"These are pointless questions."
Sophia Cornell on Lucia Berlin's "Homing"
The following post is guest-written by S. C. Cornell, a dear friend.
Lately I’ve been reading Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, a collection of short stories which Angelo lent to me. For nostalgic reasons, I’m especially fond of the last story, “Homing.” It opens in Boulder, where I grew up and where Berlin spent a happier period of her life, after she finally beat the bottle. Berlin lived in and wrote about many places—Alaska, Idaho, El Paso, Santiago, Mexico City, Oakland. She was a rootless person, but her stories stink of place.
“Homing” is about an old woman (recognizable, like many narrators/characters in her stories, as Berlin) who one day notices crows sleeping in a tree outside her house. They land at dusk, camouflage themselves perfectly, and alight before sunrise. She hasn’t noticed them before; normally she sits on the back porch instead of the front.
I don’t know why I even brought this up. . . But what bothers me is that I only accidentally noticed them. What else have I missed? How many times in my life have I been, so to speak, on the back porch, not the front porch? What would have been said to me that I failed to hear?
This is your standard Berlin—curious, self-aware, monosyllabic. Then she diverges, in tone and in style:
These are pointless questions. The only reason I have lived so long is that I let go of my past. Shut the door on grief on regret on remorse. If I let them in, just one self-indulgent crack, whap, the door will fling open gales of pain ripping through my heart blinding my eyes with shame breaking cups and bottles knocking down jars shattering windows stumbling bloody on spilled sugar and broken glass terrified gagging until with a final shudder and sob I shut the heavy door. Pick up the pieces one more time.
Perhaps, the old woman thinks, alone on the porch with her oxygen tank, it would be safer to imagine a hypothetical past. What if she hadn’t moved with her family to Chile when she was a child? What if she had stayed in Arizona, boarded with the Wilsons? Seamlessly, we are dropped into an alternate youth, where she works after school at the Wilsons’ Sweet Store, sleeps in a bed with their oldest daughter, Dot, befriends young Willie Torres. Every weekend she takes the bus to Tuscon to have her scoliosis painfully attended to. On Saturdays, there are barn dances: alcohol, sex, guns shot into the air. Rakish diamond drillers from out of town sneak out to the parking lot with “somebody’s wife or sister.”
Next she imagines her future. The narrator’s family is killed in an earthquake in Chile. She stays on at the Wilsons, marries Willie, raises their children in an apple orchard. But no. . . Berlin edits the fantasy—she couldn’t have stayed with the Wilsons. She’d have moved to Amarillo, to her aunt and uncle’s:
There would be a lot of what they would call ‘acting out’ and the counselor would refer to as cries for help. After my release from the juvenile detention center it would not be long before I would elope with a diamond driller who was passing through town, headed for Montana, and, can you believe it? My life would have ended up exactly as it has now, under the limestone rocks of Dakota Ridge, with crows.
Like the crows, Berlin is homing. It is as if, after such a restless, rootless life, her only home is the past.
S. C. Cornell is an MFA candidate in Fiction at New York University.