by Lucia Berlin
“I don’t want to send you back to the detention home.”
“Why not?”
“Because you are a bright boy. I want to see you learn something here, to graduate from San Marco’s. I want to see you go on to high school, to…”
“Come on, Sister,” Tim drawled. “You just want to button my shirt.”
“Shut up!” I hit him across the mouth. My hand remained white in his dark skin. He did not move. I wanted to be sick. Sister Lourdes left the room. Tim and I stood, facing each other, listening as she started the ninth-grade prayers … Blessed art Thou amongst women, Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus …
“How come you hit me?” Tim asked softly.
I started to answer him, to say, “Because you were insolent and unkind,” but I saw his smile of contempt as he waited for me to say just that.
“I hit you because I was angry. About Dolores and the rock. Because I felt hurt and foolish.”
His dark eyes searched my face. For an instant the veil was gone.
“I guess we’re even then,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “let’s go to class.”
I walked with Tim down the hall, avoiding the beat of his walk.
Point of View
Imagine Chekhov’s story “Grief” in the first person. An old man telling us his son has just died. We would feel embarrassed, uncomfortable, even bored, reacting precisely as the cabman’s fares in the story did. But Chekhov’s impartial voice imbues the man with dignity. We absorb the author’s compassion for him and are deeply moved, if not by the son’s death, by the old man talking to his horse.
I think it’s because we are all pretty insecure.
I mean if I just presented to you this woman I’m writing about now …
“I’m a single woman in her late fifties. I work in a doctor’s office. I ride home on the bus. Every Saturday I do my laundry and then I shop at Lucky’s and buy the Sunday Chronicle and go home.” You’d say, Give me a break.
But my story opens with “Every Saturday, after the laundromat and the grocery store, she bought the Sunday Chronicle.” You’ll listen to all the compulsive, obsessive boring little details of this woman’s, Henrietta’s, life only because it is written in the third person. You’ll feel, hell if the narrator thinks there is something in this dreary creature worth writing about there must be. I’ll read on and see what happens.
Nothing happens, actually. In fact the story isn’t even written yet. What I hope to do is, by the use of intricate detail, to make this woman so believable you can’t help but feel for her.
Most writers use props and scenery from their own lives. For example, my Henrietta eats her meager little dinner every night on a blue place mat, using exquisite heavy Italian stainless cutlery. An odd detail, inconsistent, it may seem, with this woman who cuts out coupons for Brawny towels, but it engages the reader’s curiosity. At least I hope it will.
I don’t think I’ll give any explanation in the story. I myself eat with such elegant cutlery. Last year I ordered six place settings from the Museum of Modern Art Christmas catalog. Very expensive, a hundred dollars, but worth it, it seemed. I have six plates and six chairs. Maybe I’ll give a dinner party, I thought at the time. It turned out to be, however, a hundred for six pieces. Two forks, two knives, two spoons. One place setting. I was embarrassed to send them back, figured well maybe next year I’d order another one.
Henrietta eats with her pretty cutlery and drinks Calistoga from a goblet. She has salad in a wooden bowl and a Lean Cuisine on a dinner plate. While she eats she reads the This World section where all the articles seem to have been written by the same first person.
Henrietta can’t wait for Monday. She is in love with Dr. B., the nephrologist. Many nurse/secretaries are in love with “their” doctors. Sort of a Della Street syndrome.
Dr. B. is based upon the nephrologist I used to work for. I certainly wasn’t in love with him. I’d joke sometimes and say we had a love/hate relationship. He was so hateful it must have reminded me of how love affairs get, sometimes.
Shirley, my predecessor, was in love with him, though. She pointed out all the birthday presents she had given him. The planter with the ivy and the little brass bicycle. The mirror with the frosted koala bear. The pen set. She said he just loved all his presents except for the furry sheepskin bicycle seat. She had to exchange it for biking gloves.
In my story Dr. B. laughs at Henrietta about the seat, is really mocking and cruel, as he most certainly could be. This will actually be the climax of the story, when she realizes the disdain he feels for her, how pitiful her love is.
