Clean Laundry

Hi. My name’s Ginna. I was born on May 30, 1954, in Memorial Hospital in Wilmington, Delaware. That same day, a litter of possums was born in our basement. We infants drew the attention of the local newspaper, and we got our first ink.

It is the Cold War. We like Ike. I am skinny, painfully shy, imaginative and nervous. I have short, white-blonde hair with bangs that Mrs. Russo has cut all the way up to my hairline. I am unpopular at school. The administration of my northeastern private school always assigns me to the “slow” class sections.

Summers are green. We toughen up our bare feet before it’s truly warm enough to remove shoes. We catch lightning bugs and sell them to the DuPont Company, a dollar per hundred. From dawn to dusk we roam free, exploring every crevice of our shaded old neighborhood.

I have three friends. Lisa is descended from one of Wilmington’s wealthiest clans. She is fat now, but later she becomes anorexic. Her mom is a drunk and her father detests her, but he likes me. He talks about “niggers” but I don’t know the word. At dancing class Lisa is sought after as a partner. Meanwhile, in party dress and white gloves, I sit in a folding chair, swinging my patent-leather-shod feet. Maria is one of the DuPonts. She is kind and patient: the best kind of friend a person could have. Her father is a drunk and her sister retarded. And Barbara is full of life and fun and laughter. Her father abuses her but we don’t know it.

I can’t spend the night at their houses because I’m afflicted with homesickness so profound that I can’t bear to be away from my parents. My parents are loving, effervescent and creative, but exceptionally strict. Young opinions are forbidden, and behavioral perfection is expected. When we fail, the punishment involves Dad’s leather belt. My two siblings and I sometimes break the rules, but I’m the only one who gets caught. That’s because Kate and Jay have something I don’t: the capacity to lie.

I believe in two things: that God will punish me, and that I will become the wife of a nice businessman. Ozzie and Harriet’s life is all I want. In my fantasy future, I see myself hanging diapers on the clothesline on a freezing, sunny December morning; as I watch steam rise from the clean laundry, I am gloriously happy.

I inhabit a land with invisible yet impenetrable boundaries. It’s not entirely safe, though. The occasional adult male is drawn to my innocence, fracturing it.

Voices

A block from my house is a working-class Irish and Italian Catholic neighborhood where people pronounce words differently than I do. It’s strange, because otherwise we seem the same. The two elderly women in their forties who work for Grannie also have accents. They’re from a place called England (one of them survived the Titanic) and I love listening to them talk. I try speaking like they do, but it doesn’t work. Since we look similar, I don’t think their speech patterns have any significance beyond the words.

My other grandparents, B and G, live in Virginia where Dad was born. Because my name is Virginia, my uncle often jokes with me: “It’s lucky your father wasn’t born in Kentucky!” Even though they’re my grandparents, B and G don’t talk like I do. They talk like my uncles and cousins who live near them.

Like Grannie and Granddad, B and G also have people who work for them. “Servants,” Mom calls them. I get this new word mixed up with another one — “slave” — but Mom says they’re not the same. Otis, Mamie and Lizzie have very dark skin, and glossy like Dad’s business shoes that I shine for him. At first it’s really hard to understand them when they talk, but I start to get Lizzie’s meaning after a while. It’s not only their accents that are different, but the kinds of words they use, and their tone: more vivid and spirited than my quiet, proper family.

I get the feeling, I think from my grandparents, that Mamie and her family are not quite as human as we are. I wonder if they’re not as sad when someone they love dies. I’m not sure how I’m getting this message, but it’s coming from somewhere. Maybe it’s when my uncle kids around about that Otis spends more time in jail than out. Maybe it’s the times my grandmother, whiskey in hand, insists that “Lizzie is my best friend” when I can tell that’s not true. I spend a lot of time thinking about this. Something bothers me but I don’t know what. No one else in my family seems to notice. I don’t know why Otis and Mamie look angry sometimes. I don’t know how they all live together in that dark, one-room cottage next to my grandparents’ big house.

I adore Lizzie. She’s around thirty, tall and slender and shinier than the others. Whenever we go to Virginia, I run to the kitchen and I fling myself into her arms the second I can get away from my grandparents. She hugs me really tight. She laughs and lifts me into the air. But when she puts me back down I can tell she’s sad about something. I just know it. I sit on the floor and listen to Mamie and Lizzie and Otis talk and laugh. I’d give anything just to stay in there all weekend and eat Eskimo Pies. But, no: Before long Mom always makes me go sit politely and quietly on the sofa with my boring grandmother who doesn’t like kids much. “Come on now, Gins. You can’t have your grandparents think you like Lizzie more than you like them!”

Pivot

Ten years later the Civil Rights Movement is in full swing and I begin to understand and have words for the nameless thing that had troubled me for so long. Ten years later, they find Lizzie dead in the field behind her cottage. She’d bled to death after cutting her arm on a window. People guess she’d been running from something, and they think it might have been from something in her imagination. They say the problem was that she drank a lot.

I will never forget Lizzie. She was kind to me in a world that wasn’t kind. The small glimpse she gave me into her culture — its vitality and originality — was the first spark to my interest in people from other “worlds.” And that sadness I sensed but didn’t comprehend was my first awareness of social injustice.

I graduated from high school a year early, so desperate was I to leave the insular world of Delaware. I wanted to live in a place that was more culturally rich. I moved to New York City.

Over the years I’ve had the good fortune to get to know people from all over: from the hollers of West Virginia to the mountains of Nepal, from a tiny village on a Greek mountaintop seven hours from the nearest road to a bustling Buddhist shrine in Lhasa, Tibet. These cultural opportunities have been among the pinnacles of my life. Each experience has changed and expanded my vision.

It’s been a long time since the birth of those five possums and me. The road from insulation to diversity has been challenging and rewarding. I wonder what Lizzie would have thought had she known she was the source of my journey.