Dirty Laundry

"I would like to tell you there is absolution somewhere. Maybe steaming up from the gutters where poor people sleep or maybe it's on the sidewalks where those women, the ones with the painted toes and strappy shoes, stand to admire more shoes and clothes. The forgiveness, that smell of bleach mixed with lemon to remove a stain, might come at you like that. From the gutters, where it rinsed after the washing, or maybe from behind those square panes of glass where they advertise clothes that haven't been washed yet. Yeah, maybe that's the most logical place for it to come from, the clothes that don't have any stains. They have all the good stiff feeling in them and haven't had to take a bleaching yet. I'd like to say that's where you can find it, but like the dirty t-shirt says, this is New-York-Fucking-City and if you're looking for absolution you might want to consider relocating."

* * * *

That is the manner she uses to speak. She speaks to everyone that can hear her and everyone that can't. Jane rehearses these monologues of hers, of this point, I am certain. I see her mumbling and waving her hands as she traverses the sidewalk of Jane Street. Yes, it is too good to omit, this point of her name, it is too much real-life bad literary irony. Her parents, Min and Soon, named their first daughter Jane after the great American children's book and the great American street that plays host to their laundry facility. She has, in that Western feminist manner, insisted upon "co-opting the language of fucking oppression" and makes it her mission to educate the citizenry one at a time. Of what topic or strain of religious belief, I do not know. I know little regarding her evangelism except that she favors synonyms of the infinitive 'to clean.' Her verbiage includes, but is not limited to, 'purify,' 'sanitize' and 'pontificate.'
"Pontificate?" I ask in my ignorance thinking the word implies babble from the mouths of fools.

"Yes, ponti-fucking-cate. It's from the French pont, which means bridge, which of course, medieval oppressors commandeered to brainwash the masses that the pope was a bridge to heaven." Jane holds high regard for her duty as a public educator and drops the pile of boxer shorts she carries to devote her entire energies to her gesturing hands. "Pontificate is a cleansing word. It reeks so strongly of bullshit, that no one can do anything except call in the toxic waste experts and purge, purge the scene of the pontificating crime. Burn all the fucking bridges."

I do not care to argue with Jane. Who am I but her customer? She washes my laundry, has seen all of my clothes and the brutalities I inflict upon them with my coffee stains and the chemical burns from my workplace. She is the person to know when my period arrives because the laundry is bloody with leaks from my underutilized birth canal. Jane may also know that for three months my underwear was not bloody. I believe that Jane does not miss many details, but I do not know for certain.

* * * *

"It tastes like cunt, Andy. Fucking cunt. You don't make pizza, which is yummy with tomatoes and cheese and throw fish on it. Who wants to eat that? Bleach it. Fucking assholes that order this shit!" Jane bites into the pizza. No, to be accurate she severs the slice from itself, in the distinctly middle portion of the large serving. It looks as if she has burned her throat with her gigantic effort, but I do not know for sure. Her face often clenches in pain, "existential pain for the world," she says.

"I wouldn't know." I reply and blow on my slice because I do not care to burn my tongue.

I also despise anchovies. But this pizza we are eating is stolen. It is not as if we had placed an order that was not fulfilled to our liking. Jane had relieved a delivery boy of this meal when he chained his bicycle, but not his pizzas, so that he might knock on the door of my neighbor's house.

"As the old saying goes...do not look a gift horse in the mouth." I scrape the anchovies from the pizza and bite into the fishless-slice. Her beer and my beer sweat beside each other on my kitchen table, a comforting distance from the laundry basket with my clothes. The basket seems more full than if one of her sisters had folded the load, because Jane does not take time to press the air from between the items. Jane inspects clothes for the minutiae of dirt and will attack them with the full power of laundry lore available to her. But she does not fold well. Her folding takes up more space.

"It's not right to remove the anchovies. I admit this pizza sucks ass. It tastes like smelly cunt. But it's all about form. If you take the anchovies off, you destroy the form of the object, the form that was imagined by the pizza maker when he got the order from some shit-head to start a pizza that would have fish on it. It's the pizza maker's fault, more than whoever ordered this. He should have known better, known that this form sucks!" Jane bites into the slice again and it is gone. I have always been impressed with her appetite. Perhaps she eats heartily to spite her heritage, the one that dictates she should be shy about her consumption. Or perhaps she is not so political about her eating and really enjoys the taste of food.

"You eat a lot Jane, more than I can. I would be enormous." I wash the fishy taste away with her Budweiser. We are comfortable, Jane and myself. We drink each other's beer but not with sisterly camaraderie. A more precise description would make me the little sister that tries to sip beer because her older sister gulps it. I enjoy drinking after Jane because she is sloppy and leaves lipstick and spit on the neck. Her spit smells and tastes faintly of soap.

