The Alaskan Laundry Read online

  She opened the door and got in.

  2

  AFTER SPENDING most of the muggy Philadelphia summer in Connor’s room, scooping water ice during the day, raging about her father at night, she couldn’t take it anymore. The “it” being herself, subsisting on Wheat Thins and chive cream cheese, hardly getting out of her torn sweatpants, taping episodes of The X-Files to watch over and over, showering only when she and Connor started sleeping together. She had thought the sex would help—and it did, briefly. But after the rush of blood and warmth she only felt emptier. She wanted to disappear, like the dot when she turned off her TV, reduced to a point. To reanimate on some different planet, find some new sun to orbit. Connor tried to help, going out to fetch another box of crackers, a block of cream cheese. If she heard once more that he was there if she needed to talk, she thought she might scream.

  One day in early August, while Connor was at his job bricklaying, she woke up barely able to catch her breath. At first she thought she was having a heart attack, or her lungs were shutting down. The walls seemed to close in. She panicked. That same day she tracked down her cousin Acuzio Marconi in Santa Fe.

  She remembered his stories about working in what he called the Last Frontier. Catching salmon with his bare hands, running into grizzlies, working at the hatchery, then a fish processor. “Place is huge!” he said. “Instead of America it should be called Alaska and Its Forty-Nine Bitches.” Her father at the far end of the table, silencing Acuzio with a glare.

  “Are there girls too?” Tara asked, from her chair beside her mother.

  “If they’re born there. But it’s a man’s world, shows you what you’re made of.”

  Afterward, as they did dishes in their burnt orange and avocado Formica kitchen, her mother shut off the faucet and took Tara by the shoulders. “This young man, your cousin, he don’t know nothing. Alaska, it is like where I come from, where these”—her mother held up her hands and spread long sudsy fingers in front of Tara’s face, her nickel-sized medallion dangling over her breasts—“these are how you grow strong. Si? It doesn’t matter what is here.” She patted between her thighs. “Capisce?”

  When she was in fifth grade Tara did a social studies report on Alaska. She glued eight stars onto purple construction paper, coloring them in with the yellow highlighter her father used to mark late orders at the bakery.

  “No, that can’t be right,” Sister Delaney said when Tara taped a cutout of the state over the rest of the country. Its borders stretched from Canada to Mexico, from Rhode Island to Los Angeles. But it was right, Tara insisted. Alaska, she announced proudly to the class, could absorb more than two Texases.

  So that horrible day in August, when she was so desperate to leave the city she could hardly breathe, Alaska came to mind. “Cooz,” she said, a cloud of wood dust rising as she dropped into Connor’s couch. “Help me out here.”

  “Aren’t you going to college or something?”

  “I was, to Temple or CCP, but things got fucked. Didn’t you work on some island? Can’t you find me something? Cleaning houses, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Tara, it ain’t no rolling cannolis up there.” Over the phone she could hear screaming, kids at a motel pool, perhaps. “I’m telling you, T. It’s about as many people on that island as the Italian Market on a Monday, you feel me? I mean, bears try to chew your brain for fucksake.”

  Bring it, Tara thought. As far as she could get from the clogged gutters of South Philly, the burn barrels, Oldsmobiles sliding past stop signs. As far as she could get from her father—that was where she wanted to be.

  A few days later, Acuzio reached her before a shift.

  “Hey. I heard what happened. You and your pop talking yet?” he asked. “I heard—”

  “Did you find me a job?” she interrupted.

  “Dag,” he said, his voice going soft. “I’m just so sorry. I mean, I know your pops explained. I was on the road for the wake, and . . .”

  Over the past year Tara had perfected her response to this sort of awkward condolence: silence. She was beginning to discover that she could use this to her advantage; just let the quiet echo until you got what you wanted.

  Acuzio sighed. “So this guy Fritz, pissy dude with a good heart. He said he could use a hand at the hatchery, starting at the end of September. No overtime. Only other condition is you stick around for the year.”

  “Done,” she said. “You tell him anything about me?”

