Super America

by Anne Panning

  #3

  Because when you’re married and own a house and pay a mortgage and have a baby, you do so much laundry in your laundry room that you think you will collapse from exhaustion or boredom or both. And because your laundry room has a window and because it faces your neighbors’ backyard, you overhear them, the Stringers, fighting and crying and saying, “You’re out of control, Dick! You’re really out of control!” (They will divorce later that fall.) Because you have whole loads now of nothing but dirty little stinky, stained baby clothes full of noodles and canned pears and Cream of Wheat and crusty boogers and poop. Because your laundry room is so dirty it shouldn’t even be a place where you try and get things clean, but because you’re so tired and spent (and not in any kind of sexual way spent) you can’t summon the energy to care about such things anymore, so you drink cold beer every night on the couch and watch television.

  You remember how lively it used to be in the laundromat downtown, despite the blush of shame at folding your black underwear in halves, then quarters, in front of rednecks and welfare moms and sixteen-year-olds just killing time at the video games. You remember the bright, cheery hum of possibility at all those clean clothes swirling together in tandem. You remember the soft, hot smell of Downy on other peoples’ towels. You use scent-free now: everything has to be scent-free, because of your delicate nose, because of the baby’s rash, because of your husband’s belief system.

  In the laundromat once—before you had a house and a husband and a baby and a washer and dryer—you ran into Bibs, a friend of yours who everyone thought was homeless because of the multiple tattered stocking caps he wore and his long, greasy beard and his muttering. But you loved him and listened to him and talked about art and writing and grandparents while your clothes spun. You stood on the stoop beside him in the ugly butt end of winter while you both smoked. The sun struggled to break through. People walked by, and he knew all of them, and you knew some of them, and everybody laughed or gave peace signs or offered Bibs whatever snack they were eating. Bibs had made a sculpture out of old laundry-soap bottles, he told you, and invited you to his apartment to show it off. You thought surely he really wanted to smoke pot or hit you up for money, but lo and behold, there sat the most interesting sculpture you had ever seen. It looked like Dr. Seuss with lots of royal blue plastic, with a drop of Picasso and a touch of Warhol for good measure.

  You put your hand over your heart. It’s so wonderful! Bibs! You almost kissed him, but he wasn’t really that kissable, and you were engaged to be married to a plastic surgeon with perfect teeth whom you had met, of all places, at the dentist’s office. Bibs made coffee. You sat staring at the piece, the piece, as you kept calling it—out of respect for his art. You had a nice conversation over coffee while the sun continued to make efforts at shine. Bibs played his radio softly. He kept it on top of the refrigerator.

  Because now you have privacy in your own home, your own first-floor laundry room, so much privacy it makes you miss things you’d rather not. There’s nobody like Bibs anymore. You think—you laugh out loud—you should have married Bibs.

  #4

  Because the Oregon coast was rainy and rocky and not the beach vacation I’d imagined, though my husband kept telling me it would be magical. Because clothes get dirty, even when you’re on vacation, and our little boy, Winston, was of an age where he smeared avocado on his pants and smashed fresh blueberries against his T-shirts. Because clothes get especially dirty when there’s wet sand around and nothing for a four-year-old to do but roll around in the wet sand. On the rainiest day of the vacation, we headed up to the Rockaway Beach Laundromat. We divided up our clothes into two loads: kid and adult. We were the only customers.

  My husband had just bought a touristy little reed flute for Winston, who sat blowing sweet, empty notes like a Sufi on the floor, cross-legged. I bought miniature boxes of Biz and tossed them into the tumbling waterfalls drumming down against speckled metal. Winston was happy with the saltwater taffy we’d bought him, though I could almost hear the sugary slime rotting his teeth upon contact. He wore his swim trunks because they were the only thing clean. I wore my bikini as underwear for the same reason. Winston chewed and chewed and rolled the square laundry carts up and down the stained linoleum like a drag race.

  It rained and rained, but it was Pacific Northwest rain I wasn’t accustomed to: little fizz balls of tepid water with tails like minicomets. I sat on the counter meant for folding clothes and looked out the window: the soft rain, the little beach highway on the opposite coast of my continent. How do I explain ... that I was happy? The flute music, the warmth, Winston’s simple entertainment, our clothes being cleaned, just the three of us in this strange place. And the rain. It was part of the vacation process.

  Then a couple walked in. I ruffled open a Dreamsicle taffy, chewed, said hello, and tried not to stare. It was obvious: we were vacationing and they were locals. How was it obvious? It just was. She was pregnant. He was wiry. Bad hair on them both. They looked very tired, and not the kind of tired you get on vacation from bland, shapeless days of reading and eating but tired from failing to manage any kind of career or prosperity or solidity. They didn’t have any laundry, I noticed, and I shot my husband a raised eyebrow, which he deflected with a stoic shake of his head. The couple went back to the bulletin board and pinned up a couple things. Winston sidled up next to them and asked them their names. Mike and Crystal, they said, not unkindly. Then they left.

  Of course I ran to look at what they’d put up. My husband shot me a look that I was being nosy, and I was. I was! Who wouldn’t be? Mike’s tatty little scrap paper said: “Need work, can do electrical, plumbing, lawn care, basic carpentry—I don’t have tools—will need to use your’s—355-2503.” I frowned. No tools! The one from Crystal (clearly a woman’s handwriting) said: “Need to sell, need the room! Therm-o-Rite hot tub, marble blue interior, never been installed. Bought for $3,000, asking $500. Sacrifice—Having a baby! 355-2503.”

  We should buy this, I told my husband, but he didn’t even want to know what it was. Winston went back to drag racing the carts. The clothes were spinning.

  My mind was spinning, and the rain came down outside, beading against the glass door, hanging on for all it was worth. My happiness had suddenly grown complicated, a luxury I was beginning to wonder if I could afford.

  #5

  Because as a kid, it was cozy. Going to do laundry meant being with Mom. Mom was strong and sturdy and no-nonsense, and even though we were poor, and even though I’m sure I didn’t know the term “trailer trash” then, she got us by. The laundromat smelled like gasoline from the service station next door. It was big and roomy and yellow. It had a gum-ball machine by the door and another machine that dispensed swirly rubber balls and skeleton rings and miniature tattoos all captured in plastic bubble containers. Fifty cents each. But quarters were quarters and needed for the wash.

  Mom was tall. Mom could heave-ho with heavy machinery, big armfuls of clothes, mean people. Mom could scoop me up and hold my butt cupped in her arm and at the same time spin the noisy dials on the machines and slide coins in. At the end, sometimes, if there was money left, we ate next door at the Tip-Top Lounge, a place that to me meant a grilled cheese sandwich and a chocolate malt but to Mom meant a Jack & Ginger and a cigarette. Later, I would learn she stripped there for cash. To feed me, to wash my clothes.

  How could I know, even later, that I would be someone who’d appreciate the irony of the situation, really love the irony of it, and tell the story over and over to boyfriends who listened halfheartedly and thought me clever: the irony, I’d say, of washing clothes, clothes you take off, right next to the place where you literally take off those clothes, at a strip joint. I’d shake my head, remember Mom, miss her sturdy walking through the world. She was a heavy bleach user. She believed in the purity of bleach. Every time I open a bottle now, I am transported to visions of her big rusty eyes chunked with mascara on the lashes, her long jaw, her high fr
eckled cheekbones, the slight sweat beaded across her forehead. She could stack and hoist all of our laundry in one fell swoop. She’d put the full baskets one atop the other, tell me to climb aboard, then—upsy-daisy—kick open the door with her foot and away we go.

  FREEZE

  That was the summer everything changed, and while I couldn’t know it at the time, it was to be a year of extremes. The August temperatures lingered for weeks in the high nineties, literally bleaching our new black roof shingles a charcoal gray. That winter, after an agony of months during which we did not know if my father would live or die, the same roof shingles became coated with so many layers of ice that, having nowhere else to go, the gradual melt crept its way through the shingles, down into the attic beams, through the floor, and finally through the ceiling of my bedroom where I heard it splashing one January night, drop by drop, atop my desk. The odd thing was that I immediately sprang out of bed and called for my father to help, only to realize he wouldn’t be able. That was how it was at first: an accumulation of realizations that nothing would ever be the same.

  My mother had become a portrait of a girl after the accident. She let her hair grow long with bangs, wore simple blue jeans with cardigans, seemed smaller in stature than she really was; I had already surpassed her in height by my twelfth birthday and stood, a year later, five full inches above her. I remember flashes of her standing outside in the cold, bitter wind that winter, hair flying into her face, navy peacoat wrapped around her but unbuttoned while various vans, vehicles, and people pulled in and out of our driveway for my father. It was a year of strangers fronting as intimates walking around our house at all hours, reading books in corners while my father slept, sitting at the dinner table with us as if they were old friends.

  My brother, Harry, I rarely saw. Three years my senior, he had no idea how to face what seemed the worst possible thing. He’d essentially retreated away from our family and into his girlfriend, Rebecca’s, who lived across the canal bridge in a comfortable old house surrounded by pine trees. Although we were brothers, Harry and I had never been particularly close, and the accident only seemed to pull us farther apart and create a chasm I found defeating.

  The thing that kept me going was my camera—a fully manual Pentax K-1000 given to me by my parents for my thirteenth birthday. For years I had been the family documentarian, the one who assumed responsibility for preserving memories of birthdays, anniversaries, ice storms, Christmases, and vacations. I’d used my parents’ expensive little 35 mm automatic until it died one Halloween and was never replaced. A year later, I was finally given my own. It was an extravagant gift, certainly—I’d realized that as soon as I opened it—and I began to suspect something wasn’t right between my parents. That same year, when Harry turned sixteen and got his driver’s license, he was given, to his amazement, a used Honda hatchback. Both of us could sense something afoot.

  After the accident, I photographed every person who came to help my father in some way. I simply asked their permission to do so as soon as they entered our house, and most of them, although confused, could not refuse me. My favorite shot was of Rhonda Fontel, a rehabilitation specialist from Rochester. She was sitting in the front entryway unzipping her winter boots when our cat, Nomad, ran by in a tabby flash. The look on Rhonda’s face—both weary and astonished—reflected the general state of our household that year. That picture was hung, like all the others, in a simple black frame in my bedroom where no wall space remained save for a hard-to-reach corner or a finger of plaster between shots. Photographing people who came and went, who provided care and equipment, who did their jobs and left, allowed me to avoid looking directly at my father. Every time we made eye contact, it was as if my eyes—on their own accord—diverted downward to take in the effects of the accident, but then quickly, forcibly almost, ascended back to his face, only to see him looking out the window at the thick slurry of snow that seemed to constantly fall that year. I didn’t photograph him when the accident was still new and fresh; that would come later and in its own odd time. But I did photograph the objects of his new life: the equipment, his new bedroom, his many medications from the pharmacy. We will want to remember this for what it is, I remembered thinking. We must make a record of it.

  My mother refused to let me photograph her; in fact, the only shot of her is mostly a blurred swipe of the palm of her hand, her face turned away, her hair caught up in an exaggerated sweep. What I did instead was photograph her asleep. That year she often collapsed on the couch in front of the evening news or fell asleep, chin in hand, at the dining room table—forms and envelopes and piles of hospital bills all around her. My favorite photograph was of her asleep in the rocking chair. Her hands rested gently atop the rocker’s arms, her head lay back, her legs crossed at the ankle. There was a peace in her slack jaw and lidded eyes I wouldn’t see again in her waking hours.

  Talking about it later, Harry and I decided we should have seen it coming—not the accident itself, but the slow disintegration of our parents’ marriage. That June our father bought a fancy touring bicycle with whip-thin wheels and a small, hard tongue of a seat; the whole thing reminded me of a greyhound in its anorexic spareness. He had never been an avid cyclist before, but Harry and I, and our mother—from a distance—watched him cycle down the driveway in his tight Lycra wear, his hard, shiny helmet, and his special cleated shoes. On the weekends, he’d be gone sometimes whole days, and while Harry and I lazed around the pool, our mother smashed pots and pans around the kitchen, tossed the recycling out in the bins with a fury, rearranged the patio furniture in an awkward, chaotic way, then finally grilled us thick steaks for dinner with a look on her face that seemed to suggest she’d just as soon be turning our father on a spit. It was only later, much later, in that dim, sad dusk of summer when birds settle, bats begin to swoop, and children disband and run for baths, beds, and sleep, that we’d hear the light click of my father’s bicycle chain coming up the drive. Our mother feigned nonchalance, although watching her carefully from the corner of my eye, I’d see her body physically tense up and could hear the ice cubes melt and shift in her gin and tonic as if mimicking the fall of her heart.

  Later, I’d awaken from sleep to hear whispered screams, threats, tears, then low-murmured negotiations, and feeble-sounding, very temporary-seeming reconciliations.

  When my mother—my mother, a birthday overdoer, a birthday sap to the extreme—spent her fortieth birthday alone, I knew I should take notice, possibly intervene, and yet, being thirteen, I hadn’t the resources. On top of that, Harry and I were up to a lot of soccer playing that month, finishing out the season. To our credit, though, we did take our mother out to dinner at the newly opened Chinese restaurant in town, but watching her munch a soggy egg roll bathed in a horrible red sauce was finally more than we could bear. My gift was no better, although she’d smiled sadly and kissed me absently on the hair as she opened it. It was a small bowl glazed yellow and green bought at the college art department’s annual sale. My mother never actually used it for eating, as I’d intended, but relegated it to special status as her coin and ring holder on the window sill above the kitchen sink. Harry gave her a box of stationery, his usual. My father, nothing.

  For some reason, it was in me that my mother confided, and while I found the exchanges rather awkward (“Should I give your father an ultimatum? Do you think he would buy into that, or retract?”), I was forced to play both good son and close girlfriend; I was hardly prepared for the latter but tried to nod, question, rage, or enthuse when each seemed appropriate. I was jealous of Harry and how he seemed released from any responsibility in terms of our domestic situation. He’d always been the compulsive, scattered free spirit of the family; his sudden exits and manic mood swings were just enough to keep the focus effectively on him instead of the real sources of tension. “He’s just like his father,” my mother said to me one June evening as we watched Harry zip off on his rollerblades to Rebecca’s. It got my attention that she’d said “his�
�� father instead of “your” father, but she seemed for once so calm as we sat on the back patio, glasses of cool iced tea dripping in our hands, that I didn’t want to rile her. Our father was still out on his bicycle and it was nine thirty, going on ten; the last strips of sunset fell pink and amber through the darkened tops of the trees. He’d certainly spent whole days away before but usually wheeled in closer to dinnertime than bedtime. Instead of being upset, my mother seemed resigned, at last, to something.

  “It’s finally cooling off,” she said. She wiggled her bare toes in her sandals and folded her hands across her stomach. I was afraid anything I might say would ruin the mood, so I nodded and fell silent beside her. That’s when we heard the phone ring, and lazy as we both were, I finally dragged myself inside, running to catch it before the machine picked up. I answered, breathless, on the fourth ring. “Hello?” My voice sounded young, even to me, and cracked on the second syllable; the person on the other end immediately asked for Mrs. Ginny Foster, my mother, whom I could see out the kitchen window. Something about the form of address alerted me to the fact that bad news somehow lay ahead. “Mom!” I yelled outside. “For you!”