Talia nodded dutifully, clearly unconvinced. She retrieved her load of leotards, tights, and leg warmers from the washer and tossed them in a pink plastic basket about three times her body width. Balancing the huge tub in front of her, she resembled a pregnant duck, waddling over to the dryer with her ballerina’s splayed gait. She loaded the machine and set it to permanent press. “Another thing—but I guess it can wait till next week,” she said, studying her reflection in the dryer’s porthole as her 100% cotton garments danced in clockwise circles behind the glass. “People seem to find me really vain.”
2
ALICE
The first actual laundry-doer of the day was a young woman I rarely saw down in the basement. I think she used to be a nine-to-fiver during the weekdays. All I really know about Alice is that she’s an actress, or an aspiring one, and that her grandmother Irene was a former showgirl who was always tickled to tell anyone who would listen that Alice took after her.
The poor girl was struggling to steer a collapsible shopping cart overflowing with garments through the narrow doorway. “Do you need some help with that?” I asked.
Alice knocked the front axle into the door frame. “Shit!”
A couple of polyester blouses slid from the summit of the pile onto the not-exactly-pristine floor and I realized that I should have swept up before I opened the room that morning.
“Yes, help would be good. Thanks,” Alice said, tossing me a grateful look and glancing over at Talia. “My head isn’t really on straight this morning. I guess I don’t want to do this.” She stared at the haphazard pile of clothes and her eyes and nose began to redden. “Sorry,” she said, looking away, embarrassed to be caught by a stranger in a private emotional moment.
I relieved Alice of her unwieldy cart and rolled it over to the row of washing machines. “I knew your grandmother,” I told her. “She was a wonderful woman—and very proud of you.” My words released the floodgates; I felt terrible for making her cry again. Alice cast about helplessly for a tissue, and as she began to head toward the bathroom to unspool some toilet paper, I reached into my pocket and handed her a shrink-wrapped packet. “Keep it.”
“Thanks.” She tried to smile through her tears. “I’m going to need them. These are hers,” she added, resting her hand atop the colorful pile of clothes. “Were hers, I mean. I couldn’t bring myself to wash Gram’s stuff until today. I’m still not sure I’m ready to handle it. But I…I have to clean everything before I donate it to the thrift shop. It’s only right.”
Without bothering to sort the garments, she started to load the laundry into an empty machine, but accidentally knocked her box of quarters to the floor, sending them rolling halfway across the room. “Shit!” Alice exclaimed again. She gripped the handle of the shopping cart and dissolved into sobs.
I draped my arm over her shoulder and helped her over to the sofa. “Why don’t you sit there for a bit, okay? I’ll take care of it,” I assured her, chasing down the escaping change. “Just tell me what cycles you want everything to go on, and I’ll load the clothes.”
“I’m alone,” Alice mumbled into one of the Kleenex. “Really alone. For the first time in my life. It’s eight A.M. on Friday. It is Friday, right? Gram’s been gone for twenty days, fifteen hours, and forty-nine minutes. Not that I’m counting or anything.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked her, and before I could add that I meant privately, Alice was off and running.
“If I weren’t performing eight shows a week of this completely irreverent Off-Broadway comedy called Grandma Finnegan’s Wake—which is kind of a macabre experience in itself, since Gram’s name was Irene Finnegan—I think I would truly go nuts. Every time I think about Gram, I start crying. Pretty unattractive, huh? I play an outrageously flamboyant former Star Search winner, so at least I can get away with wearing pounds of eye makeup to mask my swollen lids. When my mascara runs I probably look like Tammy Faye Baker.” Alice loudly blew her nose. “I guess I should consider myself pretty lucky since I’m thirty-five years old and Gram’s passing is my first real experience with death—other than the dissections I did in high school biology class—which I totally sucked at, by the way.”
“It’s okay. No one’s judging you. Not even on the dissections; the statute of limitations expired years ago. Alice, everyone deals with death in their own way, and grieving is a process.” I realized I hadn’t introduced myself, in case she didn’t know my name, despite the numerous times over the years we’d seen each other around the building. “I’m Susan Lederer,” I said, offering Alice my hand.
