Forty Rooms (25 page)

Gods, my gods, how did I come to be in this desolate place, where did my sunlit garden go, did I take a wrong turn somewhere along the way—

“There, there, no need to mope like that,” her grandmother said, patting her sweaty hand. “Bad things happen whenever they get a mind to, but good things don’t happen at all unless you go looking for them. Remember the story I told you about the tree? Why did you stop with those nice little poems you used to write? You shouldn’t give up trying, you know. Go ahead and rhyme a
line or two—start with your own small life if it makes you feel better, but do remember to aim higher and higher as you plod along.” She cackled, her crow’s eyes sparkling. “Why, if you take me as your guide, you could become a modern-day Dante someday. Oh, the things I could tell you about heaven and hell . . .”

Abruptly she ceased cackling, dropped her cigarette onto the floor, and glanced over her shoulder, looking half annoyed and half alarmed, as if she had done something wrong and someone was calling her now to come and be chastised.
(In the end she would be forgiven yet again. Silly woman, God boomed in her ear, sternly but not unkindly. Why must you always run on so? You told this poor girl enough fairy tales when you were alive. Come now, Gabriel has called everyone to evening tea, and we will be serving your favorite gooseberry jam.)

Mrs. Caldwell looked where her grandmother was looking, but there was nothing there. “What tree, Grandmother?” she asked, turning back, but her grandmother was gone, and she was finishing her second mile on the treadmill, out of breath, crying for some reason, the mirrors all around the exercise room crowded with unmistakably middle-aged women who had swimming, inebriated eyes and unsubtle hints of double chins. The air held telltale traces of smoke. Mrs. Caldwell wiped away the tears with her sleeve, turned off the treadmill, and stepped down, swaying. If Paul finds out that I’ve taken up smoking, he will be upset, she thought, bending to pick the cigarette stub off the floor. Of course, I only ever smoke down here, where he never sets foot, but still . . . She was about to slip the stub into her pocket, to bury it in the depths of the trashcan later, when she noticed that it looked oddly unfamiliar, steely gray instead of the speckled gold
of her own preferred brand, and ringed with peach-tinted lipstick. Why, oh why, did she have to start on that fourth martini? Averting her eyes, she tossed the cigarette back on the floor and pushed it under the treadmill with her foot. There, all out of sight now, and everything was well, and no reason to feel so unsettled.

She turned off the lights, and, to her relief, the middle-aged, double-chinned women vanished obediently. “So what if I’m no longer twenty,” she said aloud, arguing with an invisible someone. “So what if I’m no longer skinny. My husband will love me no matter what.”

She slammed the door on her way out.

29. Laundry

The Laundry Cycle

Friday was Mrs. Caldwell’s laundry day.

Unlike some things, it did not become more enjoyable with repetition.

Occasionally, as she threaded collar stays through shirt collars, buttoned cardigan buttons, and ironed creases into Paul’s pants, she pondered a certain paradox: An average woman—or at least an average married woman with children, which, for all she knew, no longer signified an average woman; to rephrase, then, a woman average for most of human history—almost certainly devoted more of her time to the pursuit of laundering than to the pursuit of love; yet for all the thousands and thousands of poems written about love, only a handful had ever been written about laundry. Without a doubt, laundry, as she had learned rather exhaustively, was in its essence not a poetic matter, and most poets were men and knew little about it; but was not imparting
beauty and meaning to the mundane and the meaningless one of the most vital missions of poetry?

One day in January, after she had hurried to cram the washer full of her husband’s shirts, she tried her hand at a limerick. She stumbled almost instantly: there seemed to be nothing that rhymed with either “Moscow” or “Russia.” She grew stubborn and for a couple of minutes paced the stuffy laundry room, now and then bumping the ironing board with her hip, until the last syllable fell into place.

There was a young woman from Moscow

Who bought laundry detergent at Costco.

But her clothes turned to mold,

And then she grew old,

That no-longer-young woman from Moscow.

