Chapter 8 - The Weight of Linen
The dry-cleaning plant on 47th Street was built of Chicago common brick in nineteen-forty-eight.
It had high, arched windows that had been painted over with silver radiator paint thirty years ago to keep the South Side sun from fading the woolen coats hanging on the automated conveyors, and a twenty-foot chimney of blackened iron that rose above the roofline like an unpainted spar.
On a Thursday afternoon in late January, the street was three inches deep in dirty, salt-crusted slush.
The South Shore commuter train rumbled past every fifteen minutes on the elevated embankment fifty feet from the rear loading dock, the electric third-rail arcing with sharp, blue-white flashes that illuminated the gray snow in the alley like magnesium flares.
I sat in the passenger seat of the Audi.
Claire was in the rear, strapped into her rear-facing Britax seat, asleep beneath a quilt of pink and white flannel that had been sewn by Julian’s sister in Kenosha thirty years ago.
Theo had gone into the manager’s office with a clipboard and two certified checks from the escrow account.
The passenger window was down two inches, letting in the smell of the neighborhood: wet bituminous coal smoke, diesel exhaust from the CTA buses on the avenue, and the sharp, chemical, familiar tang of tetrachloroethylene from the condensing vents on the roof.
A woman came out of the side door of the plant.
She was carrying an aluminum bucket filled with gray, soapy water and a short-handled mop with greasy cotton strands.
She wore a navy-blue quilted nylon vest over a stained gray sweatshirt, a pair of men’s work trousers that were rolled four inches at the cuffs to keep them out of the slush, and a pair of yellow rubber kitchen gloves that reached to her elbows.
Her hair was covered in a red bandanna tied tight at the nape of her neck.
It was Bianca.
She set the bucket down on the concrete apron of the loading dock, her breath coming in ragged white plumes that hung in the freezing air like steam from an iron press.
She did not look twenty-six.
Her face had lost that smooth, porcelain fullness that three hundred dollars’ worth of monthly facials in the Gold Coast had maintained. Her skin was dry, red around the nostrils from the cold, her eyes small and dark beneath brows that had not been shaped in four months.
She reached into the pocket of her quilted vest and pulled out a pack of generic menthol cigarettes.
Her fingers—the fingers that had held the crystal flute while eighty people clapped—were thick, red-knuckled, and chapped along the cuticles from three months of commercial detergent and floor wax.
She flicked a disposable plastic lighter three times.
The yellow flame caught, illuminating her cheekbones—Julian’s cheekbones, the ones she had spent ten years trying to soften with blush and lighting.
She took a long, deep drag, her shoulders rising, her head tilting back against the dirty brick wall of the plant.
Above her head, through the second-story sash window where the paint was peeling in long, gray strips like dried birch bark, a silhouette appeared.
Renata.
My mother was standing behind the glass.
She wore an old woolen cardigan that had belonged to my father—a brown, heavy thing with leather buttons that smelled of dry-cleaning spotter—buttoned all the way to her chin. Her hair was gray now, completely white at the temples, cut short and blunt with a pair of paper shears she had found in the desk drawer.
She had an iron in her right hand.
Through the dirty glass, I could see the steam rising from the board—a small, rhythmic cloud of white vapor that puffed every five seconds as her foot pressed the mechanical treadle on the floor.
She was pressing industrial towels.
White, coarse, cotton towels used by the auto repair shops on the avenue, each one stacked in neat, five-pound bundles on the wooden bench beside the window.
She did not look down at the street.
She did not look at the Audi idling at the curb with its single cracked headlight and its crumpled left fender.
She kept her eyes pinned to the linen beneath her iron, her arm moving forward and back, forward and back, with that slow, mechanical, eighty-year-old rhythm that my father had maintained through three recessions and two wars.
Bianca flicked the cigarette butt into the slush.
It died with a tiny, sharp hiss.
She picked up the aluminum bucket with both hands, her back arching slightly under the weight of the gray water, turned on her heel, and walked back through the heavy steel fire door into the steam, the latch clicking shut behind her with a dull, hollow clack that was swallowed instantly by the roar of the three-fifteen train from South Bend.
Theo came down the concrete steps of the office.
He carried no legal binders today. He carried a small, square brown paper bag that smelled of fresh cinnamon rolls from the bakery on 43rd Street.
He climbed into the driver’s seat, pulled his gloves off with his teeth, and set the bag on the dashboard.
"The roof leak is fixed," he said, shifting the Lincoln into gear. "The manager put three layers of tar paper over the pantry rafters yesterday."
"Did she take the allowance?" I asked, looking back toward the elevated tracks.
"She took it," Theo said. "She asked if the baby was gaining weight."
"What did you tell her?"
Theo turned the car out onto the slush of the avenue, the tires finding the clean asphalt beneath the ruts with a smooth, heavy resistance.
"I told her the baby weighed seven pounds," Theo said, his hand reaching across the console to rest over my knuckles on the seat. "And that she has her grandfather’s hands."
May you like
He glanced in the rearview mirror.
In the back seat, Claire gave a tiny, contented sigh in her sleep, her flannel quilt rising half an inch and settling back down against her chest, as the black chimney of the 47th Street plant disappeared behind the gray girders of the railroad bridge, cold, permanent, and clean against the winter sky.
