by Lucia Berlin
We stayed awake waiting to hear his parents doing it but they never did. I asked him what he thought it was like. He held his hand up to mine so our fingers were all touching, had me run my thumb and forefinger over our touching ones. You can’t tell which is which. Must be something like that he said.
* * *
I didn’t go to the cafeteria on my break, but went outside the fourth floor onto the terrace. Cold January night, but already there were Japanese plum blossoms lit by the streetlamps. Californians defend their seasons by saying they are subtle. Who wants a subtle spring? Give me an Idaho thaw any old day with Kentshereve and me sliding down muddy hills on a flattened cardboard box. Give me the blatant blast of lilac, of a surviving hyacinth. I smoked on the terrace, the metal chair making cold stripes on my thighs. I yearned for love, for whispers on a clear winter night.
We fought only at the movies, on Saturdays in Wallace. He could read the credits but wouldn’t tell me what they said. I was jealous, as I was to be later of one husband’s music, another’s drugs. The lady in the lake. When the first title appeared he would whisper, “Now! Quiet!” The writing slipped up the screen as he squinted, nodding. Sometimes he’d shake his head or chuckle or say, “Hmmph!” I know now that the hardest thing the titles ever say is cinematographic but I’m still sure I’m missing something. Then I would writhe, frantic, shaking his arm. Come on. What’s it say? Hush! He’d fling my arm away and lean forward in his seat, covering his ears, his lips moving as he read. I longed to go to school, for second grade to hurry up and come. (He said first was a waste of time.) Nothing then, between us, would not be shared.
4420, Bed Two’s bell rang. I went into his room. His roommate’s visitors had accidentally moved the curtain over his TV as they left. I pulled it back and he nodded at me. Anything else? I asked and he shook his head. The credits for Dallas were floating up the screen.
“You know, I finally learned to read, you dirty rat,” I said and his BB eyes glittered as he laughed. You couldn’t tell really—it was just a wheezing rusty pipe sound that shook his zigzag bed, but I’d know that laugh anywhere.
Carpe Diem
Most of the time I feel all right about getting old. Some things give me a pang, like skaters. How free they seem, long legs gliding, hair streaming back. Other things throw me into a panic, like BART doors. A long wait before the doors open, after the train comes to a stop. Not very long, but it’s too long. There’s no time.
And laundromats. But they were a problem even when I was young. Just too long, even the Speed Queens. Your entire life has time to flash before your eyes while you sit there, a drowner. Of course if I had a car I could go to the hardware store or the post office and then come back and put things into the dryer.
The laundries with no attendants are even worse. Then it seems I’m always the only person there at all. But all of the washers and dryers are going … everybody is at the hardware store.
So many laundromat attendants I have known, the hovering Charons, making change or who never have change. Now it is fat Ophelia who pronounces No Sweat as No Thwet. Her top plate broke on beef jerky. Her breasts are so huge she has to turn sideways and then kitty-corner to get through doors, like moving a kitchen table. When she comes down the aisle with a mop everybody moves and moves the baskets too. She is a channel hopper. Just when we’ve settled in to watch The Newlywed Game she’ll flick it to Ryan’s Hope.
Once, to be polite, I told her I got hot flashes too, so that’s what she associates me with … The Change. “How ya coming with the change?” she says, loud, instead of hello. Which only makes it worse, sitting there, reflecting, aging. My sons have all grown now, so I’m down from five washers to one, but one takes just as long.
I moved last week, maybe for the two hundredth time. I took in all my sheets and curtains and towels, my shopping cart piled high. The laundromat was very crowded; there weren’t any washers together. I put all my things into three machines, went to get change from Ophelia. I came back, put the money and the soap in, and started them. Only I had started up three wrong washers. Three that had just finished this man’s clothes.