She shoved her soggy tissue into the pocket of her jeans and apologized for giving me a damp handshake. “Hi, Susan, I’m Alice. But I guess you already knew that. You’re the therapist, right?”
I nodded. “My grandmother—on my mom’s side of the family—was my favorite relative. She was the only one who thought my teen angsty poetry didn’t suck and I’ll love her forever for it.”
“Should I leave?” Talia asked; her discomfort at feeling like an eavesdropper was evident. “I mean I’m not really listening.” She had been folding her clothes, but every now and then would stop to shuffle her feet a bit and waggle her hands, drawing little figures in the air. “Don’t mind me; I’m just running the steps for Agon in my head.”
“No, it’s okay,” Alice said, removing another tissue from the pack. “It’s fine with me if you hear. Maybe you knew my grandmother too.” Alice focused on the crumpled Kleenex in her hands. “She was my conscience in a lot of ways. Her bedroom’s been kind of like a shrine for the past few weeks, because I haven’t been able to bring myself to disturb anything. I’ve been trying very hard to convince myself that she’s just on an extended vacation, rather than reunited with my Grandpa Danny up in Heaven, or wherever old hoofers go when they’ve executed their last shuffle off to Buffalo.”
Alice was shredding the tissue into lint. “Gram’s bedroom still has her smell—rosewater, AquaNet hairspray, lipstick, damp wool, and mothballs…and the scent of her skin too, even though she’s not there. She wasn’t in that room when she’d ‘crossed over,’ as Charlesy, her former cleaning lady used to say. My grandmother had a heart attack after a visit to the hairdresser.”
“Talk about bad hair days,” I joked gently.
“No kidding,” Alice sniffled. “I like your sense of humor,” she added, cracking a faint smile. “You’re not maudlin. Maudlin makes me cry even more. I’m a sucker for sentiment. We’re talking basket case. That’s why doing Grandma Finnegan’s Wake is really helping me get through all this. A few of my friends think it’s in total bad taste under the circumstances. But I think Gram would have appreciated the irony. She was a real pistol, herself.”
“Keeping your sense of humor is very important in times like this. And humor is often a very effective tool in therapy. It sounds to me like you’re doing the right thing.”
Alice nodded. “I hope so. But the moving on part is really hard.”
“There’s no timetable,” I assured her. “I still cry every time I think about my granny, and she’s been dead for fifteen years. My husband Eli still hasn’t gotten past being an eyewitness to his dog getting hit by a car when he was ten. Eli, not the dog. The dog was forty-two—in dog years.”
“It makes total sense to me,” Alice commiserated. “Maybe the fact that I never really got to say good-bye to Gram has something to do with my inability to begin a thorough clearing-out of her possessions. Right after she died, I gave a few of her things to my friends Izzy and Dorian, who knew Gram well, but I didn’t start tackling most of her stuff until yesterday. She had two closets and a dresser that were crammed with garments, shoes, and other accessories. And of course I also had to take the sheets off her bed and launder them.”
Alice rose from the couch and walked over to the washers. “I guess the sheets should go in hot water, even though they’re florals. I’m afraid there’s so much stuff that I’m going to hog the machines.”
Alice was so deep into her grieving zone that I don’t think she heard her. “When I opened the door to one of Gram’s clothes closets this morning, I couldn’t help falling apart all over again. There was this muted scent of camphor and Shalimar that was pure Gram.” She lifted a Qiana blouse in an appalling faux Pucci print of camel, mulberry, and beige from the pile of clothes I was planning to wash on the delicate cycle. “This is really pretty vile, but I swear to God, for a few moments there I started to find it the most beautiful thing in the world…despite the unidentifiable stain just above the third button,” she added, examining the mystery splotch. “Still…it’s one thing of hers I’m never going to wear, no matter how much I want to honor her, so after I launder it, it’s going to go straight to the thrift shop. She used to volunteer at the Second Chance store over on Columbus Avenue, doing intake. You know, the place that gives the proceeds from their sales to help rehabilitate crack-addicted teenage moms. She befriended the girls too; she took them to museums from time to time and she even taught a couple of them to tap-dance, which was her grand passion. I’m sure it helped to keep her feeling young; she was in her nineties when she died. I tried not to feel jealous whenever any one of those troubled kids who actually came into contact with Gram became kind of a surrogate granddaughter, but there were times when I’d get really annoyed with her because she so generously dispensed souvenirs from her former life as a Ziegfeld Follies girl: boas, gloves, tiaras—all that kind of stuff—as though they were Halloween candy. Anything someone admired, Gram would give to them.
