More of This World or Maybe Another

by Barb Johnson

  Delia reaches behind her for the net and sets it next to Calvin. She’d rather disappear for this portion of the program—flailing-fish-meets-net—not just because of what is about to happen to some poor, unsuspecting fish, but because Calvin requires an audience. Someone has to see him fight the fish and win. It’s a fish with a minuscule brain. Delia can’t imagine why anyone would want a witness. And it’s not that Calvin comes right out and says, Watch me. It’s just a rule. Women have to watch men. It’s exhausting.

  While Calvin, who is six-two, wrestles a fifteen-inch catfish, a red canoe gets loose from its tie-up on the opposite shore. The artists aren’t outside, and, for a while, Delia’s the only one who knows about the boat’s getaway plans. She tracks the progress of the little canoe, knows that nothing really needs to be done about it. The water will bring it right here to the end of the bayou and push it up on land. You don’t have to tie down every single thing to keep track of it.

  “Oh, man,” Calvin says when he sees the canoe. “Some jackass didn’t tie his boat up.”

  Delia points across to the tiny trailer park. “Came from over there,” she says. “They’ll know where to find it.”

  “Well, no, Delia. When the tide shifts, it’s going to carry it clear to the lake.” Delia doubts this, but Calvin likes to solve problems, and you can’t solve a problem unless there is one.

  He lowers the hooked catfish into the grass, puts one of his big boots across its body and works the barb loose from inside the fish’s mouth. The catfish struggles against the pain of the hook, which Calvin swears it can’t feel, and gasps for oxygen, which there’s plenty of, though none the fish can use. “Why don’t you paddle it back over for them?” Calvin asks.

  Delia looks away from the gasping fish. “Why don’t you?” The embarrassing fact is that Delia is afraid of boats, one of the many things she’s never told Calvin, who assumes everyone is living a rational life. I’m afraid of boats, she imagines telling him. But you can swim, he’d argue. I’m not afraid of drowning, Delia would answer. I’m afraid of falling. I’m afraid I’ll tip the boat and fall in. But you can swim, he’d repeat. In Calvin’s mind, the best way to correct wrong thinking is through the repetition of a fact. There’s no explaining yourself to him.

  Calvin tosses the catfish in a bucket of water with another fish, then hops into the red canoe and paddles off. He won’t just bring the boat back; he’ll have to find the owner and explain the error of his ways. Sure enough, after he ties the boat up, Delia hears the faint echo of his Hello? Hello?

  A girl comes out of the little silver Airstream and, flip-flap, flip-flap, walks over to Calvin. She’s tall and moves the way that rich girls who’ve had ballet lessons move, loose in the hips, feet pointing out. She puts her hands up to her face in an expression of what Delia would say is false embarrassment. It’s the expression girls give to guys when they’re trying to move things along. It’s faster than arguing. Her body language is pitch-perfect, designed to save Calvin’s feelings. You’re trying to be helpful, the girl’s body says, and I’m trying to look embarrassed by what you perceive as my neglect, which is what you want from me. Calvin’s body says, I’m a superhero. It’s my duty to rescue, ma’am, and to explain the world to you.

  There’s a frantic splashing in the bucket next to Delia, and she’s sure one of the fish is about to jump out and swim away. The struggle doesn’t last, though. The catfish go quiet in their murky prison. They’ve accepted their fate, Delia imagines. Que sera, sera.

  Delia backs her little Toyota truck up onto the sidewalk in front of the Bubble, which is what she has finally decided to call her Laundromat. She’s been too nervous about falling to get up on a ladder and hang the sign she made. At the service entrance, she doesn’t even have the key in the lock before her buddy, Pudge, is behind her. He’s Big Luce’s nephew, and the Laundromat is home base, the place he’s said he spent most of his time as a child, when Big Luce ran her own Laundromat out of this building.

  “You need help with that?” Pudge asks, meaning the two used coin-op washers in the back of the truck.

  Pudge enjoys breakfast cocktails, which often makes him a little dangerous as a helper. He looks bleary but not unsteady this morning. “I could use some help if you’ve got a few minutes,” Delia says. She wishes Pudge would take money when he helps her, which is often, but he won’t. She doesn’t like to feel beholden, like she’s been helped because she’s a girl. “I’m happy to take a beer,” Pudge always tells her. “Cuts out the middleman, if you know what I mean.”

