Some short story writers — Chekhov, Alice Munro, William Trevor — sidle
up and tap you gently on the shoulder: Come, they murmur, sit down,
listen to what I have to say. Lucia Berlin spins you around, knocks you
down and grinds your face into the dirt. You will listen to me if I have
to force you, her stories growl. But why would you make me do that,
darlin’?
Berlin’s
stories are the kind a woman in a Tom Waits song might tell a man she’s
just met during a long humid night spent drinking in a parking lot.
They take place in the ragged borderlands on the outermost fringes of
American life: West Texas (“the Holy Land,” one character calls it),
inner-city Albuquerque, the slums of Oakland — all dust and buses and
late-night laundromats. Their characters are friendless children,
pregnant teenagers, unmarried women past middle age in search of
connection or just a bottle of vodka. More often than not, they are
alcoholics. Many of them might be the same person at different stages in
her life.
The
stories in “A Manual for Cleaning Women” are all linked, in that
they’re connected by the sensibility of the person who tells them, who
has lived them. Nearly all the stories are told in the first person;
when third-person protagonists surface, they tend to be a version of the
first-person narrator. Characters fade in and out. Sometimes they
share the author’s name, or a variation of it; sometimes they have
different names or go unnamed. What they all have in common is their
rawness, as in knuckles rubbed raw, exposed. In one story, a man in a
nursing home, a double amputee, screams constantly of the pain in his
legs. The nurse tells him to hush — it’s only phantom pain. “Is it
real?” the narrator asks the nurse, who shrugs. “All pain is real.”
All pain is real
could be Berlin’s mantra, the motto of this collection. It’s no
accident that one of her alter egos is named Dolores. The narrator is
sometimes a cleaning woman (as in the title story) or an emergency-room
nurse, two jobs that require constant contact with the messier aspects
of being human: blood, vomit, colostomy bags, hemorrhoids. The
agonizing moments relived here are often rooted in the physical. The
time her grandfather, a dentist, took her into his office and told her
to pull out all his teeth: “The sound was the sound of roots being
ripped out, like trees being torn from winter ground.” The trip across
the Mexican border to an abortion clinic, where she couldn’t go through
with it but watched another girl hemorrhage on the hallway floor. Her
arrest in middle age with her teenage boyfriend: After he is beaten by a
policeman, she licks clean his eyes, fused shut with blood. “The best
thing that could happen to you would be for you to be uncomfortable once
in a while,” a teenage narrator, during a rare moment of privilege, is
told by her teacher. In the context of this collection, it sounds like a
bitter joke.
The
emotions in “A Manual for Cleaning Women” are maximalist, but the
language is sparse and unadorned. Sentences are fragmentary, sometimes
just single words. They turn on the sudden flash of an image, not the
elegance of the construction. The language is so precise that it
paradoxically creates ambiguities. “The strange thing was that for a
year or so we were always at Angel’s at the same time. But not at the
same times.” “Everybody hated Grandpa but Mamie, and me, I guess.”
Sometimes the ugliness is tempered by a momentary lyricism, often in the
form of an overheard sound. Before her grandfather makes her pull out
his teeth, the girl in that story hears children next door playing
jacks, the sound “magical . . . like brushes on a drum or like rain,
when a gust of wind shimmers it against the windowpane.” In “Temps
Perdu,” with its incongruously romantic title, a young girl asks a boy
her age what sex is 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.”
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With
its unique power to transform, at least momentarily, sex in a Lucia
Berlin story is a possible (if unreliable) antidote to life’s pain.
Relationships — flings that last one night or one week — happen between
strangers who meet at random. Eloise, a middle-aged teacher mourning
her husband’s death, finds herself strangely at home in a cheap Mexican
hotel frequented by scuba-diving fishermen, one of whom teaches her to
dive. One day they embrace far beneath the surface. “She realized then
that his penis was inside her; she twined her legs around him as they
spun and undulated in the dark sea. When he left her his sperm drifted
up between them like pale octopus ink.” Is this realistic or even
possible? It somehow doesn’t matter. Berlin’s stories make love itself
seem so improbable that it is best viewed through the lens of magical
realism. In “Melina,” several men confess to the narrator that they were
once madly in love with a woman who “wasn’t like anyone in this world,”
her skin like white silk or milk glass. In an almost impossible
coincidence, the narrator meets her and befriends her. One night, after
dinner, she offers to read Melina’s palm and tells her the story of her
life. “You are a witch,” Melina whispers, amazed.
That
label appears more than once in “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” always
regarding a character who knows everything there is to know about
another person, or seems to. If that’s the definition of a witch, then
Berlin must have been one as well. (She died in 2004, on her 68th
birthday.) In “Point of View,” the closest she comes to writing about
writing, the narrator explains that she hopes “to make this woman so
believable you can’t help but feel for her.” That “can’t help but feel”
implies a certain defenselessness on the part of the reader, and a
triumphant power for the narrator. It’s an affirmation of the radical
empathy any great fiction writer must embrace. It’s also a spectacular
claim to authority — perhaps an authority that can come only from lived
experience.
Indeed,
these stories often feel more like stream-of-consciousness memories
than like fiction. They are all beginnings and middles with no ends,
which is to say that the end often comes the way it does in life, via a
death or a departure rather than a well-turned phrase. In her foreword,
Lydia Davis affirms that the stories conform in many of their details
to the outlines of Berlin’s life, which was “rich and full of incident,”
and describes her genre as similar to the French auto-fiction or
“self-fiction”: “the narration of one’s own life, lifted almost
unchanged from the reality, selected and judiciously, artfully told.”
One of Berlin’s sons says something similar, but closer to the way she
might have said it herself: “Ma wrote true stories, not necessarily
autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes.”
Though
I’m an admirer of Davis’s writing, I couldn’t bring myself to read her
foreword, or the book’s introduction by Stephen Emerson, until I had
finished the collection. Something about this book made me feel, as I
picked it up for the first time, that it was important to encounter the
stories on their own terms. Now I know a little more: that Berlin first
began publishing her stories at age 24, in Saul Bellow’s magazine The
Noble Savage, and later with small presses like Turtle Island and
Poltroon. Though her work was beloved by many writers and her volume
“Homesick” won the American Book Award in 1991, she never found a large
number of readers — perhaps because she resided on the margins of the
literary world, or perhaps because of the uncompromising, unsanitized
nature of her writing. Berlin’s stories are full of second chances. Now
readers have another chance to confront them: bites of life, chewed up
and spat out like a wad of tobacco, bitter and rich.
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