Fear and Laundry (4 page)

“It’s not like that,” I glowered, dodging and batting her hand away. I knew she and Jake didn’t get along, I said, but I thought maybe for the good of the band she could “you know,
suck it up
.”

She frowned when I quoted her earlier words back to her. “Oh, please,” she said, crossing her arms. But she sounded a little uncertain.

We watched Clyde 2 roll around on his back, begging for love, for a little while. When Lia tried to scratch the cat’s belly, he clammed into a ball around her hand, sinking his claws into her forearm and pressing his teeth into her wrist.

“Ah! Jesus, Clyde! Okay, already.” She shook free of him and got up, going to the door.

“Where’re you going?”

“I’ll be right back.” I followed and peered after her, watched her approach Jake’s door and knock on the jamb. “Hey,” she barked at her brother, “Can I talk to you?” I didn’t hear his reply, but she stepped into his room and didn’t reemerge for several minutes. When she came marching back up the hall, I dashed back to the bed and sat with my hands in my lap.

“There. He’s in. You happy now?” she asked when she returned.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Only he doesn’t exactly know it.” Reading the question on my face, she said, barely suppressing a smile, “I told him if he wants the gig, he has to audition for us tomorrow. And pass an interview.”

“You did not,” I laughed. “He went for that?”

She shrugged. “Guess he really is hard up for stuff to do, now he’s back.”

***

W
e spent the afternoon listening to music and planning features for the next
Blank Slate
. Then Lia drove me to the Crawford Hotel to meet my mother for dinner. I told Lia she was welcome to join us, but she shook her head.

“I wish,” she said, maneuvering the car into the hotel lot. Her parents would be home tonight, she explained, and it was still her week to cook.

Lia complained about her family’s rotating cooking schedule, but personally, I was glad for it. Regular dinner duty had transformed her into an above average cook and I fully intended to exploit this skill once we graduated in the spring and shared an apartment together. I was useless in the kitchen.

“Watch it,” I said, as she narrowly avoided clipping a bellhop hurrying by with a luggage cart. “You almost mowed down your boyfriend.”

Brakes squealing, she pulled up in front of the hotel doors, next to a bright yellow airport shuttle and behind a white limousine.

“We’ve been through this,” she said, honking at the bellhop. He turned and glared, but then saw it was Lia behind the wheel and smiled. “He’s not my type.”

“Yeah.” I watched Jonathan Krantz, a guy we went to school with and who’d had a crush on Lia (she’d told me) since kindergarten, push through the hotel’s revolving door and disappear into the lobby. “No pocket protector.” I found her nerd fetish endlessly entertaining.

She pinched me.

I was rubbing the sore spot on my arm and calling her names when a car pulled up behind us, the driver honking. “Go on,” Lia shooed me, “get out.”

I obliged, telling her I wasn’t in the mood to discuss her perversions anyway.

“Tell Mom I said hi,” she called after me. “And Vee? Try to roll out of bed at a reasonable hour tomorrow? I wanna start rehearsal early.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I waved as she peeled out and around the limo.

When I stepped into the lobby, I saw Jonathan again, leaning languidly against the front desk. I didn’t know what Lia’s problem was. He was kind of short, but cute, with dark hair and eyes, and a nice smile. His uniform’s long sleeves hid them, but I’d seen him without a shirt at Lynch’s and knew he had a few tattoos.  And he was in good shape. “Nice driving,” he said as I passed him.

“What? She didn’t hit you,” I replied.

“Maybe I’m growing on her,” he said, hopefully.

I crossed the lobby, bypassing the elevators for a spiral stairwell to the hotel’s basement level, where my mother, the Crawford’s Executive Housekeeper, oversaw a regiment of maids, laundry personnel and maintenance staff that kept the hotel clean and running.

I reached the bottom of the staircase and went down a narrow hallway where faulty lighting flickered intermittently overhead. The further I traveled, the moister and warmer the air became. I heard the loud, low rumble of industrial-sized dryers and quickened my pace, heading past locked offices and storage closets to the laundry room.