I was backed into the machines. Ophelia and the man loomed before me. I’m a tall woman, wear Big Mama panty-hose now, but they were both huge people. Ophelia had a prewash spray bottle in her hand. The man wore cutoffs, his massive thighs were matted with red hair. His thick beard wasn’t like hair at all but a red padded bumper. He wore a baseball hat with a gorilla on it. The hat wasn’t too small but his hair was so bushy it shoved the hat high up on his head making him about seven feet tall. He was slapping a heavy fist into his other red palm. “Goddamn. I’ll be goddamned!” Ophelia wasn’t menacing; she was protecting me, ready to come between him and me, or him and the machines. She’s always saying there’s nothing at the laundry she can’t handle.
“Mister, you may’s well sit down and relax. No way to stop them machines once they’ve started. Watch a little TV, have yourself a Pepsi.”
I put quarters in the right machines and started them. Then I remembered that I was broke, no more soap and those quarters had been for dryers. I began to cry.
“What the fuck is she crying about? What do you think this does to my Saturday, you dumb slob? Jesus wept.”
I offered to put his clothes into the dryers for him, in case he wanted to go somewhere.
“I wouldn’t let you near my clothes. Like stay away from my clothes, you dig?” There was no place for him to sit except next to me. We looked at the machines. I wished he would go outside, but he just sat there, next to me. His big right leg vibrated like a spinning washer. Six little red lights glowed at us.
“You always fuck things up?” he asked.
“Look, I’m sorry. I was tired. I was in a hurry.” I began to giggle, nervously.
“Believe it or not, I am in a hurry. I drive a tow. Six days a week. Twelve hours a day. This is it. My day off.”
“What were you in a hurry for?” I meant this nicely, but he thought I was being sarcastic.
“You stupid broad. If you were a dude I’d wash you. Put your empty head in the dryer and turn it to cook.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“Damn right you’re sorry. You’re one big sorry excuse for a chick. I had you spotted for a loser before you did that to my clothes. I don’t believe this. She’s crying again. Jesus wept.”
Ophelia stood above him.
“Don’t you be bothering her, you hear? I happens to know she’s going through a hard time.”
How did she know that? I was amazed. She knows everything, this giant black Sybil, this Sphinx. Oh, she must mean The Change.
“I’ll fold your clothes if you’d like,” I said to him.
“Hush, girl,” Ophelia said. “Point is, what’s the big deal? In a hunnert years from now just who is gonna care?”
“A hunnert years,” he whispered. “A hunnert years.”
And I was thinking that too. A hundred years. Our machines were shimmying away, and all the little red spin lights were on.
“At least yours are clean. I used up all my soap.”
“I’ll buy you some soap for crissake.”
“It’s too late. Thanks anyway.”
“She didn’t ruin my day. She’s ruined my whole fuckin’ week. No soap.”
Ophelia came back, stooped down to whisper to me.
“I been spottin’ some. Doctor says it don’t quit I’ll need a D and C. You been spottin’?”
I shook my head.
“You will. Women’s troubles just go on and on. A whole lifetime of troubles. I’m bloated. You bloated?”
“Her head is bloated,” the man said. “Look, I’m going out to the car, get a beer. I want you to promise not to go near my machines. Yours are thirty-four, thirty-nine, forty-three. Got that?”
“Yeah. Thirty-two, forty, forty-two.” He didn’t think it was funny.
The clothes were in the final spin. I’d have to hang mine up to dry on the fenc
e. When I got paid I’d come back with soap.
“Jackie Onassis changes her sheets every single day,” Ophelia said. “Now that is sick, you ask me.”
“Sick,” I agreed.
I let the man put his clothes in a basket and go to the dryers before I took mine out. Some people were grinning but I just ignored them. I filled my cart with soggy sheets and towels. It was almost too heavy to push and, wet, not everything fit. I slung the hot-pink curtains over my shoulder. Across the room the man started to say something, then looked away.
It took a long time to get home. Even longer to hang everything, although I did find a rope. Fog was rolling in.
I poured some coffee and sat on the back steps. I was happy. I felt calm, unhurried. Next time I am on BART, I won’t even think about getting off until the train stops. When it does, I’ll make it out just in time.
Toda Luna, Todo Año
Toda luna, todo año
Todo día, todo viento
Camina, y pasa también.
También, toda sangre llega
Al lugar de su quietud.
