Also by Lucia Berlin
A Manual for Cleaning Ladies (1977)
Angels Laundromat (1981)
Legacy (1983)
Phantom Pain (1984)
Safe & Sound (1988)
Homesick: New & Selected Stories (1990)
Where I Live Now: Stories 1993–1998 (1999)
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories (2015)
This is
A Black Sparrow Book
Published in 2016 by
DAVID R. GODINE, PUBLISHER
Post Office Box 450
Jaffrey, New Hampshire 03452
Copyright © 1993 by Lucia Berlin
Copyright © 2016 by the Literary Estate of Lucia Berlin LP
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact Permissions, David R. Godine, Publisher, Fifteen Court Square, Suite 320, Boston, Massachusetts, 02108.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some of these stories first appeared in Phantom Pain, Tombouctou Press (1984) and Safe and Sound, Poltroon Press (1989). Some of the stories also appeared in the following magazines: City Lights Review, Folio, Gas, In This Corner, Jejune, Peninsula, Rigorous, Rolling Stock, The New Censorship and Zyzzyva. Many thanks to those publishers for permission to reprint.
SOFTCOVER ISBN: 978-0-87685-893-6
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-57423-230-1
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA BERLIN, LUCIA.
So long : stories, 1987–1992 / Lucia Berlin.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-87685-894-9 (cloth) : $25.00.
ISBN 0-87685-893-0 (pbk.) : $13.00.
ISBN 0-87685-895-7 (cloth signed) : $30.00
I. Title.
ps 3552.e72485s6 1993
813’.54–dc20 93-6659
CIP
For Monica
Contents
Luna Nueva
The sun set with a hiss as the wave hit the beach. The woman continued up the checkered black and gold tiles of the malecón to the cliffs on the hill. Other people resumed walking too once the sun had set, like spectators leaving a play. It isn’t just the beauty of the tropical sunset she thought, the importance of it. In Oakland the sun set into the Pacific each evening and it was the end of another day. When you travel you step back from your own days, from the fragmented imperfect linearity of your time. As when reading a novel, the events and people become allegorical and eternal. The boy whistles on a wall in Mexico. Tess leans her head against a cow. They will keep doing that forever; the sun will just keep on falling into the sea.
She walked onto a platform above the cliffs. The magenta sky reflected iridescent in the water. Below the cliffs a vast swimming pool had been built of stones into the jagged rock. Waves shattered against the far walls and spilled into the pool, scattering crabs. A few boys swam in the deeper water, but most people waded or sat on the mossy rocks.
The woman climbed down the rocks to the water. She took off the shift covering her bathing suit and sat on the slippery wall with the others. They watched as the sky faded and a new orange moon appeared in the mauve sky. La luna! people cried. Luna nueva! The evening grew dark and the orange moon turned to gold. The foam cascading into the pool was a sharp metallic white: the clothes of the bathers flowed eerie white as if under a strobe light.
Most of the bathers in the silver pool were fully clothed. Many of them had come from the mountains or ranchos far away; their baskets lay in piles on the rocks.
And they couldn’t swim, so it was nice to lie suspended in the pool, for the waves to rock them and swirl them back and forth. When the breakers covered the wall it didn’t seem that they were in a pool at all, but in their own calm eddy in the middle of the ocean.
Street lights came on above them against the palms on the malecón. The lights glowed like amber lanterns on their intricate wrought-iron poles. The water in the pool reflected the lights over and over, first whole, then into dazzling fragments, then whole again like full moons under the tiny moon in the sky.
The woman dove into the water. The air was cool, the water warm and salty. Crabs raced over her feet, the stones underfoot were velvety and jagged. She remembered only then being in that pool many