I am reading Lucia Berlin’s posthumous A Manual for Cleaning Women – Selected Stories (2015). In the foreword, Lydia Davis describes the stories as electric, palpable, embedded in the real physical world. I would describe them as bonkers, extravagant, and wildly imaginative. Berlin is a master at creating and capturing unusual and seductive details about her characters, their relationships, and their surroundings. The stories are high velocity fragments. Fiction on speed. I am bewitched by both the stories and the intense craft of her writing.
My dead friend Scott was a cinematographer and a teacher of cinematography. Scott taught my the concept of craft. In film, rather than writing, Craft, as I understood it from our long, reflective discussions, requires making or producing something with ingenuity, skill, integrity, and most of all, care. What care Berlin has shown with her stories of transformation, her imagery, her clarity, the intimacy of her voice.
I loiter outside Frank and Jimmy’s boxes of cabbages and onions in the store frontage across the road, waiting for Berlin to pop out for a cigarette. She glances at me as she comes out of the laundrette, puts her hand in her bag, pulls out what must be a lighter and a pack of cigarettes, puts a cigarette in her mouth, cups her hand around a flame, and lights up. Her shoulders drop. Her bra straps are astray, ashen.
I cross the street and sit down beside her on the rough hewn wooden bench outside the laundrette. She is leaning back against the glass but I hold myself stiff, upright. Tell me how you do it, I ask, as I light my own cigarette. Do I say the words aloud or just will a response from her? I am star struck. Or if not, I should be. I don’t smoke but I do in this conversation. I look at my feet, rubbing the heel of my sandal into an errant purple cotton thread on the pavement, waiting for her answer.
She takes another draw, and pulls her bra straps up under her dress. I compare our feet, our sandals, the mottle of our goose skin in the unexpected chill of the morning. My feet are wider than hers, and my toenails are naked. Hers are wild plum. I am wearing a dress of my mother’s. The one in the photo of me aged around two with my mother and a chestnut horse, its neck outstretched as it reaches for the cheese sandwhich in my mother’s hand. The dress is sleeveless, cotton, with vertical stripes of sky blue, periwinkle and lilac. I’ve picked this dress because Berlin wears a similar one for a photoshoot for the Paris Review in 1961. Berlin is four years older than my mother. On the bench outside the laundrette we are the same age. In our thirties. At the height of our hair.
Berlin’s story ‘The Jockey’ is just over a page long. Written in the first person, the narrator works in the emergency department of a hospital. When the jockeys come in, fractured and seeping, bloody, depleted, she gets them because she speaks Spanish. The jockeys are Mexican. This story is light on plot and heavy on feeling. Its heft leaves me pondering the relationships between those in need and the strangers that tend to them after catastrophes. It is about compassion and tenderness. But it is also, I believe, about power, differentials in status, and what those who proffer a moment of tenderness get out of it. What’s in it for them?
Is Berlin posing this question in the last paragraph of the work?
‘We waited in the dark room for the X-ray tech. I soothed him just as I would a horse. Cálmate, lindo, cálmate. Despacio… despacio. Slowly… slowly. He quieted in my arms, blew and snorted softly. I stroked his fine back. It shuddered and shimmered like that of a splendid young colt. It was marvelous.’
It was marvelous.
I am accosting Berlin because it was marvelous. Lucia, I say. Can I call you Lucia? She turns to check on her two children. They are playing chariots with a large green plastic laundry basket and two teddy bears beside the oversized tumble dryers. The bears, lank and disheveled, have been tied to the basket with orange baling twine and the boys are sitting in the basket side by side, lashing the bears with imaginary whips. The boys are just in their underpants, the rest of their clothes presumably thunking round and round in washing machine number 3.
Berlin tilts her head back and blows a smoke ring towards the tram pulling up outside the florist across the road. I should have bought her flowers. Febrile daffodils. Or a slim bunch of bobbing tulips to go with her dress. Swaddled in translucent tissue paper. She doesn’t answer. Has she heard me? Lucia, I say again. I want to ask you about marvelous. Behind us there’s a scream from inside the laundrette, then another, and a woman’s voice scolding. Berlin doesn’t flinch. The screaming stops. The boys are fighting. Or the teddy bears are. Or the bears have turned on the boys.
When his back shuddered and shimmered, I go on, ignoring the growing kerfuffle behind the plate glass window, what was marvelous? The fact that the broken jockey glistered like a young colt? Or the warm feeling you got from tending the foal-like man child? I have said ‘you’ in error. It’s an easy mistake to make when the work is written in the first person. I don’t apologise. I’ll only make it worse.
Berlin gets to her feet. Smoothes down her cotton dress. Stubs her cigarette out on a broken red brick by the bench. Drops the butt into the metal bucket of sand. The bucket with the butts and the sand and the scattering of bloodied teeth. Waiting to be planted. Or dug in. I don’t look at her face. I should have bought the tulips. There is still time to cross the road. But the tram is blocking the flower shop. And old Mrs Ramson is so slow at the till. Her fingers too arthritic to pick out the coins for change. Or so she says.
Berlin’s boys are out of the chariot now. One has dropped his pants and pressed his bare bum to the window behind me. It flattens dimpled cream against the smeared glass. He is shrieking with laughter.
Lucia, I say. ¿Lo que es maravilloso?
Ah, she says, as the door bell tinkles on opening. Eso es un pregunto.
SANDERLINGS 