The birds are chirping away, their shrill cries leaking in through my cracked bedroom window. I get up to do the laundry. As I pass by the kitchen I eye the boxes of cereal lined like books on a shelf. I grab a box of cinnamon Life and look at the photograph of the child happily digging into a glistening bowl of latticed cereal squares. I pour myself a bowl and sit down at the kitchen table, looking out my front window at the busy street already bustling with Saturday morning joggers and speed-walkers floating and bouncing past in their swishy windbreaker outfits. I wish someone would take a photograph of me right now: a camera from the sidewalk pointing into my apartment at me with my pensive, serious look on my face while I’m lapping up the soggy Life squares from a neon-pink plastic Ikea bowl. There are unwashed dishes piled in the sink in the background and a knocked over saltshaker lying on the dirty tablecloth in the foreground. If this photograph were taken, it’d be a more earnest cover of a cereal company that calls itself Life. Perhaps there’d even be a house-fly buzzing past my face.
I have the slimy feeling of damp cereal, almost-expired 2% milk, and morning breath in my mouth as I start a load of laundry. I place the clothes in hurriedly, paying no heed to the suggestions on the clothing tags. The whirring of the washing machine hums a mechanical tune that entrances me. I stand there reading the wash cycles to myself for a minute, thinking about how profound this cycle is. It could be a religion maybe. The Zen of Laundry. Maybe I’ll write a book about it, perhaps a fictional memoir. I’ll call it Cycles of Addiction: From Full Spin to Rinse and Back, My Addiction to Huffing Tide Concentrated.
I leave the house and walk down to the neighborhood daycare that I work at a couple days a week. I go to collect my check. I mutter promises to myself to not spend it all on something wasteful because I need to start saving to go back to school in the Fall. There’s sweat beading on my nose, sending a scent of apricot bodywash and salty skin up my nostrils. Two elderly men with huge brown-canvas sun-hats are sitting on the front step of the hardware store next-door to the daycare, casually holding a lively chat in Spanish–words I wish I could understand so I can jump in, maybe agree with something they’re saying just to show them I can speak Spanish. But I walk past them into Dani’s Daycare next door.
Dani is calmly placing white styrofoam cups filled with pretzels next to a few children sleeping on mats on the ground. I watch her for a moment, imagining her when she was younger, someone who you know was a beautiful woman. Her eyes are large and youthful, like large green polished marbles. She’s short but athletic in build. She stands up from her stooping after delivering the last cup from her plastic tray, straightening her blue sundress before looking at me and smiling. She puts a finger up to her mouth, telling me to be silent lest I wake up the napping children. She motions me to follow her to the back, which I do. As we weave through the scattered kids, I think about when I’m older, whether I’ll have children one day, whether they’ll be as angelic as these kids seem in their sleep right now.
It’s a little office that I’m led to, the familiar smell of burnt coffee pervading around us. There are pieces of Dani’s life scattered around: a photograph of her daughter framed on her worn brown desk, a sea-green yoga mat rolled up and leaning against the wall, postcards from her many cousins tacked up to a cork-board, a bicycle helmet hanging on the wall. She tells me to take a seat, which I do.
“How are the kids?” I ask.
“Oh, you know, they’re just being themselves…full of energy and things to say all morning,” she says.
“The usual,” I agree.
“I think I’m going to try gardening next week,” she says.
“Oh really? What are you going to plant?”
“Well the kids need something easy to begin with. Something we can grow indoors, that we can place right up against the front window.”
“Are you granting them the right to eat what they grow?”
“Of course! If they’re going to put in the work and effort to see a plant through to the end, then they deserve to reap the benefits.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, here’s your check for last week.”
“Thanks.”
“You bet. I’ll see you Saturday. Don’t spend it all in one place.”
I tell her I won’t and head out, being careful to not step on any sleeping children on my way out. As I close the door, in my excitement to run to the bank and cash my check, I forget about the bell attached to the door and I hear it jingle loudly as I’m walking away. I imagine Dani’s forehead furrow in aggravation as I scurry around a corner.
