“Can a woman with cancer still come? Even with all the chemotherapy?” she asked.
DEIRDRE MADE HER way past Voter Hall, the computer center, and then shuffled along the walkway that led to Monroe Hall where her office was located. A cast-iron statue of a dog catching a Frisbee in its mouth in mid-air stood several feet from the path. Legend had it that the Frisbee had been invented at Middlebury. Of course they’d try to claim credit for that; as if owning Robert Frost weren’t enough, she thought.
Ian was waiting outside her office when she finally made her way up the three flights of stairs.
“Have you been waiting long?”
“No. I just got here.”
“Good. Come on inside,” she said as she held the door open for him. She’d read several of the stories that made up his thesis throughout the semester. A couple of them were quite good. Maybe in need of a little bit of polish, but for an undergraduate they were intriguing enough for her to want to read more.
“I’ve been working on a new story that’s kind of a departure for me. I was hoping to get your input so I could begin tinkering with it for the collection,” said Ian pulling out a white folder from his knapsack.
“Tell me about it,” she said.
He told her about a laundromat in his hometown that used to be a department store and how it had turned into a meeting place for the women of Montpelier. The display window of the store was now the waiting room. There was a girl Ian had seen sitting in there smoking a cigarette and flipping through a magazine one day when he’d been walking by. She was about the same age as him, but was unkempt and “darty” (he liked the word even if he didn’t think it was one), her eyes never really on the magazine and always shifting about like she was looking for someone. She had been wearing a hoodie and tight black pants, hair streaked in several different shades of blonde like she couldn’t decide which kind of a blonde she thought she should be. She’d been sitting in that waiting room like a chipped mannequin left over from the days when the laundromat had still been a department store. She was the kind of mannequin that was too scuffed up to use anymore and is sent to the back of the store before being tossed into the garbage. He said that just watching her, the entire story had fallen into place. She was a teen runaway, a prostitute. At the laundromat, she crossed paths with a cleaning woman in town who had her own sad, pathetic story. The two began seeing each other romantically.
“I used to walk by that laundromat everyday on my way to the gym, since it’s near the Grand Union where my mom shops. I never gave it much thought, but when I saw Mary sitting there—that’s what I started calling her to myself, Mary—I couldn’t stop thinking about her. The story just began to evolve from there.”
As he described the story to her, Deirdre couldn’t help but be drawn into it through the authenticity of his voice, the unaffected way he had of describing this woman, her makeshift dwelling, the incredible richness of this laundromat. She usually found stories based on someone’s hometown to be painfully derivative and uninspiring. Stop trying to make me care about Smalltown USA and the simple people who live there. She remembered thinking this when she’d read one MFA application after another at Boston University for a few months a couple years ago, a short-term gig she’d been coaxed into by one of her old professors. Each story came with so much built-in esoteric baggage: that special road we all used to drive down, the high school parking lot where we got our cheap thrills and dropped acid for the first time together, those woods where Mr. So-and-So kept his fighting dogs that Stevie Such-and-Such went and freed once (the last page of a student’s story who she’d actually ended up recommending for the program because she just couldn’t reject them all). It was always a good impulse to write about what you know, but so often she felt like that statement needed the addendum of “but make sure that others will fucking care.”
He handed her the folder. “I’m sorry that I won’t be at your reading next week. I have an away game that night at Amherst.”
“I’ll be sure to read this and get back to you with comments, Ian.”
“Thanks, Deirdre.”
She reached out her hand to accept his new story about the laundromat, “Because We Care.”
WOMEN LIVED IN there.
They didn’t just clean clothes there; they cleaned their souls there. They escaped their tired, dark dens cracked with ceiling, molded with walls. The women set up shop. They pinochled and trashy paperbacked. They crocheted while spitting venomously at daytime’s villainesses—those women they loved to hate. They traded miseries and detergent powder. If it weren’t for the Laundromat, they would be left alone with their sad-shellacked stories. At least in here, the dirty laundry was visible.
Even half past seven was early enough for the women to already have moved in for the day. Those who’d been lurking around during the dark hours of the morning slowly filtered out. They were moving onto darker places for the coming of day. Mary ushered into the wide, open space where walls of rotating windows cleaned the laundry of the week. She was surrounded by all sorts of women in all stages of disorder. And she was one of them.
It had once been a department store. Old racks jutted out of the walls, above the dryers illuminated by fluorescent lights, yet offered no merchandise. Only hair bands, watches to tell how long the cycles, a child’s balloon. Once a leash. Wood-paneled awnings fixed with bare bulbs lit the areas underneath the dryers, like track lighting on a plane, only pointing deeper into the place. Homeless wired pushcarts lined in plaid and filled with old clothes stood against the aisles like display bins of marked-down goods. Fake potted plants that were perched upon mannequin pedestals separated back-to-back washers. The women peered at each other through a Formica jungle. Clothes left behind littered the floor underneath the folding counters. Balls of lint and dust bunnies hid behind them for cover.
A coin-operated machine dispensing Laundry Aids stood against a wall. Move selector lever under desired brand. Press handle. There were change machines.
