by Lucia Berlin
“Acheson, ma’am.” That surprised her.
“Willie, who is the secretary of agriculture?”
“Topeka and Santa Fe?”
I think we both were drunk with sleepiness. Every time she’d whack us on the head with the civics book we’d laugh harder. She sent him to the hall and me to the cloakroom, found us both curled up fast asleep after class.
A few times Sextus climbed up to Dot’s room. I’d hear him whisper, “The kid asleep?”
“Out like a light.” And it was true. No matter how hard I tried to stay awake to watch what they did, I’d fall asleep.
* * *
A weird thing happened to me this week. I could see these small quick crows flying just past my left eye. I’d turn but they would be gone. And when I closed my eyes, lights would flash past like motorcycles on the highway zooming by. I thought I was hallucinating or had cancer of the eye, but the doctor said they were floaters, that lots of people get them.
“How can there be lights in the dark?” I asked, as confused as I used to be about the refrigerator. He said that my eye told the brain there was light so my brain believed it. Please don’t laugh. This merely exacerbated the crow situation. It brought up the tree falling in the forest all over again too. Maybe my eyes just told my brain about crows in the maple tree.
One Sunday morning I woke up and Sextus was sleeping on the other side of Dot. I might have been more interested if they had been a more attractive couple. He had a buzz cut and pimples, white eyebrows and a huge Adam’s apple. He was a champion roper and barrel rider though, and his hog had won three years in a row at 4-H. Dot was homely, just plain homely. All the paint she put on didn’t even make her look cheap, it only accentuated her little brown eyes and big mouth that prominent eyeteeth kept open in a permanent semi-snarl. I shook her gently and pointed to Sextus. “Oh Jesus wept,” she said and woke him up. He was out the window, down the cottonwood and gone in seconds. Dot pinned me against the hay, made me swear not to say a word. “Hey, Dot, I haven’t so far, have I?”
“You do, I’ll tell on you and the Mexkin.” I was shaken, she sounded like my mother.
It was nice not worrying about my mother. I was a nicer person now. Not surly or sullen. Polite and helpful. I didn’t spill or break or drop things like at home. I never wanted to leave. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson kept saying I was a sweet girl, a good worker, and how they felt I was one of the family. We had family dinners on Sundays. Dot and I worked until noon while they went to church, then we closed up, went home, and helped make dinner. Mr. Wilson said grace. The boys poked each other and laughed, talked about basketball, and we all talked about, well, I don’t remember. Maybe we didn’t actually talk much, but it was friendly. We said, “Please pass the butter.” “Gravy?” My favorite part was that I had my own napkin and napkin ring that went on the sideboard with everyone else’s.
On Saturdays I got a ride to Nogales and then a bus to Tucson. The doctors put me in a medieval painful traction for hours, until I couldn’t take it anymore. They measured me, checked for nerve damage by sticking pins in me, hitting my legs and feet with hammers. They adjusted the brace and the lift on my shoe. It looked like they were coming to a decision. Different doctors squinted at my X-rays. The famous one they had been waiting for said my vertebrae were too close to my spinal cord. Surgery could cause paralysis, shock to all the organs that had compensated for the curvature. It would be expensive, not just the surgery, but during recovery I would have to lie immobile on my stomach for five months. I was glad they didn’t seem to want surgery. I was sure that if they straightened my spine I would be eight feet tall. But I didn’t want them to stop checking me; I didn’t want to go to Chile. They let me have one of the X-rays that showed a silver heart Willie gave me. My S-shaped spine, my heart in the wrong place and his heart right in the center. Willie put it up in a little window in the back of the Assay Office.
