Short Story Collection
by Smoky Trudeau Zeidel
Copyright 2011 Smoky Trudeau Zeidel
Published by: Vanilla Heart Publishing on Smashwords
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This Short Story Collection by Smoky Trudeau Zeidel in ebook edition for every reading device, through multiple online retailers.
In 1989, Susan Trudeau--the woman who later would become known as author and Earth Mage Smoky Trudeau Zeidel, was struck by lightning. This is the remarkable tale of her ordeal, her struggle to overcome physical injuries that would have killed most people, and her triumph in learning to live a life of joy and inspiration despite chronic pain.
Jack Swanson’s stepmother, Carlotta, makes a fairy tale stepmother look like Mother of the Year. Carlotta walking in on him in the bathroom is the last straw. Just how far will Jack go to rid himself of his evil stepmother?
Does a person have a right to choose their own death, despite the protest of loved ones?
Armondo and Daisy are terribly mismatched. But is their marriage doomed because he is irresponsible, or because she won’t give him room to breathe?
A homeless woman who thinks she's the daughter of Emily Dickinson takes her poetry to the streets, where she finds compassion from some and abuse from others. Goodbye Emily Dickinson puts a face on the homeless in a poignant story about love and loss and the power of kindness.
Purple chenille bedspreads and quail eggs. Mismatched socks and espresso. A lost soul and a free spirit. Can two people find love over breakfast at the laundromat?
Smoky’s Short Stories are Also Available as Individual Stories
Breakfast at the Laundromat
by Smoky Trudeau
He stared.
The machine was a confusion of buttons: warm wash/warm rinse, warm wash/cold rinse, cold wash/cold rinse, hot wash/warm rinse, hot wash/cold rinse. Water level: low, medium, high. Then there were the little cups where the detergent, bleach, and fabric softener were supposed to go, but the illustration on the machine’s lid didn’t look a thing like the cups on the machine itself. Did it matter if the detergent went in the fabric softener cup? Would it work if he didn’t use bleach?
The machine in his condo was old, but at least he knew how to use it. The buttons were labeled darks, whites, colors. He had no idea what temperature the water was for each setting, but his clothes always came out clean. But washing his living room curtains had been a bad idea, because they got all tangled up in the agitator and broke it, and getting Sears to come out to repair it had been one frustration after another. He called the service number on their Website and got a call center in Mumbai, where a polite young woman who said her name was Elaine—as if anyone in Mumbai was really named Elaine—requested his Zip code so she could direct him to the correct service representative, then informed him that according to their records, there was no such Zip code, so she was unable to help him. He’d called three different times and gotten three different Elaines before giving up and calling a local independent repairman who said his name, ironically enough, was Narhari, even though he sounded a whole lot more American than Elaine from Mumbai. Narhari said he could come out a week from next Thursday to fix the machine. So here he was, standing in the Duds ′n Suds Laundromat, a roll of quarters clutched in his fist and a bewildered expression on his face, wondering if he looked as idiotic as he felt.
“You want warm/cold, high water for your jeans.” A slender arm reached around him; a slightly arthritic-looking finger with chipped hot pink nail polish pushed the buttons on the washer. “You pour the detergent in the cup on the left. The fabric softener cup doesn’t work on this particular machine, so you’ll want to watch for the rinse-cycle light to come on before adding it.”
She stepped around from behind him and in front of the washer where he’d put his whites. “This one, you want hot wash/cold rinse. It’s only half full, so set it to medium. And your colored shirts here in this one, you want warm/cold again.”
Again, he stared. His guardian angel of the laundry looked about his age, early fifties maybe, but at the same time, she looked like she’d just stepped out of the 1960s. Her hair, streaked with gray, hung halfway down her back. Lime green flip-flops on darkly tanned feet peeked out from beneath her tie-dyed floor-length skirt, and as she bent over the machines and pushed buttons, her scoop-necked tank top gaped just enough to give him a whisper of a glimpse of what curved beneath. She smelled of vanilla and nutmeg. Like a Snickerdoodle cookie, he thought.
