The Alaskan Laundry

by Brendan Jones

  It wasn’t happening. She dressed quickly, buttoning her coat to the neck. Hands shoved deep into her pockets, she walked toward the tug. Her rubber boots squeaked in the snow, which made a latticework in front of the mountains. Standing in front of the boat, she watched as flakes buffeted the wheelhouse windows, silver tracers melting into the black water. Her lungs hurt with the cold. The For Sale sign dangled from a corner in the porthole, rimmed with orange rust. If it had been outside, she would have ripped it off.

  Back at the apartment, she flipped on the pendant light and took out a lined pad. As she sat with it on one knee, tapping the end of a pen against her front teeth, she thought of the time she had been frustrated with Connor for turning down a role in the spring play at St. Vincent’s. He kept insisting he wanted to remain behind the scenes, build sets in his workshop. They got into an argument on the sidewalk in front of the house. She told him he never took chances, that he lacked the courage to just go for it.

  When she opened the door, her mother was already wearing her winter coat, and Tara knew she had been listening.

  “Come, figlia. We go to decorate the bakery.”

  “Ma, I’m tired. I just wanna sleep.”

  “Come,” she said, taking Tara’s hand.

  That evening, as they kneeled in clouds of cotton in the display window, snapping together train tracks, her mother said, “Do you not see? He is so patient. Lui ti corteggia. And you don’t care at all.”

  “He’s not courting me, Ma.”

  Serena jabbed at her own eye. “I see what I see. And I also tell you something else. Ones like this boy, when they see who they love”—she flicked her fingers to mimic an explosion—“ka-boom they go, like a balloon with too much air. They have been saving all their lives. And then—basta.”

  “Ma, it’s not like that.”

  Her mother shook a section of train track at Tara. “You wait and see. I tell you now.”

  27 October 1997

  Dear Connor,

  It’s 2:17 in the morning. I can’t sleep. The snow turns everything white. I’m just back from walking to the harbor.

  I wish we could talk in person. It would be so much easier.

  I know we’re on our separate paths, and that’s probably for the best. I’m still angry at your letter. But I’m also sorry. I hate the idea of you alone in that city. I hope you also understand how fucked up in the head I was. Like I’m starting to see how little I really know.

  She stood up, pulled her shoulders back, and took a sip of water. The floorboard radiators ticked. In the window she could see the table and herself reflected above the letter. She took a step closer and saw, beyond her reflection, snow balanced on the branches of the spruce trees. After a moment she could feel the cold through the window.

  Okay. I’m going to put down this pen and fold this into an envelope and send it before I catch myself. I miss you.

  Tara

  13

  IN THE CHILDREN’S SECTION at the library she found a book called The Young Seafarer’s Book of Knots. Illustrations and step-by-step instructions for tying the bowline, laid out in sequence.

  At the fishing supply store by the processor she bought a spool of thin braided twine called gangion. Back in her apartment she turned on the dome light over the table, nipped off a section from the spool, and opened the book.

  Even putting the twine up against the drawings, it was difficult to figure out on which side to set the loop. She tried it this way, then that, pulling on both ends. Her result was bumpy and awkward compared to the elegant illustration.

  She flung the gangion at the photograph on the wall. Fritz had tied his bowline on the tank in just a few seconds.

  On Monday morning she found Newt smoking a cigarette. “Grandpa got you practicing knots?”

  She held out the string. “You know how to do a bowline?”

  He tossed his butt into a five-gallon bucket filled with sand, holding the door open, and started inside. “Keep at it. It’ll come.”

  That evening she pounded a tack into her shower wall with the heel of her boot. She stood beneath the showerhead, her curls flattened against her cheeks, line tied to the tack, making loops. A knot came together, one she thought might be right, but when she tried the same exact thing again the twine snarled in a bunch.

  She threw a jab at the wall, misjudged the distance, and grazed her knuckles. “Fucker!” she shouted, then looked guiltily at her duct-taped door. Her knuckles bled into the water. Frustrated, she tried again, the line twisting and looping over itself, snagging before coming undone. “Cazzo,” she hissed. “You piece of shit.”

  She looked down at the mess in her fingers, turning her hand in the stream to wash off the blood. “Settle down, Tara. Just settle the fuck down.” The water had turned tepid and her skin puckered. I’m not getting out of this shower, she told herself, taking up the line once more. Make the rabbit hole, bring the rabbit out, jog him around the log, then back down. She began to shiver as the water grew cold. She held the knot up, blinking away droplets. Ah. That looked right.

  She dried, then took her result over to the book on the table. Right it was. She flipped a page and made a bowline with a bight, fashioning a loop, pushing the doubled-over line through the opening. Slowly, the parts cinched, one loop tightening over the other until the knot was made fast. Not so bad.

  The next afternoon after work, when she reached into the shower to throw the handle, her arm got sprayed with cold water. Except this time she had an idea.

  She returned to the store and bought miniature blocking, which she screwed into the stall, setting up a pulley system. She looped a clove hitch over the handle, the two ends oriented in opposite directions, then ran the line through the pulleys, took the end over the side of the shower door. When she pulled on it, the sound of water startled her, along with the realization that she had mastered some small piece of the universe.

