by Lucia Berlin
Me, now, all the corners have me stir-crazy.
Sally adores Mexico, with the fervor of a convert. Her husband, her children, her house, everything about her is Mexican. Except her. She’s very American, old-fashioned American, wholesome. In a way I am the more Mexican, my nature is dark. I have known death, violence. Most days I don’t even notice that period when the room has sunlight in it.
* * *
When our father went to war Sally was just a baby. We went by train from Idaho to Texas to live with our grandparents for the Duration. Duro = Hard.
One thing that made Mama the way she was was that when she was little their life was very easy and gracious. Her mother and father were from the best Texan families. Grandpa was a wealthy dentist; they had a beautiful home with servants, a nanny for Mama, who spoiled her, as did three older brothers. Then wham bam she got run over by a Western Union boy and was in the hospital almost a year. During that year everything got worse. The Depression, Grandpa’s gambling, his drinking. She got out of the hospital to find her world changed. A shabby house down by the smelter, no car, no servants, no room of her own. Her mother, Mamie, working as Grandpa’s nurse, no longer playing mah-jongg and bridge. Everything was grim. And scary probably, if Grandpa did to her what he did to both Sally and me. She never said anything about it, but he must have, since she hated him so much, would never let anybody touch her, not even shake hands …
The train neared El Paso as the sun came up. It was awesome to see, the space, the wide-open spaces, coming from the dense pine forests. As if the world were uncovered, a lid taken off. Miles and miles of brightness and blue, blue sky. I ran back and forth from windows on each side of the club car that had finally opened, thrilled by this whole new face of the earth.
“It’s just the desert,” she said. “Deserted. Empty. Arid. And pretty soon we’ll be pulling into the hellhole I used to call home.”
Sally wanted me to help her get her house on Calle Amores in order. Sort photographs, clothes, and papers, fix shower curtain rods, windowpanes. Except for the front door, none of the doors had doorknobs; you had to use a screwdriver to get in the closets and prop the bathroom door shut with a basket. I called some workmen to come and put in doorknobs. They came and that was okay except they came on a Sunday afternoon while we were having a family dinner and they stayed until about ten at night. What happened was that they put on the doorknobs but didn’t tighten any screws, so each doorknob that any of us tried fell off in our hands and then you couldn’t open the closet doors at all. Also many screws rolled off and disappeared. I called the men the next day and a few days later they came in the morning, just when my sister had fallen asleep after a bad night. The three of them made so much noise I said forget it, my sister is sick, grave, and you’re too loud. Come back another time. I went back into her room but later began to hear some huffing and panting and muffled thuds. They were taking all the doors off the hinges so they could carry them up to the roof to fix them without making any noise.
Am I really just mad because Sally’s dying, so get mad at a whole country? The toilet is broken now. They need to take out the entire floor.
I miss the moon. I miss solitude.
In Mexico there is never not anyone else there. If you go into your room to read somebody will notice you’re by yourself and go keep you company. Sally is never alone. At night I stay until I am sure she is asleep.
There is no guide to death. No one to tell you what to do, how it’s going to be.
When we were little our grandmother Mamie took over Sally’s care. At night Mama ate and drank and read mysteries in her room. Grandpa ate and drank and listened to the radio in his room. Actually Mama was gone most nights, with Alice Pomeroy and the Parker girls, playing bridge or in Juárez. During the day she went to Beaumont hospital to be a Gray Lady, where she read to blind soldiers and played bridge with maimed ones.
She was fascinated by anything grotesque, just like Grandpa was, and when she got back from the hospital she would call Alice and tell her about all the soldiers’ wounds, their war stories, how their wives left when they found out they had no hands or feet.
Sometimes she and Alice went to a USO dance, looking for a husband for Alice. Alice never found a husband, worked at the Popular Dry Goods as a seam ripper until she died.
Byron Merkel worked at the Popular too, in lamps. He was supervisor of lamps. He was still madly in love with Mama after all these years. They had been in the Thespian Club in high school and starred in all the plays. Mama was very small, but still in all the love scenes they had to sit down because he was only five feet two. Otherwise he would have gone on to be a famous actor.
