Tiny Fisticuffs of Great Consequence
Alina Stefanescu
There is a memory of childhood summers situated in a small lakeside village, its wooded cabins latticed by hammocks whispering to pine trees. An abundance of chirpy birds. A few lonely beer cans. When the heart craves tiny fisticuffs of great consequence, I dream myself back into that space.
I am fondling these fisticuffs when my ex-boyfriend shows up at the laundromat. It gets awkward in the room outside my head as he unloads his laundry on the large white table. "I'm disgusted," Ernie says. He keeps touching socks and turning them over.
"That's not unusual. According to a study conducted in France, sexually coercive men are highly perceptive when it comes to noticing a woman's disgust." I say this without changing my expression—no delivery, no intonation.
"Don't know what you're talking about, Mira." The tip of his tongue pokes out a little as he speaks. "Not sure why you think I care."
Ernie is not new to the laundromat. Not new to the two plastic chairs near the row of sad-eyed dryers. His green golf shirt has a scarecrow patch on the shoulder.
I'm not new to the laundromat either. What am I? Well, I'm intrigued by disgust, and fascinated by men who mention it. And yes, I'm still interested in Ernie which is why I look at the floor rather than him, and say: "I don't care about anything, you disgusted mammal. I'm just here for the muzak."
Then I close my pumpkin eyes and plop into a terrible plastic chair for serious thinking. I think and think.
I think in a circle then a spiral.
I think about the color of irises.
I think it would be hard to play the piano against itself anywhere except in the first line of a poem, which is precisely the appropriate time and place for opposition.
I love that one poem—and others. Love the cheap packets of detergent labelled free sample. Admire the cutthroat gawk of capitalism as played out in multiple communities and laundromats owned by quiet immigrants.
"Did you hear that?" Ernie says.
He lays his palm like a teacup near his pierced earlobe.
I gaze through the gaping hole in Ernie's lobe and discover a vista that could only be called Ship Porthole Onto Neck.
"It's a rodent. It has to be." He sounds convinced.
"Hush. It's the gravel parking lot out back. Wheels make that sound over rocks."
"Nobody drives here, and you know it," Ernie snaps. Then he realizes that I'm looking through his lobe-hole. He can feel the heat of my eye-ray inches away from his, right near the ear. "Okay Earnest, if nobody drives here, explain the presence of the parking lot." Earnest is his god-given name, but I'm thinking about ear-nests and how he drank beer through twizzlers. When he asks if I drove here, his voice rises to match the shouty-cheery tone of the game how host on the muted screen above the dryers. Muteness is not a form of volume so much as the absence of volume. But I know the gameshow tonal maps by heart. And I didn't drive here. No one drives here, as Ernie pointed out in an earlier point he is using to make the present one. I am pretending not to notice or answer. Since I am the absence of joy and petunias, since I am the lack of forgiveness and understanding, since I am both violet-thief and heartbreak, I stand atop the wobbly plastic chair and unmute the television.
Gameshow noise invades the room. Now the onscreen shrugs have sounds attached to the moving shoulders. The game show stalls. Neither contestant knows the answer. Canned laughter continues. Followed by a dentures commercial.
"Check it out, good news in neurology," I nod toward the screen.
Ernie ignores me. He nudges a laundry basket with his shoe in search of small furry mammals with large teeth.
"That's right, Ernie, there is great news on the neurological front. Scientists discovered the mechanism that enables mice to ignore the sound of their own footsteps."
"Hell, etc. I didn't know that mice could do that."
"Sure. We all can."
"Not me. I know the sound my feet make on the floor and it bothers me. Thump thump." He stomps twice to test the sound.
The noise from the screen and Ernie's stomp-test invigorates me. I feel alive for a moment—the world is still racuous, still beating, still being stupid.
The alive-feeling vanishes when Darla walks in.
"I'm here to nap," she says, and proceeds to remove items from a duffel bag like a middle-schooler playing house. Then she lies on the floor near the double-dryer and closes her eyes. This lasts for two minutes before Darla fake-wakes, unrolls a neck pillow, and starts doing stretches. In a matter of seconds, she opens that hot-pink mouth and says: "I didn't realize Tamar disguised herself as a Romanian orphan and seduced her father-in-law, Judah, to get a son out of him! Crazy how things never change."
She addresses her comments to the partly blind janitor whose cane clicks across the floor in rapid ejaculation. His eyes are bandaged from recent surgery. "The Lord's hot tongue is all," Darla says, going from hustle to prophecy in less time than it takes to start a car.
"Hush Darla." Ernie sounds tired. "Stick your candle under a bed and let the man clean in peace."
"Holy hell, Ernie, do me the favor of twinkling right out."
As Ernie and Darla argue, I think about the town without a name. The staggering honeysuckle bushes and tiny violets with heart-shaped leaves. The weeds ruined the Garden, and that's why the rains flooded the creek and the fields. I think my mother loved my father but chose to dream rather than to leave him. She knew she'd leave him in real life. So she dreamt. And did dishes. There was the parole officer. The poet. The dice.
*
Last year, there was drama with Darla. According to her testimony, Darla never meant to leave the glock loaded. She was going to take a fast piss. All that orange juice she drank got entered as evidence. It took less than three minutes to pee and wash her hands. It took one minute and four seconds of toilet patience and unrolled tissue until she heard the gun go off. One single shot.