"I know what I know and I'm the first to admit it when I don't." She points to me with her tiny fingers, the ones that do not look sturdy enough to manipulate the quantities of clothing that come through the Jane Street laundry. "You will never say anything is true and so you will never be wrong." She attacks another slice of the purloined pizza and garbles with her mouth full of half-chewed food. "I didn't go to six years of college for nothing, you know. I've learned intuition." I trust that she has learned intuition. I would say that I trust her judgment more than my own in most cases but there are exceptions about which I am not sure.

* * * *

"Andy, you need to let me in!" Jane often relieves my door of its lonely stance in the night. She favors nocturnal wanderings of the sort that I do not enjoy. My body retreats into sleep when the sun leaves, but Jane's body gains energy in the dark. I encourage her to make herself welcome, any at time, but my admonitions are unnecessary because Jane does not patronize the notion of private property.

"Easier to get forgiveness than permission!" She runs up the steps into my townhouse and I experience jealousy. She is only five years my junior, but she is thin where I am round and she possesses energy as though she is not subject to the laws of entropy. My own energies scatter before I am aware that I had possessed them.
Jane is high and smells of sweet pot and soap.

"You reek, Jane." I arrive at my second floor landing and look below. Jane has turned the two paintings hanging in my living room upside down. "Any particular reason?"
"No, just generally felt like fucking in the laundry room again." Jane lies on my sofa and lifts both of her legs to the ceiling. Jane is flexible and would make a master contortionist should she decide to run away with the carnival. I maintain my silence on this thought because I do not want to put such ideas into her mind.
"You have come to gossip? It is only two a.m. and I have to be at the lab in six hours, no problem at all." I watch her blow imaginary smoke, to puff-puff away my stodgy, working woman concerns. It does not trouble me, Jane's lack of respect for my responsibilities, but I am more accommodating than most.

"Oh lady friend of mine was beautiful tonight, Andy." She keeps her legs pointed toward my ceiling and I wonder if the blood is pooling in her head. "We drank tequila shots at the Hole and hit on the bartender's girlfriend which pissed off both of those bitches and oh, we did it thirty times, at least! On the floor, in the suds and the soap and I told her that I would kiss her but only if she let me pour some vanilla lotion on her first and she did!" Jane pauses to issue a dramatic sigh, which she does with much attention to theatric detail. "And then we lit up and my sister walked in on us! She heard a noise and thought it was her stupid, lost cat! No cat, only pussy, it kills me!"

"I am happy you enjoyed yourself, but why don't you sleep at home tonight?" Jane lives around the corner from my house in the apartment above her parent's laundry. "I have an important test in the lab tomorrow. I think that is worth a good rest, correct?" I climb my second set of stairs to the landing with the door to my bedroom. "Please lock up tomorrow when you leave?"

"Locks are the means the landed elite use to oppress the poor masses!" Jane shouts after me and I look at her from above. She lowers her legs to my flowered sofa and smiles, I believe, at me. "Make sure when you clone fucking Hitler that you get it right! Evil, brilliant and definitely a closeted homosexual!" She laughs and lays her perfectly proportioned shoulders against my sofa. She is falling into a sleep of which I am jealous, for I believe it holds sweet dreams for her. "Oh, yeah and Andy...make sure to ask him what color badge you would wear..."

I pause before I enter my bedroom because I am tempted to return to the sofa and lay my cheek against her smooth brown one. I have never been overly sentimental and the thought embarrasses me as much as the story about her sexual encounter. Jane enjoys shocking me. She does it well.

* * * *

My laboratory is not unlike Jane's laundry facility. There are mixtures of strong acidic and basic solutions. There are long empty tables that are cleaned rigorously by assistants who earn far less than the scientists who mix the solutions. There are pleasant people to work with and unpleasant people with whom I must deal. I have great satisfaction that most of the scientists in my lab are devoted to their tasks and do not fear to act because of politics. I instruct them to let everyone else bicker. In the meantime, we will work. I stole that phrase from Jane five years earlier when I heard her speak to a boy who was afraid to deliver a customer's laundry across the striking doorman's picket line. She answered him in English, though he spoke in a jumble of Cantonese and his second language. She told him, "Do your fucking job and let ass-kissing politicians sort it all out." I subscribed to her sentiment and adopted it for my own needs, although I have modified the delivery to suit my incoming residents' sensibilities.