A familiar voice greeted me when I stepped through the door, and I saw the head laundry attendant, Alma, folding a plush embroidered bath towel into a neat little square. She added it to a stack of identical squares on the folding table beside her just as a dryer beeped, announcing it was done. I grabbed a laundry cart from a row against the wall and wheeled it to the dryer, asking Alma how her day had been.

She answered it’d been fine and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. Her graying hair was pulled into a loose bun, but her humidity-attacked bangs frizzed out around her face. She frowned at a kitten calendar tacked to the wall. “Is it buffet night already?”

Once a week, the hotel restaurant served a themed buffet. Sometimes it was all Italian food; other times Mexican, Japanese, or even French. Regardless, my mother and I ate there together about once a month.

I confirmed it was buffet night and unlocked and opened the dryer door, standing back to let an escaping wave of heat dissipate before leaning in to pull a clump of towels from the machine. I worked quickly, not letting my hands linger too long on the red-hot linens as I dropped them into the cart.

Alma ambled slowly with a stack of folded towels to a rack of wire shelving in the back of the room. “I haven’t been off in ten days,” she said, remarking on how quickly the week seemed to have flown by. “I’ve lost all track of time.” Then, noticing what I was doing, she said “You don’t have to do that, sweetheart. You’ll keep your mother waiting.”

“I’ve got a few minutes,” I said, shutting the dryer with my hip and wheeling the laundry cart to the folding table. “Why’re you still here?” I asked her. “It’s getting late.”

“That new girl your mother hired,” Alma explained with a disappointed sound, “hasn’t shown up all week.” The laundry, she said, had been backed up for days.

Plucking a wash cloth from the cart, I assured her that between the two of us we’d catch up in no time. I folded the cloth in half, laid it on the table and rolled it up tight, adding it to a pyramid of other cloths folded the same way.

Alma moseyed back to the table. “Just like the old days, huh?” she asked, tiny lines radiating from the corners of her mouth and eyes as she smiled.

When I was younger, Mom would pick me up from school and lock me in an empty hotel room to watch television until she’d finished her shift and could take me home. Sometimes I’d microwave popcorn in the suite kitchen and watch movies on free cable. More often, though, I’d escape, sneak down to the laundry and help Alma finish her work. She kept a stash of candy in her smock pockets, and would always let me have a few pieces.

“Just like,” I smiled.

***

“H
i, Pumpkin.” Mom glanced at the clock mounted above the doorway as I walked into her office. “You’re on time.” She sounded surprised.

People said she and I looked a lot alike, and it was true we shared some traits. We both had naturally tan skin, brown eyes, and dark, almost black, hair that fell just past our shoulders. But I was taller than she was, and not as pretty.

“I was early, actually,” I said a little defensively.  She returned to scribbling something in a ledger.

As I waited for her to finish, I looked around the small space. Her office, down the hall from the laundry, was really just a big supply closet rearranged to house a desk and two chairs. Shelves lined the walls, bulging with extra rolls of toilet paper and miniature bars of soap. Brand-new housekeeper and laundry attendants’ uniforms, folded and shrink-wrapped in plastic, stood sorted by size on a rack.

Finally she capped her pen, closed the notebook and stood up behind her desk. “I think the buffet’s Chinese tonight,” she said excitedly, pulling her purse from a hook on the wall. My stomach growled in response as she switched off the light and locked the office door behind us.

***

T
he basement hallway continued past my mother’s office, branching off into more storage closets and an employee break room. Beyond that, a dark staircase led directly up to the hotel restaurant kitchen, facilitating the movement of banquet supplies from storage, when needed, to the event halls on the first floor.

At an island in the center of the kitchen, chefs stood over sizzling-hot grills and enormous stock pots, their puffy, white hats drooping in the heat. Servers in black slacks and dress shirts buzzed around, narrowly avoiding bowling one another over as they jostled to drop off orders and garnish plates. In a corner, a red-faced dishwasher in a hair net directed a high-pressured jet of steaming hot water at a sink full of stainless steel pans. Everyone talked at once, their voices raised over the battery-powered radio blasting Led Zeppelin from a butcher block counter against the wall.

Mom and I threaded through the chaos without anyone around us taking much notice and pushed through a set of swinging doors to emerge into the dimly-lit dining room of Alonzo’s, the Crawford’s restaurant. I followed Mom to our usual booth, where she put down her purse and ordered two Diet Cokes from the server that appeared beside the table.

