Lucia Berlin passed away in 2004. She published eight short story collections before she died, and has another book coming out posthumously in August called A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories.
What struck me about this short story is how short and funny it is, and how tragic. The narrator is first person, and she speaks to us as if she is sitting down fora drink or coffee with us, in chairs outside her trailer. She immediately draws us in by speaking directly to us: “I liked him right away, just talking to him on the phone. Raspy, easygoing voice, with a smile and sex in it, you know what I mean.” Of course we know what she means, and how can we not want to read further, with that kind of easy, intimate confessional tone beckoning us to? In that second sentence, she suggests that this is a love story of sorts, and maybe even an erotic one.
This is also, very cleverly, a short story about class, aging, voices, smells and process. Our narrator used to be an operator at a hospital, longing to meet one of the doctors she paged. Now she’s an older woman of 70 but she’s still got it going on---the guys at Pottery Barn are still flirting with her. “I bet you’re really gonna enjoy lying on this rug.” This is ridiculous, funny dialogue.
By the middle of page 270, our narrator has introduced us to her man, her antagonist perhaps, and maybe a charming villain. Whoever he is and whatever he does, he’s introduced into the story to shake things up and to change the narrator. “He answered the phone…And he laughed, real slow. I told him I had a floor job and he said he was my man. He could come anytime. I figured he was a smart aleck in his twenties, good-looking, with tattoos and spiky hair, a pickup truck and a dog.” This characters sounds sexy, young, appealing--we can’t wait to meet him.
And then her, and our, expectations are dashed. He doesn’t show up and when he does, he’s an old guy, “gasping and coughing after he climbed three steps.” Not the hot young guy we were expecting, but then our narrator has “bad arthritis” and got “tangled up” in her oxygen hose. These are vivid images of aging so now the story has rearranged itself---maybe this is a story of old, new love. It’s certainly a story of defying the reader’s expectations---BF is the opposite of a hottie, and he’s nothing like the handsome young doctors the narrator was yearning to meet when she was a hospital operator. Read this great description of BF: “B.F’ was holding on to the wall and to the banister, gasping and coughing after he climbed the three steps. He was an enormous man, tall, very fat and very old. Even when he was still outside, catching his breath, I could smell him. Tobacco and dirty wool, rank alcoholic sweat. He had bloodshot baby-blue eyes that smiled. I liked him right away.”
What? She likes this old, smelly guy? Yes, she does, and again, the story rearranges itself. He doesn’t show up when he’s supposed to, he’s old and smells, but she still, she wants him. And now this is also a story about smell. This paragraph about smells is key. The narrator’s memories of smells is what propels her forward, and her description of the smells she remembers instantly suck into the story. We are familiar with all these smells and now we’re very familiar with the kind of man BF is, the kind of guy we might see in a bar, a laughing good, old boy, and we start to think about the smells of men and animals we have known: “The pong of him was like madeleine-like for me, bringing back Grandpa and Uncle John, for starters. Bad smells can be nice. A faint odor of sunk int he woods. Horse manure at the races. One of the best parts about the tigers in zoos is the feral strength. At bullfights I always liked to sit high up, in order to see it all, like at the opera, but if you sit next to the barrera you can smell the bull.” Don’t underestimate the power of using smells in your own work!
As readers, we’re constantly being forced to shift our expectations about this guy BF, and we’re happy to. Now, on page 271, we’re more than half way through this 3.5 page story. And now the story shifts to process. Process is always interesting. BF might seriously need a shower and be unreliable, but he knows how to lay tile in a bathroom. He tells her how much tile she needs and how she can’t walk on the tile for 72 hours. They banter back and forth, each one stubborn and cheerful about what needed to happen in that bathroom. He may be out of shape and unreliable, but he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to laying down tile. This makes him appealing and knowledgeable. In your own work, give one of your characters your knowledge of process---cooking, knitting, dog-walking----any ritual or habit that you are intimate with will make your character come alive.
Towards the end of the story, the narrator reminds us that B.F. is really old and unreliable. She makes us worry that he might die and this is great---nothing tethers a reader to a story like the possibility that a major character may leave us soon. (Think of how you feel when a favorite character gets killed off in a TV show. You mourn the character’s loss, but are further invested in the story’s outcome. After the death, all you want to do is see what happens next to the characters who have survived.) “He was obviously sore after bending down. Gasping for air, he limped out of the house, stopping to lean on the kitchen counter and then on the stove in the living room. I followed him to the door, making the same rest stops. At the foot of the stairs he lit up a cigarette and smiled up at me.”
The ending: Naturally, B.F. doesn’t show up again when he’s supposed to, but then he calls. The narrator and the tile guy do their dance again. Will he continue to disappoint her? Probably. Will he break her heart by dying or falling down on the job? Possibly. But a powerful connection has been established between them and we want to see what happens next. I agree that the ending leaves us hanging, but in a way, it is very effective---we start to imagine what will happens to these characters after we leave them on the page. Or they leave us. And we can see them vividly, at the end of their lives, clinging to each other, and whatever cheerful banter they can still trade, in bars and trailers. Their banter and their promises to each other are their currency.
No comments:
Post a Comment