B.F. And Me by Lucia Berlin, 2015
The magic trick:
Generating immediate chemistry between an odd couple
Lucia Berlin’s reputation surged into the mainstream early on in the history of this SSMT site. But, here in 2024, this is the first story I’ve read by her. It’s so good. I wish I’d started earlier.
So I gather that this was the last story she wrote before her death in 2004. It surfaced in The Paris Review in 2015 and in the career retrospective collection A Manual For Cleaning Women that drove so much of that hype and reappreciation of her work a decade ago.
“B.F. And Me” tells the story of – well… it tells the story of B.F. and her. It’s effectively titled in the way. Her is L.B. who is the narrator getting her bathroom redone. B.F. is the contractor who comes over to fix the bathroom.
This is not a predictable couple in any shape, form, or fashion. But the story does amazing things in its three pages to generate repartee and even a sexual tension between the two.
And that’s quite a trick on Berlin’s part.
The selection:
I used to be a switchboard operator in a hospital, spent all day talking to different doctors that I never saw. We all had favorites and ones that we couldn’t stand. None of us had ever seen Dr. Wright but his voice was so smooth and cool we were in love with him. If we had to page him we’d each put a dollar down on the board, would race to answer calls and be the one to get his, win the money and say, “Hell-oh there, Dr. Wright. ICU is paging you, sir.” Never did see Dr. Wright in real life but when I got a job working in emergency I got to know all the other doctors I had talked to on the phone. I soon learned that they were just as we imagined them. The best physicians were the ones who were prompt to answer, clear and polite, the worst were those who used to yell at us and say things like “Do they hire the handicapped at the switchboard?” They were the ones who let the ER see their patients, who had the Medicaid patients sent to County. Amazing how the ones with sexy voices were just as sexy in real life. But no, I can’t describe how people get the quality into their voice of just waking up or of wanting to go to bed. Check out Tom Hanks’s voice. Forget it. Okay, now Harvey Keitel’s. And if you don’t think Harvey is sexy just close your eyes.
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