YOU USUALLY GET HERE this early?” asks a woman, sixty or so, white uniform dress, stockings, white shoes, as she drops her clothes into an open machine.
“No,” I say, “I’ve never been before noon.”
“I love this place early,” her voice is soft but strong, the accent more Mississippi than Arkansas, “before everyone else gets here with their big bags of clothes and children piled up all over the place.”
I like the quiet too, the waiting while clothes spin and soak and dry, flipping through magazines and staring out into the parking lot, watching people come and go with their takeout boxes of BBQ, all of it in a sort of suspended animation—the Laundromat, where nothing is expected beyond feeding quarters to machines and scooping soap and softener at the appropriate times. But this morning is different. It’s my birthday, though that’s something no one else can see. No, the real difference is that I have plans while I wait. A tall coffee and a stack of student papers on the table near my basket.
“I just got off work,” she says while letting the lid to the washing machine come down, “I work from six to ten every morning.”
She works at the elementary school nearby, and says no when I ask if she’s a nurse, smiling in a shy way that reminds me of Rose Middlebrooks from junior high, the friend I’d forgotten until this very moment, with eyes as brown and skin as golden as the woman standing at a washing machine thirty years later. “In the cafeteria,” she says, “fixing breakfast.”
I ask what she cooks and she says it’s more like reheating frozen things than actual cooking and sometimes it’s as simple as setting out donuts and boxed cereal and whatnot.
“Well,” I say, “I’m sure the kids like all that stuff.”
“Yes,” she says, “they sure do.” She sits beside me saying she notices I have only one load spinning in the washer and do I live alone. I nod while tucking the paper I’d been grading into my bag. “I have a husband, but he’s away a lot,” I say and realize just how sad it sounds. “And two cats,” I tack on, as if it won’t sound sadder.
I want to tell her about my husband’s talent, the way he’s home right now making a painting of the river, and that we’ll go to the pub tonight for leek soup and soda bread and beer. And more than that, I want to explain that I don’t mind the solitude, my love of space, the price of which is sometimes loneliness. I want to describe the way it settles around me, the space and the freedoms I have, the way my life has both worked out and not worked out according to anyone’s idea of success. But she’s only asked about my lack of laundry and is now telling about a cat she once had and her current menagerie: two parakeets and a betta fish. “I talk to them birds all day long,” she says, laughing. “All day long, Lord.”
“I hope you don’t mind my asking,” her voice changes, the laughter evaporating, “but why did you move here?” Her eyes go shy again and as I scan the smooth face, I think maybe she’s not so old after all, or I am truly grown older today, the gap between us closing. Anyway, I’m used to this question and the tone in which it is asked. Unlike New York or San Francisco, where the appeal is generally assumed, Memphians are stumped about why outsiders come. The tourists down on Beale Street, the British and Germans lined up at Graceland they almost understand, but someone coming to stay? It’s nothing short of a mystery.
“A job,” I say, and tell her about my students at the local public university, how I was the first in my family to go to college, how so many Memphis students are in the same boat. I like this woman who reheats frozen pancakes for a horde of hungry children every morning and I suppose that besides technically answering her question, I’m hoping for something more, but she just looks away and asks if I know her niece over at the college.
“I’m afraid not,” I say once she says the name. There are more than twenty thousand students, but I leave this out, not wanting to dilute her niece among the others.
I stand to check my laundry, asking if she takes naps after working all morning.
“Only after I watch my programs.”
“Soap operas or game shows?”
“Neither,” she says, “I like the old ones, Bonanza, sometimes Gunsmoke and The Big Valley. And Walker, Texas Ranger; now that is my show.” I laugh at her taste for television Westerns and wonder if she likes old detective shows, like Starsky & Hutch.
“Not really,” she says. “But I love that Barnaby Jones.”
“What about Quincy?” She shakes her head, she doesn’t know much about Quincy, and I’m spinning my wheels trying to remember shows from childhood when she switches to movies.
“Normally I don’t care for Elvis, but I like Frankie and Johnny a whole lot,” she says. She throws me a look of pity when I don’t know the film, and says, “the one where Elvis is on a riverboat with the girl who played Elly May in The Beverly Hillbillies.”
