Washing

A short story about my life in New Mexico

Washing

By Liliana Jimenez

I liked going to the laundromat. I liked the rhythmic meditative drone of the machines. Six bucks wasn’t cheap. It was hard earned money and while not better spent, it was often long gone before I could sink my precious quarters into those machines.

The cheap polyester laundry bags were overstuffed and too heavy. The kind of heavy that would cut off circulation in no time. The seams were bursting and the mesh pockets on the outside were ripped apart. I had a needle and thread, hell I had several. I never did bother to repair them no matter how often I eyed those frayed edges and watched the split grow.

I wore my baby strapped to my chest, at the laundromat and everywhere we went. My first-born, my baby boy, the little one I’d dreamed about before he was born. In my dream he told me there would be something different about him and no one wanted to be his mother. Would I be his mother? I took that baby in my arms, knees sinking into the dirt. He was already mine, and until he was two years old, I wore him strapped to my chest.

I was terrified. Terrified of anyone reaching out to touch him, of drunks, and nosy old ladies. I was terrified of pedophiles. I was terrified of germs, disease, and my baby’s father. Terrified that if I didn’t have my boy strapped right to me someone might see the raw gaping hole in my chest.

When no one was watching I’d load up the car with those damn cheap bags stuffed full of dirty clothes, they’d pile up in the back hatch. No one was watching so it was fine for me to do the loading, the heavy lifting, and to take out the trash. My ex would say “oh don’t even try it you know I don’t want you doing all that now.” And he’d take out the trash, open the doors, and load up the car. But only when other eyes were on us.

The back hatch was a pain in the ass to load up. The hydraulics were broken and the door never latched in the first place. I’d play a dangerous game with those laundry bags, first heaving them up so that one would rest against my thigh. I’d lean forward and press it between my body and the back of the Isuzu while I’d slip my fingers beneath the back glass and lift, holding the glass up the whole time with one arm while I used the other to hoist the laundry back the rest of the way up and over until it toppled into the back.

I never needed a copy of the key. Never was given one anyway despite my money being the money that changed hands. Damn license. I never had my license. I’d always walked, taken the bus, and biked. I’d grown up in the city after all but these small census towns and state parks out in southern New Mexico were nothing like my city in the north and even though I’d made sure to get my drivers permit, you can’t learn to drive without someone willing to teach you.

That back hatch was the way I made that car feel like mine. The same way it could feel like anyones who was willing to wedge their fingers just beneath the glass and lift. Anyone could put what they wanted in the back of that car, and they could take anything they thought might have value.

I thought that might have been what happened to my diamond ring, my silver hoops, and the several pairs of beaded earrings it had taken me months to complete. But many months later, after I’d almost forgotten I ever had those things in the first place, we rented an empty acre up in Hillsboro. Town population around 85 people. The kind of place your business would make it all the way across town before you do.

After a few months of living up there, cleaning houses pregnant again with my boy strapped to my back, keeping the old folks in town busy with plenty to ring one another about, our landlord told me they were missing a gun. An old pistol that could have been used in the Revolutionary War. But it didn’t matter how old it was, it could shoot, and it was missing. The old marine had looked me in my eyes, not an accusation but a warning that I didn’t understand until much later and said “it’s not the only thing that’s gone missing around here lately either.”

And for a moment my cheeks had heated so much I thought they must be burning brighter than the sun. Had he caught me? Without my son strapped onto me for a moment. Had he seen that hole in my chest? The one I’d always been too careful to expose. He never said so anyway, but I think he’d known it was there all along.

Sometimes when I was alone with my baby in the laundromat, I’d watch the water cycle through our clothes, and I’d imagine what it would be like if my boy’s father never came back for us. My throat would tighten up with guilt when I’d think about how much better off we’d all be if he’d just go away and never come back, whether he’d run off or die in these dark fantasies, I didn’t care. Even if he’d take the car, the trailers and tents, the diamonds, and all my money. I was sure somehow, I’d be better off that way, but I guess I was too scared to find out. I didn’t know much then except the love I had for my boy, the constant twisting in my gut, the hungry ache in my belly, and the feeling of money being pulled out from between my fingertips.

At the laundromat I could catch a break. It wasn’t the $20 tent from Walmart that could barely hold up in the desert winds. It wasn’t the heat of the blaring sun and a hundred and fourteen degrees. There was AC and a roof and walls to contain us, for the moment. It wasn’t the kind of place a man like him could berate a woman holding a baby for hours at a time without someone at least looking at him funny. And that’d be enough to keep him away, for a few hours at least. This time with my own mind was more precious than any jewel could ever be.

