“You’re right to feel pity,” the maître d’ said coldly on the ninth or maybe the tenth or maybe the nineteenth staircase, “but you’re not supposed to direct that pity toward yourself.”
It was impossible that this stone house contained all these staircases. We’d long ago shed the loveliness of the rooms below — the candlelight, the delicate white poppies, the old Dutch paintings. Here the red carpet looked cheap and stank. Bare bulbs, unfinished walls. We arrived at a paint-splattered plywood door.
The key that the maître d’ removed from his inner pocket looked like a key from a fairy tale. Think Bluebeard; seven dead brides. Why did it take me so many staircases to realize the kind of danger I was in?
I whirled around to dash downward, but the maître d’ somehow had his arm about my waist — what a long arm he had, a miraculous arm. I whirled back around to face him, hoping against hope that what he’d brought me here for was a kiss, but it only took one look at his mouth to know this was a cage, not an embrace. With his other hand he twisted the key.
* * *
Rows of washing machines. Rows and rows of washing machines. Brights and whites swirling, the gushing bubbles and water.
That was all. An enormous laundry room.
When I looked over at the maître d’, I saw that he was smiling for the first time that night, and perhaps for the first time ever.
Strolling among the machines, in various states of undress (a shirt unbuttoned, a vest slung over a shoulder): waiters whose hairstyles I recognized from the banquet. Their faces, which had been blank blurs to me before, now seemed exceptionally vivid: an exhausted forehead, a wan smile, a cynical eyebrow.
“This,” the maître d’ told me, “is where we wash the costumes.”
I wanted to ask him which costumes he meant, or if he’d misspoken, if he’d intended to say “the uniforms” or “the linens.” But he was not the type to stand corrected.
Amid the aroma of laundry detergent, I caught a whiff of something less pleasant. I glanced down at myself, only to discover the gray fabric of my dress covered in old food, chunks of the feast plastered to the soles of my faux-vintage high heels, a layer of inexplicable stickiness on my skin; the odor emanated from me. I reached up to touch my hair — sure enough, smears of butter met my fingertips.
I hadn’t worn a gray dress to the wedding! Yet I found myself unable to recall the original color of my dress — hadn’t it been pink, or at least lavender? As I examined the dress, it struck me darkly that I recognized many of the stains now adorning it, recognized them by their shape and location; the red wine my husband spilled on my bodice at our own wedding, the sweat marks from the interview for the job I didn’t get, semen and saliva, a teaspoon or two of amniotic fluid, the olive oil from the first dinner I’d ever cooked by myself, the requisite menstrual blotch, the mud from the hill behind my grandmother’s house, the grass stains from where I’d sat on the lawn as a baby. And brownish droplets on my sleeve, which I could only attribute to the cancerous woman with the bloody nose.
“Excuse me,” I said to the maître d’, hesitant yet also desperate, desperate. “Can we wash my — costume?”
The word “costume” felt awkward in my mouth—“dress” was the word I’d have preferred.
I pictured myself unzipping my dress, unhooking my bra, stepping out of my shoes and underwear, standing there in the laundry room among the waitstaff, heavy-limbed and calm, like a child who’s never heard of sex. Maybe they would gather around me, poke at me or mock me or tickle me, or maybe the vast indifference they currently exhibited would continue. It didn’t matter, though; nothing mattered as long as my costume got washed.
“You don’t want that,” the maître d’ said simply, as though he already knew that in two days’ time I’d bust my knee while stomping my foot on the sidewalk during a fight with my husband, already knew that soon my husband would cup my face in his hands and truthfully say, “When I am an old man, I will look back on this as the happiest time of my life,” already knew that I’d truthfully reply, “When I am an old woman, I will look back on this as the happiest time of my life,” already knew that for years and years we’d alternate between the foot-stomping and the face-cupping, that I’d limp down the cereal aisle on my busted knee, that my heart would lift with joy in the produce section, that I’d wince among the pastas and laugh past the milk, back and forth, again and again, on and on, forever, until the day I once more entered the laundry room.
CONTAMINATION GENERATION
Our daughter knows the word “lawn,” of course she does, and the word still sounds green, it still sounds like leisure. And there are still people, rich people, like the Stanhopes on the other side of the wall, who have private lawns.
But when we take Lulu for a very special fifth birthday outing to the Botanical Gardens across the city (bus, subway, bus, grass for the masses) and promenade the lawn where the cherry trees are blossoming, she asks, “What’s all this grass for?” and then I feel bad, like why the heck didn’t we bring her here when she turned two, three, four?
And then I’m remembering that time last summer when we rode the subway out to the shore and I said, “Don’t you love the sound of the sea?” and she said, “Yeah, just like WaveMaker!” which is the machine we’ve used ever since she was born to try to drown out the sound of sirens and other bad things. And then I’m remembering when we took her to the urban stables, five-minute pony rides on the sidewalk for sixteen dollars a pop every Sunday morning, the dirty white pony (“Marshmallow”) stepping carefully among blowing candy wrappers, and though Lulu was so stiff with terror that I had to pull her off after forty-five seconds, she insisted I feed Marshmallow a few of the baby carrots we’d brought along.
The truth is we hadn’t taken her to the Botanical Gardens when she turned two, three, four, because we’d taken her there when she turned one. We’d set her down on the lawn, so pleased with ourselves, all ready to snap a bunch of photos, but she’d burst into tears — she was scared of the grass, she kept jerking her hands up as though the grass was burning her, she looked at us like, Hey, what’s wrong with the floor?
Lulu, five years old now, staring at the lawn at the Botanical Gardens. Lulu. A spritely, springy name. A name for feeling carefree. But our Lulu is serious. The friendly cashiers always say, “Those eyes!” but I can hear the note of fear. I get it. The largeness of her eyes. The darkness. My dark little thin little odd little glittering shadow child. I put my hand on her disproportionately large head, 90th percentile. Big brain, we told her when a kid on the playground said something a couple weeks back.
“It’s a lawn,” I explain. “For playing.” My throat surprises itself by clogging up. In the city parks, the streambeds are empty except for old soda cans, used condoms, dirty napkins, plastic bags, cigarette butts, rabies vaccination pellets. Back where I grew up, or I guess more accurately, back when I grew up, I was king of a creek.
“No,” Lulu corrects, pointing at a wooden sign: NO PLAYING ON THE GRASS.
Sarah gives that cold laugh of hers. “Kid’s right,” she says. Don’t get me wrong, Sarah is the best, my great big love, but she didn’t grow up anywhere where she could be king of a creek and sometimes that makes her less kind than, say, me.
“It’s for looking,” I correct myself. “For enjoying. For feeling the green in your eyes. The green in your bean.”
“The green in your dream,” Lulu plays.