Once we’d filled our plates from the buffet and headed back, I asked Mom about her previous night’s dinner date with the guy she’d been seeing lately, a paper salesman who spelled his name Jorge but pronounced it “George.” They’d met when he’d come around peddling stationery and pens for the Crawford suites. I’d met him briefly for the first time a few weeks ago and, as usual with the men she dated, hadn’t seen what she saw in him. He’d been nice enough, but aside from the quirkiness with his name, had seemed pretty bland. And nerdy. Lia would have liked him.

“Fine.” She shook out her napkin and settled it across her lap.

“Just fine?” I put a chunk of tofu in my mouth, chewing as I unwound the silverware from my napkin.

“Really well, actually. I’d like for you to come out to dinner with us sometime soon.”

I swallowed the tofu chunk. “Really?” My voice came out high, strangled.

She had this policy that she wouldn’t take me out with a boyfriend unless she thought the relationship was going somewhere. If she wanted me to have dinner with this guy, she must be serious about him.

“What do you think?” she asked brightly.

“Um,” I’d been caught off guard and couldn’t muster a response. And I’d had no time to mask my initial reaction before Mom noticed the horrified expression on my face. Her smile dimmed a watt.

She knew her dating again must be strange for me, she acknowledged as I reached for my Diet Coke and took a long drink. After all, it’d been just the two of us for so long. But she needed to think about the future. “You’ll be going off to college soon,” she reminded me, implying she didn't want to end up all alone when I left.

“If I’m lucky,” I said. My grades had never been all that great to begin with, but I’d really struggled last year, barely skating by with a C average. My graduation, much less getting into college, was by no means a given.

She gave me a look that let me know she didn’t find either my comment or my scholastic standing terribly funny, and I felt a pang of guilt.

I put down my glass. “Okay, Mom.”

“Okay? You’ll come?”

“Yeah, sure.”

She reached across the table to squeeze my hand, brightening again. She said she’d talk to George, figure out what day and time would be best. “Listen, Pumpkin. While you’re being so agreeable,” she said, spearing a piece of sweet and sour chicken with her fork, “I’ve got something else to ask you.”

She described the same problem Alma’d brought up earlier:  that the new-hire in the laundry hadn’t shown up all week. She asked if I wanted to make a little money by filling in for a while, until she could hire someone else. Poor Alma was “running herself ragged” trying to keep up. And I’d always done such a good job the other times I’d stepped in.

I put another bite in my mouth and chewed slowly, forcing Mom to wait while I formulated a valid-sounding excuse for why I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t after all, just come out and tell her I didn’t want to.

“Next week?” I finally asked. I’d started to sweat, and not just because of the red pepper flakes in the sautéed green beans. I took another gulp of Diet Coke, put the glass down and anxiously picked cat hair off my
Night of the Living
Dead
shirt. “I dunno. I’ll be pretty busy...school’s about to start...the band and everything...”

“I could really use your help, Veronica.”

I felt my heart sink when she didn’t call me “Pumpkin,” thinking next she’d point out the obvious and tell me I really didn’t have a choice but to do as she asked. But I should’ve known my mother was too sly to pull an overt power trip.

“What if I offered you something?” she sighed.

“Like a bribe?” I joked.

She leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table.

Now I was interested. “Like what?”

“The car,” she said, and though she tried to hide it, I could tell the suggestion pained her.

I inhaled. “That’d be awesome. Can I drive it to school sometimes? It’s a little late, but I can probably still get a parking pass.”

She held up her hand, warning me not to get ahead of myself. “You know I don’t think you’re ready to drive alone yet.”

“C’mon, Mom. I’ve got my license.”

She pursed her lips.

I’d secured my license over the summer, but it hadn’t been easy. I’d been suspended from driving school once and failed the written exam twice before finally, barely, passing it just after my seventeenth birthday. I’d bugged Mom to let me drive ever since, but she’d only relinquished control of the wheel a handful of times so far.

What she had in mind, she said, was making time to ride with me a few days in the coming week. “So you can get some practice,” she said diplomatically.