Zoetrope: All-Story Extra

    The wind bleached the sky outside Rosalie's kitchen window the color of dryer lint. It had howled for seven days. The first day, it whipped the yellow and red leaves into dancing dervishes. The second day, trees shimmied and the topmost branches, stripped of their leaves, twirled west. On the fourth day, all the brittle branches broke from the boles, drummed the bricks of the row houses with the sound of castanets and skipped away. By the seventh day, Rosalie's vine maples, her postage-stamp lawn, and the ashen sidewalks were picked clean.
    Rosalie leaned straight into the raging gale with a basket of wet laundry under her arm. She couldn't stand one more day of listening to the sad drone of her and Jack's clothes, alone in the dryer. The comforting hum of the washer and the whump-whump of wet diapers in the dryer used to fill the house like regular breathing. Now, dust motes floated in the yellow baby's room like lost moths when she passed. Rosalie clung to the clothesline pole, nearly blown off her feet. She pinched open the nose of each wooden clothespin and crammed it full of cloth.
    By mid-morning, the blouses and sheets and towels had nearly danced themselves dry. Rosalie scrubbed the inside of a coffee cup and watched their epileptic shuffles and jerks through the old, crazed glass above the sink. The porcelain under her fingertips felt as bald and fragile as an egg.
    The wind whipped a pair of Jack's khaki pants off the line. The khakis heeled over the hydrangea bush and raced across the lawn and then doubled back to the blouses that hung from the wire, like hijacked citizens with their arms in the air. The pants smacked into one of Rosalie's housedresses, and then the pants and blue flowered dress began a series of slow, suggestive movements against each other. Rosalie blinked. Tango? The dance came into her mind and she shook it off. Jack's pants guided the skirt three steps backwards. The pants paused, and changed direction. Three steps forward. A heartbeat.
    A part of Rosalie's mind flew with the scudding clouds and the whipping sheets. The other part of her mind took in the slow, erotic play of Jack's pants against the blue-gray lilies of the dress. The pants swayed and pushed the folds of the cotton skirt tight across long thighbones that weren't there. There was such tenderness, such repressed passion and sadness in the gesture, that Rosalie would have laid her head down and sobbed out loud if the pants and dress hadn't suddenly shifted to a Texas two-step.
    Rosalie cried out. Jack galloped up the stairs. "What?"
    "Look!" Rosalie pointed to the yard. A blue-striped dress shirt had joined the khakis and now a shirtsleeve guided the housedress at the waist, in a snappy strut.
    Jack's mouth opened, then shut. "It's the wind," he said. "It's never blown this hard." The ensemble shifted from the two-step, to a slow, stately waltz. One-two-three. One-two-three. The housedress bent her arm and rested her sleeve on the raised elbow of the shirt. They dipped and tilted on the lawn and the fabric swirled, as if to the music of invisible violins.
    Around noontime, after discussing whether touching the clothing was safe, Jack and Rosalie ventured into the yard. They wanted to see if wires or unseen strings of a prankster were controlling the movements. But when Rosalie touched the apron, she felt nothing but the lightness of air, and the apron shimmied away from her, as if tickled.
    Helen Hartstone, the widow next door, drooped her long and brooding face over their fence. She cast a jaundiced eye on the clothing. "They're pod people," she said. "Or garden-variety extra-terrestrials." Then Helen rasped a wooden match across the rough-sawn boards. The match flare lit the dark circles and crow's-feet and papery creases around her sad eyes. Helen spent her sleepless nights alone, smoking while she read the National Enquirer cover-to-cover. The trials of Lani and Burt and Oprah's see-saw battle with her weight and UFO sightings from Maine to Mexico kept her company since her husband, DeWayne, had had his snoring cut short by myocardial infarction.
    Within the hour, neighbors, alerted by Helen, streamed from the adjoining row houses and crowded into Rosalie and Jack's little kitchen. At first, it was just the dress shirt and pants fox-trotting the housedress around the yard. Soon after, though, a white cotton blouse with a peter-pan collar and an orange apron started to rumba. Everybody oohed and aaahed at the heat of it. The wind died down. No one noticed when it quit howling. The steps of the dancers got smoother, less herky-jerky.
    It was Jack's idea to call the Maytag repairman. By late afternoon, many people from the surroundings neighborhoods and boroughs had already gathered on the lawn. "Out of my way!" Frank T. Fitterman, a broad, fleshy-bottomed man used to sitting around and eating donuts because Maytags so rarely went on the fritz, pressed through the crowd. He brandished his toolbox, letting the tools inside jangle and clank, as if he had brought the instruments of an exorcism. Frank T. Fitterman unscrewed the agitator and aligned the levelers and cleaned the filter and checked the discharge hose for obstructions, and finally, he walked out among the dancers and sniffed each of the towels and the sheets and the socks. "What kind of soap are you using?" He quizzed Rosalie, and wrote down "TIDE" in big block letters in a little black book that had no other notes in it.
