“The heck is that,” says Jo, absently rubbing her chest.
“Where have you been,” says her mother.
“Out,” says Jo, her hand still on her chest, just below her clavicle. “Where did that come from.” She’s looking at a cardboard box on the floor before the counter there between them.
“Your father brought it by, last night. You might’ve said hello, if you hadn’t been, out.”
Jo looks up at that, frowning. “You told him.”
Her mother looks away from the laptop, looking Jo up and down, the cargo shorts, the saggy, short-sleeved shirt, cornflower framing royal blue. “You slept in that, didn’t you.”
“You told him.” Jo kneels by the box. The grime splashed up past one knee, marring her thigh. “I didn’t know it was a secret,” says her mother.
“I didn’t know you guys were talking.” Jo’s peeled back a flap of the box, wornly soft with age, printed with a red capital R offset in a red circle. Another, an ancient shipping label too faded to read still clinging to it. “We talk about important things,” her mother’s saying. “Our daughter comes home after seven years away, we’re going to talk about something like that.”
“Ma, it was not–”
“You left before your–”
“Which was not–”
“I simply cannot understand,” her mother’s voice, rising, “why anyone,” a deep, recalibrating breath, “would do a thing like that,” she says, her tone restored.
“I can’t talk to you,” says Jo, slapping the flaps shut, gathering up the box and herself to push the both of them, “I’m gonna,” she says, on the way up, “go and wash, everything. Thoroughly.” Turning away, the box in her arms. “Then sleep,” she says. “Till I wake up.”
“There are rooms to clean,” says her mother.
“It’s Sunday,” says Jo, testily limping away. Her mother’s lips purse, her brows pinch, “Where,” she says, “are your shoes?”
“Good question,” lilts Jo, without looking back.
Into the washing machine those shorts, clang of the buckle of the webbed belt still threaded through the loops. The shirt she wriggles up and off, over her head, swoop of her arm to toss it in after, she immediately knees the round hatch shut, chunk, leans a thumb against the control panel, twisting and pressing until she finds the angle that clicks. The machine gurgles into action.
A plain white towel grabbed from the stack on the table that takes up an inordinate part of this narrow room. She shakes it out and wraps it about her waist, tucking the one end under the other. A second towel shook out to roll and drape about her shoulders. She sits herself on a pink plastic chair in the corner and with a third white towel sets to rubbing the grime from her thigh, her knee, her shin, and then, lifting up the one foot rubbing, brushing, stroking, blackly smeared with grey and brownly tinged with hissing wetly ruddy touched with darkling red.
The box sits there, on the table, by that towering stack of towels.
The timbre of the machine’s operation shifts as it begins to slosh and tumble, and she gets abruptly to her feet, biting her lower lip as she opens the cabinet across from the table and wrestles a large translucent tub from the bottommost shelf. Kneeling, she lifts the blue plastic lid of it to reveal a sheaf of neatly folded shirts, the collars of them and the wide plackets almost maroon, paneled with peach.
She looks over her shoulder to the washing machine, but only a hint of churning suds can be made out through the dark glass of the hatch. She lowers the tub’s lid. Lifts it again to reveal a sheaf of neatly folded shirts, the collars of them and the plackets of a deeply regal purple, paneled with lavender. Snaps it shut again.
Stop, the word, not voiced, shaped only, by her lips.
She lifts the lid of the tub again. Collars and plackets of charcoal, paneled in heathery grey. Snapped shut, and lifted, bark-brown and ochre. Stop it, shut, lifted, candy-pink and pale rose. Dull olive and eggshell. Saffron and canary. Stop it. Stop. “Stop!”
Forest green and pale green. She shuts the lid once more, and lifts it. Collars and plackets of forest green, paneled in almost but just enough not quite seafoam. She doffs the towel from about her shoulders and wriggles into one without once looking down to the nodule on her breast, as emptily clear as glass.
Jolts awake in the pink chair when the washing machine announces the completion of its work with an insistent burring buzz. She opens the dryer stacked above the washing machine and tosses in the shorts, plap and clang, and then, the shirt she had been wearing, the wet colors of it blue and dim-soaked white, much like the drier colors of the one she’s wearing now, “Cut it out,” she mutters, and tosses the shirt in after.