My facility is a prestigious one for aspiring medical researchers and I am proud to be the woman in charge. I have found that medical research, unlike practical medicine, does not favor a sex or ethnicity and that my accent has only served to help me advance. It is a queer twist of ethnic stereotyping in which individuals that bear accents from their parents' native tongues are encouraged to pursue research. As if each child of an immigrant is engendered with special motivation! Perhaps it is an American notion with regard to their hard-working ancestors, those immigrants who are storied to have built cabins and cleared forests with their bare hands. Perhaps they look to immigrant's children to be inspired to achieve great goals. Perhaps this is the reason, but I spend little time considering accents or motivations in my laboratory. I prefer to utilize my time to decipher the mysteries underneath each body that bears an innate genetic composition and only secondarily acquires an accent.

The doctor who oversees genetic development is named Dr. Ivan Zhirovsky. He seems to believe that because our parents were born in the same country, we should share special confidences. He always attempts to speak to me in Russian and at first, I accommodated him. Now, I only respond to his advances in English. He is typically Russian and by this I mean that he is appropriately morose when necessary and joyous when the occasion calls. Ivan knows both the posture of ease and discontent but does not seem to favor one more than the other.

Jane encountered Ivan at one of my cocktail parties and pronounced him "a complicated motherfucker," and on this point I queried her for specifics. Jane, who had studied chemistry in a stint at a very good college, told me that he was the sort of man whom she would want in the kitchen supervising the cooks, but would not want inventing the ingredients for the menu. Ivan's discipline is neither culinary nor chemical, but I understand her analogy. Better for Ivan to continue in his role as developer of current projects, rather than creator of new ones. Ivan is an uncertainty in an environment where people and formulas need to be precise.

Jane conversed with each scientist the evening of my party and made herself pleasant. She is also possessed of Ivan's ability to don a persona. That night, she discussed the laboratory's new project with the partygoers and I believe she might have extracted information that should have been kept confidential. I speculate that Jane, in addition to missing her calling with the carnival, would have made a terrific spy. She puts forth the appearance of entitlement all at times and with all people.
Jane has been dismissed from three good research positions, one of which I arranged. She remains amiable toward the experimentation community because she appears to enjoy discussing science. It is unlikely that she will obtain a future role within a lab, given her reputation for disregarding the basic premise of scientific research that a scientist can never take credit for proving a fact, only for disproving a theory. Jane had great confidence in her work, even in her mistakes, and would commit to procedures outside of laboratory standards. I heard a story recited that she labeled one supervisor a "gutless wonder of a woman and a lousy excuse for someone who should be trying to help people." I understand Jane's frustrations but do not accept her view that scientists are meant to be good. Our role as researchers is to discover what is false. Jane could not abide by that rule and returned to her parent's laundry, where the form of her labor is always comforting to its recipients.

At my party, above the sound of the immigrant-tinged murmurs, her practiced American voice whispered, "Dr. Ivan looks like a tremendous fuck." She was correct in perception and pronunciation.

* * * *

"Andy, why the new dress?"
Nothing is private, according to Jane. I learned six years earlier, when I had turned thirty and undertaken the task of buying clothes for the new decade, that Jane memorizes my wardrobe. She sits at my kitchen table, sips her beer and pushes the buttons of my kitchen television's remote control with a compulsive ardor. She finds only evening news broadcasts that she pronounces "worthless" and lets her chopsticks lie idle. Tonight, we eat noodles stolen from her mother's kitchen. They are delicious and it is that rare occasion when I eat more heartily than Jane.

"I have a dinner engagement this Friday."
"Can I do your makeup?"
"No, thank you, I prefer not to be mistaken for a vaudeville act." Jane often offers her beauty advisory services but I always decline. I have seen her appearance prior to her treks into wild New York bars and do not care to have her sense of contemporary fashion replicated on my face.

"Please...I'll give you five dollars off your next load." Jane leans across the table. "I never get to do white faces, I only get to do brown ones and my sisters won't even let me do that anymore. Bet your date will want to suck your face off, I can make you look so good." She pouts, but I am unmoved, primarily out of caution for the safety of my skin.

"You should give me my next load for free. This load is poorly done." I feel perturbed at her, this time for prying. She is my friend, but she asks inappropriate questions. Despite her view on the subject, I believe some aspects of life are private.
"No it's not." Jane drops the remote control and grasps her beer, tightly.
"Yes, it is. The towels are not bleached and the clothes are not folded. It appears you wadded my belongings and threw them into my basket." My words escape my mouth as I watch her body tighten. I feel guilt that she may be angry with me, but I am eager to prove my point: she should not perform her laundry duties shoddily because we are friends.

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