The teeth were all out. I tried to bring the chair down with the foot pedal, but hit the wrong lever, spinning him around, spattering circles of blood on the floor.
When the teeth are finally fitted into the grandfather’s mouth:
“A masterpiece, Grandpa!” I laughed too, kissed his sweaty head.
Estranged by their dysfunctional childhood and by the toxic presence of their unstable alcoholic mother, Berlin’s protagonist and her sister Sally are reconciled as adults. In a number of overlapping stories, which read at times, somewhat summarily, like passages in a memoir, Berlin’s protagonist joins her sister in Santiago, where Sally is stricken with terminal cancer. These stories of sisters establishing a close, intimate relationship in middle age contain the most tender of Berlin’s memories, enshrined in set pieces in which the sisters reminisce. Their favorite subject, of course, is their impossible mother, who continues to haunt them years after her death.
When our father died Sally had flown from Mexico City to California. She went to Mama’s house and knocked on the door. Mama looked at her through the window but she wouldn’t let her in. She had disowned Sally years and years before.
“I miss Daddy,” Sally called to her through the glass. “I am dying of cancer. I need you now, Mama!” Our mother just closed the venetian blinds and ignored the banging banging on her door.
And,
Even her humor was scary. Through the years her suicide notes, always written to me, were always jokes. When she slit her wrists she signed it Bloody Mary. When she overdosed she wrote that she had tried a noose but couldn’t get the hang of it. Her last letter to me wasn’t funny. It said that she knew I would never forgive her. That she could not forgive me for the wreck I had made of my life.
(From such casual asides we understand that, within Berlin’s family, Lucia was hardly acknowledged as a writer, let alone a talented and successful writer.)
Of the many characters in Berlin’s stories it is Sally who emerges as the most appealing, even saintly. It is Sally whom the narrator most mourns, among the dead who have gradually accumulated in the beautiful and stoically rendered stories of A Manual for Cleaning Women:
It has been seven years since you died. Of course what I’ll say next is that time has flown by. I got old. All of a sudden, de repente. I walk with difficulty. I even drool. I leave the door unlocked in case I die in my sleep. . . . But there’s never enough time. “Real time” like the prisoners I used to teach would say, explaining how it just seemed that they had all the time in the world. The time wasn’t ever theirs. . . .
A lazy illumination, like a Mexican afternoon in your room. I could see the sun in your face.
Lucia Berlin published seventy-six stories during her lifetime, in such publications as Saul Bellow’s The Noble Savage, Atlantic Monthly, and New American Writing; most of these were collected in three volumes from Black Sparrow Press: Homesick (1999), So Long (1993), and Where I Live Now (1999). A Manual for Cleaning Women includes a little more than half these stories but in an indeterminate order—it isn’t clear that the editor’s principle of organization is chronological, or thematic; indeed, if there is any principle of organization at all. In his breezy introduction Stephen Emerson remarks that Berlin’s short, sketchy story “B.F. and Me” is the last story she wrote, but it is not the last story in the collection. (This is “Homing,” a meandering meditation upon mortality and the passing of time: “A weird thing happened to me this week. I could see these small quick crows flying past my left eye. I’d turn but they would be gone.”) As a memoirist piece “Homing” is poignant and essential, but it is not a fully realized work of short fiction that could stand alone, apart from preceding memorist pieces in A Manual for Cleaning Women; you would have to already know a good deal about Berlin’s woman-writer character, or persona, to make emotional sense of it.
In her enthusiastic and generous foreword to this volume Lydia Davis singles out Lucia Berlin’s gift for sharply observed metaphors and arresting sentences but does not seem to acknowledge, or perhaps to have noticed, that very few of Berlin’s stories are what might be called “fully realized” works of fiction that might be included in anthologies beside work by Berlin’s accomplished contemporaries (among them, Cynthia Ozick, Alice Adams, Alice Munro, John Cheever, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, John Updike, Joy Williams, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Thom Jones). Brevity isn’t the issue, for Carver’s stories, some of them severely minimalist, are yet fully realized, requiring no context to complete them.
