Literary Dry Cleaning
Friday, April 24th, 2009
Sherry’s best days were behind her when we met. She was pudgy – a ripple above her waist in her dry-cleaning shirt. An attitude that’d been sharpened in arguments and by disappointment. She showed up at work with her hair wet on her back, for the mid-afternoon shift, and she cussed and smoked the way you’d expect from a junior in high school. Those were the impressions of a junior class college boy who thought he could spend his summer reading his way into an editorship with the campus newspaper. I was right about the reading. I was wrong about her.
In summer 1995, we were clerks together at a small dry cleaning shop in Parkville, Mo. Sherry’s husband was a full-time maintenance worker at the college and she’d taken the job to make some extra pay for their family. She and her husband had a two-year old girl, and while she never said so, I heard a couple heated conversations between them both that told me their relationship was close to an end. I guessed she was pocketing some money away so that she could leave him, the only issue being the job paid poorly and it’d be another half a year before she was ready to pack her things and go. I deduced all this on my own, but she told me later in the summer, after we’d gotten to know each other.
Dry cleaning shops in the summer are possibly the hottest place son earth, maybe the worst job for the season aside from asphalt paving. By the time we took over the counter in mid-afternoon, most of the clothes had been pressed, bagged, and the building was filled with heat. The press operators would switch out with us, but all we did was tag any in-coming laundry and charge for pick ups. We never cleaned a thing, which made the afternoon from 2-5, just before the rush hour lines formed and brought more body heat inside, made for some quiet time. I filled mine that summer with Kurt Vonnegut. I read every book of his I hadn’t read, with the exception of one or two, in that hot cleaning shop with the poor ventilation and a desk radio tuned to 101 The Fox. Sherry’s station.
Sherry was older than me about six years. And she struck me as a teenage girl who wanted to grow up and was pretending at 18 to be 28, only now she was 28 and her emotional development had frozen back at 18. I saw her standing out back behind the high school smoking at 7:15 and getting to class late, stepping cig butts into the pavement in that poor, poor florescent lighting that high schools were lit with then. She was content for a week or so to listen to the radio. She was a Paul Rodgers fan. She told me Alright Now was the sexiest song she’d ever heard. I had never heard it that way. But classic rock is a language I spoke and I think she was surprised a college boy could relate.
When we started together, I was reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, the first book I read that summer. My girlfriend was reading it. I picked up a copy because she told me it was her favorite book and it would become mine. Sherry was content to let me read at first. We didn’t know each other and I think she probably didn’t want to interrupt me. After a few days, she asked what I was pouring over, a simple, “What d’ya reading?” I told her about the story and that afternoon she walked across the parking lot to the library and came back with a copy.
She started reading that day. We talked about the characters on our shifts as though they were soap opera characters, and the story reads that way. Sherry caught up to me – she was reading at home – and she passed me, then finished before me. She knew how the story turned out and held it over my head a little until I’d finished. She teased me for reading so slowly, but I was studying the words. I was trying to read it from a writing standpoint and if you’ve ever read East of Eden, you know how much there is to take in.
I finally finished the book. We shared ideas about the characters and she remembered more about the story in her quick read than I’d comprehended in methodically reading line after line, again and again. A few days later, she had a shouting match with her husband in the parking. It was early in the morning and he had parked the car across several parking spaces out front. I watched through the slatted window and when the talk started to turn violent, I walked outside and saw the little girl strapped in the back seat. The car tore off, burned asphalt.
Sherry quit a few days later. I saw her husband on campus the next year working on landscaping or carrying tools and work materials. He had a plain face as blank as a new sheet of paper, and I can’t explain exactly why – it was just a feeling – but I could tell in his over-politeness that Sherry hadn’t left him. If she had, she’d come back. Maybe she would some day – maybe she has by now. I don’t know. But for a time, a week or more in 1995, Sherry was brighter about literature than a decent college student who wanted to learn.
One message in East of Eden, in part a re-telling of the bible’s Cain and Able story, is that people can overcome their background and choose free moral lives. They can. It just doesn’t happen all the time.
(Note: I changed Sherry’s name to protect her identity.)
