UNDERWEARWASHER
I had to go live in a halfway house. This was in the Commonwealth, when I was 23 in 2011. And the Commonwealth would only pay if I kept a job and if the job wasn’t past sundown. Because you had to be locked in your room after sundown. No phones. We were located on the banks of a river in a small town four hours west of the capital, there was not really work… I’d heard a strung-out woman on a documentary describe her pussy as her “check to cash” and that has always stuck, but you’d need night, normally, if you want to cash out. It was not obvious how to use what I got in this small workless area during the day, but I found my path.
Or I don’t know how it works. A path found my neck.
In a town below (an hour’s commute by the Peter Pan line) there was an opera company only showing opera of Transylvania. Which is a part of Romania. ROperaMANIA was operated by elder Dooley College grads, retired investor types, I don’t know, who had 16 years ago adopted a Romanian boy, he perished. He came to them, they told me as I sat in the nude for an interview, and then he, tapered. They were sitting there smiling. They threw their hands at each other. Performative. But I didn’t get the aboutness of the performance at all. They let me know ROperaMANIA (“pera,” for short, I was to call it) is a solid daytime choice for school groups and senior day cares.
I was hired, just for the books, to be pera’s underwearwasher as the performers, in from Transylvania I was told, would need fresh stuff for a 12pm show. The underwear had to hit the dryer by 11am, to be rolled up in a stack on top of that same machine, after which I could leave, placing me back at my halfway house before the sun crashed again against the grain of the birds, with ample time.
“We’ve worked with that house,” Delia let me know, “before you.”
Delia was the big boss. Carl played a style of “porcupine chess” against himself on a divan—riddled with pricks—in the hallway. Delia explained it, there are these Romanian ways. The stars would expect this service, even if they had come with plenty of underwear. I remembered a year I spent in Santiago, Chile, in the early aughts, I had to go to a storefront to pay my electric bill. Why a store? Why not the mail? It was like standing in line at a bank. It would take for fucking ever. Everybody hated it, but it was the way things are, tellers took up your statement, and next, in a clock haze, your payment. There was something real about life then, and I figured this for that.
It was different. Yes, I washed underwear—Delia would offer me a pile of briefs, I mean, this was some ratty stuff. It was from American Apparel, so a pretty colorful small pile of briefs, it had initially been assertive purple but was so stretched out it was stretched lavender but burgundied and blue, like something blue had stared at it, a stare-stain, and torn, the cotton hanging off of the fairly intact elastic rims in the style of a ghost ship—I was to do it with Delia’s older brother, Danel. No I.
No, “Danel.”
He would be there for me in a defunct green room, it was, to give them credit, viridescent inside of this room, and he would, a yogi type, his physique, so old he looked reborn and old again, say insistently he was “trying you out for my son” to a me that was within this experience. I didn’t dissociate. I fucked him cleanly, proudly, thoroughly, so that his cum came out quick like a smack of bird poop on a placid enough mauve wall, the mauve wall of my “check.” He wanted me to like it a lot so I screamed in fascination and pleasure.
Delia would dress in these folk-art sweaters, always this 3D element to this stuff, like little Roma peoples popping out of it, but sewed on tightly, a woolly riverside scene on her sweater, the 3D people sewed down by their hands and neck—she told me to use the laundry cycle to pace the sex experience with her brother, Danel.
“When you hear the ding,” Delia said, “you can go roll up the underwear and get going to the terminal,” her machines were high efficiency and that’s how she wanted this to go, she said. She wanted me to really wash underwear, for the sake of being above book, but it was also true there was no live opera at pera, or any Transylvanians who had traveled all this way. Whatever underwear I was washing was such a false flag, if a flag that is fragmented into this loinless pile of hurting apparel, as the Brainens would only show those school kids and seniors, who were out of their fucking heads, all of them, kids, seniors, recordings from the 70s, on a screen that dropped down on a frilled little stage.
I had to be totally naked at pera, but I could use plastic gloves to handle the underwear, seeing as there was this lurid burgundy often involved.
At the halfway, I was doing good. Making progress. We were right on the Hare River that has such special properties. The Hare River is so cold and strong, its stones and rocks are hard and real. It would, I remember, cold-cremate the whole sun—gold steam coming off—every night, I, watching from my (mercifully) locked up bedroom. I needed to be locked up there, at that time in life, to try to recover.
A memorable house on the opposite bank presented itself as a spillage of wood pods, rectangles enacting a kaput game of Jenga, all of it sourced from the recycled pieces of the game itself, I read in Dwell. I learnt, reliant on magazines, no internet, no phone… 5 billion Jenga pieces are lying around all over the world, so the builders processed some of these, maybe 100 million, in a woodchipper and then figured it out into planks. Eco etc.