  Delia goes inside. While she’s digging through the storage area for the dolly, she hears yelling coming from the front of the Laundromat. On Palmyra Street, saying hello and fighting can sound just alike, and it’s pretty time-consuming if you investigate every loud conversation.

  “Put it back!” she hears a woman yell. “I’ll call the cops. You better put it back.”

  Delia runs down the side of the building to the front, where she finds Pudge with his hands up. He’s spindly, emaciated, except for a nearly round basketball of beer gut under his T-shirt. One of the washers is off the truck in the street next to him. A girl straddles a bike with a bag of groceries on the back, her finger aimed at Pudge like a gun. She’s wearing those sandals—Delia doesn’t know the name of them—the kind that cost a couple hundred bucks.

  “It’s cool,” Pudge says. “I’m cool.”

  “Does this belong to you?” the girl asks Delia, pointing to the washer in the street next to Pudge. In the bright morning light, the machine looks sad and used up in a way it hadn’t in the dim warehouse where Delia got it.

  “That’s right,” Delia says.

  “Well, I caught this guy trying to make off with it.”

  “Is that true, Pudge?” Delia asks. “Were you about to put this three-hundred-pound washer on your back and walk off with it?” Delia gives the girl a stare.

  “But-but,” the girl sputters, “the side door was standing open and…” She points to the chained front entrance. “I thought…”

  The whole scene pisses Delia off. The girl’s assumptions. Pudge’s refusal to stand up for himself. “Pudge,” Delia says without looking at him, “will you get the dolly for me?”

  Once Pudge leaves, Delia expects the girl to leave, too. Instead she puts down the kickstand of her bike. “Hey,” she says, looking Delia up and down, “I know who you are.” She takes a few steps closer.

  When the girl comes toward her, Delia recognizes the ballerina walk. Clueless, was all Calvin had said the other night when he got back from returning her boat. And clueless is what Delia thinks now. It’s like the girl has no idea how she just insulted Pudge.

  “You’re with the hunky man,” the girl says, “the one who brought my boat back.”

  “The hunky man is named Calvin,” Delia says. Hunky man. Why can’t that be enough for Delia?

  “Calvin! Right.”

  Pudge comes back with the dolly and works the washer onto it.

  “Calvin’s my…” Delia reaches over to steady the tipped-up washer and vertigo sets the world spinning. “He’s my…” but she can’t get to the word in time. Fiancé. She sits down hard on the tailgate of the truck, takes a deep breath against the nausea that the spinning causes. Slowly, slowly she reaches for the edge of the tailgate and holds on to it. Tells herself there’s no way she can actually fall.

  “Oh, God,” the girl says. “What’s wrong?”

  Pudge moves closer to Delia but doesn’t touch her. “She’s got a head injury,” he says. “Makes her dizzy.”

  “You should take her inside,” the girl tells Pudge, like she’s in charge. “Let him help you inside,” Bossy says, cupping Delia’s shoulder and squeezing it.

  Delia’s not in the mood to be told what to do, but while everything’s shifting around, it’s too hard to say so. She reaches for Pudge’s arm, and they stagger inside together.

  “Sit tight,” the girl says once Delia’s settled onto the windo
w seat. “Pudge and I will take care of these washers.” She says it like she knows Delia. Like she knows Pudge. Like suddenly she’s a part of things.

  Through the big glass windows, Delia watches Pudge and the girl roll the first washer down the sidewalk toward the back of the Laundromat. By the time they come through the service door with the second one, they’re best buddies. Pudge is saying, Maggie something or other, and Maggie, the girl, nods. “I know, can you believe it?” They both laugh at whatever it is they can’t believe. Apparently Pudge has already gotten over the girl’s rudeness. Like Calvin, Pudge is a fucking saint.

  Maggie brings her canvas bag of groceries in and sets it on the window seat that runs along the front of the Bubble. Pudge lowers himself slowly onto one of the steps that lead up to the loft, which is Delia’s office. His face is filled with the pain from his ruined knees, the result of an accident when he was in the Army. That’s what all the beer is about. “Best pain reliever I know of,” Pudge likes to say. “And tasty, too.”

