A Manual for Cleaning Women Read Free Page A

slim beige 1981 Turtle Island paperback called Angels Laundromat. By the time of her third collection, I had come to know her personally, from a distance, though I can’t remember how. There on the flyleaf of the beautiful Safe & Sound (Poltroon Press, 1988) is her inscription. We never did meet face-to-face.
    Her publications eventually moved out of the small-press world and into the medium-press world of Black Sparrow and then, later, of Godine. One of her collections won the American Book Award. But even with that recognition, she had not yet found the wide readership she should have had by then.
    *   *   *
    I had always thought another story of hers included a mother and her children out picking the first wild asparagus of early spring, but I have found it only, so far, in another letter she wrote to me in 2000. I had sent her a description of asparagus by Proust. She replied:
    Only ones I ever saw growing were the thin crayon-green wild ones. In New Mexico, where we lived outside of Albuquerque, by the river. One day in spring they’d be up beneath the cotton woods. About six inches tall, just right to snap off. My four sons and I would gather dozens, while down the river would be Granma Price and her boys, up river all of the Waggoners. No one ever seemed to see them as one or two inch high, only at the perfect height. One of the boys would run in and shout “Asparagus!” just as somebody was doing the same at the Prices’ and Waggoners’.
    *   *   *
    I have always had faith that the best writers will rise to the top, like cream, sooner or later, and will become exactly as well known as they should be—their work talked about, quoted, taught, performed, filmed, set to music, anthologized. Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves.
    *   *   *
    I could quote almost any part of any story by Lucia Berlin , for contemplation, for enjoyment, but here is one last favorite:
    So what is marriage anyway? I never figured it out. And now it is death I don’t understand.

 
    Introduction
    Stephen Emerson
    Birds ate all the hollyhock and larkspur seeds I planted … sitting together all in a row like at a cafeteria.
    — Letter to me, May 21, 1995
    Lucia Berlin was as close a friend as I’ve ever had. She was also one of the most signal writers I’ve ever encountered.
    The latter fact is what I want to write about here. Her extraordinary life—its color, its afflictions, and the heroism she showed especially in the fight against a brutal drinking habit—is evoked in the biographical note at the back.
    *   *   *
    Lucia’s writing has got snap. When I think of it, I sometimes imagine a master drummer in motion behind a large trap set, striking ambidextrously at an array of snares, tom-toms, and ride cymbals while working pedals with both feet.
    It isn’t that the work is percussive, it’s that there’s so much going on.
    The prose claws its way off the page. It has vitality. It reveals.
    An odd little electric car, circa 1950: “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.”
    The car was tall and short. Elsewhere, outside Angel’s Laundromat, where the travelers go:
    Dirty mattresses, rusty high chairs tied to the roofs of dented old Buicks. Leaky oil pans, leaky canvas water bags. Leaky washing machines. The men sit in the cars, shirtless.
    And the mother (ah, the mother):
    You always dressed carefully … Stockings with seams. A peach satin slip you let show a little on purpose, just so those peasants would know you wore one. A chiffon dress with shoulder pads, a brooch with tiny diamonds. And your coat. I was five years old and even then knew that it was a ratty old coat. Maroon, the pockets stained and frayed, the cuffs stringy.
    What her work has, is joy. A precious commodity, not encountered all that often. Balzac, Isaac