“Hey! What are you doing down there? Miss. If you’re going to be in the river, you have to stay further downstream from here.”
Brennan, a young little man who lived in the Jenga house came from one of its pods, maybe it was his bedroom. He shouted me down the river, already a little emperor he was.
“Don’t worry too hard, Kid,” I shouted up. “I’m leaving anyway for the bus terminal.”
Brennan said, “Which terminal?”
“The Peter Pan terminal, why?”
Brennan said, “The bus?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Yes, the bus.”
“Peter Pan Terminal,” Brennan said. “Isn’t he meant to live for fucking ever?”
“Do you wanna come with me to work?”
“What do you do?”
“I wash underwear, mostly.”
I always took a plunge before work, to capture the special properties. The water of the Hare is like astringent feathers getting thicker as they try harder to whip the big stones forward like their horses, without success. The stones are fixed.
I was with Danel while the underwear churned in the laundry area at pera. His face was having that look, the look, that look, the look of having become to some this grimy rim, of a well, where hated things have dolefully passed on their thrown way down. It was that way to me. I threw myself, doing my job, down his face, breasts first.
“You know, Danel, you have a well aura,” I was beginning to explain, that I didn’t mean he looked well, he had already come and I was gathering my own clothes and getting ready to switch the underwear to the dryer before heading out. I was hoping to spend the afternoon lazing on a hot rock on the river just below my halfway house, which had done me some good. I was becoming stronger. The world was becoming, in my recovery, so much smaller, so much more like the size of my life. Small power.
Delia moaned from the hall, we found her on top of Carl, on the divan, both slain.
This began my year staying with Danel, as we fled the pera together in fear of a murderer, but when we got to his house (turns out it was the Jenga topple house by my river, and Brennan was his son he would talk about), he locked me into a wood pod and wouldn’t let me out.
“Brennan,” I said, “Brennan Brainen. It’s time for me to go back to my halfway house, don’t you think?”
But Brennan only drugged me now, to have sex with me while I was unconscious. I always only got in a few sentences, a few beats of some unpersuasive dialogue before the world fell away, and when I reemerged from the haze, I was led down, by Brennan or Danel, come to think of it, often the two, to the river, to use its healing properties to preserve me as a slave. It was so fucked up and it really turned healing, health, for me on its head. I began to crave degradation of my body, the end of my beauty if not my life, to wish away the fine feelings of air and light and life that bounded like horse-blooded feathers through my blood and mind. Sometimes I tried ESP with the river, when they made me dunk there, after sundown, telling it to stop pleasuring my life as there were unintended consequences, there was a reality, I tried to mindsay to Hare, this world is a fallen tower, I said to the river, and I’m stuck in a block, I told it, but it was very, very nice feeling in its flowing cool waters. Remnants of the sunset that had gotten in its waters spilled fluid gold over my strong shoulders.
Brennan said, smirky, “This must suck for you, I guess you were trying to get away from drugging at the halfway.”
“That’s not the kind of addiction I was battling, you motherfucker. Fuck you a lot Brennan Brainen,” but unlike Danel, he wasn’t into my enjoyment, he was into me as vessel, being alone with my body, he was the type to sleep with a blanket over his head out of terror of being looked at while he slept, and so didn’t want anyone looking at him while he had sex including who it was with, except for Danel. The Brainens, Danel and Brennan, were often both present.
“Why don’t you let him fuck a real corpse,” I said to Danel before going under. “I think he’d like that better.”
“I’ve thought about it,” Danel explained. “But I don’t know, after seeing Delia and Carl like that”—he was referring to their murder, which had gone unsolved—“I don’t think I can get into just bodies, even for Brennan.”
Danel got busy folding back my teeth and clicking them down into the gums.
“So still no news?” I tried to say during being handled. He had lost his only sister.
I passed out.
When I woke, I was in a castle in Transylvania.
“Excuse me?”
“Hi. Hey.”
“Hi.”
The boy had obviously never perished! He’d been in their basement, locked up as he passed into a starving manhood, a young displaced Romanian man in a basement in the Berkshires, Delia’s little slave.
“I appreciated what you sent to me, the way you made a secret gift into the elastic bands on my underwear.”
“I read that SOS-type stuff on all your tags, but I didn’t know where you were. And, I had to strip and leave all of my clothes and stuff in the foyer at the start of work.”
Written, by necessity, in blood. In shapes approximating a language, post-blotch, something human enough. Language, in helpless times, can be anything that’s beyond a visual coincidence. The body, in darkest times, most resembles a stationary box, or, at times in history, a box of meal points.