When I’d get home, I’d shove the bags of clean laundry into the small trailer closet or leave them piled in the car to pull out my composition notebook and write falsities and flowery words. I’d write how grateful I was and how much I loved him. I knew he’d read it. He read through everything. I couldn’t have a single thing to myself unless I locked it away tightly in my cranium. Like a spy on a mission, I kept that decoy journal. I’d write what I knew he’d want to hear so that in the confines of my own mind I could decode everything going on around me. I couldn’t let him see that I might be slipping from his grasp the way my sanity had once been slipping from mine.

If I didn’t agree with the man, he’d lecture me until I did. Hours would bleed one into the next until I’d finally relent. Right around hour seven or eight when the sun started to rise, and the baby would cry, and I’d need to get ready to go to work or get back to my work assignment. Writing romance novels for clients who paid me a cent a word. When I’d see myself from the outside, I didn’t recognize her. What kind of woman worth her salt allows someone to make her so small? And in front of her child? My boy, my poor baby boy. I wasn’t worth my salt. But then again, I had to learn about salt and worth. I had to learn about the madness of isolation and of deconstruction. The kind of tactics that man employed were the same kind used to torture and reprogram— to break the human spirit.

Don’t let me get too self-congratulatory, remember the hole in my chest? The decoy journal? The way I’d load those damn bags of laundry. How I’d clung to my boy and sang him silly songs while making silly faces. I took him on long walks and breathed a sigh of relief whenever that man would leave us, even if it was just to go use the camp bathroom. Thank God, thank God, thank God.

And God, what have I done to deserve this? What lesson have I yet to learn?

I remember once I’d sat on a sandy hill and wept. I’d lamented the fact that I existed and that I couldn’t kill myself because I had to be there for my boy. Lamented the fact that I couldn’t be too sad either because babies know these things.

“But you got away.”

“You kept your children from being alone with him.”

“You did the best you could with what you had.”

“You never looked back.”

It’s true, it’s true, it’s true, but it was never enough. I’m not sure it ever will be. No matter how many programs you find, how many teachers help your child, how many friends you manage to swallow your pride and reconnect with, “I was wrong, I’m ashamed, I was lost on myself back then.” No matter how many open arms welcomed you back home. No matter how many times your toddler wanders over and tells you she’s happy out of nowhere, or your sweet nonverbal son gives you the biggest bear hug and kiss. No matter how much laughter now fills your home.

You think of all the ways in which you failed. How you failed yourself. How deceived you were. God, it’s so embarrassing. And everyone will say it all the time, “Why didn’t she pick better?” Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I? Even when a therapist tells you these are tactics that are used because they work time and time again, you keep thinking to yourself, you should have been smarter, been stronger, been better. And the worst thing is, if you’d have asked me years prior, I’d have said, “That could never be me, it could never be me.”

What a sick way to tempt fate. What a sick way to learn a hard lesson.

One day in Clovis, I ran into a couple at the laundromat. This wash was around the time of the great tarantula migration, and our tent was in a field without a picnic table or a slab of concrete as a refuge from them. The couple smelled like cheap whiskey, stale cigarettes, and dollar store detergent. Their son was just getting to the age where he might realize that he’s embarrassed by them, but he still yearns for the heroes he once thought them to be. A boy teetering along the tightrope of reality. The man, his father, was loose with his tongue, and the woman was a watcher. I did my best to smile and make polite conversation between loads of dingy washes and daydreams as I anxiously counted down the quarters in my pockets. Would there be enough to dry?

“I like your tattoo,” the man said, reaching out toward my forearm with a dirty fingernail. Close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off his skin, but not close enough that his wife’s watchful eye would turn to scornful words. I wanted to hide underneath the yellow plastic bench, but instead, I just said “thank you.”

The boy’s father had been a rodeo man. A showman. He only stopped being a rodeo man because of several TBIs and his wife’s incessant begging because she couldn’t lose him, not yet. One too many kicks in the head, too many falls in the dust, and if you’d asked me, and no one did, a few too many fingers of whiskey.

The boy looked at me like he could read my mind, and I smiled at him like I’d seen my boy eight years into the future. Or maybe even myself right now. Maybe the boy was a psychic, or maybe I was, or maybe the fates were conspiring that very day in Clovis fucking New Mexico.