  “Couple of beers in the fridge,” Delia says, checking the room for spinning. “Help yourself.”

  Pudge nods to Maggie. “You want one?”

  “Oh,” Maggie says, “no. I mean thanks, though.”

  After he gets the beer, Pudge ducks out the back without saying good-bye, which is his habit.

  “I like Pudge,” Maggie says. “He’s just really down to earth.”

  “Oh, he’s down to earth all right.” The spinning has ended and with it the crabby feeling. “Pudge just looks like a mess,” she says, “but he’s a good guy.” With the crabby feeling gone, Delia can see that Maggie is maybe nicer than she first thought.

  Maggie begins digging in her grocery bag, her head bent over it, the tight curls of her black hair twisting this way and that, a few of them aimed straight at heaven, completely unaffected by gravity. She’s rooting around in that bag as though sitting on this bench in the Laundromat with Delia is exactly what she planned to do with her morning. Maggie finally looks up. “Cracker Jacks?”

  “What?” Delia asks, then puts her hand out to where Maggie is shaking a box of Cracker Jacks. She looks at Maggie’s mouth to see if more words will come out. Maggie has a beautiful mouth. Looking at it pushes open a door that Delia’s been keeping closed for a long, long time.

  “So this is your place,” Maggie says, “your business?”

  Delia nods, watches Maggie survey the rows of ragtag washers. The mismatched dryers. It must look like a dump to everyone else. Outside in front of the Laundromat, the chairs have begun to fill with people stopping to gossip on their way to the corner grocery down the block.

  “It’s nice sitting in here,” Maggie says. “It has a really good vibe to it. You know, like soulful.”

  “Soulful?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know, it’s not prefab or like a chain. It has soul.”

  Delia wonders if Maggie is being sarcastic. “It’s all right, I guess.”

  “All right? Shoot. Being an entrepreneur takes cojones.”

  Cojones, Delia thinks, balls. Why does everything worth doing have to be about balls? She tells Maggie that she’s saving up to go to school in the fall.

  “I’m in my third year,” Maggie says, then pulls the bottom of her T-shirt into a ball and knots it, exposing her tan midriff to the meager breeze of the ceiling fans. “It’s completely overrated. Trust me.”

  A wine-colored birthmark follows the curve of Maggie’s rib. It’s shaped like, like Delia doesn’t know what because she’s trying not to stare at the private swatch of skin. It’s a relief when Deysi Hernandez from down the street walks in with her old grandmother, who’s pushing a grocery cart full of laundry.

  “Abuelita,” Delia calls out to the old grandmother, lacing her fingers together and squeezing her own hands. Abuelita nods a greeting, and Deysi searches the room for men who might want to admire her. Pudge is totally smitten with Deysi. It’s a good thing he’s not here to receive his usual dose of tease-and-dismiss.

  Delia and Maggie watch the women fill four of the washers like it’s something they’re doing together, like when Delia was a kid, and she and her friends would walk down the highway to the shopping center that had a Laundromat and a dollar store. They’d go back and forth between the two, hanging out just to see what would happen. The Laundromat was always her favorite.

  “You want a cold drink?” Delia finally thinks to ask. She nods toward the machine across the room. “I mean, you did save my washer from being carted off on the back of a skinny drunk man.”

  “Is that the going rate for good citizenship?” Maggie asks. Citizen-she-up is how she says it. A south Alabama accent. “You get made fun of and then somebody buys you a cold drink?”

  “Looks like it,” Delia says. She goes to get a couple of root beers.

  When Maggie takes the drink from Delia, her long fingers seem to wrap around the bottle in slow motion, and in a very particular pattern. Like she’s playing notes on an instrument. Delia holds on to the bottle a half second too long, clears her throat and goes to the back to bring change to Deysi and Abuelita, who have begun arguing over missing quarters.

  From the back of the Laundromat, Maggie looks like a film star on a crappy movie set. Unlike most of the customers who frequent the Bubble, she’s dressed like someone who has somewhere to go, and Delia wonders what she’s doing just sitting there. Or maybe that’s what college is like. You dress up and go to class every now and then, but the rest of the time you wear your nice clothes and just do whatever you want.