  For the moment, she felt a little less lost.

  14

  ON THE MONDAY before Thanksgiving, Tara found Fritz behind his desk. He glanced up as she reached for the logbook, adjusted his reading glasses, which made him look like an overgrown Santa’s helper, and squinted at her.

  “You got big Thanksgiving plans?” he asked.

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you,” he grunted. “By the way, that patch on the tank’s holding.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  He nodded. “Join us. Fran, my wife, enjoys meeting new folks.” He didn’t look up, as if that settled that. “Now get on out of here—go take a walk in the mountains or something. Explore. Don’t be such a sad sack.”

  Planks burped brown water as she walked up Crow Hill. Stepping into the tree cover, she smelled a rich mix of wet moss, spruce, and salt in the air. Wooden flights of stairs crisscrossed between the trees. Hill my ass, she thought, breathing heavily.

  As she went, she fooled with a spruce twig, folding it over on itself, practicing the bowline, liking how her fingers were gaining memory of the movements. How stupid of her, she thought, never to ask her mother what she knew about fishing, paying out line, making these knots.

  She angled off the trail, ignoring the tears thorns made in her jeans. A creature chattered above her, charging back and forth along a tree limb. Through a break in the needles she saw the blanket of the ocean, the cone of the volcano rising from the gray, and headed toward it, bending back branches to see better.

  Looking over the water, she remembered a night in eleventh grade when she heard a raspy sobbing coming from her parents’ bedroom down the hall. When she peered around the doorjamb she saw her father holding her mother to his shoulder. They had their backs to her, black outlines of bodies in front of the blue light of the muted television.

  “Each day,” her mother said, “it is like she goes farther from me. Like there is something, you know, that—scares her. In Sicilia I talk to my cousins. We figure out how to make it better. But here in this city . . .” She lifted her hands, dropping
them with a slap against her bare thighs. “Amore, I am no good at it.”

  As she stood listening, Tara realized her mother was talking about her.

  Alone in the woods, wanting to chase this memory away, she went up on her toes, shuffled her feet, and shook out her shoulders. She threw a couple jabs at the tree trunk. “Double jab left right hook,” she heard Gypo snap. “Jab uppercut followed by the right. Combination, then get out of there.”

  It began to rain, drops filtering through the branches. Winded, she let down her fists. She started back, this time gathering speed on the stairs, hopping high so her momentum wouldn’t cause her to slip on the dark wet wood. Just a little faster, she thought, pushing off her toes, trying not to fall. Just a little faster and I’ll be good again.

  15

  FRITZ GAVE THEM the Wednesday before Thanksgiving off. (He needed time to prepare his crab dishes.) Feeling lost without work, Tara headed to the bookstore, where she found a card with a woodcut print on it that showed a couple huddled together against the side of a mountain. Her palms began to sweat.

  Maybe her letter had fallen out of the mail plane, helicoptering down over one of those glaciers she had seen from the ferry. She could picture it, soggy, lost in the swirls of dirty ice.

  Behind the bookstore she found a coffee shop called the Muskeg. The room had a grotto feel to it, reminding her of Little Vic’s basement beneath the barbershop, with the windows looking out onto the sidewalk. She ordered coffee and a slice of salmonberry pie, and set the card in front of her.

  November 26, 1997

  Dear Connor,

  Sitting here in this café. It’s dark, just a few windows looking onto the sidewalk. Kind of like your garage.

  I thought of you when I saw this print. They say you shouldn’t hike alone up here. More on that in a moment. But it also made me think of our trip to the shore, the blankets we wrapped up in.

  She set her pen down and looked around. Now you’re getting sappy and nostalgic. Then she found herself meeting the eyes of the older, long-fingered man she saw at the library the night she called Connor. He wore the same workman’s cap, same peaceful expression. C’mon, Tara. Take a minute and figure out what you’re trying to say here. Don’t get distracted.

  Connor, I’m sorry. I miss you. But I’m going to wait to hear from you before any more letters.

  I apologize for being a little shit. For what happened over the summer, for sleeping with you then leaving like that. For tenth grade, going quiet. There are reasons I wish I could tell you. Soon.

  Tara

  As she reread the letter she heard a sound and looked up to see the man from the library in front of her.

  “Do you mind?” he asked, lowering into a chair with his coffee cup and a few cubes of sugar. He had a drawn, ageless face, and sloped shoulders—he could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy. “Excuse the intrusion. You appear to be hard at work.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Betteryear,” he said, reaching across the table. She shook his hand. Improbable distances separated the joints of his fingers. She caught the scent of old grass, and something else, cucumbers maybe.

  “Tara Marconi.”

  He touched the bill of his patched engineer’s cap. “Did you just arrive in town, Tara?”

  What was that Newt had said about men in Alaska? The odds are good, but the goods are odd. “I did,” she said. She was about to add “just before I saw you at the library,” but caught herself.

  “Well, as I said, I don’t mean to distract you. I just thought I’d introduce myself.” He pulled on leather biking gloves and stood. “I’m often in here, reading the papers. Ah—and if you don’t have plans for Thanksgiving, we do a big meal at the Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall. Come if you like.”

