Whirlpool
Marcy cried when it broke. She had first seen it in the Sears Roebuck catalogue shortly after their wedding and couldn’t help think how much time it would save with Hank’s shirts. He only had two good ones, after all, and they needed to be cleaned for work if he wanted to sell any typewriters. Hank had gone all the way to the city in the truck to pick it up. A trek he would hardly let a day pass without letting Marcy know about. “32 miles,” he would grunt, sitting sunk into the blue and red flowered La-Z-Boy sofa. “And for what. Mother never had one and cleaner sheets you’ve never seen.” Even when he could no longer make it all the way to the downstairs bathroom and she helped him onto the gray commode, on loan from the VA, or as she cleaned out the bucket below, he would grunt, “32 miles.”
So she cried. Cried in the garage as she scrubbed his soiled linens in the sink basin, staring into the tall mirrors of the medicine cabinet speckled with toothpaste spittle, the reflection of the broken-down Whirlpool washing machine haunting the mirror like a foggy memory. She could see, too, on the shelf behind her, the five cans of Cabbot’s Bleaching Oil, which were meant to be used on the fence they never bought, stacked up in perfect pyramid. “As if any of us need acceleration with turning grey” she thought aloud. Behind the cans were the memories she hid. The teacher class record book from her first, and only, year teaching at the Middle school, before Hank found the young English teacher to be, as he put it, “one of those long-haired queer boys.” The breastfeeding pump their only daughter, Harriet, left in a box of her things when she lived there between men and before the boy was killed.
Now, looking out of the garage window, Marcy can still hear the boy’s laughter as he would splash in the inflatable pool with the neighbor girl. When the men came to remove the pool, Harriet clung onto the vinyl as if it were the boy. The things left behind often take the place of those who leave too soon. Pool becomes boy.
And when, finally, Hank’s last breath left his lungs, Marcy’s eyes transfixed on his with a glint of light slowly fading, and she tightening the towel, it permanently stained from his accidents, accidents which she sometimes believed were purposeful and out of spite of the machine, she cried, the broken down moving boxes leaning against the wall in the hallway, the packing paper strewn about the floor like fallen leaves.
