In the near-enough future, I would learn Miz Verlow’s rules about use of the radio-hi-fi-phonograph console and the black-and-white Zenith television that squatted in the small parlor. Guests might listen to radio, either the Stromberg Carlson in the library or one brought with them, but must mind the volume in deference to their fellow guests. The television set was available for a very limited time each evening, with majority rule in choice of programming.
A drapery twitched. Miz Verlow looked out at me from Mama’s window.
Spinning about, I raced down the dune toward the beach. Some of the allegedly Yankee guests had also come out to play. A few were already settled on wooden and canvas chairs brought from the verandah to the beach. Another few tramped along the beach.
Scurries of little birds rushed the negligible waves in retreat and were immediately routed in peeping frantic flutters by the incoming wave. I hunkered down at the edge of the water to watch and listen to them. Their names as yet unknown to me, their voices were enthralling. I became aware too of the squeak of the clams under the sand. The water dampened my tennies but I wouldn’t melt.
After some time, I straightened up and used my toes against the opposite heel to kick off my tennies. If Mamadee had seen me do it, I’d have gotten a hiding for sure. Lazy and careless of expensive footwear, two evidences of degeneracy at once. I picked my tennies out of the water and flung them toward the dunes.
The shore seemed to go on forever. I started to run through the water where it sloshed upon the sand. I had no destination nor any desire to ever stop. I just ran. It was a glorious feeling to be moving barefoot through the shallow of the water at the greatest speed I could summon from myself. The long day’s travel in the car must have wound me up like a spring. Of course I was nearly always wound up like a spring. Nothing more or less than the violent energy of childhood, as uncomplicated and irrational as the very elements themselves, propelled me.
When my side finally stitched and I slowed, I was out of sight of the house and of a single soul. On one side of me sparkled the restless water of the Gulf. On the other, a wilderness of dunes dozed in the sun. Behind me and before me, the sand stretched down the middle. As I turned back in the direction from which I had come and moved higher on the beach, out of the shallows and onto the wet sand, I left behind me the only footprints on the beach. I jumped high, twitching myself into a half-turn, and came down facing the other way, so that I could walk backward for a while, amusing myself with my false trail.
Distantly, a pickup truck or small van worked along the dirt road beyond the dunes. From its open windows came a faint but steadily strengthening female voice, with an accent like Desi Arnaz:
I went back to the top of the dune, where I could see the road. A small, shabby van rolled at no great pace toward the house, its windows down. On its side were the words:
The driver of the ATOMIC LAUNDRY van wore his black hair in a crew cut. As I ran closer, I saw that he was Chinese. Or Japanese. I was ignorant of the fact that there were any other varieties of Asians. Ford had once informed me that Japanese could be distinguished from Chinese by the direction, up or down, of the slant of their eyes, but I could not remember whether it was up for Japanese, down for Chinese, or topsy-turvy. In any case, I assumed that Ford was lying, as usual, so it didn’t matter.
The ATOMIC LAUNDRY van driver waved at me as he rounded the side of the house toward the kitchen. I raced down the dune and after him, arriving in time to see Cleonie lean out an open window on the second floor.
Chiquita’s song had given way to a Bosco ad:
The van’s driver killed his radio.
Leaning out the window of his van, he called out, “Yoo-hoo, Missus Cleonie Huggins!”
Cleonie waved and disappeared into the house.
The van man began unloading wicker baskets of ironed and folded bed linen, and of towels. He was a small, neat man, in white trousers and a white jacket of a uniform kind. His shoes were brown and very polished. He looked young to me—by which I mean that his skin was unwrinkled and that he had no white hair—but otherwise he was one more adult in a world full of them.
By way of the door with the ramp, Cleonie emerged carrying a wicker basket of unlaundered linen and exchanged it for one of the clean ones. The van man remarked that it was a nice day; Cleonie agreed. Going in and out of the house, she made the exchange of baskets several times. I tried to help but the basket was too heavy for me.
“You too small,” the van man told me, as if it were news to me.
The discovery that Cleonie might change the beds and clean the bathrooms but that she did not launder the linen was momentarily interesting. Investigation (I asked Miz Verlow) revealed that the water from the well was too precious to use for laundry, so all the linen and clothing went off to the ATOMIC LAUNDRY in Pensacola.
Over the next few days, I discovered that Merrymeeting depended upon the services of many tradespeople. A milk truck delivered milk, cream, ice cream, butter and eggs and, most of the time, the newspaper. If the newspapers missed the milk truck, they might arrive with the mail lady, who in those golden days came twice a day and once on Saturday—or with one of the other deliveries. Local fishermen—one of them Perdita’s husband—brought fish and shellfish to the back door for Perdita’s perusal. Miz Verlow ordered what Perdita wanted by way of meat from a superior butcher in Pensacola, who subsequently delivered it. Groceries were also delivered. Local people often knocked at the back door with some seasonal delicacy. And while all this busyness was going on, Miz Verlow’s house ran smoothly, by and large, so her guests hardly knew how much went into it.
I stumbled after Cleonie up the ramp and into the house.
“Cleonie, where’s the laundry chute?”
“Rat ’ere.” She tipped her chin straight ahead of us.
We were in the back hall behind the kitchen, at the bottom of the back stairway that rose to the landing where the linen closet was. The backstairs allowed Cleonie and Perdita and Miz Verlow to move about the house without being underfoot of the guests. A small high door like the one that I had seen up the backstairs was set into the wall we faced. The bottom edge of it was at my eye-level. The wooden knob was an easy reach and immediately I pulled it open. Inside was an empty tin-lined cylinder of space. On tiptoe, I stuck my head in and looked up the tube rising to the higher floors. That inspection completed, I bounded up the stairway. Cleonie came hurrying after me.
The door to the laundry chute on the landing was closed. Just beyond Cleonie’s grasp, I yanked it open and, letting out a rebel yell, dove into it headfirst.