“But you found a way to deliver me some quills, of the porcupine, so discreet where the elastic is hemmed—”
“Yes. I had bisected a tampon embedding one there, one at a time, I’d put the rigged tampon in on the bus, riding on Peter Pan’s back to my work as a whore, and then in the laundry room, naked, I did the transfer into the elastic in your briefs. I’d do it right before rolling, and I also made the minute felt hat for the quill tip so it would not prick you as you uncovered the gift. The quills, I’m glad to realize now, had been uncovered, and you were able to use them for at least an initial surprising attack? I am glad to realize you made it out.”
“Where did you put that tampon, afterward, considering what you next had to do? I’m sure, knowing Delia, you could not have disposed of it without being found out, trash otter that she always was.”
“Delia kept W2 near to the machine, so after I took the quill from the tampon, I fit the cotton into the pinky finger of one of my plastic gloves, tied it up very tightly, coated the parcel in enough W2 to get it gliding through the gullet—it was very Maria Full of Grace if you know that film. She swallows drugs in a sort of similar manner.”
“You’ll have to forgive me, Maria, as I have no cultural references, either from America, where I was a slave in a basement all of my life or here, in Romania, I was absconded from here when so young, the little boy, I’ve learned recently, of some well-known opera stars.”
“Wait, what? Here? Where are we?”
I looked around. The window was packed with a fog and a twinkling. My bed was rich in red velvet and the walls were naked stone, moist moss—it looked moist, the way a wetness will embalm any color out there with lizard realness—came in from ancient cracks. There was candlelight.
“We had to leave the Berkshires, Maria. After I killed Delia and the flatulent Carl, and Danel had fled with you, I piled their bodies in my old prison, and I set to work finding and freeing you. I had to help you. All of Delia’s passwords are the name she called me, so I made quick work of finding out the whole deal. The Brainens love slavery. I found clippings about Danel’s house, from a Dwell Magazine. This deduced that the river with the special properties was the Hare, I trawled the banks of Hare River at night until I found a stupid, canny display of spilled blocks the size of cells. I watched you being led out to the river with the remaining Brainens, Danel, Brennan, and so found out which block held you. When you are a slave, when you are this absented person, the earth rushes ammunition, weapons, God realness all around us, yes?”
“Yes, yes.”
“So, the river had hard and real stones. I could dislodge them with my unbelievable passion for saving you from this, Maria. Also, Danel’s chainsaw, left out on the bank from a tree felling project. I got into the block one way or the other, killed those two, being careful about it as one who is mincing garlic that contains within it a little pearl. I carefully diced them away from you, my Maria.”
“Yours?”
“Not if you don’t want! At this point, I had already found my adoption information on Delia’s computer, contacted an old, rich uncle, who lives in this castle in Transylvania, and he, understanding the situation completely, chartered a private flight for us. I’m sorry, I had to put you in some of Delia’s clothes to get you decently on board. And I was so sick thinking of the ways you’ve been violated for a year that I couldn’t bear to undress you again without your waking consent.”
It was true. I was wearing a folk-art sweater populated by the Roma people. I’d never been so happy to see them all. I started deliriously ripping them off of my sweater, freeing them from their tied down positions on the banks of their woolly, woven river. Freedom, freedom, everywhere!
“But, what should I call you? You clearly don’t want to go by Delia’s password, this word for abuse, for slavery? Do you want a Romanian name?”
“I hate the Brainens with all of my heart, Maria. Delia and Danel and Brennan Brainen are dead now, our miracle. I’ve asked my uncle to name me something that is like the opposite of The Brain, as I began to call their whole sick organization—Carl, too. What a motherfucker. There’s always a muddled putz who’s sicker than everyone, sort of.”
“What will you go by, then—Hearten?”
“My uncle says he will call me Pinky, as this is something he understands to go in opposition to The Brain and I’ve agreed, Maria, only if you would be willing to call me this as well? He says we can live here in his castle, rebuild our lives. There is no need for our romance, you are free, but what can I say, I’m totally in love with you, my hero. Maria, you are full of more than grace.”
We fell together. Pinky and Maria. My life. My heart.
The end, as they say. This was 2012.
At 37, I am a free Romanian woman. But there is another path in this story. There is another neck. I was an addict when you first met me. I went to that halfway house half crawling there after my life fell apart and there I found the only environment to keep me successfully away from the poison. My ruin. Now, we have everything. Romania is modernizing, the castle, which we’ve inherited at this point, is wireless top to bottom. We are digital nomads with three children, who will never know of what we went through. There is nothing to learn, glean, juice from our story. There is nothing we can offer anyone we know but our love.
My second child, Wakko, comes to talk with me after playing. He tells me he knows everything about our past, how we came here. Who we really are. Our previous names. He figured it out on the internet.