“I think other people’s donations fascinated her too. ‘One person’s trash is another’s treasure,’ she used to say. That Shakespeare knocker I’ve got mounted on the door to our apartment: that was one of her finds. She snatched it from someone’s bag of donations, put a price tag on it, then immediately purchased it.
“Look at all this stuff!” exclaimed Alice, pointing to the various piles of clothes. “It’s the story of a life well-lived, isn’t it? Some of her things I can’t even put in the washing machine. I’ll have to take them somewhere special to be cleaned. In the very back of one of her closets I found a coffee-colored mink stole with Gram’s initials embroidered into the lining. It’s the wrap that she wore with white opera gloves every New Year’s Eve during the 1940s—she looked beautiful in it. I came across a whole bunch of old photos of her wearing it. She looked like a movie star. And wouldn’t you know, these stoles are suddenly back in fashion! I also unearthed one of those beaded twinsets from the fifties; two 1960s Marimekko A-line dresses; a red crocheted vest handmade by some friend of hers in the seventies, a heinous purple velvet Sergio Valenti warm-up suit—with shoulder pads—that was all the rage in the eighties—and they’re coming back too, would you believe—as well as a couple of nightgowns and a peignoir I’d recently purchased for her. I think Gram’s closets contained the fashion history of the twentieth century from the waning years of vaudeville right up through the Vietnam War and well beyond.” Alice managed a chuckle. “I guess you could say that she was a bit of a pack rat.”
I held up a housedress. “With a penchant for loud, geometric prints.”
“God, that’s really pretty awful, isn’t it? I can’t even imagine someone buying that from Goodwill!”
“Oh, I can think of someone who would just love it,” I grinned.
“Oh! Yes! That smelly homeless lady who wears all that mascara. Matilda!” Alice burst out laughing. “It’s all hers!” she said. “Everything that’s louder and brighter than a three-ring circus? She can have it!”
“She’ll think she hit the jackpot in Vegas,” I agreed.
“Let’s do it.”
It was a good thing that Alice had brought down all her loads so early in the morning. The tenants get very cranky when they think that people are hogging the machines. In fact, anyone using more than two of the six washers at a time is accorded pariah status.
Over the years, I’ve observed the tenants’ behavior down here, not without some amusement. They watch the little red light on the washers like it’s the green flag at Daytona, and if you’re not there to claim your clothes when it goes off, they make a mad dash to evict your load and insert their own. Actually, “in the interest of full disclosure,” as they say, I confess to having done that myself on occasion. But naturally, I have a good excuse; I was in a hurry.
Given the lack of laundry room etiquette, I have a feeling that my patients tend to covet our private counseling sessions as much for a first crack at the machines as for any psychological enlightenment or epiphanies that might take place. Stevo doesn’t unlock the door early enough for the nine-to-fivers to do a load or two before dashing off to work, and the room doesn’t stay open late enough to accommodate their needs by the time they get home either. The room’s also not open on Sundays, and I’m not allowed to unlock the door either or I lose my therapy privileges. I won’t even chance any Sunday cheating, because there’s always some wacko do-gooder tenant who will gleefully rat me out to the management.
“I think this is the first time I’ve ever been down here on a weekday,” Alice said. “I was an office drone until just a couple of weeks ago. My grandmother did the laundry for both of us, even though I always promised her I’d get to it on a Saturday. After I got the Grandma Finnegan’s Wake gig, I was finally able to ditch the insanity of an adult lifetime of temping. Not a moment too soon either. I thought if I had to work for one more two-faced, hypocritical asshole lawyer, I would hang myself.”