This, of course, was neither beautiful nor particularly meaningful; but every Friday from then on, as she folded and ironed in the small, steamy room with its stacks of damp underwear and pastel-hued seascapes on the white windowless walls, she continued to toy with words—just to while away the time—until, without writing down a line, she had half composed a collection of laundry poems across the genres.

She resolved to set them down on paper when she was done.

February she devoted to the epic and the folk song. The epic installment, written in measured Homeric rhythm, sang of the dawn of the world—rosy-fingered Eos rising over the wine-colored sea, Nausicaa and her handmaidens on the shore stretching
linens and laughing, the linens fluttering in the wind, white and fresh like Nausicaa’s purity, and Odysseus, watching her, pierced with an unaccustomed regret, the sheets spotless, the virgin smiling, the words unspoken, the cool air brisk with the flapping of taut cloth, the sweetness of what might have been and what never would be: the recently violent world of war and rapine reined in by the civilizing restraint of a young girl’s domestic perfection. The folk-song fragment was a medieval dirge, the lament of a peasant woman at a half-frozen river, scraping blood off the mail shirt of a conquering Mongol who had burned down her village and slaughtered her husband. In the last week of the month, she dashed off a quick fairy-tale tribute—a happy little ditty trilled by an ever-hopeful, ever-misguided Cinderella over her tub of soapsuds.

In March, she composed some erotic couplets—a courtesan in Renaissance Venice humming to herself as she perfumed her red satin pillows—and a longer tragic poem set in Paris, the whispered prayer of a mother in a dark, rat-infested attic bending over the tiny soiled underclothes of a dead child as revolution swept through the streets outside. While in the French mood, she also amused herself with a short Molière-style comedy, in which sly maids and greedy servants exploited their masters’ bedroom secrets gleaned from love tokens unearthed at the brushing of gold-trimmed petticoats.

She rounded off the month with a quick haiku.

God from his white cloud

watches angels soaping souls,

scrubbing off our sins.

In April and May, she paid cursory tribute to a variety of minor genres, including:

anthropology: a fiercely rhymed chorus of old women gathered in the village square the morning after a wedding to inspect the sheets and stone the errant bride;

religion (or possibly satire, she could not decide): a meditation on Protestant ethics with a prodigal son who returned home in rags to smell milk, bread, and linen in his mother’s kitchen and fell on his knees, his face buried in her crisply ironed apron, while she admonished him gently: “Cleanliness, my boy, is next to godliness”;

and, finally, autobiography: Paul doing his first-ever laundry load, in the early days of their marriage—and, far from separating the reds from the whites, indiscriminately picking up the entire pile of dirty clothes he had dumped on the floor in the hallway and throwing it into the washer, trapping in the midst of the mess her favorite, her only, pair of black leather boots (which she had lined up neatly by the door). The boots had been ruined, and she had been vexed. She had never let him approach the washer again. Now, after having devoted what must have translated into solid weeks of time to laundry duty (a conservative calculation: at three hours a week, fifty-two weeks a year, thirteen and a half years of married life: some eighty-eight
days
of nothing but laundry), she wondered whether the boot fiasco had been as scatterbrained, as innocent of intent, as she had supposed it in the heat of the moment. Yet the poem was devoid of any traces of anger: it had turned out oddly tender, nostalgic almost.

She did not think it one of her more successful efforts.

In the middle of June, two weeks before her fortieth birthday, she was hunting down the twins’ mismatched socks while working on a children’s song:

The sock monster through the house

Tiptoes quiet as a mouse.

Doorknobs turn and drawers creak,

But you won’t see him if you peek.

He will crawl into the laundry,

He will—he will—he will . . .