The only other human present in the house was her seven-year-old niece, Darla, Jr. Dead on impact. The bullet went through Darla Jr.'s head and knocked a Mardi Gras poster from the wall. The cat was startled.
"It's bad luck to break glass," Darla told the judge.
My mouth hung open when Darla first told me about it; I couldn't fathom how Darla's luck could be any worse.
"I rue the day I named her Darla," Darla's sister said in a fit of mourning. The funeral was at Happy Garden Cemetery. The first grave in Schlite.
"That's how we knew we were a family," Darla explained. "Darla Jr. brought us together. We purchased the three adjoining plots. I believe one day we'll be buried together forever. Bearing ringworms and leaf debris to heaven."
Speaking of family, Darla didn't really have one.And Ernie didn't have much of a heart when he almost had grief-sex with Darla on accident. They kissed and gave up. Watched old horror movies and got in a fight about Hitchcock's meter movement. But he was my boyfriend at the time, and Darla Jr.'s death changed everything. Except Darla.
The laundromat is quiet. Darla and Ernie have stopped arguing. I write the word lovesick on my arm in black ink. Ernie listens to music on his iphone. Darla does calisthenics. She pauses after every stretch sequence to add uninvited commentary.
"The ghost of Jane Fonda is not dead yet," I think as Darla gabs about how God works in unforeseen wonders. As Darla pummels us with questions and affidavits. Say, wasn't it a blessing that Darla Jr. died before being molested by the pedophile neighbor who was arrested last week for multiple molestations up and down the street? Investigations are ongoing. The evidence of affection is circumstantial. Everything she says sounds like a poster.
I return to the Chinese wall between my mind and my memory of the town I can't forget. Why we went there. Why my father never came back. Why it doesn't exist.
"Children are a terrible idea," my mom told her best friend as they adjusted their scheduler to work the same shifts at the hospital. They bonded in their role as nurses, with the particular distinction of hating what mom called "difficult patients," namely, the ones who cried at night or needed assistance. All of us, at some point.
Eventually, Ernie finishes drying his whites.
I pour my dry, hibiscus-scented laundry into a white trash bag.
We leave the laundromat together, loosely.
We leave Darla doing stretches. Darla annoying the janitor. Darla talking about a dream of getting swept into the ocean and attacked by poisonous squid.
Outside, the sun is trying to set—no colors, only a leak of peach light near the roadway. Ernie says it looks bleak. But we should get dinner anyway. He says we should get dinner that is not gas-station pizza since he's going gluten-free for the day. He says he's not scared of the ocean—not the Atlantic or Pacific at least.
"Let's go to the Punjabi place," I suggest. We love the owners. It is love that makes us realize we could scare away customers by lugging our laundry inside. Ernie grabs my bag and begins to consolidate our clothes. One bag is less intrusive than two.
"It still looks like trash."
"Right you are, Mira. It looks pretty trashy. The trash bus comes around in the morning so we missed today's pick-up. I think our laundry is safe from the sanitation department. Follow me." I follow him with my eyes. I watch Ernie deposit our clean clothes next to the dumpster behind the Punjabi restaurant. His legs look longer, less cocky, more wretched in a good way. He scans for cars as he saunters over the crosswalk, and then blows a stay-here kiss to the laundry. "We won't be eating all night!" he shouts at me.
I spy the hole in his ear from across the street.
*
At the restaurant, Mrs. Patel gives us free roti. She and her co-owner husband are negotiating a difficult divorce. I lay my hand beneath my chin like a memorable statue, and listen as she describes how Mr. Patel drifted off.
"Was like raft bobbing away," she says, without a trace of vindictiveness. She motions with one hand slowly up and down toward the front door, her face undone by wonder. "Bobbing off," she whispers. "Bobbing off and away . . . ."
"I hope when I divorce I'm as beautiful in the broken metal as you," Ernie says to Mrs. Patel. "You are married?" Mrs. Patel opens her eyes wide, disbelieving. Then she looks at me, and back at Ernie.
"No. But when—and if—I get married, I'm statistically likely to divorce. It's in the palm of my demographic as well as my personal stars. Cheers to staying amazed, y'all."
Mrs. Patel moves to a different table with a solitary female, scoots onto a small wooden chair, begins the same story. I overhear the bobbing and bobbing, only this time a boat has replaced the original raft.
Ernie smiles at me from under his bulbous eyebrows.
I stay statuesque. I am a statue that wants to be touched. A statue that sends electromagnetic waves to bring Ernie's hand to my body.
Our laundry is mixed, and possibly in a dumpster.
"Did I ever tell you about the town I remember but can't find on the maps?" "Shit no, Mira you never did. What's the name?"
"That's the part I can't remember. It's just, like, tiny fisticuffs of great consequence." Ernie’s knee kisses mine under the table. His eye-rays slam into mine. There is no lightning when he says, "Let's do it then. Let's go there."
But there's this town I'm inventing to hold us, and clean laundry in a bag along the way.
ALINA STEFANESCU was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020). Her pœtry collection, DOR, won the Wandering Ængus Press Prize. Alina's writing can be found in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, and World Literature Today, among others. More online at alinastefanescuwriter.com.
“Tiny Fisticuffs of Great Consequence” first appeared in Pontoon, Malarkey’s infrequently published literary journal, which is available as a PDF and in print.