Alice’s disparaging remark about lawyers immediately made me think of one of the women I see at the health center down on Fulton Street every Tuesday at lunchtime. Carol Lerner is a Wall Streeter who exhibits several of the most negative stereotypical traits frequently associated with female attorneys: that they try to be men in order to compete in what is still very much a man’s sphere in many respects; that they’re tougher on their employees than their male counterparts are; that they’re humorless; and that they dress like nuns, wouldn’t know an attractive shoe if it was removed from their butt and shown to them, and that they display a nearly equal cluelessness when it comes to the application of cosmetics. I’ve been working with Carol to get her to acknowledge—and rejoice in—her womanhood, rather than attempt to live up to impossible expectations, several of which have been artificially imposed. Just because she’s got a well-deserved and hard won reputation as a barracuda in the courtroom, she doesn’t have to be so grimly aggressive and so aggressively grim in the other aspects of her life. She admits that she’s a tough boss, and isn’t just a tyrant in the office: Carol’s teenage daughter Diandra, who is exactly the same age as my Molly, has tried to run away from home twice in the past year.
Unfortunately, Carol misinterpreted my suggestion to break old behavioral patterns and consciously seek appropriate times to soften her edges as an exhortation to become a one-woman Bacchanal. While she still acts like Medusa in public, behind the meticulously clipped shrubberies of her three-bedroom Westchester Tudor, Carol’s become the Merry Widow, indulging in simultaneous affairs with two married men, both attorneys, one of whom is her law partner. Her other lover is the law partner’s squash partner. Talk about bedroom communities!
I don’t like to take my work home with me either, and my intrusive ruminations on Carol Lerner were exactly that. This was my much-needed mental “down time” between my laundry room sessions and my downtown ones. I was grateful for the unexpected appearance of Ian, my eleven-year-old wonder child. I have no idea how I ended up so blessed with this boy. He always slept through the night when he was an infant, never went through the terrible twos, cleans up his room without being prodded, has legible penmanship, and his teachers around the corner at Ethical Culture adore him: in short, Ian embodies all the things that are supposed to be lacking in the gender allegedly composed of snails and puppy dogs’ tails…althoug
h he was eating Cheez Doodles for breakfast.
I assumed my voice of maternal authority. “Young man, those are not an adequate substitute for corn flakes.”
“I know; they suck with milk,” Ian said, folding the bag closed. All parenting should be this easy. “Mom, my agent called. You have to take me on an audition after school. It’s a national commercial for McDonald’s, and we can’t be late.”
“When are we ever late?”
“Last week, at the one for replacements for Big River.”
“I’m an actor too,” Alice said to Ian. “Although I really hate it when women refer to themselves that way. Ess. I’m an actress. I don’t think it’s un-PC or something to consider myself an actress—as opposed to actor, I mean. It’s a prettier word too.”
“Oh, that’s cool. Have you ever been on Broadway? I played Gavroche for eight months in Les Miz, and I was also in the national tour of Peter Pan with Mary Lou Retton. I did three national commercials and a local one for the Vision Center. It was their back-to-school commercial last year. And I did the print campaign for the Gap and a catalogue for Kids ’R’ Us. Are you in something now?” Ian asked, finally pausing for breath. “Hey, Mom, there’s a boggart in that machine!” he yelped, his attention diverted by the sudden violent shaking of one of the washing machines. It did in fact look like it was demonically possessed, or that some less-than-benign force was trapped inside.
“Well, sweetie, there’s not much I can do about that now. If I open the machine, everything will stop like it’s supposed to, but with these old washers, I’m afraid it might not start up again and our clothes will be too damp for the dryer to be effective.”
“I’m in Grandma Finnegan’s Wake,” Alice told Ian. “I auditioned for it and got the part on the same day…the same day my grandmother died…and our last name is Finnegan. Can you believe it?” Alice began to choke up, and although I really don’t know her, I decided she could use a hug. But that started her sobbing again, and in a matter of moments Alice’s tears had completely saturated the shoulder of my Indian cotton blouse.
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