She turned to him and smiled. “They won’t bite you. Really. They’re just machines.” She pointed to the coin slot on a machine. “You put in a buck and a quarter, then shut the lid. It’ll start automatically.”
He knew he should move, should say something. Neither the muscles in his hands nor those in his lips would budge. He stood there, feeling foolish—looking foolish—not saying a word, not budging an inch, just staring at this magical creature who seemed to have materialized from nowhere to come to his rescue.
She reached out and pried the roll of quarters from his hand. “May I?” Without waiting for his answer, she shoved five quarters into a machine and shut the lid. He heard water gushing into the washer as she moved down the line and started his other two machines.
He searched his memory and finally found his voice. “Thanks.” It came out a coarse bark. Like the cat before he barfs up a hairball, he thought. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Thanks. The machine in my condo is broken …”
She smiled. “I recognized the look. There’s always at least one person in here who can’t figure out these new-fangled machines. I’ve rescued at least a dozen from the terrible fate of having to wear dirty clothes because they’d been beaten by a washing machine.”
She gave him a critical look, head to toe. He thought, perhaps, it was an approving look.
“You look like an intelligent guy. You probably would have figured it out in a minute or two yourself,” she said.
“No, I appreciate your help.” He laughed a little, and this time he sounded more like himself than a sick cat. “I’m a musician, not a machine kind of guy. It took me a month to take my espresso machine out of the box because I didn’t want to have to deal with figuring out how to use it.”
He bent down and pulled a battered red-plaid Thermos from a laundry bag on the floor. “Finally, the craving for caffeine won out over my fear of technology.” He grinned, and the smile she returned reminded him of his daughter’s smile when she was ten years old and he’d brought home a puppy. It was a smile of pure joy, with a child-like innocence that made the gray strand of hair dangling in front of her face all the more charming.
She reached into the oversized crocheted bag hanging from her shoulder and pulled out a white, grease-stained sack. “Donuts,” she said. “One jelly-filled, one coconut. I’ll share if you will.”
They sat on two battered plastic chairs that were wedged between the folding table and a game where, for fifty cents, you could win a stuffed animal by grabbing it with a claw and dropping it into a bin. There was only one animal left, a faded green dog whose ear had a tear in it, probably from having been grabbed and dropped one too many times by the claw. While he was loading and trying to figure out how to work the washers, he’d noticed the machine played the same goofy song about every two or three minutes, first in Spanish, then in what he assumed was Chinese, then finally in English so garbled he couldn’t understand the words any better than he could with the Chinese version. The green dog looked lonely, he thought. Kind of wistful. Like he himself often felt.
He opened the Thermos and poured half the steaming espresso into the top and handed it to her. The clock on the wall said it was ten twenty-three.
“That’s funny; I thought it was a lot earlier than that,” he said to her.
“What? Oh, that,” she said, seeing his eyes were fixated on the clock. “That old clock has said ten twenty-three since the first time I came in here a few years back. Owner never bothered to change out the batteries. You want the jelly or the coconut?”
“Either. You choose.” He took a swig of the coffee straight from the Thermos, then accepted the donut she held out to him. “Funny, I almost said I’d take the coconut.”
“I know. I read minds.” She laughed, wrinkling up her nose at him at the same time. “Just joking.” She took a bite out of her donut; a drop of bright red jelly oozed out and dripped onto her shirt. She didn’t seem to notice, or care; he wasn’t sure which. “So, musician, what’s your instrument? Guitar?”
Maybe she did read minds. “How did you know?”
She swallowed the bite of donut and grabbed his right hand, held it up as if to show it to him for the very first time. “Nails. When a guy has long nails on his right hand, he’s usually a guitarist. Classical, I’m guessing.”
