With everything shut, everything’s perfect, as if nothing ever went soiled, gone spoiled, as it was and has been clean forever, without taint; she’s talking to herself pure from the very beginning — all that’s dull the life and the knifing made sharp upon the whetstone of her tongue, foods wrapped to keep in her skin, how she’d always served, never served herself, never been served herself, that’s if you forget Wanda and how in her high mighty she daily does. Which is terrible, makes her feel what, slighting, mistaken, and ill. But now she opens a drawer, and leaves it open to feel it, the sin.
In the drawer are the towels, and there folded responsibly, neatly, under the towels, the rags, the ripped pieces of old white dress shirts gone inked, skiddled underwear spangled with monsters. Patched together and held torn with sop. Rags once engaged as veils to hide the about to be wed, the knotted napkin she’d held with her husband for dancing at their reception, then once slit a hole with scissors it’s for knowing each other later that night, while hiding the nakedness, pleasure. And under all the rags folded below the towels at the very rooting bottom of the stack and there almost stuck to the plastic lining of the drawer is the Rag — the dirtiest rag, the unmentionable, the secret, the rag best forgotten, for mistakes made and of them.
This had been a napkin, from her wedding, their wedding, from the banquet or maybe it was a cateringhall she didn’t want it at but — a long story — from the table, from the very placesetting of the mensch she’d thought of as her father, zichron l’vracha as they say, when he was still alive and married himself to her mother: once white (the tablecloths had been offblue, as if ordered prestained, used or rented), this unwashed, neverwashed Rag’s unmentionable as much say as her underwear’s sexy or not, it’s a secret; at most she shakes it out outside, or now in winter off either the screenedin or windowed porches; how she can’t ever wash it, mustn’t, she needs it like this, needs the history, the past and its record of stains and grains — if it were to be found, she thinks it would turn
Now, the Rag’s as hard as a plate and its corners, its edges like blades, as sharp as a shard — as if a piece of the glass it’d wrapped that Israel had broken underfoot at their wedding (whose wine had been cleanedup with whatever’s around).
Hanna replaces the other towels atop, takes the top placed to do the dishes, with which to dry them, Israel’s undershirt shmatte — with it draping each object as if magic or fragile, to decide: which is a bowl and which is a plate, deep and with a stiffly high lip she’s not sure; only to scrape whatever’s been missed by the dishwasher, the machine and not Wanda, her neither — sauce stuck, a crumb caught. Holding a serving of silver, a platter, up to the light; the last to be replaced before darkness, the darkness of its appropriate drawer: she looks at her face looking at her, as if asking whose fault, misdirection; the platter’s edge a rose garland, she likes how it frames her face, which in turn frames the eyes: for a lighter brow, she tilts from; for fuller lips, she tilts toward. That stain, the remains of the afternoon, the morning’s meal ingrained: reflected at forehead, this mole made from a freckle, a kinder’s pox or the swelling of hives, must scrub it away — steelwool as if it’s been shorn from her thighs, grown between them…
Hanna replaces the knife from the floor to the sink to the towel to dry at the edge of the sink and now to its own drawer again, which she shuts; she takes a new towel from the other, adjoining, runs an edge around each tine of a servingfork, finished with the drying; until, she’ll begin a new meal, which begs a new wash.
