The St. Ambrose School for Girls(15)

Even if she might get into her cups from time to time and argue with her husband over long distance.

I watch call-me-Nick unlock the driver’s side door of his two-seater and insert his rangy body into the seat behind the wheel. His car is even older than my mother’s, but it’s no Mercury Marquis. His is some kind of vintage Porsche and it’s in gleaming mint condition. It’s a pale blue, with eyelike headlights offset on the flat hood, its back end curved in tight like a dog with its tail tucked under. When he starts the engine, it has a ticky, high note, and as he drives it forward with confidence—because he always parks rear fender in—I have a feeling it was probably his father’s and has been passed down. From what I’ve overheard in the bathroom, Hot RA graduated from Yale with a master’s in English, and he is only here for a year before he, and that traveling wife of his, go back to New Haven so he can get his PhD. He is going to be a professor at an Ivy League school. He is going to write important books about important books.

The fact that he is smart and wealthy as well as too beautiful to look at seems like too much good fortune for one person to possess. He reminds me of Greta.

Returning the pills to their new spot, I decide to motivate. I have some laundry that I’ve started down in the basement, and I should put it in the dryer before everything smells like gym clothes even though I don’t take gym. I swap my geometry textbook and notebook out of my backpack, and put my French things in there. Then I one-strap the avoirdupois and leave.

The dorm’s laundry room is in the basement, and as I descend into the lowest level of our building, I’m hit with a pervasive cool that feels good for the moment, but that will soon make me want to put a sweater on. Along with the washer and dryer facility, there’s a rec room nobody uses and some storage areas that have doors that are not just deadbolted but chained with padlocks. There’s also the boiler room, which wafts an auto repair shop smell of dirty oil.

As I enter the laundry, the air smells too sweet, a meadow’s worth of lab-created floral scents making my eyes water because there is no ventilation. It’s also toasty because somebody is using one of the six dryers. I think of that Peanuts comic strip: Happiness is a warm blanket.

Was it Schroeder who said that about his blanket? I wonder as I go over to the six washers.

There’s a shelf that runs above the workhorse Maytags, and on it are various detergents, most of them liquid, all of them labeled with student names. An overflow for supplies is off to the side, the well-used, Formica-topped table sporting a secondary fleet of bottles. There’s also a vending machine that dispenses boxes of powder for twenty-five cents. The washers and dryers are free.

Naturally, there is a lucky machine for me. The one I must use is all the way down the row on the left, a random choice that is another absolute—

As I open the lid, I stop where I am, my aimless wander of thoughts ceasing in concert with my body.

A smell rises up from the belly of my machine, sharp, pungent, pool-like.

Leaning down, I pull out something, anything. What arrives at the lip of the maw is the exhausted twist of one of my long-sleeved shirts. The black of the fabric is speckled with pale brown spots and splashes, and as I flatten it out on the closed lid of the next machine in line, I do not understand what is happening. What has happened. What I am looking at.

I bring more of my clothes out, and the autopsy reveals a possible explanation. It appears that undiluted bleach was poured in after the end of the spin cycle, and the Clorox has been sitting in there long enough to stain, but not long enough to eat holes in what it came into contact with.

I look around the laundry room, as if answers will present themselves courtesy of the peanut gallery of Tides and Drefts and Persils. There are a couple of different bottles of bleach in and among the detergents and fabric softeners, and I have a passing thought that I need to check out the names on those labels. I’m utterly fatigued, however.

I assess the dryers, especially the one that is operating. Before I look away, there is a click and the carousel inside of it falls still. My heart pounds harder as I go across and pull open the door. Reaching into the hot, soft air, I pull out whatever my hand touches first. And I already know the answer. My body trembles as I turn the shirt around, and open the boat neckline to look at the fabric name tag that has been stitched into the—

Karen Bronwyn.

I don’t even know her.

I look around the laundry room again as if it’ll explain how the name is not Margaret Stanhope. Putting the shirt back where I took it from, I make sure the door is closed properly.

I go back to my washer. I don’t move my clothes over to a dryer. I have some thought, which is expressed in the voice of my mother, that I need to rinse everything first through another wash cycle. If I put my things in the dryer with the bleach still wet on them, I’ll do even more damage.

My first instinct is to ignore the advice. I want to shove everything in the clothing kiln, crank up the dial to “High Heat/Cottons,” and let it all roast in a chemical bonfire.

But like I’m going to wear a towel to class?

One by one, I transfer my stained clothes out of the chosen washer into another, two units over. I can’t bear to rinse them in what I thought was my anointed machine. My hands continue to shake as I gently put each shirt, and the three pairs of heavy canvas pants, and the seven underwears, and a school of black socks into their new bathing accommodation.