A Manual for Cleaning Women Read Free

storytellers, did she seek them out, learn from them? Both, no doubt. She had a natural feel for the form, the structure of a story. Natural? What I mean is that a story of hers has a balanced, solid structure and yet moves with such an illusion of naturalness from one subject to another, or, in some stories, from present into past—even within a sentence, as in the following:
    “I worked mechanically at my desk, answering phones, calling for oxygen and lab techs, drifting away into warm waves of pussywillows and sweet peas and trout pools. The pulleys and riggings of the mine at night, after the first snow. Queen Anne’s lace against the starry sky.”
    About the way a story develops, Alastair Johnston has this insight: “Her writing was cathartic but instead of building to an epiphany, she would evoke the climax more circumspectly, let the reader sense it. As Gloria Frym said in the American Book Review , she would ‘underplay it, surround it and let the moment reveal itself.’”
    And then, her endings. In so many stories, Wham! comes the end, at once surprising and yet inevitable, resulting organically from the material of the story. In “Mama,” the younger sister finds a way to sympathize, finally, with the difficult mother, but the last few words of the older sister, the narrator—talking to herself, now, or to us—take us by surprise: “Me … I have no mercy.”
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    How did a story come into being, for Lucia Berlin ? Johnston has a possible answer: “She would start with something as simple as the line of a jaw, or a yellow mimosa.” She herself goes on to say: “But the image has to connect to a specific intense experience.” Elsewhere, in a letter to August Kleinzahler, she describes how she goes forward: “I get started, & then it’s just like writing this to you, only more legible…” Some part of her mind, at the same time, must always have been in control of the shape and sequence of the story, and the end of it.
    She said the story had to be real—whatever that meant for her. I think it meant not contrived, not incidental or gratuitous: it had to be deeply felt, emotionally important. She told a student of hers that the story he had written was too clever—don’t try to be clever, she said. She typeset one of her own stories in hot metal on a Linotype machine, and after three days of work threw all the slugs back into the melting pot, because, she said, the story was “false.”
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    What about the difficulty of the (real) material?
    “Silence” is a story she tells about some of the same real events she also mentions more briefly to Kleinzahler, in a kind of pained shorthand: “Fight with Hope devastating.” In the story, the narrator’s uncle John, who is an alcoholic, is driving drunk with his little niece in the truck. He hits a boy and a dog, injuring both, the dog badly, and doesn’t stop. Lucia Berlin says, of the incident, to Kleinzahler: “The disillusion when he hit the kid and the dog was Awful for me.” The story, when she turns it into fiction, has the same incident, and the same pain, but there is a resolution of sorts. The narrator knows Uncle John later in his life, when, in a happy marriage, he is mild, gentle, and no longer drinking. Her last words, in the story, are: “Of course by this time I had realized all the reasons why he couldn’t stop the truck, because by this time I was an alcoholic.”
    About handling the difficult material, she comments: “Somehow there must occur the most imperceptible alteration of reality. A transformation, not a distortion of the truth. The story itself becomes the truth, not just for the writer but for the reader. In any good piece of writing it is not an identification with a situation, but this recognition of truth that is thrilling.”
    A transformation, not a distortion of the truth.
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    I have known Lucia Berlin ’s work for more than thirty years—ever since I acquired the