Lucy's Launderette (19 page)

“But Candy, you can't. You're the best painter I know.”

“I'm scared. I'm scared I'll go crazy again.”

“But you said yourself, it was the drugs.”

“Maybe. I don't know.”

“What about your work, your paintings? What about all the stuff you did while you were in New York?”

“As far as I know, it's still there where I left it. Listen, Lucy. I want to forget about all that. It belongs to the past. I'm in neutral now. I'm doing okay with Prozac. I'm doing okay. Really I am.”

And I'm the Queen of England, I wanted to say.

 

Two days later, Sky came down to the launderette for a long visit. She wanted to hang out, to see the painting I'd done and talk about my idea. The mural had grown. A dis
tinct Paradise, Inferno and Purgatory were emerging. There were starry skies populated with unlikely angels. There were oceans with murky floors along which crawled primeval slimy creatures. One of the creatures bore a surprising resemblance to Paul Bleeker. There was an earthly zone of fields and forests and oceans that hosted me and my friends. I left an empty space for a Sam figure but still had no idea what it would look like.

Sky paced back and forth in front of the painted walls. “This is definitely one of your finer works. I really think you should talk to Max about your plan.” I eased down off the scaffolding and sat on one of the benches. She came over and sat down beside me. A clutch of black-clad widows chattered and lamented in Italian in the other corner of the launderette.

“C'mon,” I said, “Let's go into the back room.”

I'd made myself a kind of informal office-workshop-napping place in the utility room. I'd moved a table, chairs and a lamp into it as well as a mattress I'd found in Jeremy's attic but I'd stopped sleeping there at night and moved into my father's old room in Jeremy's house.

Sky sank into the armchair and went on, “The sooner you put this plan into action, the sooner you'll be able to get rid of the present clientele.” She rolled her eyeballs in the direction of the women on the other side of the mirror.

“Look out, Sky, they'll put a curse on you. You should know better than I do that the customer is always right, bag ladies, Bagwans and scuzz-buckets included.”

“Yeah…unfortunately. Really, Lucy. Talk to Max. I know you don't want men involved in this thing but sexist discrimination can backfire in your face.”

“Well, I suppose he is kind of a borderline case, having to
temporarily explore his anima, empathize with people of other sexualities, if only for business purposes. Still, I'd like it better if he was a woman.”

“You could regard him as an honorary female. A sort of half-baked ambassador to the oasis of females,” said Sky.

“Implying that the land of males is a desert? That seems awfully grim,” I said. “I'll think about it.”

We wasted time well into the afternoon, gossiping about everyone we knew. I filled her in on my meeting with Candace, and she agreed with me. We'd work on it. We wouldn't leave Candy alone. We wouldn't let her decline into a blob of Prozac jelly.

All our plotting made us very hungry. Sky phoned to order some Chinese food. When it came, we sat in the back room over egg rolls, mushroom chow mein, almond chicken and deep-fried prawns, and went on discussing my big project in detail.

Sky had her eye on the two-way mirror the whole time, studying the “clientele.” It was around six-thirty in the evening when she abruptly stopped chewing and grabbed my arm. “Get a load of this clown.”

I followed her gaze. A man had just come in. His movements were painfully slow. He had propped the door open with a cardboard box full of laundry and was carting other similar cardboard boxes into the launderette. There must have been nearly a dozen of them. Once he had all his boxes lined up in front of the machines, he began to dig around in his pants pockets. And I have to say, they were the ugliest plaid pants I'd ever seen. The plaid was in vibrant orange, yellow and brown. There was a tear in one knee, a brown paint stain drooling across the other leg, a torn back pocket that flapped, and the pant legs were just short enough so that every so often, his mismatched gym socks showed. The top half of him
wasn't much better. He had one of those hooded sweatshirts with the kangaroo pouch and over that, a fluorescent green windbreaker. The hood was pulled up over hair that was either very wet or very greasy. I couldn't tell. He had a scruffy reddish-blond week's growth of beard and wore classic nerd glasses, black tortoiseshell with a bit of white surgical tape holding them together at the bridge of the nose and at one of the sides.

When he finally managed to dig all the coins out of his pockets, he held them for a second then fumbled them. They burst across the floor and rolled in all directions. He dropped down onto his knees and started to gather them up.

“This guy's a real prize,” said Sky.

“Quite the classy dresser,” I said.

“What do you think he has in all those boxes?”

“I don't know. Nobody has that many clothes.”

“Nobody. Not even Max.”

He'd managed to scoop up all his coins and was arranging them in little piles along the top of a washer. He began to pull things out of boxes and stuff them into the machines. We watched him, hypnotized by how slow and awkward he was. It was taking him forever to put his loads in. And the things were blotched and stained so badly, I figured this was a guy who regularly ate lasagna with his feet. I gave up and looked away, shaking my head.

