by Lucia Berlin
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, fewer 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 dulce 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.
“El sol,” Sally said. “I can feel it.”
I sat against the other wall and watched her look out her window. Airplane. Birds. Jet trail. Sunset!
Much later I kissed her good night and went to my little room. The humidifier on her oxygen tank bubbled like a fountain. I waited to hear the breathing that meant she slept. Her mattress creaked. She gasped, and then moaned, breathing heavily. I listened and waited and then I heard the clink clink of curtain rings above her bed.
“Sally? Salamander, what are you doing?”
“I’m looking at the sky!”
Near her I looked out my own little window.
“Oye, sister…”
“Yes,” I said.
“I can hear you. You are crying for me!”
* * *
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 it’s more likely I’ll go endlessly on until I get put away someplace. I am already dotty. I parked my car around the corner because there was someone in my usual spot. Later when I saw the empty spot I wondered where I had gone. It’s not so strange that I talk to my cat but I feel silly because he is totally deaf.
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.
I teach in a pretty, fresa, mountain town now. The same Rocky Mountains Daddy used to mine, but a far cry from Butte or Coeur d’Alene. I’m lucky though. I have good friends here. I live in the foothills where deer walk dainty and modest past my window. I saw skunks mating in the moonlight; their jagged cries were like oriental instruments.
I miss my sons and their families. I see them maybe once a year and that’s always great, but I’m no longer really a part of their lives. Or of your children’s either. Although Mercedes and Enrique came here to get married!
So many others have gone. I used to think it was funny when someone said, “I lost my husband.” But that is how it feels. Someone is missing. Paul, Aunt Chata, Buddy. I understand how people believe in ghosts or have séances to call the dead. I go for months without thinking of anyone but the living, and then Buddy will come with a joke, or there you vividly are, evoked by a tango or an agua de sandia. If only you could speak to me. You’re as bad as my deaf cat.
You last arrived a few days after the blizzard. Ice and snow still covered the ground, but we had a fluke of a warm day. Squirrels and magpies were chattering and sparrows and finches sang on the bare trees. I opened all the doors and curtains. I drank tea at the kitchen table feeling the sun on my back. Wasps came out of the nest on the front porch, floated sleepily through my house, buzzing in drowsy circles all around the kitchen. Just at this time the smoke alarm battery went dead, so it began to chirp like a summer cricket. The sun touched the teapot and the flour jar, the silver vase of stock.
A lazy illumination, like a Mexican afternoon in your room. I could see the sun in your face.
Homing
I have never seen the crows leave the tree in the morning but every evening about a half an hour before dark, they start flying in from all over town. There may be regular herders who swoop around in the sky for blocks calling for the others to come home, or perhaps each one circles around gathering stragglers before it pops into the tree. I’ve watched enough, you’d think I could tell by now. But I only see crows, dozens of crows, flying in from every direction from far away and five or six circling like over O’Hare, calling calling, and then in a split second suddenly it is silent and no crows are to be seen. The tree looks like an ordinary maple tree. No way you’d know there were so many birds in there.
I happened to be on my front porch when I first saw them. I had been downtown and was on my portable oxygen tank, sitting on the porch swing to look at the evening light. Usually I sit out on the back porch where my regular hose reaches. Sometimes I watch the news at that time or fix dinner. What I mean is I could easily have no idea that that particular maple tree is filled with crows at sundown.
Do they all leave together then for still another tree to sleep in, higher up on Mount Sanitas? Maybe, because I’m up early, sitting at the window facing the foothills, and I have never seen them come out of the tree. I see deer though, going up into the hills of Mount Sanitas and Dakota Ridge, and the rising sun glowing pink against the rocks. If there is snow and it is very cold, there is alpenglow, when the ice crystals turn the color of the morning into stained glass pink, neon coral.
Of course it is winter now. The tree is bare and there are no crows. I’m just thinking about the crows. It’s hard for me to walk so the few blocks uphill would be too much for me. I could drive, I suppose, like Buster Keaton having his chauffeur drive him across the street. But I think it would be too dark then to see the birds inside the tree.
I don’t know why I even brought this up. Magpies flash now blue, gree
n against the snow. They have a similar bossy shriek. Of course I could get a book or call somebody and find out about the nesting habits of crows. But what bothers me is that I only accidentally noticed them. What else have I missed? How many times in my life have I been, so to speak, on the back porch, not the front porch? What would have been said to me that I failed to hear? What love might there have been that I didn’t feel?
