The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [115]
It was an odd moment. Bill’s death felt like a loss, to me, to many people, but we also knew that our young minister would know nothing of him. The pastor was about to begin the intercessory prayer that follows this part of worship, when one of Bill’s oldest friends couldn’t resist saying, “You know, Bill paid me the first fifty cents I ever made, back in 1930.” The minister smiled, but looked a bit nonplussed. He took a breath, as if to start the prayer. From a pew in the back of the church came a voice, “And I’ll bet you still have it.”
Of course we laughed for a good long time, before continuing with our worship; it was the kind of story Bill would have enjoyed. He didn’t care much for church decorum, but he took some aspects of religion seriously enough. The last time I saw him was at the Lutheran church, where he’d come for the funeral of an old friend. Bill sat alone at the back of the church. “I wanted to make sure they gave him a good sendoff,” is all he said to me, after the service. He was apparently satisfied.
When the minister finally got to say his “Let us pray,” we were ready. We had been praying, all along. We had been being ourselves before God.
AT LAST, HER
LAUNDRY’S DONE
Laundry seems to have an almost religious importance for many women. We groan about the drudgery but seldom talk about the secret pleasure we feel at being able to make dirty things clean, especially the clothes of our loved ones, which possess an intimacy all their own. Laundry is one of the very few tasks in life that offers instant results, and this is nothing to sneer at. It’s also democratic; everyone has to do it, or figure out a way to get it done. When I picture Honolulu’s Chinatown, circa 1960, which I passed through daily on a school bus, what I smell is the open-air fish market, but what I see are the signs, mysterious to me then, that read “Taxi Dance Hall: Girls Wanted,” and all the colorful laundry strung up between tenements. There was never a day without it. In any city slum, it’s laundry—neat lines of babies’ T-shirts, kids’ underwear and jeans—that announces that families live here, and that someone cares. For some people, laundry seems to satisfy a need for ritual. A television commentator with a hectic schedule once told me that the best, most contemplative part of his day was early morning, a time he set aside for laundering and ironing his shirts.
My images of laundry abound. One that I’ve never seen but love to imagine is that of Benedictine nuns in the Dakotas, in the days before Vatican II, when many of them worked in elementary schools, beating their black serge habits on snow banks to get the dust out. They tell me that the snow was good for removing stains. I picture the small clothesline that a friend has put up in her penthouse garden in Manhattan. For her, laundry is a triumph of hope over experience. “I grew up in the suburbs,” she explains, “and my mother hung clothes on the line. This is not ideal,” she admits, “but on a nice windy day, the soot doesn’t fall.”
Of course an attachment to laundry can be pathetic, even pathological, in a woman who feels that it’s one of the few areas in her life over which she has control. More often, though, it’s an affectionate throwback to the world of our mothers and grand-mothers. We may be businesswomen or professors, but it’s hard to shake that urge to do laundry “the right way,” just like mama did. The sense that “laundry must not be done casually,” as an arts administrator once told me, is something that seems lost on most men. She and her husband had reached an armed truce: he could do his own laundry but was to leave hers alone. She had grown tired of picking lint from his red sweatpants off her good blouses.
Many women have a “system” that is not to be trifled with. “You’re hanging the underwear wrong” I was solemnly informed by a woman minister one day as we rushed to get her laundry on the