A young girl is expelled from school for striking a nun and forced to spend every day of her summer vacation working in her grandfather’s dental office. Despite his alcoholism and the filth of his working environment, he makes the best set of false teeth in all of Texas in his workshop, a place of pure horror, where the intensely visceral climactic scene unfolds. With her spare, unsentimental prose, Berlin normalises the trauma the grandfather puts his granddaughter through, even tempering it with the darkly comic image of the child hitting the wrong lever and “the chair spinning him around, spattering circles of blood on the floor”.
Minor characters such as the Mexican and Syrian neighbourhood children the narrator isn’t allowed to play with, Jim, the black elevator man in the building where her grandfather’s sign “I Don’t Work for Negroes” hangs, and Mamie dying amid “the stench and the flies” speak to us, through their silence, of the poverty and racism of working-class 1940s/50s America.
Published in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Picador, 2015. Picked by Hazel Norbury. Hazel is currently completing her MA in Creative Writing at City, University of London, and finalising the draft of her first novel Turkish Mosaic.
A Personal Anthology 