Some Saturday nights there were barn dances, way out in Elgin or Sonoita. In barns. Everybody from miles and miles would go, old people, young people, babies, dogs. Guests from dude ranches. All of the women brought things to eat. Fried chicken and potato salad, cakes and pies and punch. The men would go out in bunches and hang around their pickups, drinking. Some women too, my mother always did. High school kids got drunk and threw up, got caught necking. Old ladies danced with each other and children. Everybody danced. Two-step mostly, but some slow dances and jitterbug. Some square dances and Mexican dances like La Varsoviana. In English it’s “Put your little foot, put your little foot right there,” and you skip skip and whirl around. They played everything from “Night and Day” to “Detour, There’s a Muddy Road Ahead,” “Jalisco no te Rajes” to “Do the Hucklebuck.” Different bands every time but with the same kind of mix. Where did those ragtag wonderful musicians come from? Pachuco horn and guiro players, big-hatted country guitarists, bebop drummers, piano players that looked like Fred Astaire. The closest I ever heard anything come to those little bands was at the Five Spot in the late fifties. Ornette Coleman’s “Ramblin’.” Everybody raving how new and far-out he was. Sounded Tex-Mex to me, like a good Sonoita hoedown.
The staid pioneer-type housewives got all dressed up for the dances. Toni permanents and rouge, high heels. The men were leathery hardworking ranchers or miners, brought up in the Depression. Serious God-fearing workers. I loved to see the faces of the miners. The men I’d see coming off a shift dirty and drawn now red-faced and carefree, belting out an “Ah-hah, San Antone!” or an “Aí, Aí, Aí,” because not only did everybody dance, everybody sang and hollered too. At intervals Mr. and Mrs. Wilson would slow down to pant, “Have you seen Dot?”
Willie’s mom went to the dances with a group of friends. She danced every dance, always in a pretty dress, her hair up, her crucifix flying. She was beautiful and young. Ladylike too. She didn’t dance close on slow dances or go out to the pickups. No, I didn’t notice that. But all the Patagonia women did and mentioned it in her favor. They also said she wouldn’t be a widow for long. When I asked Willie why he never came, he said he didn’t know how to dance and besides he had to watch the kids. But other children go, why couldn’t they come. No, he said. His mother needed to have fun, get away from them sometimes.
“Well, how ’bout you?”
“I don’t care that much. I’m not being unselfish. I want my ma to find another husband as much as she does,” he said.
If diamond drillers were in town the dances really livened up. I don’t know if there still are diamond drillers, but in those mining days they were a special breed. Always two of them roaring into the camp ninety miles an hour in a cloud of dust. Their cars were not pickups or regular sedans but sleek two-seaters with glossy paint that shined through the dust. The men didn’t wear denim or khakis like the ranchers or miners. Maybe they did when they went down in the mines, but traveling or at dances they wore dark suits and silky shirts and ties. Their hair was long, combed in a pompadour, with long sideburns, a mustache sometimes. Even though I saw them only at western mines, their license plates usually were from Tennessee or Alabama or West Virginia. They never stayed long, a week at the most. They got paid more than brain surgeons, my father said. They were the ones who opened a good vein or found one, I think. I do know they were important and their jobs were dangerous. They looked dangerous and, I know now, sexy. Cool and arrogant, they had the aura of matadors, bank robbers, relief pitchers. Every woman, old ones, young ones, at the barn dances wanted to dance with a diamond driller. I did. The drillers always wanted to dance with Willie’s mother. Somebody’s wife or sister who had had too much to drink invariably ended up outside with one of them and then there was a bloody fight, with all the men streaming out of the barn. The fights always ended with somebody shooting a gun off in the air and the drillers hightailing off into the night, the wounded gallants returning to the dance with a swollen jaw or a blackening eye. The band would play something like “You Two-Timed Me One Time Too Often.”
One
Sunday afternoon Mr. Wise drove me and Willie up to the mine, to see our old house. I got homesick then, smelling my daddy’s Mr. Lincoln roses, walking around under the old oaks. Rocky crags all around and views out into the valleys and to Mount Baldy. The hawks and jays were there and the ticky-tick drum cymbal sound of the pulleys in the mill. I missed my family and tried not to cry, but I cried anyway. Mr. Wise gave me a hug, said not to worry, I’d probably be going to join them once school was out. I looked at Willie. He jerked his head at me to look at the doe and fawns that gazed at us, only a few feet away. “They don’t want you to go,” he said.