“Oh, you’re good; you’re very good,” and this time he was the one who laughed. “This is a good donut. I didn’t get a chance to eat breakfast this morning; I wanted to get here early. Figured I’d beat the crowd. If there ever is a crowd at a laundromat.”
“It can get pretty snarled up in here by ten or eleven,” she said. “And don’t even try to get in here on a Sunday afternoon. The college kids take over the place, washing off the puke they’ve tossed all over themselves drinking too much at the Saturday evening frat parties.”
“Doesn’t seem to keep them from doing the same thing Sunday evening,” he said, trying not to sound as cynical as he felt. “I’m a professor at the university, and sometimes half the frat boys don’t show up to my Monday morning class because they’re too hung over to know their books from their butts.”
She nodded. “Me too. Art History. And you?” At least, that’s what he thought she said. Her mouth was full of donut; she may have said “Methodology Two Can Use,” although he wasn’t quite sure what kind of class that could possibly be. Statistics, perhaps.
“Music of the Baroque Era. Intro to Guitar. Some semesters, the History of Rock and Roll, although I haven’t taught that in a while now. Budget cuts.”
“Tell me about it,” she groaned. He could understand her now; she’d swallowed her donut. “I’m down to two classes a semester. If they cut the art department budget any further, I’ll be doing caricatures on the street corner to cover my rent.”
He’d heard right; it was art, not statistics. He felt relieved, although he wasn’t quite sure why. He took a swig from the Thermos while he considered what he should say next and wondered if she’d shared breakfast with those other poor souls who couldn’t figure out how to run the washers.
“Damn!” She thrust her coffee into his hand, jumped up, and dashed to the end of the row of washers, where soap suds were oozing from the top and puddling on the floor like little cumulus clouds that had somehow gotten lost and wandered into the laundry. The machine was banging loudly and wobbling so badly he thought it would sashay right out the door. She lifted the lid; the wobbling and banging stopped. He could hear her muttering something as she reached in and started pulling out what looked like an enormous purple chenille snake from the washer. She’d pulled at least six feet of the purple viper out of the machine before he realized it was a bedspread that had gotten twisted and tangled around the agitator. He set her coffee on the folding table next to the Thermos, crammed the last bite of coconut donut in his mouth, and went to offer assistance.
“This is why I’m doing my wash here instead of at home,” he said, reaching into the machine and tugging loose a pulled strand of chenille that was wedged under the agitator. “Big chunks of material like bedspreads are too heavy to wash; I broke the agitator on my washer doing living room drapes. You have to send stuff like this to the cleaners when they get dirty.”
“Oh, pish-posh,” she said, untwisting the tangled spread, shaking globs of soapy bubbles loose from its folds. “I wash mine here at least every couple of months. You just have to rebalance the load in the machine every so often while it’s washing.”
She crammed the bedspread back into the machine and shut the lid. After a moment, it started spinning again, this time with a minimal amount of banging and wobbling on the machine’s part.
He picked his way among the clouds of suds that had escaped from the washer and returned to his chair. He assumed she was right behind him, but when he turned he saw her bending over the piles of suds and scooping them up in her arms as if they were piles of autumn leaves. Using her backside to push open the door to the parking lot, she stepped out of the laundry and let the suds fly in the breeze. She slipped back inside, once again marched over to the washer, again scooped up a pile of suds, and again sent them sailing outside. By her fourth trip to the parking lot all that was left of the suds clouds on the laundromat floor was a tiny ribbon of water inching its way toward the floor drain, and the clouds themselves whirled through the air above a shiny new Lexus convertible and a rusty green pickup truck in the parking lot. She whirled and danced among the suds clouds until they drifted off toward the street.
He stared. Enchanted. He’d been married to his ex-wife for more than twenty-five years, and never had he seen her dance in a parking lot. Or wear green flip-flops, for that matter. “Carefree abandon” was not a term that would come to anyone’s mind when describing his ex. He had assumed all women were that way once they grew up, settled down, had kids. Yet here was this exquisite, middle-aged woman, dancing with soap suds in the parking lot of the laundromat.