It is customary for short story writers to carefully arrange their stories for hardcover publication, in the way that poets arrange their poetry; it is never the case that writers toss stories together haphazardly, and it is unlikely that a writer would arrange his stories merely in chronological order of writing or of publication. (There are distinctive instances of story “collections” that constitute a subgenre midway between story collection and novel: Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, James Joyce’s Dubliners, Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, to name but three. In these, the arrangement of stories is as crucial as the arrangement of chapters in a novel.) It’s to be assumed that Lucia Berlin gave some thought to the order in which her stories appeared in the Black Sparrow volumes Homesick, So Long, and Where I Live Now and that, if she had lived to oversee her Selected Stories, surely she would have made clear which stories were taken from which books, and there would have been, very likely, a grouping of stories that had not yet appeared in any hardcover publication. Customarily, a Selected Stories, like a Selected Poems, will either begin or end with a section consisting of new, not-yet-published work. But Stephen Emerson has indicated nothing in the table of contents—forty-three titles are simply lumped together with no identification at all, not even dates of publication. Consequently we have no way of knowing if the first story in the volume, “Angel’s Laundromat,” is placed in this crucial position because it was Berlin’s first published story, or whether its positioning is thematically significant. (Though vividly and engagingly written, the story is far from being one of the more fully realized of Berlin’s works; like “Sex Appeal,” “My Jockey,” “Teenage Punk,” and others, it is essentially a character sketch, of a terminally alcoholic Jicarilla Apache who frequents the Laundromat frequented by the unnamed woman protagonist.) The title story “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” like “Emergency Room Notebook 1977,” seems to be comprised of sharp-eyed journal entries tenuously attached to a story of loss; a “young cowboy, from Nebraska” named Terry has died, but we know very little of Terry, other than the narrator’s grief for him. It isn’t clear why Berlin’s Selected Stories has been titled A Manual for Cleaning Women, out of other possible titles.
Thanks are due to Stephen Emerson, however, who speaks in his introduction of Lucia Berlin being “as close a friend as I’ve ever had,” and who has assembled this collection of Berlin’s work for a new generation of readers. Those unfamiliar with Berlin’s fiction are advised to read A Manual for Cleaning Women at least twice, for essentially this is a memoir of the author’s life related in installments and fragments, that fit together upon a second reading, and generate a considerable emotional power. As such, A Manual for Cleaning Women is an achievement greater than the sum of its heterogeneous parts.
A Manual for Cleaning Women:
Selected Stories
By Lucia Berlin
Edited by Stephen Emerson
EDNA O’BRIEN:
THE LITTLE RED CHAIRS
Edna O’Brien’s boldly imagined and harrowing new novel, her twenty-third work of fiction since The Country Girls (1960), is both an exploration of those themes of Irish provincial life from the perspective of girls and women for which she has become acclaimed and a radical departure, a work of alternate history in which the devastation of a war-torn Central European country intrudes upon the “primal innocence, lost to most places in the world” of rural Ireland. Here, in addition to O’Brien’s celebrated gifts of lyricism an
d mimetic precision is a new, unsettling fabulist vision that suggests Kafka rather more than James Joyce, as her portrait of the psychopath “warrior poet” Vladimir Dragan suggests Nabokov in his darker, less playful mode. Should we not recognize immediately the sinister “Dr. Vladimir Dragan of Montenego” the author has placed this poignant passage as an epigraph to the novel:
On the 6th of April 2012, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the start of the siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb forces, 11,541 red chairs were laid out in rows along the eight hundred metres of the Sarajevo high street. One empty chair for every Sarajevan killed during the 1,425 days of the siege. Six hundred and forty-three small chairs represented the children killed by snipers and the heavy artillery fired from the surrounding mountains.
Like a figure in a malevolent Irish fairy tale a mysterious stranger appears one day seemingly out of nowhere on a bank of a tumultuous river in western Ireland, in a “freezing backwater that passes for a town and is called Cloonoila.” The stranger is himself “mesmerized” by the “manic glee” of the deafening water. (It is helpful to know that “Cloonoila” is Gaelic for “despoiled field.”)