The day I started working there I ordered paper gowns. Shirley used cotton ones: “Blue plaid for boys, pink roses for girls.” (Most of our patients were so old they used walkers.) Every weekend she’d lug the laundry home on the bus and not only wash it but starch and iron it. I have my Henrietta doing this too … ironing on Sunday, after she cleans her apartment.
Of course a lot of my story is about Henrietta’s habits. Habits. Not even that they are so bad in themselves, but they go on for so long. Every Saturday, year after year.
Every Sunday Henrietta reads the pink section. The horoscope first, always on page 16, the paper’s habit. Usually the stars have racy things to say about Henrietta. “Full moon, sexy Scorp, and you know what that means! Get set to sizzle!”
On Sundays, after cleaning and ironing, Henrietta makes something special for dinner. A Cornish game hen. Stove Top stuffing and cranberry sauce. Creamed peas. A Forever Yours for dessert.
After she washes the dishes she watches 60 Minutes. It’s not that she is particularly interested in the program. She likes the staff. Diane Sawyer so well-bred and pretty and the men are all solid and reliable and concerned. She likes it when they look worried and shake their heads or when it’s a funny story they smile and shake their heads. Most of all she likes the shots of the big watch. The minute hand and the click click click of the time.
Then she watches Murder, She Wrote, which she doesn’t like but there is nothing else on.
I’m having a hard time writing about Sunday. Getting the long hollow feeling of Sundays. No mail and faraway lawn mowers, the hopelessness.
Or how to describe Henrietta’s eagerness for Monday morning. The tick tick of his bicycle pedals and the click when he locks his door to change into his blue suit.
“Have a nice weekend?” she asks. He never answers. He never says hello or good-bye.
At night she holds the door open for him, as he is walking out with his bike.
“Good-bye! Have a good one!” she smiles.
“A good what? For Christ’s sake, stop saying that.”
But no matter how nasty he is to her Henrietta believes there is a bond between them. He has a clubfoot, a severe limp, whereas she has scoliosis, a curvature. A hunchback, in fact. She is self-conscious and shy but understands how he can be so caustic. Once he told her she had the two qualifications for being a nurse … “stupid and servile.”
After Murder, She Wrote, Henrietta takes a bath, pampering herself with floral-scented bath beads.
She watches the news then as she smoothes lotion on her face and hands. She has put water on for tea. She likes the weather report. The little suns above Nebraska and North Dakota. Rain clouds over Florida and Louisiana.
She lies in bed, sipping Sleepytime tea. She wishes she had her old electric blanket with the switch LO-MED-HOT. The new blanket was advertised as the Intelligent Electric Blanket. The blanket knows it isn’t cold so it doesn’t get hot. She wishes it would get hot, comforting. It’s too smart for its own good! She laughs out loud. The sound is startling in the little room.
She turns off the TV and sips her tea, listening to cars pulling in and out of the Arco station across the street. Sometimes a car stops with a screech at the telephone booth. A car door slams and soon the car speeds away.
She hears someone drive up slowly to the phones. Loud jazz music comes from th
e car. Henrietta turns off the light, raises the blind by her bed, just a little. The window is steamed. The car radio plays Lester Young. The man talking on the phone holds it with his chin. He wipes his forehead with a handkerchief. I lean against the cool windowsill and watch him. I listen to the sweet saxophone play “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.” In the steam of the glass I write a word. What? My name? A man’s name? Henrietta? Love? Whatever it is I erase it quickly before anyone can see.
Her First Detox
Carlotta woke, during the fourth week of steady October rain, in the County detox ward. I’m in a hospital, she thought, and walked shakily down the hall. There were two men in a large room that would have been sunny if it weren’t raining. The men were ugly, wore black-and-white denim. They were bruised, had bloody bandages. These men are here from a prison but then she saw that she was wearing black-and-white denim, that she was bruised and bloody too. She remembered handcuffs, a straitjacket.
It was Halloween. The volunteer AA lady taught them how to make pumpkins. You blow up the balloon, she knots it. Then you stick gooey paper strips all around it. The next night, when your balloon is dry, you paint it orange. The lady cuts out the eyes and the nose and the mouth. You get to choose whether you want a smile or a frown on yours. You don’t get scissors.