  “Just that you boxed, and could keep up. But I’m tellin’ you, he’s grumpy as a garden gnome, and you already got two counts against you.”

  “What,” she laughed. “I’m a girl, that’s one. And the other?”

  She could hear him chuckling on the other end of the line. “That island’s gonna turn your head around, little cuz. That’s about all I can say about that.”

  She thought about times in the boxing ring when she had been hit so hard, she thought her head might twist off her spine. “It sounds perfect,” she said.

  What wasn’t perfect was telling Connor two days before she left. Connor, who had held her hand in third grade to cross Broad Street. Who played Jesus in the Stations of the Cross in fourth grade, and let her color red squiggles across his forehead for the blood of Christ. Connor, who asked her out in ninth grade and who, when she broke up with him after her sixteenth birthday, sent flowers. Connor, who took her in after she fled her father’s house, then became her lover. And now she was sitting him down after a long day on the scaffold, his hands spattered with dried mortar, to say she was leaving in two days for Alaska.

  His features tightened. The furrow above his nose took on shadow. He wasn’t like her father. He didn’t rage. In fact, he didn’t say much of anything.

  She knew it was cruel. But it was time to change her life. And Alaska was the place she’d do it.

  3

  TARA WAS SILENT as they turned out of the ferry terminal parking lot.

  “As I said before, you got two main roads on the island. Think of them like eagle wings. This one here’s called Chinook Way. Then you got Papermill Road on the other side. Main Street in town with the Russian Orthodox church—call that the beak of the bird—library down by the water, where there’s payphones. Only place you get lost is the woods.”

  Chinook Way hugged a mountain to one side, and dropped off to the ocean on the other. Islands tufted with trees rose from the water, the surface rustled dark by the wind. There was a newness, a scrubbed quality to the rock faces pushing out from the trees, even the mottled surface of the ocean. Her lungs drank in the clean, moist air. It felt like a place where anything could happen.

  They drove into a cloudbank, creamy white outside the windshield, the silence in the cab broken by the steady click of Fritz’s blinker. He pulled into a parking lot and stopped the truck at the top of a ramp leading to docks.

  “This here’s the main harbor. Just to get you situated.”

  Below was a mishmash of boats of all shapes and sizes, bobbing in their parking spots. “See that big old dark one in the distance there, at the end of the docks? That’s a tugboat, where one of my workers tried to hide the other night after getting himself in trouble at the Frontier Bar.”

  When her eyes found it, black smokestack visible behind the masts and poles, a jolt ran through her. Thick-set, powerful, like the tugs she had watched with her mother on the Delaware River, jockeying barges of garbage upriver. She had to fight the urge to get out of the truck and inspect it more closely.

  “You a big drinker?” Fritz asked. She shook her head, unable to take her eyes from the boat.

  “Good.” He started up again.

  Farther on they passed a smaller harbor at the bottom of the hill. Through the dirty glass and fog she made out a quadrangle of dilapidated shingled buildings. Keta raised his head as Fritz coasted to a stop and set the emergency brake.

  “What about dogs?” Fritz asked, sliding out. “You a fan?”

  She hauled her bag, damp now, fro
m the flatbed. Dogs. She had inherited her mother’s dislike of the creatures, and generally crossed to the other side of the street when she saw one approaching. They were dirty, chewed through the plastic coverings of the couch, and kept people up with their barking.

  “They’re fine,” she lied. The dog grunted as he hopped out of her open door. He had a long body and furry chest, a black nose with a smudge of pink at the end.

  “You sure that’s not a wolf?”

  “Wolves don’t look you in the eye like that,” Fritz said. It was true—the dog wouldn’t stop staring. It almost seemed as if he had come out of the truck to get a better look at her. “German shepherd, Aussie, Lab, malamute. Maybe a smidge of arctic wolf? Who knows.”

  “He’s got no tail,” Tara observed. The dog’s sleek white head jerked up.

  “Don’t say that too loud,” Fritz said in a stage whisper. “He’s gets self-conscious.”