So I probably would have gone to South America. But then there was a terrible earthquake in Chile, a national disaster, and my family was killed. I went on living in Patagonia, Arizona, with the Wilsons. After high school I got a scholarship to the University of Arizona where I studied journalism. Willie got a scholarship too, and had a double major in geology and art. We were married after graduation. Willie got a job at the Trench and I worked for the Nogales Star until our first son, Silver, was born. We lived in Mrs. Boosinger’s beautiful old adobe house (she had died by then) up in the mountains, in an apple orchard near Harshaw.
I know it sounds pretty corny, but Willie and I lived happily ever after.
What if that had happened, the earthquake? I know what. This is the problem with “what ifs.” Sooner or later you hit a snag. I wouldn’t have been able to stay in Patagonia. I’d have ended up in Amarillo, Texas. Flat space and silos and sky and tumbleweeds, not a mountain in sight. Living with Uncle David and Aunt Harriet and my great-grandmother Grey. They would have thought of me as a problem. A cross to bear. There would be a lot of what they would call “acting out,” and the counselor would refer to as cries for help. After my release from the juvenile detention center it would not be long before I would elope with a diamond driller who was passing through town, headed for Montana, and, can you believe it? My life would have ended up exactly as it has now, under the limestone rocks of Dakota Ridge, with crows.
Acknowledgments
Throughout the several years that have gone into this book, support, enthusiasm, and effort have come from many quarters, and despite an inherent sadness, the process has often brought actual joy. Would that Lucia could know.
Profuse thanks to the publishers of previous volumes, including several who can no longer accept them. Michael Myers and Holbrook Teter (Zephyrus Image), Eileen and Bob Callahan (Turtle Island), Michael Wolfe (Tombouctou), Alastair Johnston (Poltroon), and John Martin and David Godine (Black Sparrow) make up the honor roll. All who could cooperated generously.
The writers Barry Gifford and Michael Wolfe spearheaded the effort behind the collection at hand. They, together with Jenny Dorn, Jeff Berlin, Gayle Davies, Katherine Fausset, Emily Bell, and Lydia Davis, were unstinting and expert in their work on behalf of the book. At FSG, an exemplary and wide-ranging team joined Emily, contributing with élan and commitment. I think you all know how grateful Lucia would be. Please know that I am as well.
—S.E.
A Note on Lucia Berlin
THE WRITING
Lucia Berlin (1936–2004, pronunciation: Lu-see-a) published seventy-six short stories during her lifetime. Most, but not all, were collected in three volumes from Black Sparrow Press: Homesick (1991), So Long (1993), and Where I Live Now (1999). These gathered from previous collections of 1980, 1984, and 1987, and presented newer work.
Early publication commenced when she was twenty-four, in Saul Bellow’s journal The Noble Savage and in The New Strand. Later stories appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, New American Writing, and countless smaller magazines. Homesick won an American Book Award.
Berlin worked brilliantly but sporadically throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and most of the 1980s. By the late ’80s, her four sons were grown and she had overcome a lifelong problem with alcoholism (her accounts of its horrors, its drunk tanks and DTs and occasional hilarity, occupy a particular corner of her work). Thereafter she remained productive up to the time of her early death.
THE LIFE
Berlin was born Lucia Brown in Alaska in 1936. Her father was in the mining industry and her earliest years were spent in the mining camps and towns of Idaho, Kentucky, and Montana.
In 1941, Berlin’s father went off to the war, and her mother moved Lucia and her younger sister to El Paso, where their grandfather was a prominent, but besotted, dentist.
