Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

She resolved to set them down on paper when she was done.

February she devoted to the epic and the folk song. The epic installment, written in measured Homeric rhythm, sang of the dawn of the world—rosy-fingered Eos rising over the wine-colored sea, Nausicaa and her handmaidens on the shore stretching linens and laughing, the linens fluttering in the wind, white and fresh like Nausicaa’s purity, and Odysseus, watching her, pierced with an unaccustomed regret, the sheets spotless, the virgin smiling, the words unspoken, the cool air brisk with the flapping of taut cloth, the sweetness of what might have been and what never would be: the recently violent world of war and rapine reined in by the civilizing restraint of a young girl’s domestic perfection. The folk-song fragment was a medieval dirge, the lament of a peasant woman at a half-frozen river, scraping blood off the mail shirt of a conquering Mongol who had burned down her village and slaughtered her husband. In the last week of the month, she dashed off a quick fairy-tale tribute—a happy little ditty trilled by an ever-hopeful, ever-misguided Cinderella over her tub of soapsuds.

In March, she composed some erotic couplets—a courtesan in Renaissance Venice humming to herself as she perfumed her red satin pillows—and a longer tragic poem set in Paris, the whispered prayer of a mother in a dark, rat-infested attic bending over the tiny soiled underclothes of a dead child as revolution swept through the streets outside. While in the French mood, she also amused herself with a short Molière-style comedy, in which sly maids and greedy servants exploited their masters’ bedroom secrets gleaned from love tokens unearthed at the brushing of gold-trimmed petticoats.

She rounded off the month with a quick haiku.

In April and May, she paid cursory tribute to a variety of minor genres, including:

anthropology: a fiercely rhymed chorus of old women gathered in the village square the morning after a wedding to inspect the sheets and stone the errant bride;

religion (or possibly satire, she could not decide): a meditation on Protestant ethics with a prodigal son who returned home in rags to smell milk, bread, and linen in his mother’s kitchen and fell on his knees, his face buried in her crisply ironed apron, while she admonished him gently: “Cleanliness, my boy, is next to godliness”;

and, finally, autobiography: Paul doing his first-ever laundry load, in the early days of their marriage—and, far from separating the reds from the whites, indiscriminately picking up the entire pile of dirty clothes he had dumped on the floor in the hallway and throwing it into the washer, trapping in the midst of the mess her favorite, her only, pair of black leather boots (which she had lined up neatly by the door). The boots had been ruined, and she had been vexed. She had never let him approach the washer again. Now, after having devoted what must have translated into solid weeks of time to laundry duty (a conservative calculation: at three hours a week, fifty-two weeks a year, thirteen and a half years of married life: some eighty-eight days of nothing but laundry), she wondered whether the boot fiasco had been as scatterbrained, as innocent of intent, as she had supposed it in the heat of the moment. Yet the poem was devoid of any traces of anger: it had turned out oddly tender, nostalgic almost.

She did not think it one of her more successful efforts.

In the middle of June, two weeks before her fortieth birthday, she was hunting down the twins’ mismatched socks while working on a children’s song:

And it was while searching for the insistently escaping rhyme to “laundry” that she looked directly at the telltale stains on her husband’s collar, the glinting peach-colored traces resembling a woman’s lipstick—smelling of a woman’s lipstick too, as she verified in the next, unthinking moment, lifting the shirt to her nose before she could divert her attention. And, of course, she had seen them before, these now obvious signs—had glimpsed them, but had not wanted to inspect them closely, thrusting the clothes into the washer with increasingly frantic movements, explaining away the faint whiffs of perfume and the most conspicuous spots—a splash of ketchup on this sweater’s shoulder, a dash of mayonnaise on those pants’ zipper, he had always been an enthusiastic eater—and, on that January day, when she had peered an incautious instant too long at another peach-tinted smear on a shirt’s cuff and found the truth looming dangerously close, occupying her mind with a limerick, then a dirge, then a haiku…

And yet, for all her hectic poetizing of the past few months—whether an attempt to break through the mundane to a deeper reality or to escape the reality altogether—was it not telling that most of her laundry poems had ended up being love poems after all?

Her hands trembling, she pushed the shirt under other shirts, pressed the “Heavy Soil” button. “‘Laundry’—‘husbandry.’ ‘Laundry’—‘quandary,’” she repeated, but neither was a very good rhyme, and abruptly she abandoned the composition. She already knew that she would never write any of the poems down, but that was not important, not important at all. And the thing that was important, the thing that had gone so horribly, so inexplicably, wrong—it could still be fixed, could it not, it was not too late to fix it, all they needed was a fresh start, yes, she was certain that everything would be fine, everything would be back to the way it was, if only they could have something—someone—someone new and wonderful in their lives to remind them how much love there really was between them.

If only they could still—if only she could still—

Unhappiness this impenetrable is likewise silent, but the silence lasts longer.

“‘My dear children,’ said the old king, ‘I will give you three trials, and he who wins shall have the crown. The first trial is to bring me a cloth so fine that I can draw it through my golden ring…’”

It was the girls’ turn at book hour. Mrs. Caldwell had made sure that Eugene had finished his homework and Rich and George had brushed their teeth, and had settled in the girls’ room with a volume of the Brothers Grimm tales, a spiderweb and a glossy red apple on its cover. She read mechanically, pausing now and then to listen for the sounds of her husband’s arrival. She promised herself that it would be tonight. Tonight she would tell him. She had meant to tell him every night for weeks, but every time, her nerve would fail her at the last minute. He would come home late, looking harried or morose, and stomp down to the bar to mix himself a drink without checking on the sleeping children first, not asking her about her day. At times she imagined she caught wafts of floral perfume. He was never unpleasant to her—it was more like he did not remember her presence; his eyes slipped past her, his thoughts slipped past her. Tonight she would make him stop and look at her.

Tonight she would tell him.

“‘And so the king embraced his youngest son, told his servants to throw the coarse linen of the older sons into the sea, and said to his children, “For the second trial, you must bring me a little dog, so small that it will fit in a walnut shell.”’”