It’s Christmas time in 1956 and Lou, a soon-to-be-single mother of toddler Ben has arrived in El Paso, Texas for a family reunion. Her glamorous cousin Bella Lynn picks her up from the train and informs her: “Your mama and my mama started drinking and fighting right off the bat. Mama went up on the garage roof and won’t come down. Your mother slit her wrists.”
I knew as soon as I started reading Lucia Berlin’s ‘Tiger Bites’ that it was the Christmas Story for me. My Christmas memories are marked by neighbourhood violence, breakdowns, cold radiators, cash shortages, and a kind of squalor that we all wished would magically go away. ‘Tiger Bites’ takes place in a different time and place, but the trouble that eclipses Christmas in this story seemed so familiar to me that I wanted to claim Lucia Berlin as family when I read it.
Lou is pregnant with a second child and her husband Joe has left her. Rather than finding solace among her family on the Southern US border, she’s persuaded to travel to Juarez, Mexico where, for $500 cash, she can obtain an abortion at a secret clinic. Her journey there and what she witnesses is terrifying. And yet, there’s also a kind of magic to the story. It’s not redemptive, but even as Lou observes and endures terrible things, she conveys what’s happening with humour and warmth. And the terrible things don’t destroy Lou; she keeps going.
First published in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Picador, 2015. Also available online at LitHub.
Chosen by Linda Mannheim. Linda is the author of three books of fiction, most recently This Way to Departures, a collection of stories about people who have left the places they consider home. Her work has appeared in Granta, Catapult Story, Ambit and other magazines. You can read her full Personal Anthology here.
A Personal Anthology 