These are pointless questions. The only reason I have lived so long is that I let go of my past. Shut the door on grief on regret on remorse. If I let them in, just one self-indulgent crack, whap, the door will fling open gales of pain ripping through my heart blinding my eyes with shame breaking cups and bottles knocking down jars shattering windows stumbling bloody on spilled sugar and broken glass terrified gagging until with a final shudder and sob I shut the heavy door. Pick up the pieces one more time.
Maybe this is not so dangerous a thing to do, to let the past in with the preface “What if?” What if I had spoken with Paul before he left? What if I had asked for help? What if I had married H? Sitting here, looking out the window toward the tree where now there are no branches or crows, the answers to each “what if” are strangely reassuring. They could not have happened, this what if, that what if. Everything good or bad that has occurred in my life has been predictable and inevitable, especially the choices and actions that have made sure I am now utterly alone.
But what if I were to go way back, to before we moved to South America? What if Dr. Mock had said I couldn’t leave Arizona for a year, that I needed extensive therapy and adjustments to my brace, possibly surgery for my scoliosis? I would have joined my family the following year. What if I had lived with the Wilsons in Patagonia, went weekly to the orthopedist’s in Tucson, reading Emma or Jane Eyre on the hot bus ride?
The Wilsons had five children, all of them old enough to work at the General Store or the Sweet Shop the Wilsons owned. I worked before and after school at the Sweet Shop with Dot, and shared the attic room with her. Dot was seventeen, the oldest child. Woman, really. She looked like a woman in the movies the way she put on pancake makeup and blotted her lipstick, blew smoke out of her nose. We slept together on the hay mattress covered with old quilts. I learned not to bother her, to lie quiet, thrilled by her smells. She tamed her curly red hair with Wildroot oil, smeared Noxzema on her face at night, and always put Tweed on her wrists and behind her ears. She smelled of cigarettes and sweat and Mum deodorant and what I later would learn was sex. We both smelled like old grease because we cooked hamburgers and fries at the Sweet Shop until it closed at ten. We walked home across the main street and the train tracks quickly past the Frontier saloon and down the street to her folks’ house. The Wilson house was the prettiest in town. A big two-story white house with a picket fence and a garden and a lawn. Most of the houses in Patagonia were small and ugly. Transient mining town houses painted that weird train station mining camp butterscotch brown. Most of the people worked up the mountain at the Trench and Flux mines where my father had been superintendent. Now he was an ore buyer in Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. He hadn’t wanted to go, didn’t want to leave the mines, working down in the mines. My mother had convinced him to go, everybody had. It was a big opportunity and we would be very rich.
He paid the Wilsons for my room and board, but they all decided it would be good for my character for me to work just like the other kids. We all worked hard, too, especially Dot and me, because we worked so late and then got up at five a.m. We opened up for the three buses of miners going from Nogales to the Trench. The buses arrived within fifteen minutes of one another; the miners had just enough time for one or two coffees and some doughnuts. They’d thank us and wave on their way out, Hasta luego! We’d finish washing up, make ourselves sandwiches for lunch. Mrs. Wilson got there to take over and we’d go to school. I was still in the grade school up on the hill. Dot was a junior.
When we got home at night she’d sneak back out to see her boyfriend, Sextus. He lived on a ranch in Sonoita, had left school to help his dad. I don’t know what time she got back in. I was asleep the minute my head was on my pillow. The minute I hit the hay! I loved the idea of a hay mattress like in Heidi. The hay felt good and smelled good. It always seemed like I had just closed my eyes when Dot was shaking me to wake up. She would already have washed or showered and dressed, and while I did she brushed her hair into a pageboy and made up her face. “What are you staring at? Fix up the bed if you got nothing else to do.” She really didn’t like me, but I didn’t like her back so I didn’t care. On the way to the Sweet Shop, she’d tell me over and over I better keep quiet about her seeing Sextus, her daddy would kill her. Everybody in town knew about her and Sextus already or I would have told somebody, not her folks, but somebody, just because she was so mean. She was just mean on principle. She figured she should hate this kid they put up in her own room. The truth was we got along well otherwise, grinning and laughing, good teamwork, slicing onions, making sodas, flipping burgers. Both of us fast and efficient, both of us enjoyed people, the kind Mexican miners mostly, who joked and teased us in the mornings. After school, kids from school and town people came in, for sodas or sundaes, to play the jukebox and the pinball machine. We served hamburgers, chili dogs, grilled cheese. We had tuna and egg salad and potato salad and coleslaw Mrs. Wilson made. The most popular dish though was the chili Willie Torres’s mother brought over every afternoon. Red chili in the winter, pork and green chilis in summer. Stacks of flour tortillas we’d warm on the grill.
