Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

At this, Mrs. Caldwell had to speak, had to object.

“I’m thirty-eight, Grandmother. Almost thirty-nine. Hardly young.” To herself, she added: In this place, aging begins early. And earlier still when you have five kids.

“Child, you don’t have the slightest idea of what aging means. And who forced you to have five kids?” her grandmother grumbled, just as though Mrs. Caldwell had voiced her thoughts aloud. She should not have drunk that third martini, she scolded herself dully. “And did you have any of your children for the simple reason that you wanted to have them?” the old woman continued relentlessly. “Indeed you did not. You had the first one to console a sick parent, the second to provide a playfellow for the first, the next two by accident, or maybe out of some self-destructive impulse—let a council of psychiatrists puzzle over that one—and the last, the last out of guilt. Children are not some stoppers you can wedge in wherever your life springs a leak. Next you’ll be having one to fix your failing marriage.”

“My marriage isn’t failing!” Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed with indignation.

Her grandmother was the one to stay silent now, but her silence felt full of gloating.

“Oh, what can you possibly know about it?” Mrs. Caldwell cried, nettled. “You divorced both of your husbands, and only ever had my mother, and you didn’t even raise her, you left her to Grandfather and his second wife to raise, while you went off somewhere, I suppose to have experiences and to be greedy. Well, I have all the experiences I need right here. Of course, I could have had a different life, I could have gone hopping from Paris to Rome to Vienna with that—that genius wannabe who didn’t love me nearly enough and who was so self-absorbed he probably would never have wanted children. Instead I chose to create a real home, to have a family with a man who makes me feel safe and whole, who will always love me, no matter what—”

Her grandmother’s small eyes glittered like a crow’s, and her voice grew sharp with wicked triumph. “And if he will always love you no matter what, then tell me, my dear, why are you huffing and puffing like that on this infernal contraption?”

And all at once grief was upon her. The monstrous notion of growing old, of losing her husband’s love, of finding herself alone—of having her entire life fall apart—took hold of her roughly. Was it indeed true that she had spent her best years as a fairy-tale princess locked away in a tower—a confinement of her choosing, a confinement with many comforts, but one with barred windows and locked doors all the same? And now, seeing the gates inexplicably open, had she wandered outside, only to find herself, dazed and helpless, in the midst of a dark, frightening forest where wild beasts crouched in wait in the shadow of the night and she herself was no longer young enough, no longer pretty enough, to count on a rescue by a passing knight?

Gods, my gods, how did I come to be in this desolate place, where did my sunlit garden go, did I take a wrong turn somewhere along the way—

“There, there, no need to mope like that,” her grandmother said, patting her sweaty hand. “Bad things happen whenever they get a mind to, but good things don’t happen at all unless you go looking for them. Remember the story I told you about the tree? Why did you stop with those nice little poems you used to write? You shouldn’t give up trying, you know. Go ahead and rhyme a line or two—start with your own small life if it makes you feel better, but do remember to aim higher and higher as you plod along.” She cackled, her crow’s eyes sparkling. “Why, if you take me as your guide, you could become a modern-day Dante someday. Oh, the things I could tell you about heaven and hell…”

Abruptly she ceased cackling, dropped her cigarette onto the floor, and glanced over her shoulder, looking half annoyed and half alarmed, as if she had done something wrong and someone was calling her now to come and be chastised. (In the end she would be forgiven yet again. Silly woman, God boomed in her ear, sternly but not unkindly. Why must you always run on so? You told this poor girl enough fairy tales when you were alive. Come now, Gabriel has called everyone to evening tea, and we will be serving your favorite gooseberry jam.)

Mrs. Caldwell looked where her grandmother was looking, but there was nothing there. “What tree, Grandmother?” she asked, turning back, but her grandmother was gone, and she was finishing her second mile on the treadmill, out of breath, crying for some reason, the mirrors all around the exercise room crowded with unmistakably middle-aged women who had swimming, inebriated eyes and unsubtle hints of double chins. The air held telltale traces of smoke. Mrs. Caldwell wiped away the tears with her sleeve, turned off the treadmill, and stepped down, swaying. If Paul finds out that I’ve taken up smoking, he will be upset, she thought, bending to pick the cigarette stub off the floor. Of course, I only ever smoke down here, where he never sets foot, but still… She was about to slip the stub into her pocket, to bury it in the depths of the trashcan later, when she noticed that it looked oddly unfamiliar, steely gray instead of the speckled gold of her own preferred brand, and ringed with peach-tinted lipstick. Why, oh why, did she have to start on that fourth martini? Averting her eyes, she tossed the cigarette back on the floor and pushed it under the treadmill with her foot. There, all out of sight now, and everything was well, and no reason to feel so unsettled.

She turned off the lights, and, to her relief, the middle-aged, double-chinned women vanished obediently. “So what if I’m no longer twenty,” she said aloud, arguing with an invisible someone. “So what if I’m no longer skinny. My husband will love me no matter what.”

She slammed the door on her way out.

Friday was Mrs. Caldwell’s laundry day.

Unlike some things, it did not become more enjoyable with repetition.

Occasionally, as she threaded collar stays through shirt collars, buttoned cardigan buttons, and ironed creases into Paul’s pants, she pondered a certain paradox: An average woman—or at least an average married woman with children, which, for all she knew, no longer signified an average woman; to rephrase, then, a woman average for most of human history—almost certainly devoted more of her time to the pursuit of laundering than to the pursuit of love; yet for all the thousands and thousands of poems written about love, only a handful had ever been written about laundry. Without a doubt, laundry, as she had learned rather exhaustively, was in its essence not a poetic matter, and most poets were men and knew little about it; but was not imparting beauty and meaning to the mundane and the meaningless one of the most vital missions of poetry?

One day in January, after she had hurried to cram the washer full of her husband’s shirts, she tried her hand at a limerick. She stumbled almost instantly: there seemed to be nothing that rhymed with either “Moscow” or “Russia.” She grew stubborn and for a couple of minutes paced the stuffy laundry room, now and then bumping the ironing board with her hip, until the last syllable fell into place.

This, of course, was neither beautiful nor particularly meaningful; but every Friday from then on, as she folded and ironed in the small, steamy room with its stacks of damp underwear and pastel-hued seascapes on the white windowless walls, she continued to toy with words—just to while away the time—until, without writing down a line, she had half composed a collection of laundry poems across the genres.