(Books of Chilam-Balam)
Automatically, Eloise Gore began to translate the poem in her head. Each moon, each year. No. Every moon, every year gets the fricative sound. Camina? Walks. Shame that doesn’t work in English. Clocks walk in Spanish, don’t run. Goes along, and passes away.
She snapped the book shut. You don’t read at a resort. She sipped her margarita, made herself take in the view from the restaurant terrace. The dappled coral clouds had turned a fluorescent pewter, crests of waves shattered silver on the gray-white beach below. All down the beach, from the town of Zihuatanejo, was a faint dazzle and dance of tiny green light. Fireflies, neon lime-green. Village girls placed them in their hair when they walked at dusk, strolling in groups of twos or threes. Some of the girls scattered the insects through their hair, others arranged them into emerald tiaras.
This was her first night here and she was alone in the dining room. Waiters in white coats stood near the steps to the pool and bar where most of the guests still danced and drank. Mambo! Que rico el Mambo! Ice cubes and maracas. Busboys lit flickering candles. There was no moon; it seemed the stars gave the metallic sheen to the sea.
Sunburned wildly dressed people began to come into the dining room. Texans or Californians she thought, looser, breezier than anyone from Colorado. They called across the tables to each other: “Go for it, Willy!” “Far fuckin’ out!”
What am I doing here? This was her first trip anywhere since her husband’s death three years before. Both Spanish teachers, they had traveled every summer in Mexico and Latin America. After he died she had not wanted to go anywhere without him, had signed up each June to teach summer school. This year she had been too tired to teach. In the travel office they had asked her when she needed to return. She had paused, chilled. She didn’t need to return, didn’t need to teach at all anymore. There was no place she had to be, no one to account to.
She ate her ceviche now, feeling painfully conspicuous. Her gray seersucker suit, appropriate in class, in Mexico City … it was dowdy, ludicrously the wrong thing. Stockings were tacky, and hot. There would probably even be a wet spot when she stood up.
She forced herself to relax, to enjoy langostinos broiled in garlic. Mariachis were strolling from table to table, passed hers by when they saw her frozen expression. Sabor a tí. The taste of you. Imagine an American song about how somebody tasted? Everything in Mexico tasted. Vivid garlic, cilantro, lime. The smells were vivid. Not the flowers, they didn’t smell at all. But the sea, the pleasant smell of decaying jungle. Rancid odor of the pigskin chairs, kerosene-waxed tiles, candles.
It was dark on the beach and fireflies played in the misty green swirls, on their own now. Out in the bay were red flares for luring fish.
“Pues, cómo estuvo?” the waiter asked.
“Esquisito, gracias.”
The hotel boutique was still open. She found two simple hand-woven dresses, one white and one rose. The dresses were soft and loose, unlike anything she had ever worn. She bought a straw bag and several combs with jade fireflies on them, for prizes for her students.
A nightcap? the manager suggested as she crossed the lobby. Well, why not? she thought and entered the now empty bar by the pool. She ordered Madero brandy with Kahlua, Mel’s favorite drink. She missed him acutely, wanted his hand on her hair. She closed her eyes to the sound of palms rippling, ice shaking in the mixer, the creak of oars.
In her room she looked at the poem again. Thus all life arrives / at the place of its quietude. No. And not life, anyway, the word is sangre, blood, all that pulsates and flows. The lamp was too dim, bugs clattered into the shade. As she shut off her light the music began again in the bar. Insistent thud of the bass. Her heart beat, was beating. Sangre.
She missed her own firm bed, the efficient lull of cars on the distant freeway. What I really miss is my morning crossword puzzle. Oh, Mel, what am I going to do? Quit teaching? Travel? Get a doctorate? Commit suicide? Where did that thought come from? But teaching is my whole life. And that’s pitiful. Miss Gore is a Bore. Every year a new student invented that, gleeful. Eloise was a good teacher, dry, dispassionate, the kind that years later the students liked.
Cuando calienta el sol, aquí en la playa. At any lull in the music sounds from nearby rooms came through the shutters. Laughter, lovemaking.
“Mr. World Traveler! Mr. Know-it-all! World Traveler!”
