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Laundry

We love useless vintage lesbians.

By Brittany MacKeownPublished 3 years ago 9 min read
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Laundry
Photo by Kai Oberhäuser on Unsplash

Somebody on the street is playing the familiar solemn cords of “The House of the Rising Sun” on a scratchy guitar. The sound floats through the trundling cars and to the beat of pedestrian footsteps, wavering and soulful. I am hanging laundry on the clothesline above on the second floor of my apartment, and Claire is talking to me from the next apartment over, leaning out the window like she is searching for the guitar player. She is a year older than me, but no one on the street would notice. Maybe that is why she cakes on lipstick like it is as common as dandelions.

My mother dislikes her. When Mom came to visit last week, Claire was standing in the hallway, smoking. She was on the phone, the cord pulled taut, and a haze that smelled distinctly of burnt apples and butter was choking the hallway. “—suddenly the pie was on fire. Everything was on fire,” Claire was saying into the phone.

Mom thought she was talking to the fire department.

I told her Claire couldn’t bake or cook or even clean her own laundry. I charged her to do her laundry at a quarter a heap. Mom said Claire didn’t have a good head on her shoulders, and I said that she didn’t. That it wasn’t screwed on right but hey, what could you do?

Claire burns pies or cakes or potatoes or pasta every other day. The fire department rushes over about once a week to bail her poor kitchen out, and our landlord Bernie thinks she ought to find another place to live. He doesn’t want a fire hazard walking around in the shape of a woman. I guess I can’t blame him, but instead of evicting her, he just keeps raising her rent. He doesn’t really want her gone. After all, she’s a choice girl, and she can screw up a thousand times as long as she wears low-cut blouses. I can’t say he’s wrong about the blouse thing either; I enjoy the view too.

Once, Claire brought over a half of an apple pie for me, one of her more successful attempts. She made coffee to go with it. That was one of the things she could do, make coffee. She could somehow mitigate the metallic tang that coated your throat after you’d found the grounds at the bottom; she could turn it into warmth that spread from your heart to your ribs and down to the tips of your toenails. She served it in a tin cup that had rolled all the way from Texas to her apartment; it was dented and scratched to hell, but she always cradled it to her bosom when she brought it out. It may be one of the last remaining possessions she has to remember her parents by; Judy from down the hall in 3F told me that Claire is an orphan. I haven’t lived here long enough to know who’s a gossip, but I suspect anyone who’s willing to give away that information must be one. So I don’t exactly believe Judy.

Today though, as Claire chatters on to me, I wonder if she does have parents. I should ask her, but we are not close enough to talk about our families. She has only met Mom once in passing, and Claire doesn’t even know the old woman who had judged her in the hall was my mother. She never even asked even though I am sure she noticed Mom go into my apartment.

Claire is talking about Mr. Astor, the principal lawyer at Astor Law Firm where Claire works as a receptionist. She’s saying that she saw his wife the other day for the first time, a little wisp of a woman with hair as white as cream. Neither of the Astors wore a wedding ring, but Mr. Astor sauntered up to the desk and asked Claire to give his wife directions to Jessie’s Breakfast Café. He didn’t remember the way. The woman didn’t talk and listened only vaguely to Claire’s directions, her eyes darting from the clock on the wall to the other receptionist to Claire and then back to the clock. “She looked like she’d seen a ghost. Maybe she’d seen her reflection in the window, ya think?” Claire says with a soft twinkle of a laugh. “She really did look like a ghost. Her skin looked like glass, Maria, not a dimple on it. She looked like she’d didn’t know what the sun was.”

“Maybe she’s a vampire like Dracula,” I suggest, pinning one of Claire’s low-cut blouses to the clothesline.

Claire crinkles her nose. “That would make Mr. Astor Dracula and that’s ridiculous,” she says. “I think Dracula must have been fairly handsome, and Mr. Astor is not at all. He’s old, grouchy, and potbellied.”

I smile. The guitar player has changed their tune; they have opted for Sonny and Cher. “Mr. Astor doesn’t have to be Dracula,” I say. “Perhaps his wife isn’t really his wife at all but she’s confused him with her vampire powers.”

Claire’s eyes sparkle in the sunshine. I look away quickly, my cheeks staining permanently red. The coffee might not be what gives me such a warm feeling when she makes it.

“Now, Maria dear, that’s a fun story. You should write it into a magazine,” Claire says. She smiles and crosses her arms over the windowsill, laying her chin in the nest provided by her inner elbows. “Or better yet, write a script. Make it big in Hollywood. Tell them you’ll only sell them the script if they cast you as the mysterious Mrs. Astor.”