He took her to plays. Cradle Song. The Glass Menagerie. Sometimes he’d come over in the evenings and they’d sit on the porch swing. They’d read plays they performed in when they were young. I was always under the porch then in a little nest I had made with an old blanket and a cookie tin with saltines in it. The Importance of Being Earnest. The Barretts of Wimpole Street.
He was a teetotaller. I thought that meant he only drank tea, which was all he drank, while she drank Manhattans. That’s what they were doing when I heard him tell her he was still madly in love with her after all these years. He said he knew he couldn’t hold a candle to Ted (Daddy), another strange expression. He was always saying, “Well, it’s a long road to Ho,” which I couldn’t make out either. Once, when Mama was complaining about Mexicans, he said, “Well, give them an inch and they’ll take an inch.” The trouble with the things he said was he had a deep projecting tenor voice, so every word seemed weighted with significance, echoed in my mind. Teetotaller, teetotaller …
One night after he had gone home she came in, to the bedroom where I slept with her. She kept on drinking and crying and scribbling, literally scribbling, in her diary.
“Are you okay?” I finally asked her, and she slapped me.
“I told you to stop saying ‘okay’!” Then she said she was sorry she got mad at me.
“It’s that I hate living on Upson Street. All your Daddy ever writes me about is his ship, and not to call it a boat. And the only romance in my life is a midget lamp salesman!”
This sounds funny now, but it wasn’t then when she was sobbing, sobbing, as if her heart would break. I patted her and she flinched. She hated to be touched. So I just watched her by the light of the streetlamp through the window screen. Just watched her weep. She was totally alone, like my sister Sally is when she weeps that way.
So Long
I love to hear Max say hello.
I called him when we were new lovers, adulterers. The phone rang, his secretary answered and I asked for him. Oh, hello, he said. Max? I was faint, dizzy, in the phone booth.
We’ve been divorced for many years. He is an invalid now, on oxygen, in a wheelchair. When I was living in Oakland he used to call me five or six times a day. He has insomnia: once he called at three a.m. and asked if it was morning yet. Sometimes I’d get annoyed and hang up right away or else I wouldn’t answer the phone.
Most of the time we talked about our children, our grandson, or Max’s cat. I’d file my nails, sew, watch the A’s game while we talked. He’s funny, and a good gossip.
I have lived in Mexico City for almost a year now. My sister Sally is very ill. I take care of her house and children, bring her food, give her injections, baths. I read to her, wonderful books. We talk for hours, cry and laugh, get mad at the news, worry about her son out late.
It is uncanny, how close we have become. We have been together all day for so long. We see and hear things the same way, know what the other is going to say …
I rarely leave the apartment. None of the windows look out onto the sky, just onto air shafts or the apartments next door. You can see the sky from Sally’s bed, but I only see it when I open and close her curtains. I speak Spanish with her and her children, everybody.
Actually Sally and I don’t talk that much anymore. It hurts her lung to talk. I read,
or sing, or we just lie together in the dark, breathing in unison.
I feel I have vanished. Last week in the Sonora market I was so tall, surrounded by dark Indians, many of them speaking in Nahuatl. Not only was I vanished, I was invisible. I mean for a long time I believed I wasn’t there at all.
Of course I have a self here, and a new family, new cats, new jokes. But I keep trying to remember who I was in English.
* * *
That’s why I’m so glad to hear from Max. He calls a lot, from California. Hello, he says. He tells me about hearing Percy Heath, about protesting the death penalty at San Quentin. Our son Keith made him eggs benedict on Easter Sunday. Nathan’s wife, Linda, told Max not to phone her so much. Our grandson Nikko said he was falling asleep in spite of himself.
Max tells me the traffic and weather reports, describes the clothes on the Elsa Klensch show. He asks me about Sally.
In Albuquerque, when we were young, before I met him, I had listened to him play saxophone, watched him race Porsches at Fort Sumter. Everybody knew who he was. He was handsome, rich, exotic. Once I saw him at the airport, saying good-bye to his father. He kissed his father good-bye, with tears in his eyes. I want a man who kisses his father good-bye, I thought.