She danced back inside, plopped down next to him, then leaned over him and grabbed her coffee. Again his senses were filled with the smell of Snickerdoodle cookies. She tossed the last few sips of espresso back as if she was drinking a tequila shot. Rummaging around in her bag, she pulled out a plastic bag filled to bursting with red grapes, orange slices, and strawberries. She opened the bag, popped a handful of fruit in her mouth, then offered it to him. He pulled out an enormous strawberry.
“Good heavens, this is the size of the state of Connecticut,” he said, taking a bite. “Where’d you find strawberries this big?”
“Calabasas farmer’s market,” she said through a mouthful of grapes. “The best market in L.A. if you ask me.”
“Better than Santa Monica?”
She nodded vigorously. “More personal. Plus, lots of free samples. They’re stingy with free samples at Santa Monica. The rinse-cycle light just went on, on that one machine of yours.”
He got up to add softener to the machine. He needed a minute—or six—to clear his head. He’d been gun-shy about women ever since his wife left him two years earlier. Oh, his daughter had tried to get him to date. She’d even coaxed him to sign up for an online dating service. That had been an unmitigated disaster. The first woman he’d met just stared off into space while they stood in line at Starbucks, then bolted out the front door before they’d even ordered. The second woman he met turned out to be a Republican.
But this woman … this woman surprised and fascinated him. Like an egg with two yolks, or finding perfectly ripe figs at the grocery store in February, or fresh basil in a summer salad. He wasn’t sure why food metaphors kept popping into his mind.
She was stuffing the purple bedspread into a dryer. She looked up, saw him looking at her, smiled. He smiled back.
“Books,” she said as they resumed their seats. “For me, it’s the classics, like Hemingway and Salinger. I adore Salinger, especially. Lately, I’ve really gotten into Jose Saramago.”
He stared. He knew he was doing too much staring, but somehow was powerless to stop. “You’ve got to be kidding. I just finished reading Death With Interruptions. Best book I’ve read in years.” He helped himself to a wedge of orange from her fruit bag.
“Me too! Didn’t you just fall in love with Death?”
An elderly Mexican gentleman who had been stuffing his laundry in a washer turned and gave them a horrified look. “¡Muerte! ¡No es bueno!” he muttered. He shook his head, glowered at them once again, then turned back to his own business.
She burst out laughing, a rolling laugh that started as a gurgle somewhere in the vicinity of her toes before erupting loudly from between her lips. It sounded to him like a combination of a train barreling down the tracks and fine crystal breaking. He was relieved his thoughts were no longer food metaphors. “What did he say?” he asked, the extent of his Spanish not creeping beyond ¡hola! and ¡adios!
“Death! Is no good!” she said. “Your rinse cycle just finished.”
She was keeping better track of his washers than he was. He hurriedly emptied the washers, stuffed his jeans into one dryer and his shirts and underwear and socks into another, and returned to find her rummaging in her bag once again. This time, she pulled out two hard-boiled quail eggs, handed him one without even asking if he wanted it. He wasn’t a big fan of eggs, but not sure what else to do with it, he slipped it out of its shell and popped it whole into his mouth. She ate hers, too, then relieved him of his eggshell and stuck it in the now-empty fruit bag.
“Do you always carry a three-course meal in your bag?” he asked, only half joking. He was lucky if he remembered to stick a granola bar in his messenger bag before he left for the university each day, let alone pack a full meal. Especially breakfast. Especially especially if he was going someplace as mundane as the laundromat.
“You never know when you’re gonna need an energy boost,” she said. She hummed a little tune to herself that may have been “Send in the Clowns.” He wasn’t sure. He hoped her choice of tune wasn’t meant to imply anything about himself. When he’d gotten his doctorate, the organist at the graduation ceremony had played that when the graduates were marching in, and he’d never quite gotten over it.
“Judy Collins,” she said.
