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PART THREE

Seventeen

She stands at the edge of the pier in the October cold. The moon is high and so bright that she could read a book. The boys are silent behind her, not believing their luck. One of them says, “Don’t,” but she knows that he wants her to, that he can’t help himself. The water twitches in a cone of light, and, briefly, she has an image of swimming to the horizon. She steps to the edge, and in the next instant, she is out over the water in a perfect dive.

The ocean closes over her head, the water like silk along her body, a phrase she will later give to the boy who said Don’t. The sea is briny in her sinuses and eyes. She swims out and away from the pier before surfacing, enjoying the perfect clean of the water, though she knows that at the bottom there might be old shoes and broken bottles and used tires and saggy bits of underwear.

In a moment, she will have to break the surface, and she will hear, as though distantly, the hoots and awed cries of the boys who will be calling to her. But for now there is just the clean and the dark, a perfect combination.

______

She is sent away for years. The word slut flung across a room and hitting her like a thrust stone. An aunt returning too soon and shrieking at the girl and the man, who scuttles away like a beetle. The aunt approaching, arms flailing, all fury and righteousness, shouting whore and then slut again, and then ungrateful and then bitch. Words that ring in the air like notes from a bell.

______

The place that she is sent to is beautiful and harsh. A house stands above the ocean. The surf is constant and comforting, a whisper-rumble of indifference. The house is cavernous and is filled with other girls who have been called whore and slut as well. They live in small bedrooms and go to a Catholic girls’ school around the corner, but the center of their lives is the laundry. In the basement of the house are a hundred tubs and washing machines and whenever the girls aren’t otherwise engaged — with school or with studying or with sleeping or with eating or, on rare occasions, watching television — they do the laundry. Girls, like herself, with hot faces and reddened hands from the water and the bleach, wash the laundry of the rich and the merely harried: linen sheets and oblong tablecloths; Oxford shirts and belted dresses; babies’ sleepers and soiled diapers. It gets so that Linda can guess the story of any family who has left their laundry. Men’s and boys’ overalls and corduroy shirts speak of a household without a woman. Sheets stained from a birth speak for themselves. Boxer shorts with stiffened crotches suggest furtive pleasures, and women’s underpants with blood on them tell them no more than they already know. A household that quite abruptly ceases to send the baby sleepers suggests a tragedy that requires silence.

______

The hands of the girls will always be red, the damage too deep to be salved with ointments. They will remain chapped for years, the nuns repeatedly tell them, a reminder of their lot, as if it had been planned. The hands will be, for years, a badge of shame.

______

Good drying weather. The phrase is a clarion call. The damp laundry that never dries properly inside the basement is pinned to ropes with wooden clothespins, then left to furl in the breezes, smelling of the sun when the wash is brought inside in wicker baskets.

Coming back from her classes, rounding a corner, Linda sees the wash on the line: acres of white and colored shapes moving in the wind. It takes the breath away, the sight of all that wash, and seems like fields of crisp flowers, a strange, enchanting crop. The bloodied sheets are clean, the labor pains forgotten, the stains of all that lust rinsed away. Shirts fill with air and move, so that she can believe that they are occupied. Overalls kick out sturdy legs, and nightgowns drift fetchingly in the air. Sheets billow and snap and seem to have a life of their own, defying their owners