  “Jesus.” Tara looked down into the dog’s mournful eyes. “Sensitive guy.”

  “C’mon. I’ll show you your new home.”

  The dog trotted ahead, leading the way across a small bridge. The air reminded her of Oregon Avenue at Christmas, spruce trees trussed up against a chain-link fence strung with oversized lights. Life on this “Rock,” as the man on the ferry called it, wouldn’t be completely unfamiliar. Her mother’s first memory had been sitting atop a barrel of sardines brining by the water, where she had been set to keep the gulls away. This same blood ran in her veins.

  They entered a door at one end of a long, single-story building, and went down a dreary hallway. Fritz stopped in front of a door, and the dog leaned against her thigh as he sifted through his key ring. “You grew up in Philadelphia?”

  “Yeah. But my mother was from Sicily.”

  He nodded. “Worked in your folks’ bakery? That what Coozy said?”

  Not if you ask my father, she thought. “Yeah.”

  “Well, I am a fan of the baked goods, as you can probably tell.” He patted his stomach. “Wife’s always trying to get me to cut down, but I tell her I need to put on hibernation weight. Lack of sunlight bother you?”

  “I guess we’ll find out.”

  “That’s right, soon enough now.”

  He pushed open the door and extended a hand. There was a single electric burner in the corner, a bed beneath the curtained window, pendant light over a table, and a shower and toilet on the other side of a wood-planked wall.

  “You got cockroaches, rats, and all that back in Philly?” Fritz asked from the doorway. He turned the knob on the thermostat.

  Was he an idiot? “Sure. It’s a city.”

  “Well, none of that crap here.” He pulled a plastic package from his back pocket and tossed it onto the bed. “There’s dinner if you like. I’ll see you in the A.M., eight sharp down at the hatchery. Five-minute walk. Head back out across the bridge, between those old brown buildings to the concrete bunker by the water. Basement. Get some sleep. C’mon, buster. It’s our feeding time.” And then he was gone. The dog watched her for a couple seconds, blinking his blond eyelashes a few times before Fritz whistled, and he bounded off.

  She sat on her bed, looking around, her mind bright with exhaustion. She had made it. From the living room sofa in front of the television, from scraping the bottom of the barrel of lemon water ice, to this bare bones room on an island in Alaska. Right now she needed sleep.

  From her duffel she took a framed, washed-out photo of men standing by boats, mending nets, and taped it above her bed. How fragile, even feminine, these dark-skinned cousins of her mother, the men of Aci Trezza, appeared compared to Fritz, with his rainbow suspenders framing his stomach, or the white-bearded man on the ferry with the wrinkles. For all her mother’s talk about work, how it kept a person right in the world, Tara was beginning to think work in Italy meant something different than it did in Alaska.

  Outside the curtained windows, branches waved in the dark. The baseboard radiators made a ticking sound as they heated. She picked up the package, still warm from Fritz’s pocket. Among gimcrack cookware in a kitchen drawer she found a serrated knife and sawed open the plastic. The soft, dark meat tasted of liquid smoke—fish, she realized, picking a filament of bone from her teeth. The springs beneath the thin mattress squeaked as she flopped on the bed.

  She tore off another piece, chewing slowly. When she left Wolf Street it had been with not only anger but also relief at not having to trail any longer in her father’s dark wake. Not to be shocked out of sleep each morning by the knock of the filter against the rim of the sink as he dumped stale espresso grounds. No more shuffle of his slippers with the collapsed heel on the kitchen linoleum.

  Her father’s eyes, magnified behind the lenses of his glasses, froze people. It happened with Gypo, her boxing coach, when her father arrived at the gym with sixteen-year-old Tara in tow. Even Urbano’s closest friend, Vic, who ran the barbershop up the block from the Italian Market social club, fidgeted under his gaze. And when gifts appeared at their row home—pepper shooters stuffed with provolone and prosciutto, squid marinated in garlic and olive oil, bottles of home-distilled grappa—they were left on the front stoop. No one wanted to risk looking Urbano in the eye.

