Coming Clean

Sometimes I want to speak to her directly, ignore the worlds, class gulf, religious divides between us, and just talk, woman to woman
Giana
Downstairs, done, now time for ironing. Where are those shirts?
Brenda, the woman of the house, is on the phone, wearing a path in the carpet as she paces.
“Ironing now, right? The shirts aren’t in the basket.”
She looks at me absently, blinks, and says, “Oh. Shirts. They’re in the dryer.”
I hold up a thumb. “And by this afternoon the man’s all sorted.”
Brenda tries to return my smile, but her lips fall in on themselves.
“Oysh, I wish.”
I open the dryer and warm my hands in hot collars and cuffs. She worries too much about him. And it’s worse now, these past few weeks, something with Havi. I feel it soon as I come in, brooding heaviness blanketing the house. A paper-thin coating of normalcy, but underneath that, I sense her disquiet, her despair. I breathe, try to exhale it; ironing time.
The iron heats up, and steam rises over the little room. My own warm ironing kingdom. I open the wall-mounted ironing board, forming a castle, and bring the iron over a shirt. Clouds rise, I inhale steam, ahh, it’s not half bad. And it’s all mine; this old contraption hangs limp and lifeless all week, until we make magic on Mondays.
Magic, ha. Your imagination’s stronger than anything, Gramma would say. And Mama, she’d flap her hands like a falcon and say, Man who has no imagination has no wings.
Ah, she’s a hodgepodge of sayings, my mama is. Was. No, is.
There were so many sayings, and sometimes they’d contradict each other. But if I were to quote one to challenge another, she’d somehow string them together like a chunky necklace, and I don’t remember understanding how it made sense so much as I remember her words, hypnotic words, and the passion she had to make everything come together.
What was that other one? You can’t live by imagination alone, you gotta live by the sweat of your hands.
I look at my own hands, well-worn. I’m doing good on both sayings, Mama.
My mama worked her own hand until she was seventy, more. She’d clean, press, mend, do whatever it took. When I was a child, she’d sometimes take me along to a Jewish family in Brooklyn. Now her hands are still. She only ever lives in her imagination, her mind running up and down the alleys like a falcon that can’t find rest. She’s in a state-sponsored nursing home, eligible for the highest level of care, but she wouldn’t like me to think that. No, she’d say, like a bird in endless happy flight.
I plunge a hand into the basket and come up empty. On the counter is a tower of pressed shirts I barely realized I was building. When I’m thinking about Mama, when I ache with how I can’t bear to see her like that, what is time?
But it’s midday already. Creak of stairs, here’s Brenda.
She sets down a mug with a sprig of rosemary. “Sit, sit Giana, here’s a hot drink.”
“You know I like to drink it standing. My mama used to say things taste better when you’re busy.”
She tries to smile but I see the tug of guilt in the corners of her mouth.
Sometimes I want to speak to her directly, ignore the worlds, class gulf, religious divides between us, and just talk, woman to woman.
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