When you are dying it is natural to look back on your life, to weigh things, to have regrets. I have done this, too, along with my sister these last months. It took a long time for us both to let go of anger and blame. Even our regret and self-recrimination lists get shorter. The lists now are of what we’re left with. Friends. Places. She wishes she were dancing danzón with her lover. She wants to see the parroquia in Veracruz, palm trees, lanterns in the moonlight, dogs and cats among the dancers’ polished shoes. We remember one-room schoolhouses in Arizona, the sky when we skied in the Andes.
She has stopped worrying about her children, what will become of them when she dies. I will probably resume worrying about mine after I leave here, but now we simply drift slowly through the patterns and rhythms of each new day. Some days are full of pain and vomit, others are calm, with a marimba playing far away, the whistle of the camote man at night …
I don’t regret my alcoholism anymore. Before I left California my youngest son, Joel, came to breakfast. The same son I used to steal from, who had told me I wasn’t his mother. I cooked cheese blintzes; we drank coffee and read the paper, muttering to each other about Rickey Henderson, George Bush. Then he went to work. He kissed me and said So long, Ma. So long, I said.
All over the world mothers are having breakfast with their sons, seeing them off at the door. Can they know the gratitude I felt, standing there, waving? The reprieve.
I was nineteen when my first husband left me. I married Jude then, a thoughtful man with a dry sense of humor.
He was a good person. He wanted to help me bring up my two baby sons.
Max was our best man. After the wedding, in the backyard, Jude went off to work, where he played piano at Al Monte’s bar. My best friend Shirley, the other witness, left almost without speaking. She was very upset about me marrying Jude, thinking I had done it out of desperation.
Max stayed. After the children went to bed we sat around eating wedding cake and drinking champagne. He talked about Spain; I talked about Chile. He told me about the years in Harvard with Jude and Creeley. About playing saxophone when bebop began. Charlie Parker and Bud Powell, Dizzy Gillespie. Max had been a heroin addict during those bebop days. I didn’t know what that meant then, actually. Heroin to me had a nice connotation … Jane Eyre, Becky Sharp, Tess.
Jude played at night. He woke late in the afternoon, then he would practice or he and Max would play duets for hours and then we’d have supper. He went off to work. Max would help me do the dishes and put the children to bed.
I couldn’t bother Jude at work. When there was a prowler, when the kids got sick, when I got a flat tire it was Max I called. Hello, he said.
Well, anyway, after a year we had an affair. It was intense and passionate, a big mess. Jude wouldn’t talk about it. I left him to live by myself with the children. Jude showed up and told me to get into the car. We were going to New York, where Jude would play jazz and we would save our marriage.
We never did discuss Max. We both worked hard in New York. Jude practiced and jammed, played Bronx weddings, strip shows in Jersey until he got into the union. I made children’s clothes that even sold at Bloomingdale’s. We were happy. New York was wonderful then. Allen Ginsberg and Ed Dorn read at the Y. The Mark Rothko show at MoMA, during the big snowstorm. The light was intense from the snow through the skylights; the paintings pulsated. We heard Bill Evans and Scott LaFaro. John Coltrane on soprano sax. Ornette’s first night at the Five Spot.
In the daytime, while Jude slept, the boys and I took the subway all over the city, getting off each day at new stops. We rode ferries, over and over. Once, when Jude was playing at Grossinger’s, we camped out in Central Park. That’s how nice New York was then, or how dumb I was … We lived on Greenwich Street down by the Washington Market, by Fulton Street.
Jude made a red toy box for the boys, hung swings from the pipes in our loft. He was patient and stern with them. At night when he got home we made love. All the anger and sadness and tenderness between us electric in our bodies. It was never spoken out loud.
At night when Jude was at work I read to Ben and Keith, sang them to sleep and then I sewed. I called the Symphony Sid program and asked him to play Charlie Parker and King Pleasure until he told me not to call so often. Summers were very hot and we slept on the roof. Winters were cold and there was no heat after five or on weekends. The boys wore earmuffs and mittens to bed. Steam came out of my mouth as I sang to them.
