Summer Light by Roxana Robinson

Author:Roxana Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of New England

Nine

Laura spent the afternoon cleaning out the linen closet. It was precisely the kind of job she needed: quiet, finite, sensible. She had reached the limit of her emotions. The situation downstairs was beyond her; she turned her attention toward restoring order in the linen closet. She carried pile after pile of the fouled sheets down to the laundry room. This was a dreary place, with dark-green walls and a concrete floor; it had been built for servants, and not favorite servants.

Laura had found Sheba in a closet. They had not discussed Sheba’s crime. Laura had carried her gently downstairs, the velvet limbs rigid with alarm, and let her go in the laundry room. The cat leapt stiffly onto the floor and hurried toward the wall, her body low to the ground in a flattened trot. When she reached the wall, Sheba did not stop but flowed along it until she reached more shelter, the unpainted metal legs of the old wash tubs. Here Sheba curled up, her tail neatly covering her front feet, in case that might help. The Kitty Litter box was on the other side of the room, near the door outside, but, when Sheba’s head turned in that direction, her golden gaze passed through it like sunlight through a pane of glass. She did not admit its meaning.

Laura made a sign for the door: PLEASE DO NOT LET THE CAT OUT. She went back upstairs with a bucket of soapy water and ammonia to start on the shelves. The acid smell of the ammonia was a relief to her. She scrubbed fiercely at the shelves.

Pia came and stood in the hallway, her short curve of blond hair bright in the sunlight. She swayed back and forth, hands in her blue jean pockets, balancing on the balls of her bare feet. She said nothing.

“Hello,” Laura said finally. “Want to help?”

Pia nodded, pleased.

She saw her aunt as glamorous, a city woman, rich and temperamental. Pia herself would not have dared temperament. She knelt and took a sponge, rubbing at a darkened patch on the wood.

“Pew,” she said, “this really stinks.”

Laura scrubbed, two shelves above her. “We weren’t allowed to use that word. When we were little.”

“Pew?”

“Stinks.”

“Stinks,” repeated Pia, testing the newly important word. “I like it. It sounds like just what it means.”

“It does,” agreed Laura.

Three times she made the long trip downstairs to the laundry room, changing loads of sheets, refilling the bucket.

“Clean water,” she told Pia, “that’s the most important thing.”

“Do you like to clean?”

“I don’t do it much,” said Laura, “so I don’t mind it.”

“Yeah,” said Pia. “We do our own.”

“I did my own when I was your age,” offered Laura, as though freedom from cleaning was something she had earned with age, instead of through marrying rich.

“Well, I hate it,” announced Pia, who then wondered if she sounded rude. “But I don’t mind this.”

“It’s always more fun to work in a strange house.”

“But what do you do, then?” asked Pia suddenly, as though, without housecleaning, Laura’s day must stretch blank and unrelieved before her.

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