Some people called it the Wash-Dry & Fold. Others simply called it the Laundromat.
Because We Care…We Ask You Not to Put your Children in the Carts or on the Folding Tables. Thank you. Next to the sign a woman had her baby in a cart. It looked like she might be shopping for children on sale.
The front of the Laundromat had once been a glassed-in showcase for the fashionable wares of its department store era. It now functioned as a vitreous cage littered with month-old circulars, beauty magazines, and the stale, dried butts of the chain-smoking mothers. Slowly rotating fans hovered over the smoke clouds, moving them nowhere. Mary sat in a black metal chair, facing the passers-by, with one leg stuck underneath her. She was a chipped and discarded mannequin, unfit for the display of any new merchandise.
Her hair was greasy from not showering the night before—a long string of nights before—but the blonde part outweighed her dark roots. Blondes can always pull off a bad hair day, she thought. Her hair was tied in the back by a pink ribbon she’d found on the floor, something someone had probably used once for gift wrapping. She wore stonewashed jeans and a knee-length white pullover that, despite her sitting in the middle of a Laundromat, was unwashed. She actually believed she could solicit this way.
AFTER READING THE first couple of pages, Deirdre immediately latched onto several images and phrases. The entire opening section, in fact, seemed to evoke so much more than just one singular downtrodden character’s sadness. She felt like Ian had reached deeper to capture the small, dry death of small-town New England life in all its utter starkness and chill. She admired how the story was, at once a throwback to a simpler time, yet also painfully relevant in a way, like everyone inside of his fabled laundromat. He made everything immediate and important. She appreciated his inventive use of nouns as action verbs (pinochle, trashy paperback). It displayed a boldness with language she liked to reward. There were still certainly revisions to be done (he had used the word “usher” without a direct object which the transi
tive verb required), but for a first draft from an underclassman, this showed more promise than she’d seen in a long time. There was even something about it that made her think of her own work.
Ian’s women seemed damaged in a far less obvious way than Deirdre’s were. Deirdre had always been drawn to visibly broken women as characters in her stories: women with missing limbs, strange body parts, preternaturally ugly faces. She remembered watching Dead Ringers in college and being enthralled by the tortuous—downright medieval—gynecological instruments Jeremy Irons used on Geneviève Bujold’s freakishly distorted vagina in the film. The friends she had gone to the film with at the time had claimed that David Cronenberg, the director, was a misogynist, a pig—claims that Deirdre found to be baseless and somewhat alarmist.
She came home that night thinking how there was something inherently beautiful about the calm serenity lying beneath the most tortured of bodies. She imagined the possibility of transcending trauma, of positioning oneself above the mangled limbs and the twisted vaginas to actually see the full and complete woman behind them—imperfection worn on the outside as a kind of sad mask for the calm, imperceptible beauty underneath the skin. In a way, these women got to wear on the outside what Deirdre considered her own internal deficiencies, deeply hidden, exposed only briefly on the page under the guise of fiction, if ever exposed at all.
Years later after college, while driving down I-95 on her way from New York back to Boston University, Deirdre had caught an unforgettable glimpse of a woman who had flown through the passenger-side windshield of a car involved in a three-car pile-up. Before the car had been cleared off the road, or at least hidden from rubberneckers and other looky-lo’s, she’d been able to see that the woman’s head had gone through the glass, but had been stopped at the base of the neck, so that she appeared almost as a ceremonial bust. Her head was turned slightly toward traffic and her blonde hair tuffeted around her. Deirdre had been too far away to see any blood, so that she was able to almost immediately remove herself from the gruesome nature of the tragedy to see the dead woman as someone whose beauty had been permanently arrested, captured in the crumpled blanket of cracked glass surrounding her like a large royal robe.
IT WAS A Tuesday and she was finished with her morning classes. She got into her Le Car and drove past several inns and small shops along Main Street that led out of town. She was looking around, wary of who might be walking down the sidewalks. A college town is like a regular small town, only more striated. Not only did everyone want to know everyone else’s business, they were immediately distrustful of interlopers and transients. She heard a professor who’d lived there for over two decades still being referred to as “that woman from Atlanta” as if one’s ancestors had to have been shuttled directly from the Mayflower to the town square four hundred years ago to ever be fully accepted. Deirdre didn’t feel the need to try and ingratiate herself with the townspeople. She viewed them much like background, a great sea of faces that made up her current milieu. They were secondary characters not worth much more than a passing hello.
Deirdre didn’t want to see anyone while she was making her way out of town for the afternoon. Not any of her students, not Jim or his ghostly wife. Or nosy Raquel. Or Ian, especially not Ian.
