David Gates - The Wonders of the Invisible World

But in the past few years he’s stopped going to any movies at all. He wouldn’t even go see Schindler’s List, and I worry about him getting out of touch. But he’s still the only man I personally know who wears a beret, which he says is because in the wintertime he can pull it down over his ears, but what I think it is, it’s because he wants to make sure you know he’s an intellectual. So then he has to go around saying fucking this and fucking that to compensate. Growing up in Binghamton and graduating from Penn State, that was how I used to read it all — and of course the usual male thing where if you’re sensitive you have to not seem to be, which is the meaning behind pussy. I wonder how he read me back then. I was there and okay-looking, that was probably about the extent of it, why lie. He’s a hard worker, Tobias, but lazy about his life.

Lugging the laundry, I squint against the morning sun. I need to get something in my stomach, but there’s a homeless man with a shopping bag in front of the Koreans’—same guy from last night? — so I decide to put the clothes in first and maybe he’ll be gone. Saturday mornings you can pretty much always get a machine if you come before eight-thirty; after nine o’clock, forget it. If you thought about it in a victimized way you could think of going to the Laundromat as part and parcel of everything else, like having the tub in the kitchen and parking on the street. Tobias absolutely forbids paying someplace to wash and fold, not so much because of the twenty dollars it just about ends up being but for class reasons: paying somebody to handle and smell your dirty clothes perpetuates the division between the clean and the unclean or something. Which I basically agree with, though I don’t see him ever doing the wash. But mostly I don’t mind because at least it gets me up and out. Saturday morning used to be our morning in bed; Sunday morning, we agreed, was a cliché. Plus for me additionally, spending Shabbos in bed was a fuck-you thing. Yet also in some slantwise way reverent. Now I’d just as soon get something accomplished.

And although I know what he’s saying about the wash-and-fold, I don’t go all the way with Tobias in seeing absolutely everything as being about class. Like we got into this huge thing at the time Margaret asked me if I wanted to come to work at Helping Hands. For me, the class reasons against working at a day-care place that costs like a thousand dollars a month were canceled out by the feminist thing of women getting into the workforce. Except of course that they’re already in the workforce because they have to be because the whole economic system is so fucked, which Tobias would say comes right back to the thing of class again, so where did your feminism get you? And at a thousand dollars a month, these are not beaten-down women. Okay, Tobias is right: my politics aren’t all that thought-out. But on the other hand, I get something out of being with the kids, and I don’t really feel like arguing the point.

I told Margaret that Tobias and I didn’t have children because we can’t, which I think was okay to say because I’m pretty sure she would never bring it up with him. The truth is, I always used to think I might someday want to do something and then not be able to do it if I had a kid. That plus Tobias’s political problems about it: too many children already starving globally and so forth and so on. Though since I’m going to be forty in addition to not having sex anymore, I guess you could say that at some point it got decided. One of those hard-to-pinpoint points, like the thing about when does life begin. As it’s worked out, I get a lot of the good stuff that goes with kids of your own and get spared the worst, like being afraid every minute that they’re going to die. What I end up with is the moderately precious moments. At nap time, Gwendolyn is usually too wired to sleep and, quote, helps me by going around and patting the other children, though I discourage her made-up lullabies, which tend to get loud. Then we go into the big playroom, where I can watch them through the doorway, and we read. But deep down we both know what the deal is. I mean, what childless woman hasn’t had her life brightened, temporarily, by some other woman’s child? It’s the oldest, most disgusting story in the world.

I flomp the laundry bag down in front of the row of top-loaders. One thing that’s feminist about doing your husband’s wash plus your own plus the sheets and towels, you have to be strong to carry it all. I untie the knot in the drawstring and start tossing whites into one machine, bright colors into another and dark stuff into a third. Between us, Tobias and I have a lot of black jeans and T-shirts. Lately he’s even been getting on my case about stuff like tying up the laundry bag, supposedly I’m being anal. “You tie the drawstring again every time you put in a pair of socks?” he said the other day. “Christ, it even looks like a puckered asshole.” This is the man who used to sing, Every night/why do I/quake with fright?/’Cause my Dinah might/change her mind about me. Sometimes I’m afraid there’s something wrong with him, like he has a brain tumor. I mean, not just his moods but the way he sleeps. I just try to bite my tongue when he gets evil, which really probably isn’t as often as I tend to think it is.

I get the stuff going, then head back to the Koreans’ to pick up a Times and something to put in my stomach. I’ve quit hovering over the machines waiting to add fabric softener when the rinse light goes on: Dinah’s little protest. The homeless man is still in front of the door, so I first go over to this sort of diner place to get coffee. One of Tobias’s things is to call the man who runs the place Mr. Mippippippippopolos (not to his face), which does strike me as being not funny. I always say milk no sugar, and Mr. Mekos always drops four sugar packets into the bag. I suppose you could take it as not listening; I take it as wishing you more sweetness in life, like a Mediterranean thing. I pick up the Times at a little news and candy store that keeps the papers outside so you don’t have to go in and see all the sex magazines. The homeless man is still in front of the Koreans’, so I figure okay, fine. I hang back until he turns to this woman in running shorts coming out with a bottle of Evian, and I dart in past him. But when I come back out with my banana I’m the only one around, and he says “Spare anything ?” in this odd voice, so I give him three quarters and say “Good luck.” My usual.

I walk up to what used to be a block of 91st Street and is now this mall with benches, and sit with my back to the little park we herd the kids into every nice day in the warm weather. It’s great having a job right in your neighborhood, except sometimes it makes you crazy, like you can’t ever get away. Already children are yelling and running through the sprinklers.

I take the lid off the coffee and say “You and me, pal,” to the mostly naked discus thrower on the cup. His crudely drawn muscles look like the squares on a turtle’s shell. I sip gingerly so I won’t burn my mouth. Then I peel the banana partway down and break off a bite.

I always read the Times the same way: scan the front page, go to the editorials, then the columns, then see if there’s a letter about anything interesting or from somebody famous. What stops me is Bernie Adler’s name, at the bottom of a letter headed WE’RE ONE COMMUNITY.

To the Editor:

Thursday’s peaceable and mostly amicable march on City Hall has reminded New Yorkers of what we’re too apt to forget: that we’re one community and not (ideally) a welter of warring entities at each other’s throats in a zero-sum game.