The air is bright and glistening, like sandpaper. The people are small and fast, like critters. I stop in a bakery and grab a couple Mexican trinkets. They crumble on my lips all flaky and dry as I eat them. It’s a morbid time when I cut through the alleys, with shopping cart pushers with metallic sounds pushing by me glumly. At the bank the air is cool and soft, air conditioned and industrial smelling. I wait in line until my turn, then watch my check go through a little scanning machine and get put into a compartment under the bank teller’s counter. She hands me a receipt that I throw away on the street corner outside. Now my wallet is filled with twenty dollar bills, crispy and bulky.
Another week goes by and I find myself showing a crowd of seven-year-olds how to make macaroni-noodle bracelets. I let them select a color of yarn and then splay out an assortment of different pastas for them to pick out. One boy asks if I can pick the color and noodles for him. I ask him what his favorite color is and he says he doesn’t have one. So I choose green because it’s my favorite color. And I choose mostaccioli because they have larger holes and are easier to work with.
“Give me the macaroni instead,” he says.
“I thought you wanted me to pick for you,” I say.
“Well I want the macaroni.”
“You know, one day, you’re going to have to make up your mind quicker than that.”
That night I have a dream about ordering pizza at a neighborhood parlor. The waitress brings me a steaming pizza with mostaccioli baked under the cheese. When I bite into it it has no taste, just a chewy sensation. I wake up to find myself chewing on my pillow case, with a little bit of dried saliva crusted on my sheets.
Wednesdays are the worst: Dani isn’t there to help me manage the kids, so I must handle things alone. I always fear leaving the front room because of how the neighborhood isn’t, in my mind, trustworthy. I wish that I could lock the front door, but I need to leave it open in case a parent or new client comes. Dani doesn’t want the place to seem like a prison, she says. So I spend my time devising little games for the dozen or so children. I have them play duck duck goose, which they only seem to enjoy for ten minutes or so, when some of them grow impatient because they aren’t ever picked. So I began sitting in on the circle, so that when people tagged me I would always let the duck get away so that I could pick the kids that never got picked. My head would tower above everyone, making even the tallest kid have to jump to tap the top of my head. Other times we break off into groups and they play games like Jenga or Connect 4. I still have a hard time getting them to open up. But I can’t expect much from four to ten year-olds.
One day Dani and I see each other at the farmer’s market. I’m browsing the vendors, deciding what to buy with my limited budget. Dani is chatting with a cheese farmer from just north of the Wisconsin-Illinois border. I take a sample of a white and brown spotted cheese and say hi to her.
“Hey, fancy seeing you here!” she says.
“You’re a long way from home,” I say.
“I had to come down to the center and pick up some things. I’m going on a trip.”
“Really? Where to?”
“My husband and I are driving to Kentucky. The funeral is this weekend.”
“Funeral?” I ask, a little more animated than I felt.
“Oh gosh, I must have not told you. His father died four days ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, send him my condolences.”
The kids notice a change of mood in me that weekend, even though I try to hide my aggravation. I am missing the J Mascis concert and spending my whole weekend working. It’s a rough deal, I think to myself. That I have to work all weekend when I may never be able to see J Mascis again, who is getting quite old. As I’m leading a game of hangman, the kids don’t seem very engaged. I switch to something more lively; I have them all push the tables, chairs, and toys off to the sides of the room and we sit Indian-style in a large circle. Starting with my immediate right, I ask everyone a question, one-by-one.
“What do you enjoy more: laughter or running?”
“What are the best kinds of dreams you’ve had?”
“Do you like the sounds of nails being hammered into wood?”
“How about the sounds of the laundry machine?”
“Are you scared of the dark?”
“What do you think about money?”
“I’m Chinese. What does that mean to you?”
“Feet are what holds our bodies up. But what holds up our minds?”
That night, I have a nightmare. I am in a bed the size of a galaxy, stretching as far as I know, with the blanket entirely draped over my body. I have a third-eye view, looking down at my skinny body under the blankets. Everything is a dark-indigo shade: the sheets, the bedcovers, the blankets, the covers. I feel sweaty and sticky, even in the dream. I want to get out from under the covers. But no matter how much I tug and crawl and grab upwards, I can’t find the end of the covers. My hands yank with all their might at the covers, but I only bunch them up more, until I am weighted down by the gigantic growing bundle of bed covers pinning me to the spot. The mattress begins to soften, making me sink and become engulfed in sheets. When I wake I am shivering. My window is fully open, cold gusts of winds rushing in. I crawl under the covers and shut my eyes tight.