 

Twenty minutes later, I remembered I still had to contact Sam, tell him about Dirk's Russian phase.

“Can I borrow your cell again for just a minute?” I asked Sky.

“I think it's time you thought about getting your own phone.”

I just grinned at her.

“Go on then, Madison. Take it.” She handed it to me.

“I've got to get in touch with Dirk's caseworker. Let him know the latest.” I punched out one of Sam's numbers.

“Omagod,” said Sky. She leapt up and moved closer to the two-way mirror. “I have to stop that guy.”

“He still hasn't finished putting in his loads?”

Sky was already running out into the main area toward the geeky man. He was dropping a red towel into the machine where a second before he had been stuffing some very grotty whites. Sky moved closer to him, looked around her with a strange expression on her face then pulled back a little. I could see her telling him something but couldn't make out the words. He nodded and smiled then pulled the red towel out and put it back in one of the boxes. He had narrowly avoided having a very rosy future.

I sat back in the armchair to concentrate on my call. The phone had rung six times when a voice said, “Sam Trelawny here.”

“Is that the real Sam Trelawny or is this a recording?”

“It's the real me. Who's this?” His voice sounded strange, thick and slurry.

“Lucy Madison.”

“Hi, Lucy Madison. I've been trying to get in touch with you.”

I turned back toward the two-way mirror to see a strange sight: Sky standing behind the man's back, jumping up and down, grimacing at me through the mirror and pointing at him; and the man looking toward my murals and talking on a cell phone.

“I left a message for you,” I said.

“I got it. You left the address of a launderette.”

“That's right.”

“Well, I'm there. I mean here. In the launderette. Where are you?”

As I watched the man, I realized his mouth was in perfect synchronization with Sam's half of the phone conversation.

“I'm not sure,” I said, “but I think I'm here in front of you.” I walked out of the utility room, still talking. I approached the man. He stared at me, then at his phone.

“Sam Trelawny?” I asked. He nodded.

“Lucy Madison?” he asked. I nodded in turn.

There was an overpowering smell of rotting cabbage, old diapers, fish on the turn, overflowing ashtrays and alcohol. It was coming from Sam.

“N
ice to meet you at last, Lucy.” He reached out his hand to shake mine then changed his mind and yanked it back quickly. “No, better not,” he mumbled.

The smell coming from him was quite pungent. It probably would have rubbed off on me. And he was definitely drunk. A good strong vodka whiff mingled in with all the other disgusting smells. Some of it must have spilled on his clothes. He reeked like a big-time rubbie.

But despite the booze, his speech was still relatively under control. He said, “When I got your message, I thought Lucy Madison—launderette. I'll kill two birds with one stone. This place is off-beat. Is that your work?” He pointed toward the murals, leaned a little too far and swayed dangerously.

“Yes.”

“Yes, I figured it must be since you seem to be wearing a whole lot of your art materials.”

“My what?”

“Your art materials. Your work.” He pointed at me, smiling. “All that paint on your clothes.”

For a second, when I'd realized it was Sam the Voice there in person, I'd had the knee-jerk instinct to worry about the way I looked. I was no prize either. My face was smudged with paint, my hair bundled up in an old scarf, bits flying out at the sides. I was wearing my baggy painting grubbies and a pair of old paint-splotched runners with holes in the toes. I'd been living in these clothes for weeks. Self-consciously, I'd yanked the scarf from my head and tried to smooth my hair down.

“Don't get me wrong,” he said, looking back at the murals. “I like it. It's weird. It's punchy and yet lyrical…listen, I better get on with it. I've got a ton of washing to do.”

Given the way he looked, it was silly for me to worry about my appearance. He was a certified slob. It was hard to imagine why Francesca St. Claire de la Roche would want to smooch with this malodorous individual. And he was ineffectual, too. The whole thing had started at the beginning of March and now it was the end of May and he still hadn't rounded up Dirk for an interview. He'd never even seen him.

“About my brother Dirk…” I said.

“I have his file right here.” He went over to the bench, undid his briefcase and a sheaf of papers flew out of his hand and across the floor. They were stained with coffee and other unidentifiable foodstuffs.

I huffed with exasperation. He was down on all fours again gathering the file.

“Sorry about this,” he muttered, “I'm a little distracted today. Really sorry.”

“Are you people ever going to apprehend Dirk?”

“Yes.” His tone was sharp and for a second he looked al
most scary. “But these things sometimes take time. You just have to have faith. We'll get him.”

I filled him in on Dirk's Russian gig but he seemed to be only half listening.

“I'm telling you again, Lucy. We'll get him.”

Hollow words from a useless government employee.