And it was while searching for the insistently escaping rhyme to “laundry” that she looked directly at the telltale stains on her husband’s collar, the glinting peach-colored traces resembling a woman’s lipstick—smelling of a woman’s lipstick too, as she verified in the next, unthinking moment, lifting the shirt to her nose before she could divert her attention. And, of course, she had seen them before, these now obvious signs—had glimpsed them, but had not wanted to inspect them closely, thrusting the clothes into the washer with increasingly frantic movements, explaining away the faint whiffs of perfume and the most conspicuous spots—a splash of ketchup on this sweater’s shoulder, a dash of mayonnaise on those pants’ zipper, he had always been an enthusiastic eater—and, on that January day, when she had peered an incautious instant too long at another peach-tinted smear on a shirt’s cuff and found the truth looming dangerously close, occupying her mind with a limerick, then a dirge, then a haiku . . .

And yet, for all her hectic poetizing of the past few months—
whether an attempt to break through the mundane to a deeper reality or to escape the reality altogether—was it not telling that most of her laundry poems had ended up being love poems after all?

Her hands trembling, she pushed the shirt under other shirts, pressed the “Heavy Soil” button. “‘Laundry’—‘husbandry.’ ‘Laundry’—‘quandary,’” she repeated, but neither was a very good rhyme, and abruptly she abandoned the composition. She already knew that she would never write any of the poems down, but that was not important, not important at all. And the thing that
was
important, the thing that had gone so horribly, so inexplicably, wrong—it could still be fixed, could it not, it was not too late to fix it, all they needed was a fresh start, yes, she was certain that everything would be fine, everything would be back to the way it was, if only they could have something—someone—someone new and wonderful in their lives to remind them how much love there really was between them.

If only they could still—if only she could still—

30. Master Bedroom

Conversation in the Dark at the Age of Forty

Unhappiness this impenetrable is likewise silent, but the silence lasts longer.

31. Girls’ Room

A Grimm Fairy Tale

“‘My dear children,’ said the old king, ‘I will give you three trials, and he who wins shall have the crown. The first trial is to bring me a cloth so fine that I can draw it through my golden ring . . .’”

It was the girls’ turn at book hour. Mrs. Caldwell had made sure that Eugene had finished his homework and Rich and George had brushed their teeth, and had settled in the girls’ room with a volume of the Brothers Grimm tales, a spiderweb and a glossy red apple on its cover. She read mechanically, pausing now and then to listen for the sounds of her husband’s arrival. She promised herself that it would be tonight. Tonight she would tell him. She had meant to tell him every night for weeks, but every time, her nerve would fail her at the last minute. He would come home late, looking harried or morose, and stomp down to the bar to mix himself a drink without checking on the sleeping children
first, not asking her about her day. At times she imagined she caught wafts of floral perfume. He was never unpleasant to her—it was more like he did not remember her presence; his eyes slipped past her, his thoughts slipped past her. Tonight she would make him stop and look at her.

Tonight she would tell him.

“‘And so the king embraced his youngest son, told his servants to throw the coarse linen of the older sons into the sea, and said to his children, “For the second trial, you must bring me a little dog, so small that it will fit in a walnut shell.”’”

“Well, that’s just stupid,” Emma declared. “The first trial was not so great either, not like battling a giant or finding a sorcerer’s stone or anything, but at least you can make something useful out of cloth. Why does the king want an itty-bitty dog? It can’t hunt or defend anything. And how does your ability to find a tiny dog make you good ruler material, exactly?” She had her blanket tucked neatly under the mattress and drawn below her chin in a straight line; her bed was free of stuffed animals, and the books on her nightstand were arranged by size in perfect order. Mrs. Caldwell imagined that inside Emma’s ten-year-old mind things were just as organized and logical and uncluttered. Emma possessed a clear-eyed, levelheaded need to make sense of the world, and she usually succeeded. Mrs. Caldwell did not worry about Emma.

“It’s
not
stupid,” Celia said in an impassioned voice from her side of the room. Her bed barely had space for her, crowded as it was with teddy bears and dogs and elephants, her favorite one-eared bunny dressed in her old baby nightshirt. “I think the king just loved pets. Like I love Squash. Like I loved Pepper before he
went to dog heaven.” Her mouth curled downward, and Mrs. Caldwell hurriedly resumed her reading.