Once finished with the wet clothes, I move on to folding the dry ones. They are heaped in a plastic bin I usually use to store cans, but since Claire had given me her laundry, I had to separate mine from hers somehow. She didn’t even have a hamper and had brought the pile of dirty clothes over in her arms. If she ever expected to run a household, I don’t know how her husband would feel about her ineptitude for domestic work.

Claire ditched the window and instead wandered into my apartment, standing in the open doorway. My apartment was only one room with a kitchenette stuffed in the corner, a worn couch in front of a radio on a dusty stand my grandmama had given me, and a bed pushed into the opposite corner from the kitchenette. I used to have a record player, but I had let my sister borrow it a month ago. She has not given it back. I assume it is in the trunk of her car where she forgot about it; I might never see it again.

“I should buy you a present,” Claire says in a suddenly serious tone. “For always doing my laundry, ya know.”

I fold one of her shirts, tucking it into a square. “You already pay me.”

“Yeah, but… you do it all the time.”

“Again, Claire, you pay me to do it. It’s not like I’m doing this out of the goodness of my heart.”

She goes quiet. I glance up at her and find her staring through my radio as if she can see through the apartment walls to the streets below. “You used to have a record player, didn’t you? You played Ella Fitzgerald when you’d get home from work,” she murmurs almost as if she is ashamed to admit she noticed. “I never hear it anymore.”

It strikes me like a blow that she had noticed. She had never said anything before about the music being too loud. “Oh, uh, sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know it was that loud.”

“Not your fault the walls are so thin,” Claire says, shrugging. She’s wearing bell bottoms, embroidered flowers creeping up the sides of her thighs where the fabric hugs them. I notice it when she leans against the doorway and bites at her lip, nibbling off a patch of lipstick. It stains her teeth, and she must know it somehow because she clamps her mouth shut.

I have washed those pants before. They are her favorite pair; she wears them out at night when she goes to the bar with her friends. She’s invited me plenty of times, but I always refuse. I want to be near her, but… well, I don’t think she’d appreciate my company if she knew why.

“Still, sorry,” I say. She doesn’t seem to want an apology, but I can’t think of anything else to say. Should I offer to loan her some of my Ella Fitzgerald records? Does she have a record player? I don’t remember seeing one the few times I had coffee with her. I start to say something stupid when she cuts me off.

“Let’s go to the movie theater this weekend,” Claire says in a rush. Her voice is tight, constrained, as if she wasn’t sure what would come out of her mouth before it did.

I stop folding the last of her shirts and look up at her. “Oh,” I say. There’s a blush dyeing her face again, cherry red and growing. “Sure. When were you thinking?”

Upon releasing a soft, shuddering sigh that seems melodramatic for the situation, Claire smiles. That smile more than reaches her eyes, it lights them up like a flare in the middle of a dark, wrathful sea. She steps in front of me and takes the unfolded shirt from my hands, tucking it with the preciseness of someone who does it everyday. It surprised me, but I suppose she has seen me fold laundry quite a lot now. She sets the folded shirt on top of her pile and then reaches into her pocket, pulling out a quarter. “Thanks,” she says, “and I’ll come pick you up around eight. Wear that yellow dress you wore when your mom stopped by.”

So she did know it was my mother. I flush and shake my head, closing her fingers around the quarter. “Don’t worry about it. You can buy me some Dots at the theater.”

She ducks her head, that smile growing. I feel a waterfall of pride tumble through my heart, pooling in my belly. I want to make her smile like that again and again and again until she’s sick of smiling. “Remember, yellow dress. Eight o’clock,” Claire says. She leans forward and drops a gentle kiss on my cheek.

My heart freezes. I want to pull her back down and kiss her on the lips, but she is gone, taking her laundry with her. I can hear her giggling even through the walls of her apartment.

I know there’s an imprint on my cheek from her lipstick. Every part of me is screaming to leave it there, and so I do. I stand up on newborn legs and stumble into my closet, grinning as if I could outshine the sun. The dress glitters when I pluck it from its hanger and lay it out on the bed. Through the window, I can hear the guitar player. They have moved on to a different song, and this one is almost in tune. I hum along quietly, and through these thin apartment walls, I can hear Claire humming too.

literature
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About the Creator

Brittany MacKeown

I also go by my middle name, Renee, but you can call me about anything

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