"... like a Broadway star, but nice ..."

I have somewhere in the house Lucia Berlin's Where I Live Now: Stories, 1993-1998, published by Black Sparrow Press near the end of its 35 year run of 700 titles, all of them done on great paper, with covers that never did with pictures what words could do first.

At AA Furniture & Appliances a couple weeks ago I came upon Picador's 2016 A Manual for Cleaning Women, a selection of 43 of Berlin's 70 stories, with a Foreword by Lydia Davis and an Introduction by editor Stephen Emerson. The copy had been exposed to water and now bears a hard ripple, with a weird weather pattern stain at the bottom end.

Prior to the Picador edition, my most recent Berlin sighting was in Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian's anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative, 1977-1997 (2017). The context was Small Press Traffic's retail outlet, where, in "new narrative" fashion, we learn that "[t]he great short story writer Lucia Berlin was sometimes spotted in the stacks, impossibly glamorous, like a Broadway star, but nice, and with that waitress slouch you knew had come from a lifetime of hard living," (x) but in "old narrative" fashion, more likely the result of a scoliosis that eventually punctured her lung, tethering her to an oxygen tank.

Here's a paragraph from Berlin's "Angel's Laundromat" (1981), the opening story in A Manual for Cleaning Women:

I have a lot of unfounded generalizations about people, like all blacks are bound to like Charlie Parker. Germans are horrible, all Indians have a weird sense of humour like my mother's. One favourite of hers is when a guy is bending down tying his shoe and another comes along and beats him up and says, "You're always tying your shoe!" The other one is when a waiter is serving and he spills beans in somebody's lap and says, "Oh, oh, I spilled the beans." Tony used to repeat these to me on slow days at the laundry. (7)