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<\/a>Continued from yesterday.<\/em><\/p>\nCatholic imagery appears throughout Lucia Berlin\u2019s A Manual for Cleaning Women, the posthumous selected stories that has brought her singular fiction out of obscurity.<\/p>\n
The magnificent \u201cEl Tim,\u201d a story about a charismatic adolescent Mexican-American boy who disrupts a Catholic school with his sly behavior, begins: \u201cA nun stood in each classroom door, black robes floating into the hall with the wind.\u201d The grade school nuns keep perfect order, but the middle school ones have a harder time: \u201cThey could not use awe or love like the grade school nuns. Their recourse was impregnability, indifference to the students who were their duty and their life.\u201d<\/p>\n
In this story, Berlin contrasts the nuns\u2019 garb and demeanor with that of the young men they teach. They may share a religion, but the boys display its symbols to different ends: \u201cThey wore open black shirts or V-neck sweaters with nothing under them, so that their crucifixes gleamed against their smooth brown chests\u2026the crucifix of the pachuco, which was also tattooed on the back of their hand.\u201d<\/p>\n
In \u201cGood and Bad,\u201d set in Chile, where Berlin lived like a debutante during her teen years while her father worked a lucrative mining job, she again evokes the grace of nuns: \u201c[The school] was run by French nuns, lovely old nuns, with fleur-de-lis coifs and blue-gray habits. They floated through the dark rooms, above the stone floors, flew down the passages by the flowered courtyard, popped open wooden shutters, calling out in birdlike voices.\u201d<\/p>\n
Berlin didn\u2019t care for the way contemporary nuns dressed. The \u201cStars and Saints\u201d narrator says: \u201cI had of course decided to become a nun by then, because they never looked nervous but mostly because of the black habits and the white coifs, the headdresses like giant starched white fleur-de-lis. I\u2019ll bet the Catholic Church lost out on a lot of would-be nuns when they started dressing like ordinary meter maids.\u201d<\/p>\n
Berlin loved the trappings of the Catholic Church, from the nuns\u2019 crisp habits to gory depictions of Christ, especially in Mexican churches she saw when visiting her sister, who married a Mexican man and lived in Mexico City. In \u201cFool to Cry,\u201d inspired by the weeks Berlin lived with her sister as she was dying of cancer, the narrator says of visiting a church in Coyoac\u00e1n:<\/p>\n
\u201cI knelt at the back, near the bloodiest Christ, and watched the ceremony.\u201d She recalls, \u201cIn Mexican villages, when my sons were infants, Indians would sometimes make the sign of the cross on their brows. Pobrecito! They would say. That such a lovely creature should have to suffer this life!\u201d<\/p>\n
In \u201cPanteon de Dolores,\u201d the narrator makes an ofrenda for her sister: \u201cOfferings to the dead. You make them as pretty as you can. Cascading and brilliant with marigolds and magenta\u00a0velvets, a flower that looks like brains, and tiny purple sempiternas. The main idea about death here is to make it beautiful and festive. Sultry bleeding Christs, the elegance, the ultimate beautiful deadliness of bullfights, elaborately carved tombs, headstones for the graves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clearly the look and symbols of Catholicism appealed to Berlin. But more than that, the themes of her stories are the most deeply Catholic I have come across in writing by a non-Catholic. Time and again, Berlin creates dignified portraits of the downtrodden: alcoholics, the poor, the blind, the ill, people who hold jobs others disdain. Berlin would have rolled her eyes to hear me say it, but she ventured where Jesus would have gone and came back with beauty.<\/p>\n
In \u201cA Manual for Cleaning Women,\u201d the narrator says, \u201cRich people in cars never look at people on the street, at all. Poor ones always do\u2026in fact it sometimes seems they\u2019re just driving around, looking at people on the street. I\u2019ve done that. Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, Laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc.\u201d<\/p>\n
In \u201cAngel\u2019s Laundromat,\u201d the narrator comes to an understanding with a Jicarilla Apache Indian man who is frequently at the Laundromat the same time she is: \u201cOne day I hadn\u2019t seen him but I knew it was his fine hand on my shoulder. He gave me three dimes. I didn\u2019t understand, almost said thanks, but then I saw that he was shaky\u2013sick and couldn\u2019t work the dryers. Sober, it\u2019s hard. You have to turn the arrow with one hand, put the dime in with the other, push down the plunger, then turn the arrow back for the next dime.\u201d<\/p>\n
But perhaps my favorite example of the absolute empathy, humor, and grace that characterized Berlin as a person and a writer is in \u201cEmergency Room Notebook, 1977.\u201d In the story, a woman who works as an assistant in an emergency room has gotten to know a blind man whose wife died there. Later she spots him on the bus and sits beside him:<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was very funny, describing his new, messy roommate at the Hill Top House for the Blind. I couldn\u2019t imagine how he could know his roommate was messy, but then I could and told him my Marx Brothers idea of two blind roommates\u2014shaving cream on the spaghetti, slipping on spilled stuffaroni, etc. We laughed and were silent, holding hands\u2026from Pleasant Valley to Alcatraz Avenue. He cried, softly. My tears were for my own loneliness, my own blindness.\u201d<\/p>\n
The last time I saw Berlin, she was living in a trailer park in Boulder, struggling with poor health. \u201cIn terrible pain,\u201d she wrote me in one of the last emails she sent me. \u201cCan barely walk around. Making oatmeal a huge project.\u201d<\/p>\n
How ecstatic Berlin would be that her book is now a finalist for the $50,000 Kirkus Prize. It kills me that I can\u2019t share the good news with her. I think this makes her an honorary Catholic: in life she experienced all of the suffering but almost none of the glory.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jenny Shank is a novelist whose first novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award.<\/p>\n
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![\"a](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/162\/2015\/10\/a-manual-for-cleaning-women.jpg\")
<\/a>Continued from yesterday.<\/em><\/p>\n