“Mom…” he trembles. He’s weeping with emotion. “Are you ok?”
“Of course I am. We are all safe, Wak.”
“But how could you have gone through all of that, you and Dad. Don’t you have severe PTSD? Don’t you want justice or something?”
“I mean, we did kill everyone. So…”
“But even more justice. Like, sometimes people who can’t get enough justice tell their children about this stuff, so that the children might avenge them.”
“But who? Who should you kill?”
“It doesn’t matter, just that you would want vengeance in my blood, you would spit it into my blood, for some later appointment. It could just be an attitude I carry. Or, I could kill other people or make art or something. You’d want me to know. What’s the point of having me if I don’t know?”
“Wak, give me a goddamn break. You’re romanticizing this whole deal. What do you want for dinner?”
“I’m really troubled by what you went through, Mom.”
Still trembling, crying… The sensitive one.
“Listen to me. At the time all this horrible stuff happened to me—and look at what your dad was dealing with for way longer—I was recovering from a really bad addiction. And the truth is, even when I was living in the Jenga block for that year, I didn’t have access to the stuff I was addicted to. The Brainens didn’t know the nature of my addiction, so they couldn’t torture me with exposure to it. I continued, in that way, to only get better. I was never knocked off my path to recovery, even when living in the Jenga block as a slave. And, think about it, I got to dunk in a magic river almost every night, by the moonlight. Think of these things, too, when you think of me and that time, Wakko.”
“Ok…”
I hug my kid.
“So if you’re going to face what happened to your mom, which is hard stuff, you’re also going to have to face that these were the years in my life when I was most in recovery from my addiction. In a lot of ways, now, my life is fucking trash, because I’m fully back with the poison. I’m living out a tint of a real life. It’s really insane. Even though I have you three, and Dad, dear, sweet, daffy Dad”—
—“He is daffy, isn’t he?”
“Oh. Yeah. But can you see this, Wak? It’s hard to hold but try. Even though conditions have improved in a lot of ways, my life is more a hell now. I’d rather be tied up in a block being drugged and used for sex by the Godawful Brainens than spend my days now the way I do, with my whole loving family swarming around me. Don’t you see that I used to live on the banks of a magic river, that flowed around me and through and up into me, healing and helping me even against my wishes? Now what do I have? I have you, but it’s hardly real. You aren’t the river. Your dad isn’t the river. Your brother and sister aren’t the river. Romania has rivers but isn’t the river. My mind and feelings aren’t the river. Writing’s no river. Not even close. The big river in my life is my fucking phone, Wakko. It doesn’t matter that we live in a castle. Who cares? I’d gone to that halfway house in 2011 to detox from the goddamn motherfucking internet and phone and look, it’s only gotten even much worse. There’s no way to live now without it. In 2011, you could say that was your addiction and be admitted into a halfway house that the Commonwealth would pay for, acknowledging your struggle. These days, if you said you were addicted to your phone, people would treat you like you were treating life or survival or money or civic virtue as addiction. They’d turn you in. They wouldn’t even have to do that. They’d text you a photograph of a joke. Because that’s what passes for life. If you said you felt like you were a slave, that my phone is my master, that you live a shell life and have for many years, even though you’ve bore children, which are so real they tore your cunt”—
“Cunt?”
“Don’t worry about that. All I’m saying is, sometimes despite the negativity of those times, I crave them, hard. I remember not having a phone that year, a crazy gift. Even though I guess I could have used it to call 911. But look at the news, on the internet, look, that wouldn’t have necessarily gotten me anywhere, not really, Wak. Sometimes when my phone rings, even if it’s your dad, or it pings making my blood spin as an editor emails me with a solicitation for a story about a river, someone young and talented, someone cool, something real, I mindsay to my phone, ‘I am coming, my Master,’ and the Brainens in these moments seem, to me, quaint. Not perfect people, but better than this less-than-half life.” I take Wakko in my arms—he’s sobbing—and carry him down our stone stairs to the laundry room, where I am getting a series of loads done before packing for a family trip to the Balkans. “Sometimes I marvel at their energy.”
Caren Beilin is the author of the novel Sea, Poison (New Directions, 2025), longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her previous books include Revenge of the Scapegoat (Dorothy, 2022)—winner of the Vermont Book Award for Fiction—Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books, 2019), Spain (Rescue Press, 2018), The University of Pennsylvania (Noemi Press, 2014), and the chapbook Americans, Guests, or Us (Diagram/New Michigan Press, 2012). Some of these titles have been published abroad with Scribner (UK), The Last Books (Amsterdam), and los tres editores (Madrid). She lives in Cleveland where she is Fiction Editor for Cleveland Review of Books and an Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University.