One reason Dot and I worked so hard and so fast was we had an unspoken agreement that after we did all the dishes and cleaned the grill, she’d go out back with Sextus and I’d handle the few pie and coffee orders between nine and ten. Mostly I did homework with Willie Torres.
Willie worked until nine at the assayer’s office next door. We had been in the same grade together at school and I had made friends with him there. On Saturday mornings I’d come down with my dad in the pickup to get groceries and mail for the four or five families that lived on the mountain by the Trench mine. After he did all the buying and loading, Daddy would stop by Mr. Wise’s Assay Office. They’d drink coffee and talk about ore, mines, veins? I’m sorry, I didn’t pay attention. I know it was about minerals. Willie was a different person in the office. He was shy at school, had come from Mexico when he was eight, so even though he was smarter than Mrs. Boosinger, he had trouble reading and writing sometimes. His first valentine to me was “Be my sweat-hart.” Nobody made fun of him though, like they did of me and my back brace, yelling, “Timber!” when I came in because I was so tall. He was tall too, had an Indian face, high cheekbones and dark eyes. His clothes were clean but shabby and too small, his straight black hair long and raggedy, cut by his mother. When I read Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff looked like Willie, wild and brave.
In the Assay Office he seemed to know everything. He was going to be a geologist when he grew up. He showed me how to spot gold and fool’s gold and silver. That first day my father asked what we were talking about. I showed him what I had learned. “This is copper. Quartz. Lead. Zinc.”
“Wonderful!” he said, really pleased. During the drive home I got a geological lecture on the land all the way up to the mine.
On other Saturdays Willie showed me more rocks. “This is mica. This rock is shale, this is limestone.” He explained mining maps to me. We’d paw through boxes filled with fossils. He and Mr. Wise went out looking for them. “Hey, this one! Look at this leaf!” I didn’t realize I loved Willie since our closeness was so quiet, had nothing to do with the love girls talked about all the time, not like romance or crushes or ooh Jeeny loves Marvin.
In the Sweet Shop we’d close the blinds, sit at the counter doing our homework for that last hour, eating hot fudge sundaes. He could trip the jukebox to keep playing “Slow Boat to China,” “Cry,” and “Texarkana Baby” over and over. He was good at arithmetic and algebra and I was good with words so we helped each other. We leaned against each
other, our legs hooked around the stools. He even hooked his elbow onto the part of my back brace that stuck out and I didn’t mind. Usually if I saw that anybody even noticed the brace under my clothes I’d feel sick with embarrassment.
More than anything else we shared being sleepy. We never said, “Gee, I’m sleepy. Aren’t you sleepy?” We were just tired together, leaned yawning together at the Sweet Shop. Yawned and smiled across the room at school.
His father was killed in a cave-in at the Flux mine. My father had been trying to get it shut down ever since we got to Arizona. That was his job for years, checking on mines to see if the veins were running out or if they were unsafe. They called him “Shut-’em-down Brown.” I waited in the pickup truck when he went to tell Willie’s mother. This was before I knew Willie. My father cried all the way home from town, which frightened me. It was Willie who later told me my father had fought to get pensions for the miners and their families, how much that helped his mother. She had five other children, did washing and cooking for people.
Willie was up as early as I was, chopping wood, getting his brothers and sisters breakfast. Civics class was the worst, impossible to stay awake, to be interested. It came at three o’clock. One endless hour. In the winter the woodstove steamed up the windows and our cheeks would be blazing red. Mrs. Boosinger blazed under her two purple spots of rouge. In summer with the windows open and flies buzzing around, bees humming and the clock ticking so drowsy so hot, she’d be talking talking about the First Amendment and whap! bang her ruler on the table. “Wake up! Wake up! You two jellyfish have no backbone! Sit up! Open your eyes. Jellyfish!” She once thought I was asleep but I was only resting my eyes. She said, “Lulu, who is the secretary of state?”