A Manual for Cleaning Women (50 page)

Authors: Lucia Berlin

BOOK: A Manual for Cleaning Women

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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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Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook.