But for now it was still Fourth Year French, and the last girl had fluttered out the door. All that was left in the classroom was a bunch of eighteen-year-old boys and Madame Lipsky. She exhaled a sigh, smiling with relief. In her enormous plastic glasses and purple-tinted hair, she looked radiant. She had done what Mack had never done—and what he now longed, palpably, to be able to do. She had set all things right in the world.
Sunshine Cleaners
Any weekday in Brookline, drivers caught in Beacon Street traffic might see Sergei hurrying along a certain stretch of wet sidewalk. Sergei’s back crooks slightly to the left, and his pants, baggy on thin, bowed legs, billow in the cold April air. If he’s already completed his transaction, he’ll be heading west, pockets sagging with quarters. When he arrives back at Sunshine Cleaners, he obeys the PUSH sign on the door, half expecting—one might call it hope—to find something changed. But there’s old Lida behind the counter, smoking her second cigarette of the day, taking dirty silk shirts from a bald man. The man has also brought a pair of shoes to be resoled, and Lida is shaking her head.
“But the sign in the window says ‘Shoe Repair,’ ” the man protests. Other signs read, “24-Hour Tailoring,” “Instant Zipper Fix,” and “We Store Winter Furs!” but those are incorrect, too.
“Down the street,” says Lida, already turning back to her sewing machine, while Sergei, now out of his snow-flecked red satin bomber jacket, begins work: taking piles of clothes around to the front, past the partition, into the laundry, over to the wall of bright yellow washing machines. All day he tosses clothes into washers and dryers and adds them to flat, folded stacks.
If it is a Monday, Sergei keeps an eye out for the tall girl. Last week she told him, “You disgust me!” This was after the change machine took her dollar without giving quarters, and Sergei, when notified, said, “Not my machine.” Other customers have given up on Sergei—if they ever addressed him at all—and no longer bother to approach him when machines malfunction. Not the tall girl. When she offered him her other dollar for four quarters, Sergei just shook his head. That was when the tall girl yelled, “You disgust me!” The two other customers looked frightened, not realizing that Sergei and the tall girl have such conversations regularly. Sometimes Lida, from her wooden seat in front of the Singer, joins in while hemming a skirt, not looking up, yelling, “You disgust me!” or “Not my machine!” or something in Russian that the tall girl can’t understand.
The tall girl always does her wash on Mondays, when there are fewer people. Strong, fit, with blond hair that meets her shoulders, and clear, flawless skin, she looks to be in her early twenties. If a dryer doesn’t work and Sergei tells her, “Not my machine,” she confronts him with frank eyes that at times force Sergei to look to the ground. She speaks in the flat voice of someone used to having her demands met. After firing some comment at Sergei, she transfers her clothes to another dryer, then sits and reads. Usually she peruses magazines, but last week it was a book, Love: Ten Poems by Pablo Neruda, from which she copied phrases, every few minutes or so, onto a sheet of paper.
Her easy confidence Sergei sees as purely American. When the dryer buzzes, she sweeps out her clean clothes heedlessly, a clumsy shower of mixed cotton; she does not separate dark and light loads. Sergei has never seen her give any article of clothing special treatment, to be air-dried or placed flat. Her clothes are mostly denim and jersey, solid colors. She has no fancy fabrics or patterned socks like the other girls doing their laundry. But her underpants, Sergei has noticed, are the satin kind with just a thin band down the back.
Today, though, is a Thursday. It might as well be Tuesday, Wednesday, or Friday. Lida has turned the radio to Easy Jazz 107.9, filling the air with the thin, slinky whine of an electronic alto sax. Outside, Beacon Street is already busy with altercations, a wrangle of horns. It has been a long winter, and even the cars are starting to show it—rusty, tired, snapping at each other. The snow began in early December and doesn’t seem to have finished. Down the street, store windows display flowered dresses, straw Easter bonnets, pastel pocketbooks.
Inside Sunshine Cleaners, the morning bustle is fluorescent-lit and smoky. People drop off broken computers; Sergei’s friend Val runs a computer repair business and tells perplexed early-risers to leave their machines at the cleaners. Sergei wonders about Val, a widower a good twenty years older than Sergei. Val has been in this country longer, nine years. It was Val who stood in wool pants and bright red suspenders to meet Sergei at the airport two years ago, holding a sign with his name on it. All they had in common was a mutual Moscow acquaintance with whom neither has kept in touch. Now Val and Sergei play poker with two other men every Friday. The men are not yet sixty but look ancient—teeth missing, hair gone. Their skin is gray-green and deeply wrinkled. They tease Sergei because he is slim-boned and lean, and call him “Omar” because of his dark coloring and high cheekbones.
From its wide spout, the fabric softener pours a lazy pink veil. At cards last week Sergei lost four days’ pay. Val sat across from him in a peaked flannel cap, winning, smoking ceaselessly, complaining of frequent doctors’ visits for lung tests. This computer business of his has to be a sham. How could a fifty-year-old from Smolensk, rotted through with emphysema, know a thing about computers? Val claims never to have touched one until he came to America, says one day he just found one, took it apart, and figured out how it worked. “It’s just a little chip!” he has said. He claims to know all the programs, all the languages, and tells Sergei, when asked how he does it, “I’m a genius!”
Sergei adds bleach to a load of whites. Nearby, Mr. Tyne, the young freckled man who owns the washers and dryers, is making his daily visit to empty them of their quarters. He says nothing.
Sergei wonders when he’ll next have luck at cards. Ivan, the eldest, gambles on anything—horses, dogs, Val’s test results. He plays the Massachusetts lottery regularly, claims to know someone who won. He and his wife have been here three years. “On the T today,” Ivan said recently, “I saw a man with a mole out to here!” He held his gray-green hand an inch from his chin and shivered with disapproval. “I come all the way to America, I’d like to not see such a thing, for once in my life.” That last bit is in English, one of the few American phrases Ivan uses (often, and somewhat indiscriminately).
Sergei thinks of his own skewed back. Ivan must disapprove; his wife is a big old St. Petersburg beauty with perfectly sculpted hair and eyebrows. On poker nights she puts on dark lipstick, tan stockings, and matching outfits from twenty years ago to go see a movie with her friends. Her ankles puff over the tops of little fur-lined boots.
The change machine is broken again, but Mr. Tyne has already left, his bag heavy with loot. Sergei hopes Val won’t raise the stakes again this Friday. The third man is a retired physicist named Miro. He has bad luck with poker and mutters to himself in Belorussian. His wife does things in the kitchen all night long, and every half-hour or so calls out some comment or other, always something brief, anxious, and inconsequential.
When Sergei sits in Miro’s dark apartment on a Friday night, dealing out the worn plastic cards, he thinks to himself that all over this city young people must be having fun and making love. For some reason—the long hours at Sunshine Cleaners, he supposes—he has yet to find those people. American ones, that is. Not the Russians Val has introduced him to, and whom he sees frequently: glossy-haired Yelena, her sister; her cousin; their neighbors and friends. He’s in America now; why should he hang around with them all the time? When he walks home from work at seven every evening, Sergei wishes there were a bar to stop into on the way, where he could meet other thirty-yearolds. People outside of his circle, friends to make on his own, nothing to do with Yelena. But it’s a college town founded by Puritans; the only bar on his route is a big one with booths and fried food and students in baseball caps.
Sergei wonders about the tall girl, what she does when she isn’t reading magazines or copying poetry or telling Sergei,
“You disgust me!” Perhaps her friends, like Sergei’s, are aging geniuses. Sergei doubts it. He pictures them young and female. He has run out of quarters.
He will have to run down the block to change a twenty. Lida has gone on her lunch break, so there is no one to leave in charge; on a piece of paper Sergei scrawls “Back in 5 Minutes” and tapes it to the glass door, which he locks behind him. He hurries to the nearby liquor store. There is rarely a line there, at most someone asking for the on-sale cigarettes or buying a lottery ticket.
It happened once that he hurried back, nearly out of breath, to find the tall girl scowling in front of the door, her hands on her curved hips, and a plastic bin of dirty clothes in front of her. “People have lives to get to,” she said in that firm voice of hers. “People don’t have all day.”
“Neither do I,” said Sergei.
“You have time to run to the liquor store,” the girl said. Her hair was pulled back in a clip, so that her skin looked especially luminous. “I see where you go. Don’t bother denying it. And meanwhile your customers have to wait.”
Sergei felt his face heat up. Why didn’t he say anything then? Why did he just unlock the latch and, feeling his heart pounding, walk ahead of the tall girl without holding the door? From inside Sunshine Cleaners he watched her bend down to lift her laundry, and, without even trying, saw right up her denim skirt. He pretended not to notice as she struggled with the bin of clothes and an unwieldy bottle of detergent. Afterward, he had a horrible headache.
Sergei replays this in his mind as he enters the liquor store. The manager recognizes Sergei, knows why he’s here, greets him in a not-unfriendly manner. Sergei hands over a bill and takes back coins. How many times have their hands touched this way? Sergei leaves the store, passing shivering trees and an enigmatic sign announcing APRIL 25: HAZARDOUS WASTE DAY! He takes up his restrained run, his back at a tilt, pants parachuting. He considers that people may be watching him.
He does not understand that his red satin bomber jacket looks like a remnant of high school varsity and is insufficient for a New England winter. He does not realize that people who come to Sunshine Cleaners suppose he is Lida’s son, or that they suspect he is slightly ill—a Chernobyl victim, perhaps?—with his sunken cheeks and tweaked body.
He does not know that last week the tall girl called the Chamber of Commerce to complain about him, or that the woman on the phone told the girl, in a bright Brahmin accent, that Sunshine Cleaners was not a member of the Brookline Chamber, so that the girl now pictures the Chamber of Commerce as some sort of blue-haired ladies’ club. The girl was given a telephone number that turned out to belong to the Consumer Complaint Bureau, where a different woman asked, with a harsh South Boston inflection, “Have you lost any money?”
“Well, yeah, some quarters, a few dollars, I guess. But it’s not the money; it’s the rudeness, I mean—”
“I can only lodge a complaint if money has been lost. If you don’t like the way they run their business, there’s nothing we can do except urge you to take your business elsewhere.”
These are just some of the things that Sergei does not know. Today is Tuesday. Wednesday? Sergei shuffle-runs down the street. He arrives at Sunshine Cleaners, takes a breath, pushes the door that says “PUSH.” What change could he possibly expect to find inside? That Lida will be suddenly young and unwrinkled, like a replumped raisin? That her hair will be blond, her figure slim, and she will look at him when she speaks? Instead he smells cigarette smoke, sees the same faces, the broken machines.
Last night he had dinner with Yelena and her younger sister, Sonia. They ate hamburgers downtown, and Sergei admired Sonia, who had dyed her hair blue-black and pierced her eyebrow with a small silver hoop. Yelena said it was horrible, but Sergei could only like Sonia for it. Amazing what difference a few years can make; Yelena still spoke with an accent and wore embarrassing lace-up shoes, while Sonia, five years younger, looked and sounded American and had a skateboarding boyfriend named Timothy. Timothy met them after dinner, and the couple went off together.
Sergei wonders where they went. He wonders if the girls’ cousin Johnny (he gave himself that name) knows of any good parties going on this coming weekend. Johnny doesn’t always invite Sergei along, only when he happens to see him right beforehand.
Sergei works his way across the wall of yellow washers and dryers. Around ten, Val shows up to claim a computer keyboard. He flirts with Lida for a bit before telling Sergei, “Ivan wants to go to Foxwoods next Friday.”
“The casino?”
“In Connecticut. Ivan says he knows someone who won big.”
Sergei heads to the other side of the partition to start a new load.
“Where’s your enthusiasm, Omar?” Val calls to him. “It could be fun.”
“What do people play?” Sergei calls back. “Poker?”
“Everything! Blackjack! Slot machines!”
“No machines,” says Sergei. “I’m sick of machines.”
“We can all four play together,” Val says through his cloud of cigarette smoke. “You might win. Right? You could win something. Anything could happen!”
“Next Friday, then?”
“Unless my doctor’s appointment goes late. I’ve got another evaluation that afternoon.”
“Everything all right?”
“Of course not. You of all people, asking me that, with that spine of yours.” Val picks up the broken keyboard. “Your back, my heart, we’re all breaking down. All these breakdowns!” He winks at Lida and heads for the door. “Till tomorrow!”
Sergei checks the pockets of a pair of baggy pants before adding them to the cycle. He finds a roll of breath mints. They have the same scent as a mint that an aunt who raised him sometimes gave him when he behaved. He shuts his eyes to find the memory, but Lida says, “What does it mean, ‘Hazardous Waste Day’? How could they celebrate a thing like that?”
“It’s not a festival.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised, in this town. It’s always something: flag day, flu vaccination day, cat-spaying day, voting day. That must be what it is: checking for toxic garbage. I like this town. They make sure everything is okay.”
Today is Monday. Sergei stands in Sunshine Cleaners with a cart full of laundry. The tall girl is glowering at him.
A washer has left her clothes in a sudsy bath instead of rinsed clean. Sergei has again told her, “Not my machine,” but she refuses to budge. So Sergei adds, “Tell the owners,” and points to the telephone number inscribed on a small sign on the wall.
The girl takes a slow breath. “Fine, then, I’m going to call them.” She heads toward the phone on Lida’s counter.
“This is our phone,” Sergei tells her, blocking her way with his body. “Not theirs. The laundry is a separate business.”
The girl raises her hand in an ambiguous half-fist: she could be about to punch him, or she could be about to pull out her own hair. “Then may I use your phone?” she asks, her jaw tightening visibly.
Sergei pauses for a thoughtful moment before saying, “No.”
The tall girl looks him in the eye, pushes past him to the counter, and picks up the phone. She dials a number and says angry things to an answering machine. Sergei watches the way her blond hair falls pleasingly forward across her face.
“This is pitiful,” she says when she hangs up. “This is no way to run a business. You’re rude, and your machines never work. My clothes come back smelling of cigarettes.”
“So don’t come here,” Sergei says, knowing at once that he does not mean it. Except for Val’s visits, would Sergei even exist here, without the tall girl to notice him?
“This is the only laundry nearby. I don’t have a car. How can you treat me this way?” The girl has begun crying; this has never happened before.
“So you don’t have a car,” Lida says from the other side of the room, threading a bobbin on the Singer. “I waited three years for a car. When it came, it was orange and made of plastic. I h
ad to pick it up in Petrozavodsk. I broke the door just getting in to drive it home.” This is all in Russian, so the tall girl does not reply.
“I need quarters, too,” Sergei is saying. “The owner doesn’t give me a discount. When he comes to take the money from the machines, he doesn’t even talk to me. Do you know how that makes me—? I use the machines just like you.”
“Well, then, we’re all pathetic,” the girl says through tears.
Sergei hasn’t stopped talking. “I have to run to the liquor store to change my dollars. If Lida’s not here, I have to lock the door; I have to hurry, and it hurts my back. I have a bad spine, I take quinine at night. I didn’t use to be this way. I was strong, but one day . . .” Sergei hears his voice crack. That’s it. He feels those tears, ready to reveal themselves the minute he blinks. He stops talking and concentrates on not blinking, tries to distract himself by focusing on one of Val’s broken-down computer monitors. The tall girl, without appearing to have heard him, has begun sobbing.
Calamity and Other Stories Page 6