  Connor, on the other hand—how many hours had she spent on the edge of sleep thinking about how they weren’t right for each other? Or maybe their timing was off. Her thoughts orbited around him, never coming to rest. It was exhausting.

  From her bag she took out a notebook. He hated telephones. Back home, he’d hiss up at her window and they’d meet in the alley, then sit atop air conditioner compressors, kissing, while the rest of the neighborhood slept. Letters. He was old-fashioned like that.

  27 September 1997

  Dear Connor,

  I made it! Writing now from this cozy room with log rafters and wooden walls and a kitchenette. You should have seen me boarding that plane in Philly. I kept flipping the ashtray cover in the armrest until someone told me to stop. Then the wheels left the ground, and I could see the city stretched out below, shadow where Passyunk cut through, blip of aircraft warning lights on the radio towers by the Schuylkill River.

  As she wrote, she could see him at a New York City post office, the faintest impression of crow’s-feet appearing at the corners of his gray eyes. A lightness in his stride as he walked to the coffee shop. Finding his favorite corner, using the blade of a knife to slice open the envelope.

  I slept most of the plane ride, then woke to my ears popping, trying to recall this dream I was having of my mother ahead of me on this pebble beach, pushing through the waves. No matter how loud I shouted she wouldn’t turn. Like she just wanted me to follow.

  At the Bellingham ferry ticket counter this guy with a tattoo on his neck said, “Don’t get eaten alive up there. By mosquitoes, bears, or men.” I told him to fuck off. He was surprised and laughed. People seem much less serious here than in Philly. And the sky so much bigger and the trees tall and thick. These wide-open spaces, I’ve never seen anything like it.

  And the ferry! Twice the size of the tugs on the Delaware, a smokestack painted with the Alaskan flag, and everyone on the top deck duct-taping tents to the cement. Chains clattered as the loading hatch banged shut, smoke went up, water churned with the propellers. As the buildings grew small behind us it hit me hard what I was doing. I could hardly breathe, I was so excited.

  The first night there was this storm, and that did it for me sleeping in the tent. But on the third day the sun came out, and this land, Connor! Snow-covered mountains and sand beaches and trees stretching as far as the eye can see. The air so clean and salt-scented. We saw otters on their backs, seals with long whiskers barking as we passed. And the mountains, I can’t get over them, these glaciers jutting out from jaws of rock like swollen blue tongues. Ropey waterfalls falling from cliffs.

  As she wrote she wondered when he would get over his annoyance at her leaving. Sometimes she wished he’d just lose his temper. But that wasn’t Connor. When sh
e told him she was going to Alaska, his face grew pinched. In her family people said their piece, then moved on. Although, when she thought about it, her father stewed—until he raged.

  She looked back down at the letter. It would be a peace offering, she decided. Not an apology, but something close.

  The island is strange, though, not what you think of when you imagine Alaska. It’s a rainforest, and you can feel it and smell it. When I got here my boss picked me up with his dog, quiet and watchful. Kind of looked like a wolf.

  Anyway, I know there’s more to talk about, but I’m so tired. I’m sorry you feel bad. But I miss you very much.

  More soon.

  Youse,

  Tara

  As she addressed the envelope she imagined the snicker he’d give at “youse.” He never broke into full-throated laughter. They were different that way. Although, thinking about it, she couldn’t recall the last time she had really laughed either.

  She licked and stamped the letter, then set it on her nightstand. Turned off the light and pulled the covers to her chin.

  When she closed her eyes she saw South Philly encased in a plastic bubble, one of those snow globes you shook, flakes sifting between the blocks of brick row homes. Vic cutting hair, Connor’s mom at the library scanning barcodes with her red wand. How lucky she was, she thought, to have escaped. Perhaps patience wasn’t her strong suit—but what the hell, impatience had gotten her this far. As grim as the island had appeared out of Fritz’s dirty windshield, shrouded in fog, she still considered her decision a good one.

  A year. Time enough to prove to her father, to Connor, to anyone who doubted her, that she didn’t need another person’s roof. She would find her own home.