FITTED SHEET

A story by

Dennis O'Rourke

     He could pinpoint the moment that he first said it, years ago, when he was living with a girlfriend, what was her name? He couldn’t remember, but she was always on him about being a slob, throwing his clothes around, dirty or clean, made no difference; fouling the bathroom sink with shaving detritus, and so many other things that men are guilty of, things that vex women, sometimes sending them into a silent paroxysm of anger till they are gradually worn down by the behavior and the years.
     One afternoon she insisted that he help her fold laundry. He grumbled, but followed her to the washer and dryer in the spare room. She gave him the bed sheets to fold. He folded the flat sheet awkwardly, but got it done. After trying to match the ends of the fitted sheet, and after turning it over and around, he crumpled it up in a ball and set it down. She told him there was a way to fold it and tried to show him how. It was hopeless. He made no effort to watch her or follow her instruction. He yawned.
     “Baby, the day I learn how to fold a fitted sheet is the day I die.”
     He liked the line and he used it again and again, making up variations on it, as well. It soon expanded into his response to the likelihood of something happening.
     “Oh, yeah, sure, that will happen the day I learn to fold a fitted sheet. And that’ll be the day I die.”
     It was an unusual metaphor and caught people’s attention. Some thought it clever.

*     *     *     *

     He was in a cheap hotel in Memphis on the last leg of a long, sales road trip. A winter weather watch was in place for the city, windy and cold with an abundance of freezing rain. He had settled his business with one client on the phone, and stood looking out the window at the dark sky. He had a few hours to kill until his dinner meeting at seven. The TV cable was out and he had forgotten to get a newspaper. He turned around and viewed the pile of dirty clothes spilling out of the two suitcases on the floor, and sighed. He needed a clean shirt for dinner. There was a coin laundry two blocks from the hotel. Might as well, he thought. If anything, just to get out of this room.
     He stripped a pillowcase off and pushed his clothes into it, put on his coat and grabbed his umbrella. In a few minutes he was out on the street, the freezing rain pecking at his face, so much so that he began to rethink the journey. But there was no getting around the need for a clean shirt, and besides, he had already covered a block, and could see the Laundromat just ahead. As he approached he noted that it was poorly lit and at first he thought it closed. But the dirty, glass door yielded to his shoulder and he went in. A small, rusted bell hanging by a string at the top of the door clanked against the glass. It was cold and damp inside. The machines were old and several had Out of Order signs. The walls were yellowed and littered with flyers and posters with announcements of local events, many of them months old. A cork board held some ten or twelve tattered business cards. The room seemed deserted and that suited him fine. He was averse to idle conversations in places like this. It occurred to him that he hadn’t been in a coin laundry in years.
     He slipped five dollars into the change dispenser mounted on the wall and scooped up the quarters. He bought a box of soap powder, dumped it in a washer with his clothes, and set the machine to running. Then he sat down, looking around for something to read. There was nothing. He began drumming his fingertips on both knees and tapping his feet.
     The door opened, the bell clattered. An elderly woman entered, dragging an impossibly large laundry bag. He stood up quickly to help her. She gave him the bag with a nod, but her face was so leathered and wrinkled, it repulsed him. And the bag was heavier than it appeared. How far had she dragged it? There were no scuff or sidewalk marks on it, and oddly, it was dry. He looked over the top of her head and said cheerily enough, “Well, which one? Where to?”
     She motioned to the back of the room.
     She led the way. She was five feet, wrapped in an old black coat, and had a red and black checkered babushka, knotted tightly around her chin, that covered her thick, white and steel-gray hair. She wore a pair of old fashioned black rubber boots, wet, that squeaked on the tile floor. They came to the back of the room and she signaled for him to put the bag on top of a washer.
     “Anything else I can do for you?” he asked. “Do you need change for the machine or soap?”
She looked up at him with unfocused, milky-blue eyes and shook her head. He thought he heard her groan softly and of a sudden he felt awkward and then somewhat nervous. He lifted his hand slightly to wave farewell, mumbled, Okay then, and quickly headed back to the seat in front of his machine. Once there he sat down and felt the uneasiness leave him. The minutes went by. He forgot the old woman. He closed his eyes and nodded off till he awoke to find himself tipping from the chair and with the unsettling feeling that he had just dreamed something unpleasant. He stood up and went to the machine. It had jammed and stopped in the rinse cycle. He cursed. It was half-filled with water. He blindly pushed buttons and knobs, but couldn’t get it to work. The only thing for it was to move the clothes into the next machine and start again. He got more change and another box of soap, and initiated the whole process once more, trying to cool his temper. He closed the lid and listened as the machine got satisfactorily underway.