  “Okay.”

  “Happy day.”

  “You too.”

  She looked back down at her letter.

  PS. If you see my father tell me how he is. I’m assuming he’s figured out where I am by now, if he even cares. If I call I know he’s just going to hang up.

  Oh. And if I had to pick one word now—empty. Not in a bad way.

  After mailing the letter she returned to her studio and set to baking. Chilling the butter until it was hard to the touch. Folding pads of it into the flour. Halving, seeding, roasting the squash three pieces at a time in her undersized oven. She rolled out the dough, kneaded a shred between her fingers to test the consistency. Dripping in ice water, salt. In her head she heard the tune of a Sicilian folk song she couldn’t name. One her mother hummed when she was baking. Her father would recognize it. She remembered him sometimes humming along, even singing the Italian lyrics in a soft, wavering voice.

  She watched her hands as she built the crust, working slowly around the rim of the pie pan, pressing down with her thumbs with just the right amount of force, careful not to thin the dough, which needed more butter. She stopped, her hands gripping the pie. Tensing her stomach, trying not to move, for fear of starting to cry, and not being able to stop.

  16

  FRITZ AND HIS WIFE, FRAN, lived in a cabin built on piers over the water just down from the library. The kitchen was already bustling when Tara arrived, people opening ovens, pouring cream and splashes of orange juice into sweet potatoes, crumbling seaweed and shreds of king crab into stuffing. Fran smelled of patchouli, and wore a hooded Baja shirt and fleece pants with burn holes in the fabric. After hugging Tara, she set the pie on the counter. “This looks delicious—Fritz mentioned something about you working in a bakery. Wine? Beer?”

  “Beer is great.”

  Tara froze when she saw the back of a woman working over the stove. It was the set of her shoulders, her head bent over a pot. Just like her mother.

  The woman set down a potato masher, reached for a carton of milk, gave a generous pour. Fran handed Tara a beer.

  “You gotta hold the darn thing tight if you want this to work,” the woman said, turning. She was reedy, with a smoker’s body and straight, graying hair—nothing like her mother. Tara held tight as she wrenched off the cap. “Laney,” she said, clinking Tara’s bottle with a glass of white wine.

  “Tara.”

  She had polished skin and wide-set eyes traced with black liner. Beneath her apron was a red shawl. Laney sliced a lemon, squeezed, then motioned to Tara for another one.

  “You work with that lunatic Newt?”

  Tara took a slow sip of beer. “I don’t think he’s a lunatic.”

  “He didn’t tell you the story?”

  “What story?”

  Laney walked the line of being obnoxious. And yet her straightforward manner made Tara feel at home.

  “The story of him hiding on my tug and getting dragged off by the police.”

  Her heart thumped. So this was the woman who was walking away from the tug.

  Fritz yelled her name from another room. “The lion tamer calls,” Laney said, giving a coy smile.

  He was in the den off the kitchen, watching football with a can of beer balanced on his stomach, his fur-lined slippers perched on an ottoman. “Have a seat.”

  The room was wood-paneled, its walls hung with a black and red Tlingit quilt and ink prints of rockfish. “Cowgirls,” she mumbled, dropping into the couch. The Dallas Cowboys were playing Tennessee.

  He closed one eye and looked at her, as if measuring what she meant. The exchange with Laney had made her bold—or maybe it was the day off, and writing the last letter to Connor. She also felt she had earned this respite from the hatchery, the right to sit down with a beer and watch her least favorite team in the world lose. She fooled with the ends of a quilt on the sofa, folding half hitches between her fingers. “I watched the Eagles beat the Cowboys. December tenth, 1995. It was like, seven degrees out.”

  He massaged the bridge of his nose. “Bunch of grown men in tight pants that should be working, if you ask me,” he said.

  Dick. Couldn’t he say anything nice about anything?


  But the memory of the football game with her father warmed her. Watching as the Eagles kicked a field goal in the final seconds, how Veterans Stadium had erupted with sound, and Urbano had pumped his fist in the air. The smell of espresso grounds and cigar smoke, and that earsplitting noise.

  Some thirty-five hundred miles away, her father was watching this same game at the social club with Vic and the crew. Maybe Little Vic, too—he was over eighteen. Or perhaps Urbano was at Wolf Street, tapping his cigar against the saucer and shaking his head as a Cowboys runner slashed for a gain.

  She looked around the room. Draped over the porch railing was rope—or line, as Newt had said. She fetched it, then stood over Fritz.

  “Hold out your wrist,” she ordered.

  He leaned forward, his stomach bunching over his thighs. “What’s this? Some Italian magic trick?”

  “Just do it.”

  In quick twists she tied a bowline, looping the rope along the crease of his skin, then pulling it tight.

  “Not bad,” he said. “You know how to put a bend at the end?”

  But she was already doing it. After that she made a clove hitch, a trucker’s hitch, a mooring hitch, a double-half hitch, until his smile was gone, and he just looked down at his wrist as the knots pulled together.

  “Well, call me an asshole,” he said, chugging his beer and standing. “Is that what you were up to all those hours organizing that warehouse?”