Comments on Berlin's works
A video about her life and works
Written by Pere Vila
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Juneau, Alaska in 1936, Lucia Berlin led a
largely rootless childhood because her father, Wendell Theodore Brown, was a
mining engineer and the family moved nearly every year, from one mining town to
the next, throughout North America. It was not until World War II, when Brown
served overseas as a naval officer, that Berlin’s mother, Mary Emma Magruder,
was able to settle temporarily with her two daughters in her native Texas. They
spent the war years in El Paso, the town where Berlin’s parents first met when
her father was a student at the Texas School of Mines and her mother was
studying drama.
When Brown returned from naval service after the war,
the family moved to Santiago, Chile, where Berlin spent her adolescence. She
suffered from a variety of health problems throughout her life and was
particularly plagued by a curvature of the spine, which eventually destroyed
one of her lungs. The frequent displacements of Berlin’s early life, combined
with the double scoliosis that prevented her from indulging in many of the
pastimes of youth contributed to her cultivation of a rich interior life.
Berlin returned to the United States to earn a B.A. in
Spanish and in English, and a M.A. from the University of New Mexico. It was
during this time that she met her first husband, but he abandoned her when she
was pregnant with their second child. She married and divorced two more times,
and had two more sons with her third husband. She eventually raised all four
boys on her own. A Manual for Cleaning Women, her first chapbook, was
published during the late 1970’s, when Berlin supported her family by cleaning
houses.
In the 1980’s Berlin lived in Oakland, California, and
continued to publish stories in magazines. She collected many of these works in
full-length volumes. The best of the tales from the first half of her writing
career appeared in her 1990 collection entitled Homesick: New and Selected
Stories, published by Black Sparrow Press. This landmark volume won an
American Book Award, and Berlin was also the recipient of a fellowship from the
National Endowment for the Arts and the Jack London Short Story Award.
In 1994, Berlin moved to Boulder to teach creative
writing at the University of Colorado, and she soon established a reputation
there as an effective teacher. Health problems forced her relocation to
California in 2000, and she died on her birthday, November 12, 2004, in Marina
del Rey.
SUMMARY
Angel’s Laundromat is the opening story in Lucia Berlin’s posthumous
short story collection A Manual for Cleaning Women.
The story contrasts the working-class atmosphere of a
run-down laundromat in Albuquerque with the narrator’s glamorous past,
exploring themes of alcoholism, class, and shared human connection. Similar to
other Berlin’s stories, the narrator jumps from one vignette to the next in
rapid succession while sprinkling in some background history during the
process.
The story opens by comparing Angel’s Laundromat to The
Campus, a sterile, air-conditioned laundromat across town favoured by
middle-class graduate wives who listen to soft rock. The narrator avoids this
polished place. Instead, she travels across town to Angel’s, a gritty spot
filled with Pueblo and Apache Indians, travelling people, and struggling
individuals. This contrast highlights her affinity for the marginalized and the
raw reality of working-class life. In the laundromat there is an Indian named
Tony, an elderly alcoholic Apache who struggles to put dimes into the machine
due to his shakes. He usually sits next to Lucia, the narrator, staring at her
hands, so she too looks and sees “Horrid age spots, two scars. Un-Indian,
nervous, lonely hands. I could see children and men and gardens in my hands”.
There is so much psychological truth packed into just these sentences:
discomforting self-awareness, recognition of the effects of time and aging, an
insight about race, and lastly, the sense of being used up with work done. Like
many of her stories, it is about lives that brush one another in passing. She
and the Indian eventually joke and chat together, but one day he’s gone and
Lucia can’t remember when it was that she realized she never saw that old
Indian again.
But Angel’s Laundromat is also disjunctive, as
disorganized and random as memories in places of washing and waiting, muggy
places, tiny places that serve an underclass of people, students and bedsit
dwellers, the poor, the old, the indigent, and she, “Lu-chee-a”, as the Indian
calls her, is among them. It is in this sense that the story is both aimless
and easy; it does not strain to be more than itself and in this way, it evokes
the looseness of a certain sort of life, a life lived bumping around on the
bottom no matter where you began. It doesn’t matter what you are, either a
woman who once mixed with Prince Aly Khan, or a man who has been dispossessed
of his status as an Apache chief, now you are there and that’s all there is.
QUESTIONS
-Try to find information about: Zuni belt, Lady Bird Johnson, AA, Good Hygiene, Hamm’s can, Muzak, Zero bar, Okies, Vina del Mar, Prince Aly Khan.
-Try to get the meaning of these jokes: "A guy is bending down tying his shoe and another guy comes along and beats him up and says: ’You're always tying your shoe!’" And "A waiter is serving ans he spills beans on somebody's lap and says: ’Oh, oh, I spilled the beans.’"
-Why do you think that group therapies (like Alcoholics Anonymous) are effcient? Or aren’t they?
-Do you think suicide has to be penalized? Give reasons.
-Have you ever been in a laundromat and used its services? Can you tell us any anecdote?
-In your view, what is the best way to retort clichés?
VOCABULARY
Suds, super, DUZ, leaf, dimes, passed out, pressing room, cots, cross my eyes, dog tag, busted