“Now, how did you know I was thinking that?” He may have been slightly alarmed; he wasn’t sure.
“Thinking what?” she said.
“Judy Collins.”
“What about her?” She grinned wickedly. “Sorry … just yankin’ your chain. My dryers are done.”
She grabbed one of the wheeled laundry carts and shoved it over to the dryers. She pulled the chenille spread from one, then dumped a pile of brightly colored clothing from another on top before she rolled it over to the folding table next to him and began folding. He tried not to look as she folded lacy brassieres; couldn’t help but noticing she had panties with Tweety Bird on them. He picked up the empty donut sack and the fruit bag that now held only two quail egg shells and a bit of strawberry hull, wandered down the row of washers, and tossed it in a trash can before returning to his seat.
“Damn!” She held up a bright pink sock that exactly matched her nail polish. “Why do dryers always eat one sock? Why don’t they ever eat ratty old undies, or stretched out tee-shirts? No, it’s always one sock.”
He shrugged. His dryer at home always spat out fourteen socks. Seven pairs in; seven pairs out.
She folded the last of her tank tops and placed them in her laundry basket. He helped her fold the chenille spread. Then, she was done.
She let out a little chirp of satisfaction. “Ten twenty-three,” she said. “I always finish precisely at ten twenty-three.”
He remembered the broken clock. “Ah, yes … time just stands still at the laundromat, doesn’t it?” He smiled. She was going to leave. He didn’t want her to leave. He wanted a do-over, to turn back the clock to that earlier ten twenty-three when she first reached around him, to sit and eat donuts and fruit and quail eggs with her. He wanted to go outside this time and dance among the soapsuds clouds with her. He’d known her only an hour. It felt like he’d known her forever, like his soul mate from a past life had just waltzed back into his life right there in the laundromat. And he didn’t believe in soul mates.
“Yup. Before you know it, it’ll be ten twenty-three again, and I’ll be back here doing the same thing all over again. Whoever said ‘the only certain things in life are death and taxes’ was wrong. The only certain thing in life is laundry.”
She slipped her purse handle over her left shoulder, then heaved her laundry basket up onto her hip. He wasn’t sure how she put so much laundry in one basket. He was sure he should ask if he could carry it somewhere for her. While he was debating whether that would sound chauvinistic, she bid him a cheery, “See ya, Guitar Man!” and vanished out the door of the laundromat.
He hadn’t asked her name. He’d not given her his. “Damn.” He tested the world carefully, not remembering when he’d last cursed. He liked the sound of it. He’d liked the way she said it so freely; now, he liked the feel of it rolling off his own tongue. “Damn!” he said again, a little louder, a little more forcefully. Like someone who’d just discovered the dryer had eaten one of their favorite socks.
He stuffed his dry clothes into his laundry bags, not bothering to fold them. Who cared if a professor showed up for class in a rumpled shirt. It was practically mandatory they do so. A uniform, of sorts, he thought. He stuffed the empty espresso Thermos into one of the bags and slowly walked the two blocks home.
Inside, he dumped the clothes onto his bed and began to carefully fold. He smoothed the wrinkles as best he could, thought of the flash of breast he’d glimpsed beneath her tank top, decided quail eggs were his favorite food on earth. He picked up a blue Hanes tee-shirt and gave it a hard, angry snap, shaking loose a strange bit of fabric that floated out of the shirt and drifted to the bed below.
He stared. The phone rang; he didn’t bother to pick up the receiver. He was too busy, staring.
A voice boomed over the answering machine. “Hi, this is Narhari, the washer repair guy. Look, I’ve had a cancellation tomorrow at three-thirty, so if you want—”
He grabbed the phone off the jack with his left hand, the hot pink sock from the bed with his right. “I’m here,” he said, and stared at the sock some more.
“Oh, yeah, right … this is Narhari, the washer repair guy, and I’ve had a cancellation—”
“That’s okay, Narhari,” he interrupted. “Turns out, I don’t need you to come after all.”