Woman Ironing, and: Waiting Room, and: Brushes

Abstract

Woman Ironing Back, at last, where I belong: on this bench. Back in front of Degas' "Woman Ironing," my washer woman steadfastly at work, leaning close over a man's white dress shirt, already the balm of her composure beginning to soothe. Her flat iron steams in the steamy room where bed linens hang – ceiling to floor – before a wall of windows, sheets still clinging to dreams and sheer curtains billowing in the warm, cream-colored light. A plump woman in a dark blue blouse, ample rose apron – each press of her iron, rhythmic and composing. How many blues have been shaded throughout the man's shirts, one set off to the side of her work table, pressed and folded, those folds exact, and exact the starch in its high collar. She reaches for the next, though surely she must know at the ballet this evening or the races tomorrow afternoon, Monsieur's shirt will barely make an impression, at best will merely reappear as a smear of white paint. [End Page 54] Waiting Room They must have been adding up – all the addling portrait stares, Samurai swords, slashes of black across stretched canvas. And the man I'm with who won't leave a museum till he's read every inscription. He's galleries behind and we still have two levels to get through. Yet as I come into this unfurnished room – Chapter House from a Benedictine priory not far from St. Germain du Bois – all that eases. Here, the one place where those medieval monks could speak – who was to do what for the week, the year. Their lives like the limestone bricks wedged into this vaulted Romanesque ceiling – numbered, dismantled, transported, then reassembled inside a new space in this city where Elizabeth Bishop once waited for her Aunt Consuelo. An enclosure, still ordering the lives of anyone who enters. This empty room where the I that I am is now coming back. [End Page 55] Brushes In China, the first were made for writers – rabbit hair wrapped round with the hair of deer and sheep. Ogishi demanded feelers from around the rat's nose and hairs from the kingfisher's beak. The early handles were mulberry stems. Soon, official documents could be written only by scribes holding red lacquer handles. By the time ivory was required, writers kept them in gold jeweled boxes. They say it took fifteen years to master how to hold one. Even children at play with their chopsticks, trying to pick up just one grain of rice, were learning the art of longing – that implement the only ferry now to the other side of desire.