“Honey, I do! (ah dew),” the Texan drawled. A crash then and a silence. He must have fallen, passed out. The woman laughed throatily. “Praise the Lord!”
Eloise wished she had a mystery book. She got up and went to the bathroom, cockroaches and land crabs clattering out of her way. She showered with coconut soap, dried with damp towels. She wiped the mirror so she could look at herself. Mediocre and grim, she thought. Not mediocre, her face, with wide gray eyes, fine nose and smile, but it was grim. A good body, but so long disregarded it seemed grim too.
The band stopped playing at two thirty. Footsteps and whispers, a glass shattering. Say you dig it, baby, say it! A moan. Snores.
Eloise woke at six, as usual. She opened the shutters, watched the sky turn from milky silver to lavender gray. Palm branches slipped in the breeze like shuffled cards. She put on her bathing suit and her new rose dress. No one was up, not even in the kitchen. Roosters crowed and zopilotes flapped around the garbage. Four pigs. In the back of the garden Indian busboys and gardeners slept, uncovered, curled on the bricks.
She stayed on the jungle path away from the beach. Dark dripping silence. Orchids. A flock of green parrots. An iguana arched on a rock, waiting for her to pass. Branches slapped sticky warm into her face.
The sun had risen when she climbed a hill, down then to a rise above a white beach. From where she stood she could see onto the calm cove of Las Gatas. Underwater was a stone wall built by Terascans to protect the cove from sharks. A school of sardines swirled through the transparent water, disappeared like a tornado out to sea. Clusters of palapa huts stretched down the beach. Smoke drifted from the farthest one but there was no one to be seen. A sign said BERNARDO’S SCUBA DIVING.
She dropped her dress and bag on the sand, swam with a sure crawl far out to the stone wall. Back then, floating and swimming. She treaded water and laughed out loud, finally lay in the water near the shore rocking in the waves and silence, her eyes open to the startling blue sky.
She walked past Bernardo’s, down the beach toward the smoke. An open thatch-roofed room with a raked sand floor. A large wooden table, benches. Beyond that room was a long row of bamboo alcoves, each with a hammock and mosquito netting. In the primitive kitchen a child washed dishes at the pila; an old woman fanned the fire. Chickens darted around them, pecking in the sand.
“Good morning,” Eloise said. “Is it always so quiet here?”
“The divers are out. You want breakfast?”
“Please.” Eloise reached out her han
d. “My name is Eloise Gore.” But the old woman just nodded. “Siéntese.”
Eloise ate beans, fish, tortillas, gazing across the water to the misted hills. Her hotel looked blowsy and jaded to her, askew on the hillside. Bougainvillea spilled over its walls like a drunken woman’s shawls.
“Could I stay here?” she asked the woman.
“We’re not a hotel. Fishermen live here.”
But when she came back with hot coffee she said, “There is one room. Foreign divers stay here sometimes.”
It was an open hut behind the clearing. A bed and a table with a candle on it. A mildewed mattress, clean sheets, a mosquito netting. “No scorpions,” the woman said. The price she asked for room and board was absurdly low. Breakfast and dinner at four when the divers got back.
It was hot as Eloise went back through the jungle but she found herself skipping along, like a child, talking to Mel in her head. She tried to remember when she had last felt happy. Once, soon after he died, she had watched the Marx Brothers on television. A Night at the Opera. She had had to turn it off, could not bear to laugh alone.
The hotel manager was amused that she was going to Las Gatas. “Muy típico.” Local color: a euphemism for primitive or dirty. He arranged for a canoe to take her and her things across the bay that afternoon.
She was dismayed when they neared her peaceful beach. A large wooden boat, La Ida, was anchored in front of the palapa. Multicolored canoes and motored pangas from town slipped in and out, loading from it. Lobsters, fish, eels, octopus, bags of clams. A dozen men were on the shore or taking air tanks and regulators off the boat, laughing and shouting. A young boy tied a mammoth green turtle to the anchor line.
Eloise put her things in her room, wanted to lie down but there was no privacy at all. From her bed she could see out into the kitchen, through it to the divers at the table, out to the blue green sea.