She decided on Route 7 through Burlington and then the straight line down Interstate-189 into Barre-Montpelier, a straight shot past the miles of farmland, cows and red barns that gave subject to Vermont postcards. When she finally rolled into town about an hour later, she passed Montpelier High School and then made a left-hand turn at the bridge and then a right onto State Street, a long, wide avenue that flowed right into the small town, America’s tiniest capital city. She figured if she continued down State Street, she’d eventually hit a Main Street (wasn’t this just the kind of town for a State and Main intersection?), and then once she could find the Grand Union where Ian’s mother shopped, the laundromat couldn’t be too far away. Ian didn’t have the copyright on laundromats. He didn’t own them in fiction. And he didn’t own Montpelier either. Or this woman Mary, if she was still lurking around.
Main Street was empty, except for a few slow-moving vehicles and a school bus up ahead that had stopped to pick up a child from a gray clapboard house. As Deirdre continued along past an Irish bar, what looked like the town hall, and then a firehouse on her right she spotted the Grand Union. There were several spaces open in the parking lot, so she pulled the Le Car into one of them and began walking around the block.
She saw it almost instantly, catty-corner to Main Street on a street with no name. The words “Wash-Dry & Fold” blinked in blue neon on what looked like a Hollywood marquee. It was almost exactly as Ian had described, even paling in comparison to what he’d written, actually. He’d given it this discarded, ominous quality that she knew must’ve reflected the way he felt about the town.
As she got closer, she could see the makeshift waiting room he had described so evocatively. Fashioned out of what was once the display window of the department store, the women who sat there were these kind of hideous versions of real people, frozen in a way. They reminded her of the artist Duane Hanson, who did those life-size, three-dimensional model installations of regular people doing mundane things. The piece that had stuck out to her when she’d seen it at MoMA was a woman pushing a shopping cart filled with 1970s era products, wearing a floral muumuu, her hair in rollers. The artist had gone so far as to paint her teeth as if they were stained with coffee and nicotine, a perfect scowl on her face. Those were the women sitting in there. Like something out of a movie, she thought. What fabulously hideous women. She walked inside, feeling for the small notebook and pen in her back pocket.
She began to imagine that one of the women was the proprietress of the Laundromat. A gassy old crone who, in her younger years, had modeled fashions there, back when the space had still been a department store and before the town had suffered from the brain drain that seemed to have afflicted many sections of the state. They’d had normal mannequins, but she had marketed herself as a kind of living mannequin, one who would stand in a freeze position in the display window and then walk around the store to demonstrate how the clothing moved through the space. Her name was Undine. Deirdre sat down in the waiting room, just like Ian’s character Mary, and began to write.
When she finally stopped, she looked up and it was already dark. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been there. The washers around her were all rumbling loudly. Several of them were the older models that shuddered in place from side to side like angry machines that have come alive having detaching themselves from the wall. There was a curious smell of floral laundry sheets mixed with cigarette smoke that lingered in the air and the musty scent of grimy flooring and old, dirty clothes. Just as Ian had described in his story, another set of women (along with a couple men, it looked like) had moved into the laundromat to populate a kind of night shift. Under the fluorescent lighting, she could see that several of them had that dark, haunted look like they were unemployed or indigent. Or simply depressed. Deirdre got up, closed her notebook and left.
THE PROFESSORS WERE seated at a long table in front of the amassed group of students for the faculty reading. Jim read first from one of his Skipper books (Skipper’s Spare, the third book in the series that Deirdre had mistakenly read first while in college). He had asked all the professors to read new work for the faculty reading, so Deirdre found it surprising that he himself was reading from a book that had been published over twenty years ago. There had even been a film made condensing the first two of the Skipper books, bringing the character to a whole legion of new audiences. He had already been recognized by some of the greatest contemporary writers as one of their own and had the awards on his wall and mantle to prove it. Yet Deirdre felt sad thinking of him resting on the laurels of these ridiculous Skipper books. She realized that he too might be blocked, without even knowing it himself.
While he was reading, she noticed that Nan was sitting in the back of the room. She
was wearing a silk turban and a knit shawl and looked rather glamorous for the small-time event. While Jim was reading, she nodded and pursed her lips at several points. There wasn’t anyone in the room who knew him as well as Nan did, Deirdre thought. Who knew Skipper. She remembered that in Skipper’s Spare, the main character Skipper Muldoon has an affair with the wife of a couple with whom he and his wife play tennis. Everything about writers is an endless act of recycling.
Raquel read from a non-fiction piece she’d written about a recent trip she had taken with her husband to Cambodia, researching the sex-slave industry for a book she was writing on the subject. She had spoken about it with Deirdre non-stop, to the point where Deirdre felt like she had not only read the entire book already, but had also suffered through the writing of it as well. Raquel’s husband sat in the back of the room holding a squirming Starla, who was trying to wriggle her way out of his arms, exposing pink panties underneath her skirt, decorated with watermelons.
“And now, I’d like to introduce our newest member to the department. I’ve admired her from afar for a few years now since I read her story in The Atlantic Monthly, ‘My Sometimes Sister.’ Since then, I’ve had the deep pleasure of getting to know the woman behind those beautiful words. Please put your hands together for a writer who adds a touch of literary allure to this fine institution—Ms. Deirdre Kirkendoll.” Jim stepped aside. The audience clapped. She looked up.
Read by Strangers Page 20