Soon after the war, Berlin’s father moved the family to Santiago, Chile, and she embarked on what would become twenty-five years of a rather flamboyant existence. In Santiago, she attended cotillions and balls, had her first cigarette lit by Prince Aly Khan, finished school, and served as the default hostess for her father’s society gatherings. Most evenings, her mother retired early with a bottle.
By the age of ten, Lucia had scoliosis, a painful spinal condition that became lifelong and often necessitated a steel brace.
In 1955 she enrolled at the University of New Mexico. By now fluent in Spanish, she studied with the novelist Ramon Sender. She soon married and had two sons. By the birth of the second, her sculptor husband was gone. Berlin completed her degree and, still in Albuquerque, met the poet Edward Dorn, a key figure in her life. She also met Dorn’s teacher from Black Mountain College, the writer Robert Creeley, and two of his Harvard classmates, Race Newton and Buddy Berlin, both jazz musicians. And she began to write.
Newton, a pianist, married Berlin in 1958. (Her earliest stories appeared under the name Lucia Newton.) The next year, they and the children moved to a loft in New York. Race worked steadily and the couple became friends with their neighbors Denise Levertov and Mitchell Goodman, as well as other poets and artists including John Altoon, Diane di Prima, and Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones).
In 1960, Berlin and her sons left Newton and New York, and traveled with their friend Buddy Berlin to Mexico, where he became her third husband. Buddy was charismatic and affluent, but he also proved to be an addict. During the years 1961–68, two more sons were born.
By 1968, the Berlins were divorced and Lucia was working on a master’s degree at the University of New Mexico. She was employed as a substitute teacher. She never remarried.
The years 1971–94 were spent in Berkeley and Oakland, California. Berlin worked as a high school teacher, switchboard operator, hospital ward clerk, cleaning woman, and physician’s assistant while writing, raising her four sons, drinking, and finally, prevailing over her alcoholism. She spent much of 1991 and 1992 in Mexico City, where her sister was dying of cancer. Her mother had died in 1986, a probable suicide.
In 1994, Edward Dorn brought Berlin to the University of Colorado, and she spent the next six years in Boulder as a visiting writer and, ultimately, associate professor. She became a remarkably popular and beloved teacher, and in just her second year, won the university’s award for teaching excellence.
During the Boulder years she thrived in a close community that included Dorn and his wife, Jennie, Anselm Hollo, and her old pal Bobbie Louise Hawkins. The poet Kenward Elmslie became, like the prose writer Stephen Emerson, a fast friend.
Her health failing (the scoliosis had led to a punctured lung, and by the mid-1990s she was never without an oxygen tank), she retired in 2000 and the next year moved to Los Angeles at the encouragement of her sons, several of whom were there. She fought a successful battle against cancer, but died in 2004, in Marina del Rey.
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ALSO BY LUCIA BERLIN
A Manual for Cleaning Ladies
Legacy
Angels Laundromat
Phantom Pain
Safe & Sound
Homesick: New and Selected Stories
So Long: Stories 1987–1992
Where I Live Now: Stories 1993–1998
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Foreword: “The Story Is the Thing” by Lydia Davis
Introduction by Stephen Emerson
Angel’s Laundromat
Dr. H. A. Moynihan
Stars and Saints
A Manual for Cleaning Women
My Jockey
El Tim
Point of View
Her First Detox
Phantom Pain
Tiger Bites
Emergency Room Notebook, 1977
Temps Perdu
Carpe Diem
Toda Luna, Todo Año
Good and Bad
Melina
Friends
Unmanageable
Electric Car, El Paso
Sex Appeal
Teenage Punk
Step
Strays
Grief
Bluebonnets
La Vie en Rose
Macadam
Dear Conchi
Fool to Cry
Mourning
Panteón de Dolores
So Long
A Love Affair
Let Me See You Smile
Mama
Carmen
Silence
Mijito
502
Here It Is Saturday
B.F. and Me
Wait a Minute
Homing
Acknowledgments
A Note on Lucia Berlin
Also by Lucia Berlin
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux