by Lucia Berlin
After dinner, over cups of mint or Jamaica tea they would sit around the table while Sam told stories. About the time Anna got polio, at a dig deep in the jungle in the Yucatán, how they got her to a hospital, how kind people were. Many stories about the house they built in Xalapa. The mayor’s wife, the time she broke her leg climbing out of a window to avoid a visitor. Sam’s stories always began, “That reminds me of the time…”
Little by little Loretta learned the details of their life story. Their courtship on Mount Tam. Their romance in New York while they were Communists. Living in sin. They had never married, still took satisfaction in this unconventionality. They had two children; both lived in distant cities. There were stories about the ranch near Big Sur, when the children were little. As a story was ending Loretta would say, “I hate to leave, but I have to get to work very early tomorrow.” Often she would leave then. Usually though, Sam would say, “Just let me tell you what happened to the wind-up phonograph.” Hours later, exhausted, she would drive home to her house in Oakland, saying to herself that she couldn’t keep on doing this. Or that she would keep going, but set a definite time limit.
It was not that they were ever boring or uninteresting. On the contrary, the couple had lived a rich, full life, were involved and perceptive. They were intensely interested in the world, in their own past. They had such a good time, adding to the other’s remarks, arguing about dates or details, that Loretta didn’t have the heart to interrupt them and leave. And it did make her feel good to go there, because the two people were so glad to see her. But sometimes she felt like not going over at all, when she was too tired or had something else to do. Finally she did say that she couldn’t stay so late, that it was hard to get up the next morning. Come for Sunday brunch, Anna said.
When the weather was fair they ate on a table on their porch, surrounded by flowers and plants. Hundreds of birds came to the feeders right by them. As it grew colder they ate inside by a cast-iron stove. Sam tended it with logs he had split himself. They had waffles or Sam’s special omelette, sometimes Loretta brought bagels and lox. Hours went by, the day went by as Sam told his stories, with Anna correcting them and adding comments. Sometimes, in the sun on the porch or by the heat of the fire, it was hard to stay awake.
Their house in Mexico had been made of concrete block, but the beams and counters and cupboards had been made of cedarwood. First the big room—the kitchen and living room—was built. They had planted trees, of course, even before they started building the house. Bananas and plums, jacarandas. The next year they added a bedroom, several years later another bedroom and a studio for Anna. The beds, the workbenches and tables were made of cedar. They got home to their little house after working in the field, in another state in Mexico. The house was always cool and smelled of cedar, like a big cedar chest.
Anna got pneumonia and had to go to the hospital. As sick as she was, all she could think of was Sam, how he would get along without her. Loretta promised her she would go by before work, see that he took his medication and had breakfast, that she would cook him dinner after work, take him to the hospital to see her.
The terrible part was that Sam didn’t talk. He would sit shivering on the side of the bed as Loretta helped him dress. Mechanically he took his pills and drank pineapple juice, carefully wiped his chin after he ate breakfast. In the evening when she arrived he would be standing on the porch waiting for her. He wanted to go see Anna first, and then have dinner. When they got to the hospital, Anna lay pale, her long white braids hanging down like a little girl’s. She had an IV, a catheter, oxygen. She didn’t speak, but smiled and held Sam’s hand while he told her how he had done a load of wash, watered the tomatoes, mulched the beans, washed dishes, made lemonade. He talked on to her, breathless, told her every hour of his day. When they left, Loretta had to hold him tight, he stumbled and wavered as he walked. In the car going home he cried, he was so worried. But Anna came home and was fine, except that there was so much to be done in the garden. The next Sunday, after brunch, Loretta helped weed the garden, cut back blackberry vines. Loretta was worried then, what if Anna got really sick? What was she in for with this friendship? The couple’s dependence upon each other, their vulnerability, saddened and moved her. Those thoughts passed through her head as she worked, but it was nice, the cool black dirt, the sun on her back. Sam, telling his stories as he weeded the adjacent row.
The next Sunday that Loretta went to their house she was late. She had been up early, there had been many things to do. She really wanted to stay home, but didn’t have the heart to call and cancel.