     He glanced to the back of the room and saw the old woman standing, folding her laundry. Had he been asleep that long that she had washed and dried everything? She stopped and looked in his direction and then she beckoned to him. He pretended not to notice at first, looking instead out the window at the dark, rain-lashed street, and feeling the cold wind slip through the glass door. At last he turned back and found her still waving for him. He idly, nervously tapped the top of the washer once and walked to the back of the room. It seemed to be even darker than when he had first ushered her down there. It was stiflingly hot, but she hadn’t removed the old black coat or the kerchief. White linen was piled up on the machines on either side of the one she was using. One pile was small and neatly folded, while the other, large and slipping to the floor, waited its turn. She picked a ball of it from the latter pile and motioned for him to hold out his hands. He did and she placed part of the bundle in his hands and stepped back pulling the linen out to its full length, holding it as wide apart as her small arms would allow. When he did the same, and saw what he held in his hands, a sharp intake of breath caught a wad of saliva in his throat, and he choked.
     It was a fitted sheet.
     The old woman hissed at him, in a dry, coarse rasp, and impatiently shook her end of the sheet, holding it up and gesturing for him to watch how she put it together. But he couldn’t seem to recover from the choking; his breathing was suddenly short and labored and he felt a tightening in his chest that he had never experienced, as if a hand was slowly squeezing his heart. His arms were heavy, but his hands shook as he brought the ends together. She was tucking one end into itself and motioning for him to do the same. The lights around them flickered and died, leaving only a solitary, naked bulb above and behind the old woman’s head. He could hear himself wheezing and he felt his legs giving way. She pulled on the sheet and drew him closer as if to fold it in the middle between them. He was unable to resist and he stepped forward.
     When she lifted her head he found himself looking down into shapelessness, into an abyss; he tried to take in a breath but felt the maw in front of him pull the air away from his mouth, and pull him closer. A sewer stench filled his nostrils and he began to gag. Then he saw a brown, wrinkled face forming, like old tree bark, eyes black and wide, the mouth hanging open, revealing yellow teeth and a long stream of drool. He was gripped by mad fear, by terror. He tried to cry out, but could not. When he looked down, the sheet was folded perfectly in his hands.
She turned toward the pile again, pulled another sheet out and beckoned to him. He placed the folded sheet down on the pile and reached for the one she offered, even though everything inside him, his entire being was screaming to run, run, for God’s sake, run.
     He reached out for the sheet and took it in his cold hands, even as his entire body trembled. He was sweating profusely. He held the sheet in a ball until suddenly he heard a voice in his head urging him to drop it and run, run. He was about to pull away when he felt hard, cold fingers grasp his wrists. His heart thundered. He looked down at his feet and found that the sheet had enveloped his legs and was slowly moving up his body. He looked full into the horror of the old woman’s face and finally he screamed. This had an astonishing, liberating effect upon him. He felt as if he were shaking something heavy off himself.
     The old woman’s mouth opened in silent laughter, her thin shoulders shook, her grip on his wrists tightened. He kicked his feet against the sheet, caught the tip of it and pulled it down with the toe of his shoe. He was free of it and he cried out again. With a desperate effort, one that he was sure would be his last if it did not succeed, he wrenched his arms away from the old woman’s grip, a grip that now felt like steel claws.
He spun around, tripped, but reached his arms out in time to prevent him crashing into a machine. He shook the sheet off the one leg and ran, ran like a madman to the front door, past the coin changer and the soap powder dispenser, past the machine that was gently churning his clothes in the wash cycle, bursting out the glass door so hard that the stringed bell came loose and followed him several steps down the street. He was gasping for air. He did not look back.
     After an hour at the hotel, most of it under a hot shower, he gained some measure of control, telling himself that it had been some kind of a dream, or a hallucination. He sprayed the shirt he had been wearing with underarm deodorant and went to his dinner meeting. He was still shaky from the experience and he made the client nervous, finally losing the man’s attention and the account.
     He made no effort to retrieve his clothes from the Laundromat. He left Memphis that night and never went back. And he never again mentioned fitted sheets.

*          *          *          *

<= Return to ORourke Library.com