Soon, the curious, credulous inhabitants of Cloonoila fall one by one under the spell of Dr. Dragan, “Vuk,” or “Dr. Vlad”, a self-styled poet, exile, visionary, “healer and sex therapist.” To one, he resembles a “Holy man with a white beard and white hair, in a long black coat”; so priestly, one might “genuflect.” To another, he is a figure of hope: “Maybe he’ll bring a bit of Romance into our lives.” Schoolchildren think he looks “a bit funny in a long black smock with his white beard” but consider him harmless. The village schoolteacher is suspicious, suggesting that the stranger may be a kind of Rasputin, another notorious “visionary and healer,” but no one chooses to listen. The young Catholic priest Father Damien is initially wary of Dr. Vlad only because the outsider represents a threat to Catholic authority, and because he has advertised himself as a “sex therapist”—“This is a Catholic country and chastity is our number one commandment.” Edna O’Brien’s portraits of Irish Catholic priests are rarely flattering, and Father Damien is a font of clichés and empty rhetoric: “You see, many [local residents] feel a vacuum in their lives . . . marriages losing their mojo . . . internet dating . . . nudity . . . hedonism . . . the things I have heard in confession.” The presumed spiritual leader of the community is as readily taken in by Dr. Vlad as the others, confiding in him that “repentance and sorrow for sin is woven into our DNA.”
In these briskly satiric exchanges Edna O’Brien can be as wittily lethal as Muriel Spark eviscerating the foolish, but O’Brien’s sympathy is more fully engaged by those women—lonely, childless, naïve—who fall more deeply under the spell of Dr. Vlad: a Catholic nun who pays for a massage from the practitioner of “Holistic Healing in Eastern and Western Disciplines”—“[Sister Bonaventure] felt a flash of blinding light and was transported to the ethereal”; and, more crucially, the “town beauty” Fidelma, married to a man much older than she, and desperate to have a child, who contrives to be impregnated by the charlatan-therapist, but with disastrous results for both her marriage and for herself. Their union verges upon the surreal, it is so self-consciously “mythic”:
“Undo your necklace,” he said and kissed her and they lay down, his body next to hers, seeking her with his hands, with his mouth, with his whole being, as if in the name of love, or what she believed to be love, he could not get enough of her. Her breath came in little gasps, their limbs entwined, the healer and she, the stranger and she, like lovers now, as in a story or in a myth.
Later, Fidelma will feel that the union with Dr. Vlad has brought a “terrible curse on her village”—like a union with the devil. For her audacity, which (the reader knows) is a consequence of naïveté, not lust, Fidelma will be viciously punished, as in a fairy tale in which consequences are wildly disproportionate to causes. (The scene of Fidelma’s punishment by betrayed allies of Dr. Vlad is not for the fainthearted; O’Brien does not gloss over details.) Yet, somehow, perhaps not altogether plausibly, Fidelma regains not only her health and strength but acquires a confidence she had previously lacked; by the novel’s end she is determined to expiate the curse of a union with the devil by dedicating herself to the aid of desperate, displaced persons at a shelter for the homeless in London: “I could not go home until I could come home to myself.”
THE MOST BOLDLY IMAGINED element of The Little Red Chairs is, of course, the positing of an alternate universe in which a Balkan war criminal, the object of an international search for twelve years, turns up in a remote Irish village in the hope of establishing a new, much diminished life as a healer-therapist. In a more conventional work of fiction, and certainly in a work of genre mystery, the exact identity of Dr. Vlad would constitute the plot, and his outing would be the consequence of detection on the part of a canny protagonist among the villagers. One can well imagine a sly Nabokovian hide-and-seek with the reader in which the man’s exact identity is never quite established and we are confronted with the possibility that Dr. Vlad, like the mad narrator of Pale Fire, may be imagining his own lurid history. Instead, in an audacious move in which every creative writing admonition is tossed blithely aside, the author simply presents seven pages of densely iterated exposition in the (again, audaciously awkward) form of a dream of Dr. Vlad in which he is chastised by an old, now dead “blood brother” and comrade in the genocidal Serbian onslaught against Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croatian communities in the early 1990s: “You had been christened Young Torless because of the two terribly contrasting aspects of your character, the sane, the reasonable and the other so dark, so vengeful.” Later, the “Beast of Bosnia” will argue in his own defense at his trial in The Hague: “If I am crazy then patriotism itself is crazy.” (“Dragan David Dabic” was a false identity for the president of the Serb Republic in Bosnia, Radovan Karadžic´, apprehended in Serbia in 2008 after twelve years in hiding; known as the “Butcher of Bosnia,” Karadžic´ was tried in The Hague by the UN war crimes tribunal for war crimes including genocide. While he was in hiding, Karadžic´ practiced “alternative medicine.”)