“You've been saying this for weeks.” My voice was loud and hard.

“But you also have to remember that he's not our only case and definitely not the worst one,” he snapped, “so just calm down, will you?”

Without another word, I walked away, regretting the fact that the launderette didn't have the kinds of doors you could slam.

 

Everything happened at once. There was a message from Bob on his answering machine to say he would be back at the end of the week and he hoped his pot plants were still alive.

Reebee got in touch with Sky to say that she and Connie were alive and well and that they were in Oregon. They were planning to be back in Vancouver in the next couple of days.

I put all my sketches and estimates and drafts together in a large file folder and got ready to face Connie.

 

Sky and I sat on the front steps of Jeremy's house inhaling the evening air and watching the light disappear, the palest of blue dusks above a white haze of cherry, plum and apple blossoms. The streets flowed with people, glad to welcome the warmth. A new sidewalk café had opened around the corner and was crowded. Scents of coffee, pastry and cut grass wafted down to us.

The Valiant pulled up. Reebee got out first, looked up at me and waved. Connie was still just a shadow in the front seat.

Reebee yelled up to Sky and me, “Get down here, you two, and help me with these suitcases.”

The door on the passenger side opened and the bulky shadow struggled forward then straightened up slowly.

“Well, holy futhermucker, Batman,” said Sky. “Is that her?”

I didn't recognize her either. “Connie, is that you?” I called out.

I heard her barking laugh then the monotone, “Yeah, it's me.” She started toward the front steps.

It was a different person. The blond hair had all been shorn off and in its place was very short black hair. With her pronounced cheekbones and tanned skin, she looked better than ever, but what she was, undeniably, and magnificently, was native. This was accentuated by the clothes and jewelry, big dangling earrings and a heavy necklace of turquoise and silver. She wore a full-length coarse-weave cotton dress in subtle stripes of dark blue and dark rose with an embroidered panel across the yoke. She looked regal.

When she was up close, I had to stare at her irises. “You used to have blue eyes.”

“Contacts,” said Connie, “you know, those cheap colored ones.” Her real irises were nearly black. “Reebee was stuck on this thing about making me get in touch with my roots.”

I said, “I didn't know you had…ah…I didn't know your roots were…ah…”

“Yeah. I got native roots…Paleface.”

I said, “It suits you…Pocahontas.”

Connie laughed and clutched her belly. “Let's go inside. I gotta sit. This brat's doing acrobatics again. I see the house didn't burn down. Too bad. Garden looks nice, too.”

Connie went inside while Sky and I helped Reebee lug the suitcases up the steps and into the house.

“Reebee,” said Sky, “I'd like to know what you barter with. You always come back with twice the stuff you left with and I know you don't have any money.”

“Money is an abstract concept, Sky,” said Reebee.

“Uh-huh.” Sky turned to me. “I tell you, Madison, my mother has horseshoes up her butt because nobody takes a trip with as little money as she does, and survives.”

“What makes you think I don't have money?” Reebee said, then winked at me.

“We passed through Vegas,” said Connie. “Your mother won a pile.”

“She what?” squealed Sky.

“Yeah. First she was black up to the elbows with playin' the slot machines. She won enough there to go on to the bigger stakes. A little blackjack. A little roulette. I've never seen anyone with luck like hers.”

“It's the law of attraction,” said Reebee. “All you have to do is send out positive energy and the universe will send it back to you.”

“Yeah, right,” said Sky. “More like the law of premature senility. She should team up with your father, Madison.”

Reebee went into the kitchen to make tea and unpack the exotic foods she'd brought back with her. Sky and I hung around in the living room where Connie had plopped herself into the armchair. We tried not to stare but couldn't help ourselves. It was embarrassing. Connie had been transformed into the new fascinating kid on the block. We wanted to hear how it had happened but we wanted her to volunteer the information.

But instead, she just sat in the armchair and looked all around her impatiently, scrutinizing the dingy beige walls, the splintery, worn-down floorboards and threadbare carpet covering them, the textured plaster on the ceiling, the fifties teak
furniture. Then she said, “I really gotta do something about this place.”

From the kitchen, we heard Reebee call out, “Feng shui. That's what you need.”

Finally Sky said, “Tell us about the trip, Connie. Every detail. My mother tends to edit out all the bad bits.”

“I will when we've got some food in front of us.”

It had grown dark in the room but rather than turn on lights, Reebee produced beeswax and scented candles they'd picked up on the trip. She set them all over the room and lit them. The atmosphere became magic.

I had a sense that Reebee was orchestrating something. She went back into the kitchen, and we could hear her crashing around. Every so often she came in and checked on us, like a schoolteacher checking on her class of delinquent girls. Then she called us to come and help her.

