One Sunday afternoon Mr. Wise drove me and Willie up to the mine, to see our old house. I got homesick then, smelling my daddy’s Mr. Lincoln roses, walking around under the old oaks. Rocky crags all around and views out into the valleys and to Mount Baldy. The hawks and jays were there and the ticky-tick drum cymbal sound of the pulleys in the mill. I missed my family and tried not to cry, but I cried anyway. Mr. Wise gave me a hug, said not to worry, I’d probably be going to join them once school was out. I looked at Willie. He jerked his head at me to look at the doe and fawns that gazed at us, only a few feet away. “They don’t want you to go,” he said.
So I probably would have gone to South America. But then there was a terrible earthquake in Chile, a national disaster, and my family was killed. I went on living in Patagonia, Arizona, with the Wilsons. After high school I got a scholarship to the University of Arizona where I studied journalism. Willie got a scholarship too, and had a double major in geology and art. We were married after graduation. Willie got a job at the Trench and I worked for the Nogales Star until our first son, Silver, was born. We lived in Mrs. Boosinger’s beautiful old adobe house (she had died by then) up in the mountains, in an apple orchard near Harshaw.
I know it sounds pretty corny, but Willie and I lived happily ever after.
What if that had happened, the earthquake? I know what. This is the problem with “what ifs.” Sooner or later you hit a snag. I wouldn’t have been able to stay in Patagonia. I’d have ended up in Amarillo, Texas. Flat space and silos and sky and tumbleweeds, not a mountain in sight. Living with Uncle David and Aunt Harriet and my great-grandmother Grey. They would have thought of me as a problem. A cross to bear. 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.
Acknowledgments
Throughout the several years that have gone into this book, support, enthusiasm, and effort have come from many quarters, and despite an inherent sadness, the process has often brought actual joy. Would that Lucia could know.
Profuse thanks to the publishers of previous volumes, including several who can no longer accept them. Michael Myers and Holbrook Teter (Zephyrus Image), Eileen and Bob Callahan (Turtle Island), Michael Wolfe (Tombouctou), Alastair Johnston (Poltroon), and John Martin and David Godine (Black Sparrow) make up the honor roll. All who could cooperated generously.
The writers Barry Gifford and Michael Wolfe spearheaded the effort behind the collection at hand. They, together with Jenny Dorn, Jeff Berlin, Gayle Davies, Katherine Fausset, Emily Bell, and Lydia Davis, were unstinting and expert in their work on behalf of the book. At FSG, an exemplary and wide-ranging team joined Emily, contributing with élan and commitment. I think you all know how grateful Lucia would be. Please know that I am as well.
— S.E.
A Note on Lucia Berlin
THE WRITING
Lucia Berlin (1936–2004, pronunciation: Lu-see-a) published seventy-six short stories during her lifetime. Most, but not all, were collected in three volumes from Black Sparrow Press: Homesick (1991), So Long (1993), and Where I Live Now (1999). These gathered from previous collections of 1980, 1984, and 1987, and presented newer work.
Early publication commenced when she was twenty-four, in Saul Bellow’s journal The Noble Savage and in The New Strand. Later stories appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, New American Writing, and countless smaller magazines. Homesick won an American Book Award.
Berlin worked brilliantly but sporadically throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and most of the 1980s. By the late ’80s, her four sons were grown and she had overcome a lifelong problem with alcoholism (her accounts of its horrors, its drunk tanks and DTs and occasional hilarity, occupy a particular corner of her work). Thereafter she remained productive up to the time of her early death.
THE LIFE
Berlin was born Lucia Brown in Alaska in 1936. Her father was in the mining industry and her earliest years were spent in the mining camps and towns of Idaho, Kentucky, and Montana.
In 1941, Berlin’s father went off to the war, and her mother moved Lucia and her younger sister to El Paso, where their grandfather was a prominent, but besotted, dentist.
Soon after the war, Berlin’s father moved the family to Santiago, Chile, and she embarked on what would become twenty-five years of a rather flamboyant existence. In Santiago, she attended cotillions and balls, had her first cigarette lit by Prince Aly Khan, finished school, and served as the default hostess for her father’s society gatherings. Most evenings, her mother retired early with a bottle.
By the age of ten, Lucia had scoliosis, a painful spinal condition that became lifelong and often necessitated a steel brace.
In 1955 she enrolled at the University of New Mexico. By now fluent in Spanish, she studied with the novelist Ramon Sender. She soon married and had two sons. By the birth of the second, her sculptor husband was gone. Berlin completed her degree and, still in Albuquerque, met the poet Edward Dorn, a key figure in her life. She also met Dorn’s teacher from Black Mountain College, the writer Robert Creeley, and two of his Harvard classmates, Race Newton and Buddy Berlin, both jazz musicians. And she began to write.
Newton, a pianist, married Berlin in 1958. (Her earliest stories appeared under the name Lucia Newton.) The next year, they and the children moved to a loft in New York. Race worked steadily and the couple became friends with their neighbors Denise Levertov and Mitchell Goodman, as well as other poets and artists including John Altoon, Diane di Prima, and Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones).
In 1960, Berlin and her sons left Newton and New York, and traveled with their friend Buddy Berlin to Mexico, where he became her third husband. Buddy was charismatic and affluent, but he also proved to be an addict. During the years 1961–68, two more sons were born.
By 1968, the Berlins were divorced and Lucia was working on a master’s degree at the University of New Mexico. She was employed as a substitute teacher. She never remarried.
The years 1971–94 were spent in Berkeley and Oakland, California. Berlin worked as a high school teacher, switchboard operator, hospital ward clerk, cleaning woman, and physician’s assistant while writing, raising her four sons, drinking, and finally, prevailing over her alcoholism. She spent much of 1991 and 1992 in Mexico City, where her sister was dying of cancer. Her mother had died in 1986, a probable suicide.