第8章 The Language of Laundry

Katia Vreeland knew the names of stains before she knew the names of the days of the week in English, and she had never once considered this an embarrassment, because a person who is new in a country takes the words that are offered and builds a life on them, and the words that were offered to her, that first year, were blood, betadine, urine, coffee, grass, grease, ink. She worked nights in the hospital laundry, eleven to seven, feeding the great steel machines and folding the warm flat sheets that came out of the press and stacking them on carts for the floors. It was warm work in a cold building. The machines had a language of their own, and she had learned it the way she had learned the stains: by listening, and being wrong, and listening again. When the third washer coughed twice and then held its breath, the belt was going. When the press sighed at the end of a cycle, someone had fed it too much. She could hear a bad load from across the room and she had never told anyone, because it was not her job to run the machines, and there was a woman named Doreen whose job it was, and Doreen had never once asked her how she knew. She did not mind the nights. Nights meant the building was quiet and the radio was hers. Nights meant she could think about Ivan. Ivan was nineteen. He had her chin and his father's height, and he had been born in a hospital in a city that no longer had that hospital, and he had been three years old when they came, and he spoke Bosnian to her on the phone and English to his friends and a fast horrible mixture to his cousin, and she loved him with an ache that had no bottom, and he wanted to drop out of the community college. "I can make twenty-two an hour on the night crew at the distribution center," he said, over dinner, in her kitchen, which was the tidy kitchen of a rented second-floor apartment. "That's more than you make." "It is not more than I make." "It's close." "Being close to something is not the same as being it," she said, and knew as she said it that it was the kind of sentence her mother would have used, and that Ivan would hear it as a wall rather than a hand. He put down his fork. "You want me to finish two years so I can get a job that pays what the distribution center pays now, in a room with no windows." "I want you to finish two years so you can get a job that a man cannot take away from you in one bad quarter." "That's not how it works anymore." "Then let me be wrong with a diploma in my hand," she said, which was not fair, and she knew it was not fair, and she said it anyway, because she was tired, and because she had exactly one fear in her life and it was not for herself. He left angry and came back the next night and did not mention it, and she did not mention it either, and the fork lay on the table between them for a week, invisible, and they ate around it. --- The letter from her sister Jasna came on a Tuesday, which meant it had taken eleven days, and it was three pages in her sister's small neat hand, and it was mostly about the roof. The roof of the house their grandmother had refused to leave. Jasna was living in it now with her husband and one of the children, and the roof needed replacing, and there were permits, and the permits had a queue, and the queue had a man in it who wanted money. Katia read the letter twice on the bus and once more in the staff room before her shift, and then she put it in her bag and fed the machines and did not think about the roof, because the roof was eleven days old and four hundred miles away, and there were two hundred pounds of sheets coming down the chute at that exact moment, and the sheets were now. But the letter did the thing letters do when they come from far away. It made the past as loud as the present. She thought about the grandmother, and about the night the grandmother died in the bed she would not leave, and about how she, Katia, had heard it in a laundromat, on a Tuesday, with her hands in a sheet, and how she had not been able to cry, and how she had carried that unspent crying around for four years like a pocket full of stones. She thought about the word for the thing a person does when they leave and cannot come back for the funeral, and how there had not been a word for it in English that she could find, and how she had finally used the word *unable*, which was a small dry word, and how the small dry word had held more than any of the big ones. At the April meeting, Glenna asked for the passage, and Katia did something she had never done in eleven months of coming. She did not read from the book. She took a folded card from her bag and said, "I wrote this. It is not from the book. I hope that is allowed." "Of course it's allowed," Glenna said. "You make the rules when it's your turn." So Katia read, in her slow, careful voice, from the card, in her own words, which she had written at her kitchen table over three nights with the dictionary open and the pencil sharpened and a cup going cold. "The year I came here, I learned one thousand words," she read. "I know this because I wrote them in a notebook, one page for each one, and the notebook is in a box. In the notebook, the word *home* has four pages. The first page is a street with a market. The second page is the smell of bread before it is bread. The third page is a bed with a grandmother in it. The fourth page is empty, and I left it empty on purpose, because when I learned that in this language a person can have a home and also be *homeless*, I did not want to write in it yet. I am writing in it now. It says: a home is not a place. A home is a person who waits to hear from you. My sister waits. I am late. That is all I have to say." The room was very quiet. Then Vernon Inman, from his chair, said, "Read the fourth page again." She read it again. "Thank you," Vernon said. "I wanted to hear it twice." Katia folded the card and put it in her bag and did not look at anyone, and the meeting went on to the next reader, and later Junie came around with the teapot and, without a word, filled Katia's cup to the brim, which she had never done before, and Katia understood that it was the best that Junie had, and took it. --- That week, Katia went to the community college and signed up for a writing class on Wednesday mornings, which meant giving up a shift that paid eighty dollars, which her sister would have called crazy and her son would have called about time. The woman at the desk asked her whether she wanted the beginner section or the intermediate, and Katia said, "Which one writes more pages?" The woman laughed and said the beginner section, and Katia said, "Then the beginner section, please." She came out into the parking lot with a schedule in her hand and stood in the light for a minute before she found her keys. On the bus home she took the notebook out of her bag and, on the last page, where there had been nothing, she wrote a date, and under the date she wrote: *I have two homes now. One waits in the old country. One is this hour. Both are true.* And she looked out the window at the low brown river and the hills going green and the town where she cleaned other people's linens at night and owned exactly one room at night of her own, and she decided it counted. ---