  “Sorry,” Delia says when she gets back to the window seat. “What were we talking about?”

  “I just had a thought,” Maggie says, slapping Delia’s knee. “We’re having a fish fry at the compound. You and Calvin should come.” She gets up to toss the empty Cracker Jack box. On the way back, she runs her fingers across the face of the ancient snack machine left over from Big Luce’s day. “Don’t you just love fish fries?” Maggie asks.

  As a matter of fact, Delia hates fish fries. Fish fries are the exact sort of thing she had hoped to get away from when she came to the city. That and fishing. But at least in the city, you might get invited by anyone to do just anything. Where Delia and Calvin grew up, everyone knew everyone, and it had already been decided three generations ago which people you’d invite to your house and which people you’d never get to know.

  “If I could,” Maggie says, sitting back down next to Delia, “I’d have a fish fry every day.”

  “Yeah? Well, you’ll love Calvin, then.”

  Before Maggie leaves, it’s all settled. Friday, after work, Delia and Calvin will go to the compound. Delia has heard tales from Pudge about the artists living over there, about the parties they throw, parties Delia has watched from across the bayou. What do they talk about so late at night? What will she say to them Friday when she meets them? She’s no artist. According to her high school teachers, Delia has two main talents: fixing mechanical things and being a smart aleck. Neither would serve a young lady very well, the teachers said. Who you calling a lady, Delia always said back.

  The night of the fish fry, Delia and Calvin cross the small bridge over the bayou and walk down a grassy path to the trailers. When they get to the compound, Maggie greets them and then there are introductions all around. The artists are mostly men, mostly pale and scrawny or chunky from inactivity. They tend to offer their area of expertise with their names. Benny Bagneris, alto sax. Calvin goes right to work having a little fun with them. “Calvin Lafleur, uncouth swain,” Calvin says as he offers a permanently grease-stained hand for shaking. Calvin’s not stupid, but he’s not witty, either. He got that uncouth swain bit off the TV, Delia imagines. Some show with a hey-bra guy saying something surprising to the college folk. Unlike Delia, though, Calvin isn’t much bothered by other people’s assumptions. Calvin’s okay with Calvin, so Calvin’s okay with the world. He fits in everywhere.

  “You brought wine!” Maggie says when everyone is finis
hed laughing at the uncouth swain remark. “Fancy.” Bottles of beer telescope up through the ice that has been dumped into Maggie’s red canoe. Not a bottle of wine in sight. “No problem,” Maggie says, “I’ve got a corkscrew in my trailer.”

  “I’ll just put my beer with the rest,” Calvin says and shoots Delia a told-you-so look. Earlier in the week, Delia had read that white wine goes with fish, and she went to a wine shop and asked for a nice bottle.

  “Fourteen dollars?!” Calvin had turned the bottle in his hands to see if maybe there was some kind of prize floating inside.

  Delia explained to him that artists weren’t a bunch of bubbas who drank cheap beer. She was thinking of Maggie’s expensive shoes. There would be white wine, Delia told Calvin, because it goes with fish. “White wine might go with fish,” Calvin said, taking a swallow of beer and belching impressively, “but beer goes with me.”

  Over by the ice-filled canoe, Calvin is scoping the area for his prey of choice. “What y’all got in the way of fish?”

  “Grouper,” one of the guys says. “Organic.” He points to a neat line of fish on a table, bought, no doubt, from one of those places that can take a week’s pay and fit it into a single bag. Delia is afraid Calvin is going to laugh, but he doesn’t. He just goes right over to the table and starts educating the artists about how to fillet a fish.

  Maggie brings Delia to her little silver Airstream. Inside, she opens a tiny drawer in the bite-sized kitchen. “Voilà!” She hands a corkscrew to Delia.

  Delia has never in her life opened a bottle of wine, but she’s seen it done in movies. “What kind of artist are you?” she asks, picking at the wine’s foil cap with the point of the corkscrew.

  Maggie smiles. She has beautiful teeth. “The dilettante kind,” she says.

  Dilettante? Delia wishes she had her little notebook so she could add it to the list of words she needs to learn for college. “But like do you paint or play music or…”