    "I found a dime in the lint trap." With his palms up, Frank addressed the crowd, now mesmerized by the jitterbugging of three pairs of socks and Jack's dungarees. "It's not rocking or vibrating. The belts are A-OK." The people muttered a low grumble of disbelief. Frank was sweating. His days at Maytag University as a green and hopeful trainee seemed as distant as the last days of disco. Then he had an inspiration. "I'll arrange for a loaner and send your machine to the Maytag regional service depot," he said. "And if they can't figure it out, we'll ship it all the way back to corporate headquarters in Newton, Iowa."
    By the next morning, the crowd tripled with popcorn venders and rubber-neckers. Soon, helicopters clacked overhead and the riot squad squealed up in unmarked vans and thirty green-visored men in Kevlar vests set up a surveillance perimeter around the fence. Helen Hartstone ran from house to house, banging on doors, and the shouts of "Dancing laundry!" reverberated from one block of row houses to the next. The neighboring towns took up the cry, helped in part by a special "Late Breaking News" segment on Channel Thirteen. The day after Frank Fitterman's visit, Rosalie's clean laundry flapped across the front pages of every newspaper on the eastern seaboard. At two o'clock, when Oprah's producer called, Rosalie knew the story had gone national. She put the woman from Oprah on hold to answer the door. A National Enquirer reporter was shoving a Hard Copy advance man off the steps. That's when Rosalie began to think seriously about making some money on her washing.
    Rosalie negotiated a six-figure deal by offering an exclusive interview with a black brassiere. Then, The Sun and the National Enquirer got into a bidding war. Jack's boxers and Rosalie's panties were shown lindy-hopping in front of the rose bushes. Caught in the photographer's flash, the underwear looked startled and stiff, as if the photographer had simply laid the laundry on the thorns. Hundreds of bruised and lovelorn people flocked to Jack and Rosalie's yard. A woman who had lost her husband of fifty years to cancer came from Tuscaloosa. She wanted to do the Western swing—her husband's favorite dance—with a pair of Jack's blue jeans. A man about to be married flew out from New York City for lessons with Rosalie's party organdy before the wedding. One enormously fat man from Poughkeepsie couldn't get any dance partners so he came and the entire laundry basket gravely gavotted with him in the yard.
    The laundry didn't seem to mind switching from their clothing partners to live bodies. They loved dancing throughout the day and all night, never tiring. The people had to get used to the idea of following something that exerted very little sensory pressure, but most reported feeling a sense of cottony calm when they executed their dips and turns.
    The dancing laundry demonstrated high spirits when the weather was dry and, in particular, delighted in jazzy, free-flowing steps and improvisations when the wind blew. They acted impervious to cold. They seemed unhappy only when it rained, for they refused to get in the dryer and Rosalie wouldn't let them go outside, so they lounged in dispirited clumps on the dining room chairs and the sofa cushions and hung over the door frames and knobs. Once, when Rosalie needed the frying pan, she swatted an old gray sweatshirt off the dish rack. The sweatshirt draped itself on the stove hood and blue flames from the gas burner licked up its sleeve. The flaming shirt did a kind of St.Vitus dance until Rosalie doused the fire with soapy water from the sink. Then, Rosalie cut off the blackened strips of fabric with pinking sheers. After that, the shirt shrank from her whenever she passed, like a beaten dog.
    Deep in the cavernous Maytag Corporation basement where a thousand white washers churned twenty-four hours a day, the R&D men went giddy with excitement when they got the call from Maytag's Chairman of the Board. At last, something they could dirty their hands with! "Run Rosalie Kelly's washer through the third degree!" was the general consensus of every man in a white lab coat. All except for Squeaky McGee, who'd been at Maytag since the invention of the wringer washer. Squeaky advocated blowing up the machine, to get rid of the demon in the water pump, but the R&D team booed so loudly Squeaky withdrew his suggestion. The researchers redesigned the rinse and spin cycles, which they judged skimpy for suppressing the dust devils that no doubt, had gotten out of hand. And they replaced the soap dispenser and increased the bleach flow, and patented a new agitator. They might still be redesigning if a miracle hadn't occurred.
    One night, shortly after midnight, Helen Hartstone put out a load of laundry. She'd sat up late every night, drinking MadDog 20-20 and eyeing the news crews and corporate flacks that stood in line to offer her neighbors large sums of money for product endorsements of laundry detergent. Sick of the noise of chattering journalists, sick of the buzz of cell phones, particularly sick of the squeal of drills and the hammering of hammers that sounded like a thousand flamenco dancers drumming their heels on the third addition to Rosalie's house, in so many months, Helen bolted out of the kitchen door at first light and pointed, screaming, to a queen-size bed sheet draped on her clothesline. There, emblazoned, was the double-chinned face of her late husband, DeWayne. "My husband is back from the dead!" Helen shouted to the Channel 13 news crew. The camera operator swiveled the video camera over the fence and zoomed in on the sheet and the morning news led with DeWayne's hang-dog eyes and beatific smile. Rosalie caught Helen on the Montel Williams Show. She was holding up an old Fourth of July photo of DeWayne barbecuing hot dogs. The photo stood next to a blurry bed sheet that looked suspiciously stained with either rust or menstrual blood.
