her, “Sally. Dear Sal y pimienta, Salsa, don’t be sad.” Things like that.
“Remember in Chile how Rosa put hot bricks in our beds?”
“I’d forgotten!”
“Want me to find you a brick?”
“No, mi vida, I’m falling asleep.”
She had had a mastectomy and radiation and then for five years she was fine. Really fine. Radiant and beautiful, wildly happy with a kind man, Andrés. She and I became friends, for the first time since our hard childhood. It had felt like falling in love, the discovery of one another, how much we shared. We went to the Yucatan and to New York together. I’d go to Mexico or she would come up to Oakland. When our mother died, we spent a week in Zihuatanejo where we talked all day and all night. We exorcised our parents and our own rivalries and I think we both grew up.
I was in Oakland when she called. The cancer was in her lungs now. Everywhere. There was no time left. Apúrate. Come right now!
It took me three days to quit my job, pack up and move out. On the plane to Mexico City, I thought about how death shreds time. My ordinary life had vanished. Therapy, laps at the Y. What about lunch on Friday? Gloria’s party, dentist tomorrow, laundry, pick up books at Moe’s, cleaning, out of cat food, babysit grandsons Saturday, order gauze and gastrostomy buttons at work, write to August, talk to Josee, bake some scones, C.J. coming over. Even eerier was a year later clerks in the grocery or bookstore or friends I ran into on the street had not noticed that I had been gone at all.
I called Pedro, her oncologist, from the airport in Mexico, wanting to know what to expect. It had sounded like a matter of weeks or a month. “Ni modo,” he said. “We’ll continue chemo. It could be six months, a year, perhaps more.”
“If you had just told me, ‘I want you to come now,’ I would have come,” I said to her later that night.
“No, you wouldn’t!” she laughed. “You are a realist. You know I have servants to do everything, and nurses, doctors, friends. You’d think I didn’t need you yet. But I want you now, to help me get everything in order. I want you to cook so Alicia and Sergio will eat here. I want you to read to me and take care of me. Now is when I’m alone and scared. I need you now.”
We all have mental scrapbooks. Stills. Snapshots of people we love at different times. This one is Sally in deep green running clothes, cross-legged on her bed. Skin luminescent, her green eyes limned with tears as she spoke to me. No guile or self-pity. I embraced her, grateful for her trust in me.
In Texas, when I was eight and she was three, I hated her, envied her with a violent hissing in my heart. Our grandma let me run wild, at the mercy of the other adults, but she guarded little Sally, brushed her hair and made tarts just for her, rocked her to sleep and sang “Way Down in Missoura.” But I have snapshots of her even then, smiling, offering me a mud pie with an undeniable sweetness that she never lost.
In Mexico City the first months passed in a flash, like in old movies when the calendars flip up the days. Speeded up Charlie Chaplin carpenters pounded in the kitchen, plumbers banged in the bathroom. Men came to fix all the doorknobs and broken windows, sand the floors. Mirna, Belen and I tore into the storeroom, the topanco, the closets, the bookcases and drawers. We tossed out shoes and hats, dog collars, Nehru jackets. Mercedes and Alicia and I brought out all Sally’s clothes and jewelry, labeled them to give to different friends.
Lazy sweet afternoons on Sally’s floor, sorting photographs, reading letters, poems, gossiping, telling stories. The phone and doorbell rang all day. I screened the calls and visitors, was the one who cut them short if she was tired, or didn’t if she was happy, like with Gustavo always.
When someone is first diagnosed with a fatal illness, they are deluged with calls and letters and visits. But as the months go by and the time turns into hard time, less people come. That’s when the illness is growing and time is slow and loud. You heard the clocks and the church bells and vomiting and each raspy breath.
Sally’s ex-husband Miguel and Andrés came every day, but at different times. Only once did the visits coincide. I was surprised by how the ex-husband was automatically deferred to. He had remarried long ago, but there still was his pride to consider. Andrés had been in Sally’s room only a few minutes. I brought him in a coffee and pan dulce. Just as I set it on the table, Mirna came in to say, “The señor is coming!”
“Quick, into your room!” Sally said. Andrés rushed into my room, carrying his coffee and pan dulce. I had just shut him in when Miguel arrived.
“Coffee! I need coffee!” he said, so I went into my room, took the coffee and pan dulces from Andrés and carried them in
to Miguel. Andrés disappeared.
I got very weak, and had trouble walking. We thought it was estress (no word in Spanish for stress), but finally I fainted on the street and was taken to an emergency room. I was critically anemic from a bleeding esophageal hernia. I was there several days for blood transfusions.
I felt much stronger when I got back, but my illness had frightened Sally. Death reminded us it was still there. Time got speeded up again. I’d think she was asleep and would get up to go to bed.
“Don’t go!”
“I’m just going to the bathroom, be right back.” At night if she choked or coughed, I’d wake up, go in to check on her.
She was on oxygen now and rarely got out of bed. I bathed her in her room, gave her injections for pain and nausea. She drank some broth, ate crackers sometimes. Crushed ice. I put ice in a towel and smashed it smashed it smashed it against the concrete wall. Mercedes lay with her and I lay on the floor, reading to them. I’d stop when they seemed to be asleep, but they’d both say, “Don’t stop!”
Bueno. “I defy anyone to say that our Becky, who has certainly some vices, has not been presented to the public in a perfectly genteel and inoffensive manner…”
Pedro aspirated her lung, but it still became more and more difficult for her to breathe. I decided we should really clean her room. Mercedes stayed with her in the living room while Mirna and Belen and I swept and dusted, washed the walls and windows and floors. I moved her bed so that it lay horizontally beneath the window; now she could see the sky. Belen put clean ironed sheets and soft blankets on the bed and we carried her back in. She leaned back on her pillow, the springtime sun full on her face.