Giovanna's 86 Circles: And Other Stories

Between the Sheets

Between the Sheets T he morning low was ninety-two degrees, but the temperature in the hospital laundry room started to rise as soon as hot steam escaped from the open lids of washers faster than smoke out of a chimneystack. The steam spread when the wet loads were carried over to the dryers, and soon the laundry was floating in the middle of a cloud passing through. It felt as though we were all playing a game of hide and seek. I saw little patches of the room but mostly just a hint of what was there—like Bonita, the girl in my tenth-grade gym class. I saw her looking down and knew she must have been reaching into the washer to pour detergent, but I saw only her brown eyes surrounded by a veil of steam like a bride before her husband lifts it up to kiss her. Or I saw just her hands as she folded pajama tops and bottoms. It seemed like she was pinching at the air over and over again. Everybody in the laundry room looked as if they were going through the motions, miming their jobs because the whiteness of the sheets and the pajamas and the bandages disappeared into puffs of steam. Even the industrial-sized washers and dryers hid behind mist. The laundry room had no ceiling or floors, nothing ahead of me, and nothing behind. All I saw were the feet I stood on, laced up in 12 13 my new Converses for gym class, and the cloud that kept passing through. I imagined I was in the heavens, standing on the wing of an airplane because of the jet-engine sound the washers and dryers made. I wanted to feel the breeze from being in flight, to fly away from the rows of dryers, each one a rotating circle of heat. As if one burning sun in this world wasn’t enough. Although I couldn’t see, I knew exactly when Bonita took a load out of the dryers. I felt the current of air, lava-like molecules escaping with the momentum of a herd of elementary school kids stampeding through the doors to the playground when the recess bell rang. The dryers were so hot you couldn’t touch the metal snaps on the clothing with bare hands unless you wanted to burn your fingertips . That’s why, as hot as it was in the laundry room, Bonita wore garden gloves when she folded pajama tops. By late morning, the temperature in the room broke 105 degrees. I wrapped my hair up in a tighter bun, changed into another cotton top, and pulled at the frayed edges of my hip-hugger jeans so they’d stop sticking to me. Still that didn’t keep me from sweating where I never sweat before—in the backs of my knees, behind my ears, on my spine, in my belly button, between my toes, wherever skin met skin. And when my sweat began to drip, it felt as if bugs were crawling all over me. Everyone in the laundry carried hankies to wipe themselves off when they got too wet because our supervisor said she didn’t want us dripping sweat on clean clothes. The steam and heat combined sometimes took my breath away. I had to fight to get it back by inhaling as if I were diving underwater to the bottom of the deep end of a pool. I watched my waist expand and contract. I didn’t like to breathe through my mouth in the laundry room because it made my throat so dry. I tried it once. It felt as if a cotton ball was stuck down there, and I couldn’t swallow it. No matter how much water I drank, the cotton ball came back. Just as I managed to suck in another breath, I thought I saw something strange happen. The color of the water in a washing machine with a load of sheets turned from a sudsy white to red. Pure red. Between the Sheets “Did you see that?” I asked my partner, Pina, short for Giuseppina , as we were about to feed a wet sheet into the rollers to be pressed. “What just happened to the sheets in the washer?” I held back my corner of the sheet to point but had to let go as Pina put hers between...