The dryer blowing and rattling behind, she opens up the box, folding back the soft flaps one after another, the logo of the circled, offset R, the ancient shipping label, a deep breath before she reaches within to pull out an unwieldy paperback book, the cover a half-dozen branches laid on a white field beneath the words Murray Bookchin, and she lays it aside with a ghost of a laugh. Another paperback, this one smaller, creased across the cover of it, a cartoon of a bespectacled boy, a red and yellow scarf about his neck, staring perturbed at a bright red locomotive that says Hogwarts Express, and taken aback she looks about, the washer and drier, the pink chair, the cabinet behind her, the buff sack of laundry under the table, striped sheets, soggy towels, there, in the corner, by the door, she chucks the book, whuffling thump and clang, a bank shot off the wall and into the garbage can. A couple of cassette tapes next, set aside without even looking them over, gotten out of the way, Essential Songs Vol. 3(A), says the handwriting spiderly precise on the slipcover of one of them, she’s pulled out a composition book, the cover of it starkly marbled black and white, 10th Grade, it says in a different hand, exuberantly round, and beneath that, DIARY. She folds back the cover, no longer stiff, turns an empty page, another, there, in the middle of the next, written with the same cheerful orotundity, Things I HATE About This Place, No. 1, It is too QUIET, and beneath that, at an angle, in green ink dark with what might once have been glitter, GO CUBS. She’s folding the notebook shut, setting it aside, by the tapes and the book, she’s pulled out something else, a limp handful of cloth, tiger-striped, those are stubby legs a-dangle from her palm, and there a black-tipped tail, a round head drooping, and those black tufts are ears, and the whiskers of it strands of translucent line, she turns it over, gently, to trace there the belly and the throat, patched some time ago with scraps of yellow toweling. Steps back from the table, back to the pink chair, sinking into it, the oversized blue-and-white shirt, the white towel about her hips, bending low her head, her colorless hair a curtain, cradling that little tiger in her arms.
The box, dropped on the foot of the nearer bed, clack and thump of its contents. She sets the tiger atop it. Dressed once more, those cargo shorts of bleach-splotched khaki, the saggy short-sleeved shirt still blue and white, one hand up, the heel of it pressed to her breast. The further, empty bed, white comforter smoothly laid, tucked up to the neatly piled white pillows. The shadowed alcove beyond, the bathroom. She steps out of a dull red Croc, toe of it scuffed, striated by intricate creases, sets her bare foot streaked with grime, a bright red line of blood there, where a recent cut’s cracked open, careful not to set it, that, directly on the carpet, a distinctly unpristine
Spitting the last of a mouthful of something slickly transparent into the pale blue bowl of the toilet, gripping the rim of it, hack and cough as she draws herself up, sits back on her haunches, blinking, blink. Lifting a hand to the toilet’s upraised lid, laid back against the tank, she presses a fingertip, her middle finger, there, against the unmarred blue of it, pressing, leaning her weight into it, twisting her hand as she does so, clink of the lid of the tank, shifted by the force of her push back away from the toilet, up onto her feet, looking over her shoulder, distracted, someone’s knocking.
“Housekeeping,” she calls, stepping out of the bathroom, but the knocking continues, “Occupied!” she calls, raising her voice, stepping out by the beds, “Ocupado! No molestar!”
“Jesus, your grace,” says whoever’s out there on the other side, “would you open the fucking door? It’s only me!”
One uncertain step toward the door, another, past the Crocs abandoned on the carpet, lit up in a sudden rush of daylight as she opens the door. “Yeah,” says Sweetloaf stood there, his brown bomber jacket, sheepishly adjusting the leather-and-brass goggles pushed up on his forehead, “I know, I know, I’m trying to watch my fucking language.”
It takes a couple of tries before Jo’s able to work her mouth to form the word “What,” and then “are,” and “you doing,” and, finally, “here,” her tone uncertain, is it a question, an ending, or just, just waiting, and his response is to reach into his jacket and draw out an envelope, the paper of it lushly thick, of a honeyed cream, and intricately calligraphed loops and angles of deep blue ink say in and amongst a thicket of ornament Duchess of Southeast, Huntsman to the Court of Roses, Widow of the Hawk, Jo Gallowglas Maguire.
“What,” says Jo, “what is that,” without reaching for it, without lifting a hand.
“It’s from herself,” says Sweetloaf. “She only had me bring it all the way out here to you. Well. Out to wherever it was you were, that took some fucking doing, I can tell you. Go on,” shaking it at her, and then, “Lady?” he says. “Your grace? Are you all right? Hey, hey, is everything fucking okay? Shit, your grace, what should I do? What do I do?”
The Ecology of Freedom: the Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, written by Murray Bookchin, ©1982.
