|
Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
March 26, 2006
Published as Fiction
in a WIP dated December 5, 2000.
© 2000 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
|
| | |
Untitled, 2002
© 2002 by Bud Grossmann
|
FOLDING LAUNDRY
Thursday afternoon I left work two hours early and stopped by Home Depot on the way back to Walnut Creek, where I live with my wife Marcia and our ninth-grade daughter Nicole. Our older girls have left for college. At Home Depot, I found ten billion items, more or less, but not the bronze-color patio door lock I needed. They had one that looked like the correct model, in brushed aluminum, but, the clerk claimed, they don’t stock the same lock in bronze. I looked for one other item, in plumbing, nothing urgent, and they didn’t have that, either. Ten billion items, more or less. I wish they had ten billion and two.
At home, I popped the cap off a cold Corona, took a good gulp, and looked through the day’s mail. Then I checked for phone messages and found two, one from wife, one from daughter. “Hi, Alex,” Marcia said. “Remember this is my late night, so go ahead and warm leftovers in the micro. Finish the beef broccoli if you can. Nicki called, and I told her to let you know where she’ll be. See you, Love you, Bye.” And then Nicole, in a voice so much like her mother’s that it sometimes makes me cry: “Daddy? Um, hi, Dad. It’s, um, like, it’s three-thirty? Mom said I can study with Ashley. So I’ll be home, like, by nine, okay? Okay, then. Love you, See you, Bye, Daddy.” I pressed “Erase.” Now, where’d I put my beer?
I have been perhaps a tad distracted, I will admit, ever since a physical exam a few weeks ago, or I mean, ever since my doc, Dan DeLorenzo, called afterwards, called me at work, and said he was “concerned” about a “slightly irregular” reading on my EKG and wanted to send me for a Thallium stress test. I went, but I’m still waiting to hear what it showed. “Ninety-per-cent chance it’s nothing,” Dr. D. had predicted on the phone, but he hasn’t called again. I’ll give him a few more days.
My beer. Where’d I put my beer? “Is it okay, in the meantime,” I had asked Dr. D., “if I have a beer now and then, and how about a couple cups of coffee, maybe three times a week?” “Oh, definitely,” he said. “That’s fine. A beer or two every day is good for you!” “Well,” I said, “I don’t know if I can bring myself up to that level, but thank you, maybe I will try.”
Found my Corona and took it into our bedroom. I unknotted my necktie and hung it up, and put away my shoes. I changed into a T-shirt and jeans. I would have liked a little nap, but our bed was heaped with clean, not-folded laundry, and I couldn’t just shove it aside. Our cat, Pumpkin, was snoozing, belly up, left paw across her eyes, on top of a mound of towels. Whoever had taken the laundry out of the dryer—Marcia or Nicki—had neatly draped the wrinkle-prone items across the overturned laundry basket—cotton dinner napkins and Nicki’s T-shirts and denim skirts and so forth. Draped it all but had not folded it. Dish towels, socks, washcloths, underclothing, and such things were strewn far and wide.
I started to fold clothes. Pumpkin woke and went away. The house was so quiet I could hear my jaw bones click when I swallowed beer, so I turned on Marcia’s clock radio. She keeps it tuned to a Public Radio station. I came in on the middle of some kind of talk program, and I would have changed it to the jazz station out of San Jose, but I recognized the host, Carol Lynne Podolsky, who does the local news in the morning, and who, I happen to know, has kids in the same Waldorf “lower school” in Concord that my three girls went to. To my knowledge, I’ve never met Ms. Podolsky, but of course I recognized her voice. She was merrily chatting with a cheerful, smoky-voiced woman in a language I call Feminese. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but it was over-my-poor-male-head, something or other about Adolescence & Waldorf Education. Mom Talk, is what I call it. I was grasping about one word in twenty.
Man, what a lot of napkins! I finished the beer, which was getting warm, and went and got another. When I came back to the bedroom and the Waldorf Theory broadcast, lo and behold, Ms. Podolsky was “going to the phones,” and the first caller was, I couldn’t believe it, a twelfth-grader from the Concord Waldorf High School, Krysta Friedman, whom I actually know! Well, anyway, at least, I’ve met her and feel I know a lot about her because I know her mother. I work with Krysta’s mom, Leticia Lopez Friedman, which is pure coincidence because I didn’t know her when my own girls were at the Waldorf Lower School.
Krysta, bless her heart, spoke with a beautiful Waldorfy enthusiasm and with an obvious clarity of vision (“Yes, yes, Krysta!” agreed the smoky-voiced radio guest), but in about twenty seconds I spaced out, and when the smoky-voiced guest said, “Krysta, that’s an excellent question!” I wanted to press “Rewind” to find out what the question was, but this was live radio. I took a sip of beer.
Krysta’s voice and words were angelically crystal clear but incomprehensible Feminese, and I remembered something crystal clear that Leticia, Krysta’s mom, had mentioned one day at work. Krysta had snarled something terrible not so long ago, some words not so very different from things my own daughters, the older two, had screamed at Marcia or me, but so terrible despite their familiarity, that the very thought of Krysta saying them made the hairs of my arm stand up. As I listened to her radio voice, all sweetness and youthful wisdom, I held up a pair of socks and looked at the goosebumpy terrain of my right arm and thought of a customer I’d seen at Home Depot, a hefty black woman with a snow-white streak in her hair. She was moving slowly down an aisle, accompanied by a black man who wore a coat and tie. The man was pushing their shopping cart, but the woman gripped the push bar with her right hand, as if for balance. She was wearing a dress and high-heel shoes. She wore pearls and a short, fur jacket with three-quarter-length sleeves. She murmured to the man as she pointed at elegant kitchen faucets on display. She pointed with what would have been her left hand, but the arm was gone below the elbow. And I wondered, not then, in the store, but later, now, in my bedroom with the murmuring radio, and with my own arm in front of my very eyes, I wondered whether that woman, in moments of strong emotion, feels a phantom sprouting of goosebumps where her arm no longer is.
The folding done, I put my own clothes in my dresser drawers and stacked Marcia’s and Nicki’s in the laundry basket and set it on the floor. I poured half a beer down the bathroom sink drain and left the bottle on the counter. I stretched out on our bed and covered my eyes with my arm and wondered, with Krysta and Smoky Voice and Ms. Podolsky still going strong, whether women even get goosebumps at all. I couldn’t recall. A wife and three daughters, and I still have so much to learn.
I felt an ache exactly dead center behind my breastbone, not too bad, but deep. Unmistakably an ache. There is, I am sure, a ninety-per-cent chance it’s nothing. When I wake, I will let you know. ♦
|