“What about other musicals?” I say, moving to the washer whose red light has finally gone dark. “The Sound of Music?”
“No,” she laughs. “I don’t like that kind of show.”
“West Side Story?” I pull the wet ball of clothes into the metal basket as she asks what it’s about and I say it’s Natalie Wood as a Puerto Rican girl who loves a white boy but no one wants them together. We both laugh then—though I’m not sure whether we’re laughing over the idea of Natalie Wood being Puerto Rican or the fact of people being kept apart by skin color.
“Hmm,” she says after a minute. “I do like me some Shirley Temple films.”
“Yes,” I say, “she’s all right,” while slipping quarters into the dryer, and by the time I return to my seat the entertainment thread has worn down to nothing and it gets quiet, something settling onto us, the sort of thing that can’t be turned back once it starts. As I sit listening to the clank in the spinning dryer, all talk of Bonanza and Elly May Clampett out of the way, I know the question she’ll ask before it comes—one that didn’t used to come, or when it did could still be answered with the sort of possibility that let both answerer and asker off the hook.
“No kids?”
“No,” I say. “Nope.”
It’s odd the way the tender places are not touched so much by those we know as by strangers sitting in metal chairs while laundry tumbles behind small circles of glass. Funny how such moments come between talk of old TV shows and the sound of the man in the pick-up outside revving his engine while waiting for his girlfriend to switch her load.
“You never wanted any?” She’s looking straight at me now, silver curls catching the light. I look away for a minute, toward the woman who runs the place, folding laundry for those who prefer to pay more and drop it off, her long hair pulled back in a utilitarian bun, a style she’s probably worn for forty years, a habit as fixed as the way she apologies every time I ask for change, yes, ma’am, sorry, ma’am, while handing over the half roll of quarters.
“You really want to know?” I look back at the woman beside me, and a man who’s just taken a seat at the table starts flipping through a magazine when she says, “Yes.”
“I never could,” I say. I feel something then, something with force enough to cause tears in the Laundromat but with muscle enough to stop them at the root. No children. Never could. The fact of it still so strange. Something’s moving in me, and she’s watching closely, and though some small part of me wants to apologize for no good reason, like the woman as she changes dollars into quarters—no, ma’am, sorry, ma’am—I say it clean and cool, as if I’m ordering a Diet Dr Pepper from the counter next door. “I tried and couldn’t, then the marriage ended and now I’m older, married again and children wouldn’t fit.”
She keeps looking, our eyes almost connecting, the blue and the brown, before something flits away in her, and who knows, maybe I flit too from a moment so swollen it nearly splits, from this Laundromat stuck between a bowling alley and THREE LITTLE PIGS BBQ in southeast Memphis.
The man at the end of the table coughs and turns the page of the magazine and something loosens around us.
“How about you?” I ask, and listen as she tells about her boy, how his wife is expecting and how excited she is, but she hopes they don’t think she’s putting a crib up at her place. And it’s a fine conversation then, her telling about her son while I get up and begin to fold my clothes into my basket.
“They sure don’t look dry,” she says after a minute, “You planning on air drying?”
“They’re dryer than they seem,” I say.
“Hmmm,” she says. “Well, maybe you’ll come in at this time again.”
“Maybe I will,” I say, and don’t tell her how far from home this Laundromat is, how I traveled nearly twenty minutes from a neighborhood of big houses and fine streets to sit in this particular place, so far removed from anything familiar. I don’t say it because I can’t make sense of it myself, and realize just then that I’m ready to make my way home. I gather up my coffee and basket of damp clothes and the bag of ungraded papers, and say, “It was nice talking with you.” I tell her my name and ask for hers, which is odd considering I’m on my way out the door.
“Joyelle,” she says—or maybe the name is Joelle—either way it comes too fast, and all I know is that it sounds something like joy as I prop the door with a hip and push into my car fast because it’s started to sprinkle. I put the basket in the backseat and sit for a minute watching the sun filter through bare oak branches and—not despite the rain, but because of it—the light is just right. To say the sky is washed in gold would be too much, but there are hints of it everywhere, yellow light coming through the crown of black branches, so that I feel the weight of the day just then, the perfectly full weight of it.