Fourteen Weeks

Episode 2 of 3 of The Two O’Clock Wash by Nora Feld

“They’re hers.”

He said it the next Tuesday, before I’d asked. Before I’d said you’re back, even, which felt like something that had been decided somewhere between the two of us without either one saying so.

I put down the crossword.

“My wife’s.” He had the bag open on his lap now, which he’d never done with somebody looking. “Anna. She died in November. This is what was in the hamper.”

There is nothing you can say to that, so I didn’t try.

“I’ve moved everything else.” He was talking to the inside of the bag. “Her side of the closet, the coats, the shoes, all of it, I did all of that in one weekend in December because my sister came and sat on the bed with a garbage bag and we did it together. Filled the car twice. Took it to the place on Warren Street. I was fine.”

“And the hamper.”

“And the hamper.” He laughed, one syllable, not a laugh at all. “You’d think that would be the easy one. It’s the stuff she didn’t choose. That’s the whole difference. Everything in the closet she picked out and hung up. This is just what she happened to be wearing in the last week of October.”

I came out from behind the counter. I didn’t sit next to him. I sat two chairs down, which seemed like the right distance, and I have thought about that decision a lot since.

“They still smell like her,” he said. “That’s the thing. Everything else in the house smells like the house now. The pillow went first. Then the bathroom. But these are in a bag, and every time I open it, for about a second and a half, it’s her, and then it’s gone and I have to close it and wait a week.”

“A week.”

“If I open it more than that, it fades faster. I don’t know if that’s true. It’s what I’ve decided.”

“So you come here and you don’t wash them.”

“So I come here and I don’t wash them.” He zipped the bag halfway and stopped. “I think I keep hoping I’ll walk in some week and it’ll be gone already. The smell. And then it won’t be a decision I made, it’ll just be a thing that happened.”

Behind us a dryer finished its cycle and buzzed, long and flat and stupid, and neither of us moved.

“Why here,” I said. “You could sit anywhere.”

He thought about it.

“Because everybody in here is in the middle of something,” he said. “Nobody’s finished. You can’t sit in a diner for an hour and ten minutes without ordering. Here you’re just a guy waiting on a machine.”

“What’s your name.”

“Tom.” He looked over. “What’s yours?”

“Marguerite. Marnie.”

“Marnie.” He nodded like he was filing it. “You do the crossword in pen.”

“I do.”

“That’s either confidence or vandalism.”

“It’s Wednesday’s puzzle on a Tuesday,” I said. “Nobody’s grading it.”

He came the next Tuesday and the one after, and we talked about ordinary things. His job, which was something with municipal water systems that he explained twice and I still cannot describe. My crosswords. A show we’d both watched and both disliked, which took up the better part of one night. He never brought up Anna again and I never asked, and the bag sat on his lap the whole time like a third person in the conversation.

The eighteenth week he said, “I think I’m going to do it next Tuesday.”

“Do it.”

“Wash them.” He said it fast, the way you get a thing out before you can take it back. “It’s been ten months. My sister asked me at Easter and I lied to her. I think I’m going to come next Tuesday and wash them and that will be that.”

“Okay.”

“Would you.” He stopped. Started again. “It’s a stupid thing to ask a person.”

“I’m here anyway,” I said. “I’m here every Tuesday.”

He nodded about four times more than he needed to and picked up the bag and went out into the dark, and I stood behind the counter feeling something I did not want to look at directly.

The next Tuesday I came in early. I put a roll of quarters in my apron, the good ones, and I wiped down the row of machines nearest the chairs, and I did not eat my sandwich at one because I wanted to be doing nothing at two.

Two o’clock came.

The door didn’t open.

The Two O’Clock Wash · ← The Man Who Never Washed Anything · Everything in the Hamper →