In Mexico now I sing King Pleasure songs to Sally. “Little Red Top.” “Parker’s Mood.” “Sometimes I’m Happy.”
It’s pretty horrible when there is nothing else you can do.
* * *
In New York when the phone rang at night it was Max.
Hello, he said.
He was racing in Hawaii. He was racing in Wisconsin. He was watching TV, thinking of me. Irises were blooming in New Mexico. Flash floods in arroyos in August. Cottonwoods turned yellow in the fall.
He came to New York often, to hear music, but I never saw him. He would call and tell me all about New York and I would tell him all about New York. Marry me, he said, give me a reason to live. Talk to me, I said, don’t hang up.
* * *
One night it was bitterly cold, Ben and Keith were sleeping with me, in snowsuits. The shutters banged in the wind, shutters as old as Herman Melville. It was Sunday so there were no cars. Below in the streets the sailmaker passed, in a horse-drawn cart. Clop clop. Sleet hissed cold against the windows and Max called. Hello, he said. I’m right around the corner in a phone booth.
He came with roses, a bottle of brandy, and four tickets to Acapulco. I woke up the boys and we left.
It’s not true, what I said about no regrets, although I felt not the slightest regret at the time. This was just one of the many things I did wrong in my life, leaving like that.
The Plaza Hotel was warm. Hot, in fact. Ben and Keith got into the steaming bath with an expression of awe, as if into a Texan baptism. They fell asleep on clean white sheets. In the adjoining room Max and I made love and we talked until morning.
We drank champagne over Illinois. We kissed while the boys slept across from us and clouds billowed outside the window. When we landed, the sky above Acapulco was streaked coral and pink.
The four of us swam and then ate lobster and swam some more. In the morning the sun shone through the wooden shutters making stripes on Max and Ben and Keith. I sat up in bed, looking at them, with happiness.
Max would carry each boy to bed and tuck him in. Kiss him sweet, the way he had kissed his father. Max slept as deeply as they. I thought he must be exhausted from what we were doing, his leaving his wife, taking on a family.
He taught them both to swim and to snorkel. He told them
things. He told me things. Just things, about life, people he knew. We interrupted one another telling him things back. We lay on the fine sand on Caleta Beach, warm in the sun. Keith and Ben buried me in the sand. Max’s finger tracing my lips. Bursts of color from the sun against my closed sandy eyelids. Desire.
In the evenings we went to a park by the docks where they rented tricycles. Max and I held hands as the boys raced furiously around the park, flashing past pink bougainvillea, red canna lilies. Beyond them ships were being loaded on the docks.
One afternoon my mother and father, chatting away, walked up the gangplank to the S.S. Stavangerfjord, a Norwegian ship. My sister had written to me that they were traveling from Tacoma to Valparaíso. My parents weren’t speaking to me then, because of my marriage to Jude. I couldn’t call out to them and say, Hi Mama! Hi Daddy! Isn’t this a coincidence? This is Max.
But it made me feel good, to know my parents were right there. And now they were at the railings as the ship sailed out to sea. My father was sunburned and wore a floppy white hat. My mother smoked. Ben and Keith just kept riding faster and faster around the cement track, calling to each other, and to us … Look at me!
Today there was a big gas explosion in Guadalajara, hundreds of people killed, their homes destroyed. Max called to see if I was all right. I told him how everybody in Mexico thinks it’s funny now to go around asking, “Say … do you smell gas?”
In Acapulco we made friends at the hotel. Don and Maria, who had a six-year-old daughter, Lourdes. In the evenings the children would color on their terrace until they fell asleep.
We stayed very late, until the moon grew high and pale. Don and Max played chess by the light of a kerosene lantern. Caress of moths. Maria and I lay crosswise on a big hammock, talking softly about silly things like clothes, about our children, love. She and Don had been married only six months. Before she met him she had been very alone. I told her how in the morning I said Max’s name before I even opened my eyes. She said her life had been like a dreary record over and over each day and now in a second the record was turned over, music. Max overheard her and he smiled at me. See, amor, we’re the flip side now.