We brought plates and bowls into the living room and set them down on the large coffee table. She insisted we sit on the floor to eat. The food was shrubby, super organic, no doubt procured from a withered ancient medicine woman who did something ghoulish with snakes. Among the unidentifiable roots and fruits, there was wild rice, some strange-looking mushrooms, wild asparagus, cayenne peppers, special honeys and some good straightforward California Chablis for the un-pregnant among us.

At first, Sky and I were a bit worried about tempting Connie, that if she got the whiff of alcohol, she'd be cranking poppy juice into her veins the following week. But Connie said to go ahead, just not to breathe on her as the smell of alcohol made her sick.

“Go on, Connie,” said Reebee, “tell them about your trip.”

“We took the coast road for a bit. That was nothing special.”

“Now, Connie, we talked about attitude,” Reebee scolded.

“Okay, I admit, the Olympic Mountains impressed me, there was still snow on them. The park in Washington with all those big uh…” She looked at Reebee who nodded, urging. “Those conifers. Although I prefer sclerophyllous vegetation myself.”

Sky and I exchanged glances.

“Do-it-yourself vocabulary enhancement program,” said Connie. “Don't want my brat to be the class idiot like I was.”

“I think we can safely say you had your reasons,” Reebee said softly.

Connie snorted. “Yeah…what was I talking about?”

“Conifers. Washington. The Park. The big trees,” said Reebee.

“Yeah, it was okay. But Oregon was the place that really got to me.” I heard a slight tremor in her voice, another thing I'd never heard before.

“When we got to those stretches of incredible beach, those sand dunes, I felt so excited. I'd forgotten what they were like. I was born in Oregon.” Her voice was strange and distant, as if she didn't believe it, or was talking about someone else. She stared at me. “You didn't know that, did you, Lucy?”

“We don't know anything about you, except that you were with Jeremy. And he never told us anything.”

“He knew quite a bit of it but he didn't know it all. I didn't tell him all of it. But it really didn't matter. He must have guessed at most of it. He was good at seeing into people. That's why I let him talk me into coming up here with him. God, if I'd known he was in the Laundromat business…he just looked inside me that first time and I knew I didn't have to hide from him.”

“I'm not really following you, Connie,” I said.

Sky was sitting to one side, looking through Jeremy's old
record collection. Jeremy's tastes, eclectic, going against all appearances. Sky pulled out a tattered Etta James album and put the record on the old Phillips player.

Connie listened for a few seconds and then said, “Jeremy thought that Etta James was a singer with balls. He loved her… Yeah, where was I? Oregon. All that talking Reebee made me do when I first met her. She got me going on about Oregon, stuff I thought I'd forgotten forever. She figured it was important to go down there, to remember.” She looked over at Reebee. “Do I talk about the bad part first or the good part?”

“Whatever comes more easily.”

“You have to know that I was raised by my grandmother. She was a Cowichan Indian, born in Canada, but went to the States later when she married. He was a white. American. A cowboy. Died before I was born. Anyway, when I was a kid she was always talking about her people. She missed them a lot but didn't want to go back there. Figured she'd fall into a kind of life that wouldn't be good for anybody.

“We lived in a trailer park near the beach somewhere outside of Florence, Oregon. She left the reserves because she couldn't stand what drink was doing to everyone, what it did to my parents. They were both breeds. My grandmother didn't touch alcohol, you see, and she needed to be as far away from it as she could get. So we lived near the beach. I can remember she was always getting on at me for tracking sand into the trailer. She was a cook. She'd been raised in a residential school in Canada and they'd taught her to cook. She cooked in a diner along the highway outside of Florence. Used to bring home any leftovers she could sneak out of there.

“The only time she let me down, apart from dying, was when she used to leave me with the neighbors once a month
and disappear to go to see a fight, a boxing match. She didn't want me to go with her, see them mashing each other's heads in. It was the only way she could deal with the crazy feeling that she got when she saw what was happening to her people…our people, I guess, on the reserves.

“The thing I can remember really well is those sand dunes where we lived, and dancing around them in bare feet. I thought I was going to be a dancer.” Her barking laugh interrupted. “Now you've gotta picture this. When we got down to those dunes Reebee told me to go ahead and do it, to take off my shoes and dance and try to get the uh…sensation back. So there I was, with this belly, dancing. If anybody saw me…”

“I'm sure those people thought it was delightful,” said Reebee.

“I surprised myself. Didn't figure I'd be able to move still.”

“Just how much time do you have left anyway, Connie?” I had to ask.

“Two months or so they think, give or take a week. I figure it'll come when it wants to come.”

“Know the sex?”

“Naw, don't want to be…biased. Not that I hate men or anything. But sometimes I just can't like them. As a race, I mean.”