By the time I’d switched my next load and said goodbye to three dollars and seventy-five more cents in quarters, the woman grabbed her man by his elbow and dragged him off toward their truck. Their son followed behind them, head down, watching each step with unwavering intensity. Their clothes swirled around in the washer, colors, darks, and whites all crammed into one load. He didn’t look back at me once, and I couldn’t take my eyes away until that truck drove off down the road.

I was still there when they came back, my pockets much lighter and all the once white now earthen grey clothes were folded neatly with socks matched and tucked away in one of the cheap laundry bags. They parked their truck sideways by the front door, stumbling and mumbling and smelling even more like cheap liquor, their keys jingling with every step. The boy was grinning from ear to ear with a greasy slice of pizza in hand, the kind you get at the gas station from under the hot lamp. They grabbed their clothes out of the wash, still wet and soggy, and tucked them under jovial arms as they staggered back out of the laundromat. Not enough quarters left to dry.

When the boy was gone, I said a silent prayer to God. Not a saint or deity or Jesus Christ, but to the primordial Creator. I figured maybe that way my prayer would be heard, and the boy would make it home okay, make it out of that house one day. Maybe my boy would too.

The sun started to set below the horizon line, and the old ladies, the old men, and all the single mothers with their babies in car seats and their faces glued to their phones had gone home. The fluorescent lights started to flicker yellow and blue, and the crowd turned over just the way day turns into night. My heart sank every time I had to walk past the man who wasn’t washing or drying a damn thing but sat there nursing on a drink in a paper cup.

The way he licked his lips made me nervous, even though he was too busy watching the skinny woman with the frizzy ponytail who worked the night shift to ever look my way. His eyes were dark, and cold, and dead, almost, but they trailed that woman wherever she went. When she looked his way, he’d smile one of those smiles that doesn’t reach the eyes. She’d sweep and mop and nod at me occasionally as if to say she was glad I was there. Glad that she saw me watching. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do a damn thing if it all came down to it, baby strapped to my chest and as sleep-worn as I was.

I figured I’d run and call the cops or call for help if I had to. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that for all our sakes. We couldn’t afford to lose what we had, and we’d never be able to replace what we’d lost. Luckily, the woman had called her boyfriend about five minutes after the almost-dead-eyed man had shown up. Immediately after he’d put his arm around her and whispered something in her ear that another man dressed like a cowboy pretended not to notice.

The skinny woman’s boyfriend was just as skinny with a ponytail just as frizzy. Still, he wasn’t bound by the same niceties that she was being a woman, and in customer service, and terrified that she might not make it out of that damn laundromat in one piece if she didn’t play her cards right. It seems we women always need to play our cards just right, even when others would rather convince us we don’t need to play at all. The long-haired skinny man came in yelling, cussing, and picked the man up by the straps of his hoodie and told him to get the hell out. He said he’d be there every night, and if the motherfucker wanted to live, he better not keep showing his face around there. The man licked his lips as he clung to that soggy cup, but he disappeared down the block.

It wasn’t until later, when she “loaned” me a few quarters to dry my last load, that I found out the almost-dead-eyed man would be waiting for her in the dark, no matter what was said, and that’s why her boyfriend takes out the trash and makes sure to lock up the shop with her and escort her to his van. She said she was glad I was there, and I felt guilty for not feeling the same, but I had to play my own cards right, so I told her I was glad I was there, too. It wasn’t too much longer that the man who lurked in my own shadows came back around to play the role of loving father and doting ‘husband’.

When he returned, he and the skinny man with the ponytail lingered outside in the parking lot rolling cigarettes and shooting the shit long after the laundromat lights went out. Long after our 1994 Isuzu with the busted wiring, the broken back hatch, no AC, and a window that wouldn’t roll down was loaded up with splitting bags of cleaned laundry. My feet were swollen, my back was sore, and my baby was tired, but I was too nervous to say a goddamn word, and so I smiled, nodded, and laughed along, and the woman sat in the passenger side of the van doing the same.

I didn’t have a single quarter left for gas or groceries or laundry and the world seemed to be crumbling around me. But damn did it feel good to have clean clothes, and damn could I go for a slice of gas station pizza.

On our way out of town back to our tent under the starry desert sky I wished on shooting stars. I realize now that at some point those wishes must have come true.