But Edna O’Brien is not interested in sensationalizing her material, and The Little Red Chairs is not a novel of suspense, still less is it a mystery or a thriller; it is something more challenging, a work of meditation and penance. How does one come to terms with one’s own complicity with evil, even if that complicity is “innocent”? Should we trust the stranger who arrives out of nowhere in our community? Should we mistrust the stranger? When is innocence self-destructive? Given the nature of the world, when is skepticism, even cynicism, justified? Much is made of innocence in fiction, as in life, but in O’Brien’s unsentimental imagination the innocent suffer greatly because they are not distrustful enough; and usually these innocents are girls and young women, as in O’Brien’s compelling novel Down by the River (1996), in which a young rural Irish girl is impregnated by her father and further humiliated by being forced to endure the public politicization of her pregnancy by pro- and anti-abortion rights spokeswomen. As one of O’Brien’s female characters has said of her native Ireland: “Ours indeed was a land of shame, a land of murder and a land of strange sacrificial women.”
The Little Red Chairs, much farther-reaching in its historic scope, much more terrifying in its portraiture of the unrepentant war criminal, yet shares with other works of Edna O’Brien the pervading sense of guilt that is “woven into our DNA” and a determination to be free of this guilt. Initially one of Dr. Vlad’s dupes, Fidelma evolves into O’Brien’s most resourceful heroine as she throws off her very identity to live amid the homeless in London, and to remake herself by painful degrees (chambermaid, dog kennel worker) into a woman strong enough to help others. In her new awareness she hears stories told by refugees in a homeless shelter: displaced persons, victims of unspeakable horrors: “It is essential to remember and nothing must be forgotten.” She finds her community in a place that
promises “We Help Victims Become Heroines.”
In her lyric, candid memoir Country Girl, Edna O’Brien remarks that, wild as it must sound, she had wanted, as a girl, at least for an impassioned while, to become a Catholic nun. Such a vocation, in the service of others, is exactly what her courageous heroine Fidelma undertakes, in the midst of much struggle, choosing “not to look at the prison wall of life, but to look up at the sky.”
“DISPUTED TRUTH”:
MIKE TYSON
God, it would be good to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.
—Mike Tyson, New York Times, May 21, 2002
The afterlife of a champion boxer recalls Karl Marx’s remark about history repeating itself first as tragedy, then as farce. Even when the boxer manages to retire before he has been seriously injured, it is not unlikely that repeated blows to the head will have a long-term neurological effect, and the accumulative assault of arduous training and hard-won fights will precipitate the natural deterioration of aging; it is certainly likely that the boxer has witnessed, or even precipitated, very ugly incidents in the lives of other boxers. As welterweight champion Fritzie Zivic once said, “You’re boxing, you’re not playing the piano.” The boxer has journeyed to a netherworld of visceral, violent experience of which most of us, observing from a distance, can have but the vaguest glimmer of comprehending; he has risked his life, he has injured others, as a gladiator in the service of entertaining crowds; when the auditing is done, often it is found that, after having made many millions of dollars for himself and others, the boxer is near-penniless, if not in debt to the IRS, and must declare bankruptcy—(Joe Louis, Ray Robinson, Leon Spinks, Tommy Hearns, Evander Holyfield, Mike Tyson* among others.) Ironic then, or perhaps inevitable, that the afterlife of the champion boxer so often replicates this tragic role in farcical form: recall Joe Louis, one of the greatest heavyweights in history, ending his career with two ignominious defeats at the hands of younger boxers and a brief interlude as a professional wrestler, then impersonating himself as a “greeter” in a Las Vegas casino; recall the ghastly comedic effort of former middleweight champion Jake LaMotta (brilliantly portrayed by a bloated Robert De Niro at the beginning and at the end of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull) in smoke-filled nightclubs; Max Baer, Rocky Graziano, Sugar Ray Robinson, Marvin Hagler, Héctor Camacho, among others pursued careers in films or on television, with varying degrees of success.
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