    After a time, the dancing laundry story dropped off the TV screens and the front pages of the newspapers, and fell to the inside pages, and then bumped down to local news, then to small blurbs on the back page, and finally, it sank to the bottom of bird cages where it was occasionally noticed by parakeets hanging upside down from their perches.
    The afflicted throngs thinned and even the visitors who had been cured by their spins around Jack and Rosalie's yard felt compelled to pooh-pooh their experiences. The fat man, who flew in from Poughkeepsie and danced with the entire clothesline, went home and married his laundress. The whiskerless mama's boy who had hip-hopped with Rosalie's apron for a week (its strings tied behind its back) cried like a baby when his mother took up Bingo on Saturday nights. Even the laundry's biggest success—the one-legged girl from Loma Linda who learned to can-can with her crutch—claimed she had learned it on her own.
    Peace and quiet descended on Rosalie's house and she was content to look up from the sink now and then to see news crews trampling Helen's petunias instead of her own. The camellias bloomed and the roses dropped their petals. The socks mastered all the steps of the fandango, and the tee shirts were working with the scarves on The Rite of Spring, when Jack invited Rosalie to spend a romantic weekend in the Poconos. He reserved the heart-shaped bed and the mirror on the ceiling and the giant slipper of champagne. They drove away in their new Buick. The laundry waved from the front window.
    Rosalie and Jack came home to find the front door unlatched. When they entered the living room, a pair of black, lacy panties and Jack's boxers jumped apart like guilty teenagers. Later, in the middle of one summer night when Rosalie got up to go to the bathroom, they waltzed and caressed in the silver, minnow-sheen of the moon. In the instant that Rosalie recognized they were dancing to Claire De Lune, she also knew she was pregnant.
    At the end of November, almost exactly one year after the first night of the dancing laundry, Rosalie gave birth to a black-haired, red-faced, yowling boy. He looked so much like the lost baby, she held her breath, but he was completely healthy and robust and roared so much, that the laundry took turns dancing Ring-around-the-Rosie in front of his crib at night so she and Jack could get some sleep.
    They named the boy Rudolph Astaire Kelly and he learned to crawl through the laundry's legs in the wet months when they stayed indoors and got underfoot and acted despondent. With the new baby and a stray mutt Jack had brought home, Rosalie found herself picking up a lot of wet clothes and they would dart out of her hands and shake her off and she became irritated at the constant mildew and dampness. "Go outside, you wet things!" she screamed one day and the clothes scurried out in the rain to get away from her. They looked so miserable huddling under the dripping eaves, she finally let them back in. The windows fogged up. When they tried to do a few tentative steps on the rug, water flew out of their fibers as if a pack of dogs were shaking themselves on her new upholstery. Rosalie burst into tears and Jack sent her to the bathroom for a soak in the whirlpool tub. That night, she heard the wet slap of sleeves and pant legs against the chairs when they spun each other on their turns, and she felt sorry for mistreating them.
    In this way, the worst of the dark and wet months passed. The sun peeped out from bleached clouds and a kite-flying wind agitated the gray sky blue. The laundry began doing the polka quietly in the corner and tried out the hokey-pokey, putting one foot in when no one was looking. The clothes lined up in front of Rosalie's ironing board and took turns lying flat without hissing or spitting. They spent more time out of doors and took up new steps—ones Rosalie hadn't seen before—like the Irish jig and the buck-and-wing, with bent knees and heel-less kicks.
    One day in the early spring, Rosalie washed dishes in hot, steaming water at the sink, while Rudy ate lunch in the high chair. She set the wet laundry in a basket on the porch, expecting the clothes to dance themselves dry. A yellow towel and chinos and a lace slip rose from the basket, followed by a stream of blouses and socks and a lacy pink brassiere.
    When the basket emptied, all the clothes bowed at the clothesline and stepped back in two rows. Rosalie waited for some kind of gavotte to begin. Instead, the blue and gray flowered housedress and the khakis that had started the whole thing bowed to each other. They each swept low. Then the dress flew up and the pants sprang, as if in chase, and soon, the entire basket of washing lifted on the blustering wind and sailed high into the cumulus clouds.
    Rudy's cornmeal-smeared hands floured his face. Applesauce dripped over his eyebrows from the bowl upended on his head. The baby pointed. "Wwiii—wwwwiiiiii!"
    Rosalie turned to look through the crazed glass—the only window they hadn't replaced—and she caught her last glimpse of a lacy pink brassiere flying and circling in front of her. The elastic straps dipped and the bra cups jiggled, as if from milk-engorged breasts. Then the bra, too, sprang and flew to catch up with the clothes sailing high in the sky. The clean washing stretched out for miles and it seemed that the escapees break-danced all the way to the sun.
    "Wwwww—wwwwwiiiii?" The baby said.
    "Yes, wind," Rosalie answered. "What a pretty word." She watched until the brassiere was a pink speck in a blue scrubbed sky.