The front door was not unlatched, as usual, so she went to the garden, to go up the back steps. She walked into the garden to look around, it was lush with tomatoes, squash, snow peas. Drowsy bees. Anna and Sam were outside on the porch upstairs. Loretta was going to call to them but they were talking very intently.
“She’s never been late before. Maybe she won’t come.”
“Oh, she’ll come … these mornings mean so much to her.”
“Poor thing. She is so lonely. She needs us. We’re really her only family.”
“She sure enjoys my stories. Dang. I can’t think of a single one to tell her today.”
“Something will come to you…”
“Hello!” Loretta called. “Anybody home?”
Unmanageable
In the deep dark night of the soul the liquor stores and bars are closed. She reached under the mattress; the pint bottle of vodka was empty. She got out of bed, stood up. She was shaking so badly that she sat down on the floor. She was hyperventilating. If she didn’t get a drink she would go into DTs or have a seizure.
Trick is to slow down your breathing and your pulse. Stay as calm as you can until you can get a bottle. Sugar. Tea with sugar, that’s what they gave you in detox. But she was shaking too hard to stand. She lay on the floor breathing deep yoga breaths. Don’t think, God don’t think about the state you’re in or you will die, of shame, a stroke. Her breath slowed down. She started to read titles of books in the bookcase. Concentrate, read them out loud. Edward Abbey, Chinua Achebe, Sherwood Anderson, Jane Austen, Paul Auster, don’t skip, slow down. By the time she had read the whole wall of books she was better. She pulled herself up. Holding on to the wall, shaking so badly she could barely move each foot, she made it to the kitchen. No vanilla. Lemon extract. It seared her throat and she retched, held her mouth shut to reswallow it. She made some tea, thick with honey, sipped it slowly in the dark. At six, in two hours, the Uptown Liquor Store in Oakland would sell her some vodka. In Berkeley you had to wait until seven. Oh, God, did she have any money? She crept back to her room to check in her purse on the desk. Her son Nick must have taken her wallet and car keys. She couldn’t look for them in her sons’ room without waking them.
There was a dollar and thirty cents in a change jar on her desk. She looked through several purses in the closet, in the coat pockets, a kitchen drawer, until she got together the four dollars that bloody wog charged for a half-pint at that hour. All the sick drunks paid him. Although most of them bought sweet wine, it worked quicker.
It was far to walk. It would take her three quarters of an hour; she would have to run home to be there before the kids woke up. Could she make it? She could hardly walk from one room to the other. Just pray a patrol car didn’t pass. She wished she had a dog to walk. I know, she laughed, I’ll ask the neighbors if I can borrow their dog. Sure. None of the neighbors spoke to her anymore.
It kept her steady to concentrate on the cracks in the sidewalk to count them one two three. Pulling herself along on bushes, tree trunks, like climbing a mountain sideways. Crossing the streets was terrifying, they were so wide, with their lights blinking red red, yellow yellow. An occasional Examiner truck, an empty taxi. A police car going fast, without lights. They didn’t see her. Cold sweat ran down her back, her teeth chattered loudly in the still dark morning.
She was panting and faint by the time she got to the Uptown
on Shattuck. It wasn’t open yet. Seven black men, all old except for one young boy, stood outside on the curb. The Indian man sat oblivious to them inside the window, sipping coffee. On the sidewalk two men were sharing a bottle of NyQuil cough syrup. Blue death, you could buy that all night long.
An old man they called Champ smiled at her. “Say, mama, you be sick? Your hair hurt?” She nodded. That’s how it felt, your hair, your eyeballs, your bones. “Here,” Champ said, “you better eat some of these.” He was eating saltines, passed her two. “Gotta make yourself eat.” “Say Champ, lemme have a few,” the young boy said.
They let her go to the counter first. She asked for vodka and poured her pile of coins onto the counter.
“It’s all there,” she said.
He smiled. “Count it for me.”
“Come on. Shit,” the boy said as she counted out the coins with violently shaking hands. She put the bottle into her purse, stumbled toward the door. Outside she held on to a telephone pole, afraid to cross the street.
Champ was drinking from his bottle of Night Train.
“You too much a lady to drink on the street?” She shook her head. “I’m afraid I’ll drop the bottle.”
“Here,” he said. “Open your mouth. You need something or you’ll never get home.” He poured wine into her mouth. It coursed through her, warm. “Thank you,” she said.
She quickly crossed the street, jogged clumsily down the streets toward her house, ninety, ninety-one, counting the cracks. It was still pitch dark when she got to her door.
Gasping for air. Without turning on the light she poured some cranberry juice into a glass and a third of the bottle. She sat down at the table and sipped the drink slowly, the relief of the alcohol seeping throughout her body. She was crying, with relief that she had not died. She poured another third from the bottle and some juice, rested her head on the table between sips.
When she had finished that drink she felt better, and she went into the laundry room and started a load of wash. Taking the bottle with her, she went to the bathroom then. She showered and combed her hair, put on clean clothes. Ten more minutes. She checked to see if the door was locked, sat on the toilet and finished the vodka. This last drink didn’t just get her well but got her slightly drunk.
She moved the laundry from the washer to the dryer. She was mixing orange juice from frozen concentrate when Joel came into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. “No socks, no shirt.”
“Hi, honey. Have some cereal. Your clothes will be dry by the time you finish breakfast and shower.” She poured him some juice, another glass for Nicholas who stood silent in the doorway.
“How in the hell did you get a drink?” He pushed past her and poured himself some cereal. Thirteen. He was taller than she.
“Could I have my wallet and keys?” she asked.
“You can have your wallet. I’ll give you the keys when I know you’re okay.”
“I’m okay. I’ll be back at work tomorrow.”
“You can’t stop anymore without a hospital, Ma.”
“I’ll be fine. Please don’t worry. I’ll have all day to get well.” She went to check the clothes in the dryer.
“The shirts are dry,” she told Joel. “The socks need about ten more minutes.”
“Can’t wait. I’ll wear them wet.”
Her sons got their books and backpacks, kissed her good-bye and went out the door. She stood in the window and watched them go down the street to the bus stop. She waited until the bus picked them up and headed up Telegraph Avenue. She left then, for the liquor store on the corner. It was open now.
Electric Car, El Paso
Mrs. Snowden waited for my grandmother and me to get into her electric car. It looked like any other car except that it was very tall and short, like a car in a cartoon that had run into a wall. A car with its hair standing on end. Mamie got in front and I got into the back.
It was the zone where nails scrape on a blackboard. The windows were covered with a film of yellow dust. The walls and seats were mildewed dusty velvet. Taupe. I bit my nails a lot then and the touch of the moldy dusty velvet on the raw ends of my fingers, on my scratched elbows and knees … it was anguish. My teeth ached, my hair hurt. I shuddered as if I had touched a matted dead cat, accidentally. Crouching, I reached up and hung on to the carved gold flowerpots above the dirty windows. The straps for holding on were rotted and stringy, dangled beneath the flowerpots like old wigs. Hanging on this way I was suspended high in the air, swayed above the backseats of other cars where I could see bags of groceries, babies playing in ashtrays, Kleenex boxes.
The car made such a faint whirring sound it didn’t seem as if we were moving. Were we? Mrs. Snowden wouldn’t, or she couldn’t, go over 15 miles an hour. So slow we went that I saw things in a way I never had before. Through time, like watching someone sleep, all night. A man on the sidewalk deciding to go into a café, he changed his mind, walked to the corner, turned back again and went in, put the napkin in his lap and looked expectant before we were even at the end of the block.
If I ducked my head, like a swing seat beneath my dangling arms, when I looked up all I could see of tiny Mamie and Mrs. Snowden was their straw hats, as if they were just two straw hats perched on the dashboard. I giggled hysterically every time I did this. Mamie turned around to smile as if she didn’t notice. We weren’t even downtown yet, not even at the Plaza.
She and Mrs. Snowden talked about friends who had died or were sick or who had lost a husband. They ended everything they said with a quote from the Bible.
“Well, I think she was very unwise to…”
“Oh mercy yes. ‘Yet count on him not as an enemy but admonish him as a brother.’”
“Thessalonians Three!” Mamie said. This was sort of a game.
Finally I couldn’t hang on to the flowerpots any longer. I lay down on the floor. Mildewed rubber. Dust. Mamie turned around to smile. Mercy! Mrs. Snowden pulled over to the side of the road. They thought I had fallen out. Much later, hours later, I had to go to the bathroom. All the clean restrooms were on the other side of the road, on the left side. Mrs. Snowden couldn’t make left turns. It took us about ten blocks of right turns and one-way streets before we got to a restroom. I had already wet my pants by then but didn’t tell them, drank from the cool cool Texaco faucet. It took even longer to get back on the right side again because we had to go all the way back to the overpass on Wyoming Avenue.
It was dry at the airport, cars grinding in and out on the gravel. Tumbleweeds caught in the fence. Asphalt, metal, a haze of dusty dancing atoms that reflected dazzling from the wings and windows of the airplanes. People in cars around us were eating sloppy things. Watermelons, pomegranates, bruised bananas. Bottles of beer spurted on ceilings, suds cascaded on the sides of cars. I wanted to suck on an orange. I’m hungry, I whined.
Mrs. Snowden had foreseen that. Her gloved hand passed me fig newtons wrapped in talcumy Kleenex. The cookie expanded in my mouth like Japanese flowers, like a burst pillow. I gagged and wept. Mamie smiled and passed me a sachet-dusted handkerchief, whispered to Mrs. Snowden, who was shaking her head.
“Don’t pay her no mind … just showing off.”
“For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.”
“John?”
“Hebrews, Eleven.”
A few planes took off and one landed. Well, best we be getting back home. She didn’t see so well at night, the lights and all, so she slowed down on the way home, drove far from the parked cars at the curbs. All the Sunday drivers were honking at us. I stood up on the seat, propped myself away from the velvet with my hands against the rear window, watching the necklace of headlights stuck behind us all the way back to the airport.
“Cops!” I hollered. A red light, a siren. Mrs. Snowden signaled, pulled slowly over to let him pass, but he stopped next to us. She buzzed her window halfway down to listen to him.
“Lady, the lights are geared for forty miles an hour. Also, you are driving in the mid
dle of the road.”
“Forty is much too fast.”
“Speed up or I’ll have to give you a ticket.”
“They can simply go around me.”
“Sweetie, they wouldn’t dare!”
“Well!”
She buzzed the electric window up in his face. He banged on it with his fist, red-faced. Horns were bleating behind us and the people just in back of us were laughing. Furious, the policeman stomped around and got into the patrol car, gunned his engine, and roared off, sirens wailing right through a red light, crash into the tan end of an Oldsmobile and then crash again, into the front end of a pickup truck. Glass tinkled. Mrs. Snowden buzzed down her window. She drove carefully past the back of the wrecked truck.
“Let he who think he standeth take heed lest he fall.”
“Corinthians!” Mamie said.
Sex Appeal
Bella Lynn was my cousin, and just about the prettiest girl in West Texas. She had been a drum majorette at El Paso High and Miss Sun Bowl in 1946 and 1947. Later she went to Hollywood to become a starlet. That didn’t work out. The trip started off badly because of her brassiere. It didn’t have falsies in it, but you blew it up, like a balloon. Two balloons.
Uncle Tyler, Aunt Tiny and I went to see her off. In a twin-engine DC-6. None of us had ever been in an airplane before. She said that she was a nervous wreck, but she didn’t look it. She looked just lovely in a pink angora sweater. Her breasts were very big.
The three of us watched her plane, waving at it, until it was way off toward California and Hollywood and then it disappeared. Apparently at about that time it also reached a certain altitude, and because of the pressure in the cabin Bella Lynn’s brassiere blew up. Exploded, I mean. Fortunately, no one in El Paso heard about it. She didn’t even tell me about it for twenty years. But I don’t think that’s why she never became a starlet.
