I bought A Manual for Cleaning Women because I loved the title, and because Lydia Davis—a writer I greatly admire—wrote the foreword. [Correction: now that I’m looking through it, I see my partner purchased it for me, possibly for the same reasons I mentioned, and inscribed it in a meandering Berlinean fashion—moving easily from heartfelt support of my writing to playful innuendo to an oblique reference to something serious (I forget exactly what) going on between us in October of 2015…I don’t ever want to come home to a home where you don’t live with me.]
In the foreword, Davis spends significant space on Berlin’s stories’ “balanced, solid structure[s]” and the “illusion of naturalness” with which they transition from subject to subject. She quotes a critic who suggests that this illusion results in stories whose climaxes are written around (rather than toward); they pop, in other words, like space in a drawing whose lines don’t combine to represent so much as they prompt you to see what’s on either side of them (I’m taking this idea from a Diebenkorn quote I’m too lazy to look up…something about learning to see the line as divisive of space, but the important point is it goes beyond basic gestalt continuity and closure concepts—though these certainly likely apply to most readers’ conceptions of the “whole” in Berlin’s work). [Correction: I’m not too lazy to look it up: “In the late forties I worked to make a line with a strong form (or space) on either side of it. It seemed I could see only one side of a line until one day I knew I could see both sides at once.”]
In 2015, I was struggling creatively, and I wasn’t in the right space to read Manual. I didn’t like to be reminded of all the short stories I could have written while I was writing the novel I lost track of, though I remember enjoying moments within the stories—e.g. the old miner who pastes leaves of the Saturday Evening Post on his cabin walls and reads his walls all winter, snowed-in. But even that moment suggested the feeling of being inside your own head when you read, the connections between home/shelter and the written word, and those connections, for me, were broken at the time.
But now, energized, in part, by Lydia Davis’ book of essays (in which the foreword to Berlin’s Manual is collected), I have returned to Berlin in a better space. I picked up Evening in Paradise, and was struck by “Rainy Day,” which I think exemplifies some of the unique ways a fragment—or non-“traditional” flash piece—can succeed (where “traditional” stories can’t or don’t).
The story is told/spoken from within a detox facility to an implied second character (the narrator’s habits of speech—“man…you know”—suggest a listener). The beginning of the narrator’s story (the story within Berlin’s story) is a sentence whose punctuation functions as a Diebenkorn line—it invites us to see both sides at once (additionally, we are made aware that we are double listeners): “My old lady and me went over to the bleachers…it’s nice—real quiet and lots of room.” Berlin’s ellipsis is natural to the voice and suggestive of off-the-page dialogue that results from the declarative sentence about going to the bleachers (What’s it like there? / Why’d you go to the bleachers?). The ellipsis is both a moment of non-speech (for the narrator) and speech (for the audience). The answer to the implied, or actual, question brings us, equally, into two spaces at once: the bleachers, defined by their ample space and relative quiet, and the detox, which we know is crowded, and, likely, not very quiet. I think we can reasonably read the em dash as a gestural precursor—a quick glance around the room—to the ironic statement. (And it’s this gesture that sets up the offbeat, enigmatic line that struck me as Berlin’s invitation to participate in the story’s physical “reality”).
“Then it started to rain and she started to cry.” commences seven straight sentences in which the action of the story within the story rises (“I kept on asking….What’s the matter?....‘All the cigarette butts are getting wet.’”), climaxes (“Shit, so I hit her.”) and falls (“She went nuts, cops took her to jail and brought me here.”). Within this story within, Berlin examines the disparity between correlation and causation (as a fictive element and as a problem of perception/ perspective in life). This disparity gets recast in the fragment’s structure; the climax of the story within is not the climax of “Rainy Day.” The main story’s action continues to rise as the narrator attempts to resolve the “trouble” he’s in: “…when I sober up I start to think. Alcoholics think more than most people….I drink just to shut off the words.” Thinking, here, is defined as a flow of words, so to think “more than most people” is to be unable to shut off the flow, or to have a higher-than-usual flow (whether that flow is directable is another topic).
“Shit, what if I was a drummer?” is the story’s climax.
The drummer line sounds random (an effect of being an alcoholic—i.e. immediate evidence to support his claim that alcoholics can’t shut off the words), but I think it’s rooted in the physical—a shaking hand or nervous knee-bounce, the effects of withdrawal—bodily spasms that remind our narrator (and/or those around him) of the actions of a drummer. Again, Berlin invites us into the scene, asks us to observe/experience something she has not described (Davis touts Berlin’s “concrete physical imagery,” but here Berlin has gone beyond the physical, off the page). To decline this invitation is to miss the climax (she makes it easy to accept; it’s fairly parallel to the climax of the story within). To miss the climax of “Rainy Day” is to miss an opportunity to feel compassion for the narrator (or, since that’s difficult, given his nonchalant abuse of his “old lady,” to miss what Berlin seems to feel for her character—compassion might be going too far, but call it an extra-writerly, human interest in the kind of person whose story mostly goes untold). It’s also possible that she used this narrator to explore form, and she cared nothing for his type. Berlin, who struggled with alcoholism, is said to have produced much of her best work after getting sober, so for her (and for anyone else) it might be a metaphor for compartmentalization of addiction and its effects on creative generation.
“Rainy Day” teaches us what the best fragments can teach us: we’re addicted to stories with “written-toward” climaxes (i.e. we’re wired to want what we’re used to). This is why I read the gotcha moment at the end as a trap. The narrator says he read an article in Psychology Today, the last time he was in detox, that “proved alkies thought more.” Alcoholics, according to the article, “scored higher on tests than normal people.” There was “just one thing [alcoholics] scored bad on…but I can’t remember what it was.”
“Rainy Day” is an intervention. Berlin challenges her audience to consciously, rather than subconsciously, appreciate story structure, and to go beyond appreciation, to participate, to enter the framework. Once we’re inside the story (because of the fact of POV) we’re inside the narrator’s mind, so it’s impossible to judge the narrator for not remembering because we can’t remember either. If we find ourselves enjoying our superiority, we’ve missed the effect. For to enjoy superiority, in this case, is to stop thinking, to shut off the flow of words, to step out of the frame and see only one side of the line.
