SILENCE: Lucia Berlin

“Silence can be wicked, plumb wicked.”

“In third grade I read well but I didn’t even know addition. Heavy brace on my crooked back. I was tall but still childlike. A changeling in this city, as if I’d been reared in the woods by mountain goats. I kept peeing in my pants,…”
The multi-touching story of this mostly fatherless ‘I’, a girl-to-woman we get to know somehow as well as ourselves, and it is no surprise that she, too, ends up, in the story’s last sentence, understanding Uncle John better by dint of her own filter of strength-as-weakness. And why she’d kept silent about Grandpa and her sister. “…pinches that looked like stars”. Later a jabbing thing against her own behind.
“…I get fiction and reality mixed up, but I don’t actually ever lie.”
And the understanding we all develop through the strength of our own weakness, she of her Mamie and of her friend Hope, a Syrian girl who looked like a baby baboon. “We saw Mildred Pierce six times and The Beast with Five Fingers ten.” — “washing bloody menstrual rags” — “mumblety-peg” and stabbing between fingers, and later welding a sororal knot by the blood of those fingers. Petty theft et al. And the mysterious “chances” they ‘sold’ for a vanity case, and the necessary watershed of a car-ride with Hope’s elder brother… and that sororal knot broken.
Silly moments like…
“We saw four Siamese cats who used the real toilet and even flushed it.”
And prophetic moments, for our own times today, like…
“I thought the only Odessa was where Hope went.”
And Uncle John (“If only I had understood him half as much as he always understood me, I could have found out how he hurt, why he worked so hard to get laughs.”) — with probably the most telling climactic elbow-trigger in fiction literature that already teems with elbows—

“He had a bottle between his thighs, was driving with his elbows…”

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Full anthology context of this review: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/1372-2/#comment-1715