by
Lucia Berlin
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Solitude is an Anglo-Saxon concept. In Mexico City, if you’re the only person on a bus and someone gets on they’ll not only come next to you, they will lean against you.
When my sons were at home, if they came into my room there was usually a specific reason. Have you seen my socks? What’s for dinner? Even now, when the bell on my gate rings it will be Hi, Ma! let’s go to the A’s game, or Can you babysit tonight? But in Mexico, my sister’s daughters will come up three flights of stairs and through three doors just because I am there. To lean against me or say, Qué honda?
Now, me … if they said I had a year to live, I’ll bet I would just swim out to sea, get it over with. But Sally, it is as if the sentence had been a gift. Maybe it’s because she fell in love with Xavier the week before she found out. She has come alive. She savors everything. She says whatever she wants, does whatever makes her feel good. She laughs. Her walk is sexy, her voice is sexy. She gets mad and throws things, hollers cusswords. Little Sally, always meek and passive, in my shadow as a girl, in her husband’s for most of her life. She is strong, radiant now; her zest is contagious. People stop by the table to greet her, men kiss her hand. The doctor, the architect, the widower.
Tell me, what do you feel you have accomplished in your life?”
I couldn’t think of a thing.
“I haven’t had a drink in three years,” I said.
“That’s scarcely an accomplishment. That’s like saying, ‘I haven’t murdered my mother.’”
“Well, of course, there is that, too.” I smiled.
I love houses, all the things they tell me, so that’s one reason I don’t mind working as a cleaning woman. It’s just like reading a book.
I’ve been working for Arlene, at Central Reality. Cleaning empty houses mostly, but even empty houses have stories, clues. A love letter stuffed way back in a cupboard, empty whiskey bottles behind the dryer, grocery lists … “Please pick up Tide, a package of green linguini and a six pack of Coors. I didn’t mean what I said last night.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.