There was much childlike laughter, because of the slippery balloons, their shaky hands. It was hard, making the pumpkins. If they had been allowed to cut out the eyes and nose and mouth they would have been given those dull dumb scissors. Whenever they wanted to write they were given fat pencils, like first grade.
Carlotta had a good time in the detox ward. The men were awkwardly gallant toward her. She was the only woman, she was pretty, didn’t “look like a lush.” Her gray eyes were clear, her laughter easy. She had transformed her black-and-white pajamas with a brilliant magenta scarf.
Most of the men were street winos. The police brought them in or they simply checked in when their SSI money ran out, when there was no port, no shelter. County was a great place to dry out, they told her. They give you Valium, Thorazine, Dilantin if you seize. Big yellow-jacket Nembutals at night. This wouldn’t be so for much longer, soon there would be only “social model” detoxes, with no drugs at all. “Shit—why come?” Pepe asked.
The food is good, but cold. You have to get your own tray off the cart and carry it to the table. Most people can’t do that at first, or they drop it. Some of the men shook so bad they had to be fed, or they just bent down and lapped up their food, like cats.
The patients were given Antabuse after the third day. If you drink alcohol within seventy-two hours after taking Antabuse you will be deathly ill. Convulsions, chest pains, shock, often death. The patients saw the Antabuse movie every morning at nine thirty, before Group Therapy. Later, in the sunroom, the men figured out how soon they could drink again. They wrote on napkins, with fat pencils. Carlotta alone said she wouldn’t drink again.
“Wha’ you drink, woman?” Willie asked.
“Jim Beam.”
“Jim Beam?” The men all laughed.
“Shee-ut … you ain’ no alkie. Us alkies drink sweet wine.”
“Oo-wee how sweet it is!”
“Wha’ the fuck you doin’ here anyhows?”
“You mean what’s a nice girl like me…?” What was she doing here, anyway? She hadn’t thought about it yet.
“Jim Beam. You don’ need detox…”
“She sure as hell did. She was a crazy woman when they brought her in, beatin’ on that chink cop. Wong. Then later she seized bad, ’bout three minutes bangin’ around like a wrung-neck chicken.”
Carlotta remembered nothing. The nurse told her she had wrecked her car into a wall. The police had brought her here instead of to jail when they found out she was a teacher, had four kids, no husband. No priors, whatever they were.
“You get DTs?” Pepe asked.
“Yes,” she lied. God, just listen to me … please accept me you guys, please like me you runny-eyed bums.
I don’t know what DTs are. The doctor asked me that too. I said yes and he wrote it down. I think I’ve had them all my life, if, in fact, they are visions of demons.
They all laughed, plastering sticky paper on their balloons. How Joe had been eighty-sixed out of the Adam and Eve, figured he could find a better bar. Climbed into a taxi hollering, “To the Shalimar!” but the taxi was a squad car and they brought him here. The difference between a connoisseur and a wino? The connoisseur takes it out of the paper bag. Mac, on the virtues of Thunderbird wine: “Dumb dagos fergot to take their socks off.”
At night after the balloons and the last Valium came the AA people. Half of the patients nodded out through the whole meeting, listening to them tell how they used to be at the bottom too. One AA woman told how she used to chew garlic all day so nobody would smell liquor on her breath. Carlotta chewed cloves. Her mother had breathed fingerfuls of Vicks salve. Uncle John always had bits of Sen-Sen stuck in his teeth, so he looked like one of their pumpkins, smiling.
Carlotta liked it best at the end, when they all held hands and she said the Lord’s Prayer. They would have to wake their buddies up, prop them up like dead soldiers in Beau Geste. She felt a closeness with the men as they prayed for sobriety, forever and ever.
After the AA people left the patients got milk and cookies and Nembutal. Almost everyone went to sleep, including the nurses. Carlotta played poker with Mac and Joe and Pepe until three in the morning. Nothing wild.
She called home every day. Her older sons, Ben and Keith, were taking care of Joel and Nathan. Everything was fine, they said. There was not much she could say.
She stayed in the hospital seven days. On the morning she left there was a sign in the rainy dark dayroom. “Lotsa Luck Lottie.” The police had left her car in the parking lot. One big dent, a broken mirror.
Carlotta drove to Redwood Park. She turned the radio up loud, sat on the dented car hood in the rain. Below her glinted the golden Mormon Temple. Fog covered the bay. It was good to be outside, to hear music. She smoked, planned what to do in classes the next week, wrote down lesson plans, library books she would need.
(Excuses had been made at school. An ovarian cyst … Benign, fortunately.)
Grocery list. Make lasagna tonight—her sons’ favorite. Tomato paste, veal, beef. Salad and garlic bread. Soap and toilet paper, probably. Pick up a carrot cake for dessert. Her lists reassured her, held everything back together again.
Her sons and Myra, her principal, were the only ones who knew where she had been. They had been supportive. Don’t worry. Everything will be okay.
Everything was somehow always okay. She was a good teacher and a good mother really. At home the small house overflowed with projects, books, arguments, laughter. Everyone met their obligations.
In the evenings, after dishes and laundry, correcting papers, there was TV or Scrabble, problems, cards, or silly conversations. Good night, guys! A silence then that she celebrated by doubling her drinks, no manic ice cubes now.
If they awakened, her sons would stumble upon her madness which, then, only occasionally spilled over into morning. But for as far back as she could remember, late at night, she would hear Keith checking ashtrays, the fireplace. Turning out lights, locking doors.
This had been her first experience with the police, even though she didn’t remember it. She had never driven drunk before, never missed more than a day at work, never … She had no idea of what was yet to come.
Flour. Milk. Ajax. She only had wine vinegar at home, which, with Antabuse, could throw her into convulsions. She wrote cider vinegar on the list.
Phantom Pain
I was five then, at the Deuces Wild mine in Montana. Every few months, before it snowed, my father and I would climb into the mountains, following blazes old Hancock had made back in the 1890s. My father carried a duffel bag filled with coffee, cornmeal, jerky, things like that. I carried a stack of Saturday Evening Posts, most of the way, anyway. Hancock’s ca
bin was at the edge of a crater-shaped meadow on the very top of the mountain. Blue sky over it, all around it. His dog was named Blue. Grass grew on the roof, down in a rakish fringe over the porch where they drank coffee and talked, passing chunks of ore, squinting through cigarette smoke. I played with Blue and the goats or pasted pages of the Post on cabin walls already thickly layered with past issues. Evenly in neat rectangles one on top of another all around the small room. Snowed-in in the long winter Hancock would read his walls, page by page. If he found the end of a story he’d try to make up what came before, or piece it together with other pages around the cabin. When he had read the whole room he’d paste for days and days and then start all over. I hadn’t gone up with my father the first trip that spring, when he found the old man dead. The goats and the dog too, all in his bed. “When I get cold I just pull me up another goat,” he used to say.
“Come on, Lu, just take me up there and leave me.” That’s what my father kept begging me to do when I first put him in the nursing home. That’s all he talked about then, different mines, different mountains. Idaho, Arizona, Colorado, Bolivia, Chile. His mind was starting to go then. He wouldn’t just remember those places, but would actually think he was there, in that time. He would think I was a child, would talk to me as if I were the age I had been in different places. He’d tell the nurses things like, “Little Lu can read all of Our Friendly Helpers and she’s only four years old.” Or, “Help the lady take out the dishes. That’s a good girl.”
I’d bring him café con leche every morning. I’d shave him and comb him, walk him up and down, up and down the rank-smelling halls. Most of the other patients were still in bed, calling, rattling their bars, ringing their bells. Senile old ladies play with themselves. After walking with him I’d tie him in his wheelchair, so he wouldn’t try to run away and fall down. And I’d do it too. I mean I wouldn’t pretend or just humor him—I’d actually go with him someplace. To the Trench mine in the mountains above Patagonia, Arizona: I was eight years old, purple with gentian violet for ringworm. In the evening we would all go out to the cliff to dump cans and burn the garbage. Deer and antelope, the puma, sometimes, would come close, not afraid of our dogs. Nighthawks darted against the sheer rock face of the cliffs beyond us, deeper red in the sunset.
