A Shadow Behind The Heart

We used to lie on top of the machines at laundromats flat on our backs and listen to the quiet rumble of clothes swirling beneath us. We’d count the clinks of quarters and make sure they always added up to a dollar, and wonder how people could waste so much money on such useless things (being kids, we didn’t understand the value of money nor the importance of cleanliness). We spent hours every day in that laundromat. They had air conditioning and quiet Nico and David Bowie playing, which was more than we ever wanted. It was better than our Brooklyn apartment, noisy with the neighbors’ children, the air oily from the run-down restaurant below. We’d braid each other’s hair on top of the good machines—the ones with shiny and undamaged paint—and I’d laugh at how my sister’s hair would turn out lopsided every time. I was never very good at braids, but Josephine didn’t mind—she’d just undo her hair and use the same hair-tie when doing mine. We’d drink fizzing water that tickled our tongues and if we spilled it, we didn’t care. It dried fast in the heat.

Josephine and I would try to memorize how the light passed through the blue window panes so that when we got home we could attempt to sketch it out. We wanted souvenirs to remember our time in the laundromat. We’d sketch on napkins, even though we preferred our watercolor sets and paper that the school had given us. (We were too afraid of damaging them to bring them out of the house.) The colors would break easily with too much movement. They weren’t plastered in place and if they got loose, they’d mess up the whole set by staining the colors—especially the fundamental white. Our mother told us that just using water to dilute the pigments would be best but doing that soaked the paper through. It would lose its crispness.

The owner of the laundromat, Agnes, was a cadaverous woman who hobbled back and forth from the Employees Only area and her stained couch chair between the rows of machines. She appreciated our company. Much more than our siblings would at home, at least. She called us her “cherries.” We learned how to play obscure midwestern card games with her, with her special playing cards that had completely frayed at the edges. All four of the 2’s were torn in the same corner. (It later became an inside joke between me and my sister to tear all of the 2’s in new decks, much to our family’s chagrin.) Agnes taught us how to decorate for Christmas: putting up plasticky lights in the corners of the ceiling; which soap company was best; and how to mimic David Bowie’s eye makeup in her employee bathroom, squinting through the scratched and curving mirror. Josephine was more helpful with the lights than I was. She was taller and could reach the corners of the ceilings with the help of a ladder. I was always afraid of falling.

Numerous times Agnes told us how she had health problems, most notably “a shadow behind the heart.” I found her description prettier than I did alarming. She was moribund, at closer glance. Her skin was sunken and sagging; her eyes were faded and rheumy; her lips were eternally pallid; and she always had terrible sinus infections. Her bathroom contained a plethora of pale-colored pill bottles for her back, neck, head, and chest. We didn’t pay much attention to the actual contents of these bottles. Agnes didn’t mind us snooping. She liked having someone who knew things about her. She told us freedom was ‘not keeping things to oneself.’ The pill bottles weren’t on a shelf but in a wicker basket with a wax ribbon curling around the handle. She liked to accessorize. (The washing machines had drawings on them, little flowers drawn with Sharpie. She also had a wind chime with little butterflies on it that would tingle whenever a customer came in.) Even her heart problems she made glamorous.

She had a box of mementos in her bathroom we’d glance at every once in a while. We never went through it, although we’d look over the top couple of things. There were a lot of pictures. There were a few of her and her now dead husband, some of random dogs, and many of the laundromat throughout the years. It always stayed the same—we never understood why she took so many pictures of the never-changing laundromat. She seemed, from what we gathered through our investigations of her life, endlessly bored.

By the autumn of 2002, Agnes had died. Probably by old age but we were never given a definitive answer. All we had were our hypotheses and her heart shadows. We spent our days after that lazing around, occasionally checking in on the laundromat. As the days passed the laundromat fell further into disrepair. The place stayed dark. The washing machines were gone. Her butterfly chimes were with us. The man who began to clear up, presumably the owner of the building, let us keep them and the Bowie paraphernalia.

Two women who lived above Agnes were helpful concerning Agnes’ story. Agnes wasn’t very talkative, though we certainly were. We met these women randomly while sitting on the step to the laundromat. They had lived there longer than Agnes had, which we found hard to believe, simply because they were both decades younger than Agnes. To us, she had always lived there and her laundromat was as old as her. The women, both named Beth, told us when Agnes first arrived at their block she came in a bright red convertible full of simpering smiles for inquisitive neighbors. She was about 30 then. The first Beth said Agnes originally had woodsy red hair. We were in disbelief—her white hair had no remnants of any color that could be so strong. She came from Indiana, in a town small enough to not have any highways near it. She had gotten the car as part of the agreement with her ex-husband who had taken the house. Agnes had never left Indiana before then. The second Beth added that Agnes wore sunglasses in the subway to make sure no one recognized her—she didn’t like it when she bumped into people she knew. (We doubted anyone would recognize her. She had no friends.) She had a brief stint with a man she had found on a subway and didn’t want to repeat that same disaster. She liked the laundromat because it was regular. There were rarely newcomers. We, of course, had been “regular.”

She never had children. She liked us, we assumed, because we were her brief and temporary introduction into what her life may have been if she had chosen to have kids. The women said Agnes seemed more aloof than usual in the recent years and they hadn’t really spoken after 1994, when Agnes’ cat died and she had gotten into a sort of funk they believed she never really escaped from. We never knew she had a cat.

The Beths showed us a letter Agnes had written to them. It was a complaint Agnes had about their plants that were snaking down the front of the laundromat. She was worried about the structural integrity of the building. The plants in question were these long Boston ivies that stemmed from the topmost window—the first Beth’s bedroom window. We didn’t care that much about the content of the letter, but more about Agnes’ signature and handwriting. She wrote shakily, with little indentations in her lines, reminiscent of pulse monitors at hospitals. This only further confirmed to us she had never been young—or healthy. Her signature included her middle initial in spiky cursive: ‘Agnes R.’

She didn’t have a real funeral; there was no one to plan it. She seemed to evaporate from the neighborhood, and as the years passed more of her seemed to fade. The laundromat was eventually replaced by a Lebanese café which got more traffic than Agnes’ place ever had.