J. Lennon - Pieces for the Left Hand - Stories

Of course we were sorry to have asked. We left the owner a large tip, though once we were out on the road, driving with extreme care, the tip struck us as a tacky, even insulting, gesture, and made us feel even worse about our rude question.

Our elderly aunt, long ago widowed, has spent the past ten years touring the world as part of an old ladies’ travel club, despite a chronic social paralysis that prevents her from so much as taking the bus to the grocery store without a companion. When she returns from these distant places — which have included Thailand, Egypt, China and Brazil — and we ask her to describe her experiences, she always tells us, after some consideration, that she had a wonderful time and enjoyed the other ladies’ company. She offers no other details.

At a recent family gathering, conversation lingered on a grisly subject: the crash of a commercial airliner over the Atlantic Ocean, which resulted in complete destruction of the plane and the death of all its passengers. One of us commented that such a crash constitutes a double tragedy, as the passengers lose not only their lives but their identity, because they are blown to bits and scattered in the deep ocean.

All of us were surprised when our aunt spoke up. She said that this would never happen to her. Whenever she flies, she told us, she paints her fingernails and toenails the same unusual shade of purple, to aid salvage workers in the identification of her remains. In addition, she ties a length of heavy twine to one of her toes, then runs the other end up through her slacks and blouse to her hand, where she ties it to one of her fingers. This way, if she is blown apart, the top half of her body will be tethered to the lower half, and she can enjoy a decent Christian burial more or less intact.

The silence following this revelation went on for some seconds, as we all imagined the sight of our elderly aunt’s shattered corpse, held together with twine. This silence deepened when it occurred to us that she had herself imagined this very image, perhaps many times. Since then we have reinterpreted her reticence not as a symptom of some pitiable neurosis but as bold composure in the face of a morbid imagination.

A woman with whom I once worked raised two small children, whose curiosity and perceptiveness made private conversation in their presence difficult, if not impossible. Since she was rarely apart from them, she developed the habit of spelling out certain words, such as D-O-C-T-O-R or C-A-N-D-Y, to prevent them from becoming anxious or excited at inconvenient times. Eventually the children grew older and learned to spell, but my colleague continued her spelling habit, now employing it as an educational tool. She subjected the children to impromptu quizzes, asking them to point to the H-O-U-S-E or the S-T-O-P-S-I-G-N, and soon much of her speech around the children consisted of spelling.

Unfortunately, this habit spread to her speech at the office as well, and persisted long after her children had grown up and moved away. For some years she avoided any speech at all during the workday, or spoke slowly and carefully to prevent lapses. But the habit proved too strong for her, and today she spells with great frequency, presenting a new P-R-O-P-O-S-A-L or buying lunch for a C–L-I-E-N-T. The habit intensifies when she is under stress, and at these times she will occasionally grab a pen and paper and write out what she wishes to say. This compromise does seem to satisfy her urge to spell, and is easier for the listener to comprehend.

It is not unusual for her business associates to spell back at her, or even, after a long workday, to spell a word or two at home to their spouses, regardless of whether or not they have, or have ever had, children of their own.

I used to live in a large apartment building, where I had many friends, all of whom lived on the same floor as I did, and whom I’d met coming out of the elevator.

The building had twenty-two floors, but only eleven laundry rooms. This meant that those on an even floor, like me, had to share their laundry room with the people below them. But there were ample machines for everyone, and this posed no problem.

One night a neighbor of mine stopped me in the hall to tell me something. He said that about an hour before, he had moved his wet laundry to a dryer, then went out to get a bite to eat. When he came back, his dry laundry had been neatly folded and placed in his laundry basket. He was holding the basket when he told me this, and it was filled with the clean, folded laundry.

After this, many of us had a similar experience. A launderer would leave the building, or simply return to her room to watch TV, or, in one case, just pop next door to the video game room, and return to find her laundry carefully folded and stacked. This experience became a kind of joke around the floor, and we began to speak of a “mad folder.” A few of the more listless among us would actually leave their laundry in the dryers on purpose, in the hope that the Mad Folder would get to it some time soon. But the Folder was unpredictable, and as often as not this labor-saving strategy was a failure. Our feeling was that the Mad Folder was a kind of random benevolence, and it was wrong to try to lure the Folder with neglected laundry. We began to think of the Folder as belonging to us, like a kind of patron saint, and we would do silly things like offer toasts or say prayers at our many cocktail parties.

One night I went into the laundry room with some dirty clothes and fell into a conversation with a woman from the floor below. While we talked, she removed some clothes from a washer and put them into a dryer. We continued talking, and at some point a distant dryer finished its cycle, and without missing a word of our discussion she crossed the room, removed the laundry and began to fold it.

I asked her if that was more of her own laundry she was folding, and she said that it wasn’t. She told me that she liked folding laundry, it calmed her and she enjoyed imagining strangers discovering their folded clothes. She said she did it all the time.

I invited her back to my apartment and one thing led to another. For several days we carried on, calling in sick to work and making love at all hours. Lying by my side in my bed one night, the Mad Folder told me that she was glad to have met me when she did, because she was not getting on so well with her roommate and in fact was planning on moving out of the building. Did I mind if she stayed with me for a few days? Since our affair had been nearly unceasing and was conducted exclusively at my place anyway, I agreed to her plan.

That was a mistake. I came back from work the next day to find all my clothes washed and folded and put away in my drawers. Furthermore, the bed was neatly made and my closet rearranged and organized. My books had been alphabetized and kitchen implements sorted and secreted in the cabinets; and the refrigerator, purged of its rotting food and scoured clean, looked almost completely empty.

I told the Mad Folder that it wasn’t working out, and after a terrible fight — I had, after all, promised to let her stay — she stormed out, never to be seen again.

When I told my friends what had happened, they refused to believe it. Then the folding stopped. At first, our relationships went on as they had before my affair: in fact, our socializing seemed to intensify, as if in compensation for our loss. But soon the Folder’s disappearance began to take its toll. In the hallway, conversations stopped abruptly when I appeared. The laundry room took on a new desolation, and people walked around in wrinkled clothes. Eventually I spied several floormates doing their laundry two floors away, in a foreign laundry room.