She stopped being in a bad mood the minute she was inside their apartment. Hours later, exhausted, she would drive home to her house in Oakland, saying to herself that she couldn't keep on doing this. If you don't do it you feel guilty and if you do you feel like a wimp. The kind where you say to yourself, Gosh, it's the least I can do, they are so nice. She often felt helpless in situations like this. Lunch with them would mean going all the way back to Berkeley from the city, and not finishing everything in one day, as she had planned. She had taken three days off without pay because she had a lot of things that needed doing. It happened that she wasn't working for the next few days. Anna and Sam kept thanking Loretta for saving his life, and insisted that she go to lunch at their house the next day. They all sat around for a while until they were sure he was fine and could walk to their house, just down the block.
He had some medicine to take, for epilepsy, and they helped him dry off and dress. He didn't need resuscitation but he was disoriented and frightened. Loretta jumped in, shoes and all, pulled him to the steps and up out of the pool. The other two women were in the shallow end and didn't notice.
He finally got in, was dog-paddling along with a big grin on his face when he had a seizure. One day she stopped by as the two women were convincing the old guy to take a swim. Loretta would see Anna from time to time when she went to swim at her neighbor Elaine's pool. Berlin’s stories feel like nudges to a feminist movement that in its eagerness to evolve has left some of the less fortunate behind.Loretta met Anna and Sam the day she saved Sam's life.Īnna and Sam were old. In the decade since Berlin’s death, the economic chasm between the haves and have-nots has widened, especially among women. While Berlin’s tales are of a particular time-one character tells her 11-year-old cousin that crooked stocking seams have sex appeal-hindsight hones their relevance. It’s a passion.” And in “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” a maid Windexes her employers’ coke mirror and saves their sleeping pills “for a rainy day.” (Has Flannery O’Connor crossed your mind yet?) In “Good and Bad,” an American expat in Chile predicts that her communist teacher’s efforts to draw out students’ empathy will fail because “girls feel about their fathers at that age like they do about horses. “Tiger Bites” is a standout: a 19-year-old divorcée is bullied into considering an abortion in Mexico by her gossipy cousin, who uses the border trip as a vacation. The most touching stories have fun with the foreboding.
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