After Lina’s father left, Lina and Ruta had to move out of the apartment upstairs. Ruta wanted to give Magdalena and her mother the illegal washing machine, but Magdalena’s mother insisted on paying for it, which surprised Magdalena because her mother worked in the laundry at the hospital and she could wash their clothes for free.
They carried the washing machine in a procession down the stairs, the four of them, Ruta and Magdalena’s mother each straining under one end while Lina directed them from the front and Magdalena followed along behind to keep the cords and hoses from dragging on the ground.
“Like a bride,” Lina said.
“Like a bride without her own feet,” Magdalena’s mother said, out of breath from the weight. They lowered the washing machine down to rest for a moment. Lina’s mother started laughing, then Magdalena’s mother laughed too, both of them like crazy schoolgirls with a washing machine between them teetering on the steps, and their daughters, looking at them bewildered, then starting to laugh too, not knowing why. That was the beginning of a new kind of laughter, which ever since Magdalena thought of as belonging to moments involving men and disaster, and at the same time an absence of loneliness. When they finally stopped and got the washing machine the rest of the way downstairs, it took the four of them pushing to get it through the doorway of Magdalena and her mother’s apartment. They put it in the middle of the living room—there was no other place—and Ruta said she knew somebody who could help them hook up the hoses. Before Ruta and Lina left to stay with Lina’s grandmother they had a party, with a cake and dandelion wine, and they used the illegal washing machine as a table. With a crown of flowers and a bit of lace for a tablecloth, it did look like a bride.
Magdalena had gone the wrong way. The shape she’d thought belonged to the yellow church now looked more like the primary school, which meant that the park was in the opposite direction. Now she was sure to be late to meet Ivan. She turned to go back, but there ahead of her was something she didn’t recognize, a jumble of shapes and something sticking up out of them into the air. A construction site. What had been there before? She squinted, and the more she squinted, the less certain she was that she was heading toward the school after all. Time was passing. Ivan would be waiting. She had to find out where she was. Magdalena felt around for her glasses at the bottom of her bag. She cleaned the lenses on her sleeve and unfolded the frames. There was hardly anybody on the street.
She put her glasses on and the world took on sharp edges. It was a church, but across from it was a shopping center Magdalena didn’t remember ever having seen before. She turned around looking for the name of the street, and there was a man standing in the doorway of a shop, eating a sandwich and dusting the crumbs off his shirt. He smiled and Magdalena put her hands up to cover her face, but not before she saw the word, stamped out as if by a typewriter across his forehead. Murderer. Magdalena ran.
She was crazy to run like that, even from a man with such a word set in block type across his face. If it were true, it was sure to happen anyway, and if it were not and Magdalena was crazy, crazy like lots of people are crazy, then she was going to get herself locked up one day, acting like that. But Magdalena didn’t stop. She and Lina had taught themselves to run in high heels, using only the tips of their toes. As she ran she remembered the men in the Russian neighborhoods who used to call out to them, shouting “Dyevochki! Dyevochki!” trying to grab them as they went by, after Lina had made them stay out too late and they had to walk home—then run home—past the men with hands too heavy to catch them.
Those were the best times, when they were fifteen or sixteen, after they missed the last bus on a winter night without their coats—blind tired, drunk on drinks that must have been bought for them and hypnotized by the snow falling into the streetlights, running home with snow melting on their eyelashes and their bare arms, twisting away from the hands, shrieking and laughing.
Up ahead of her Magdalena saw the park, so sharp and clear through her glasses that she imagined she could even see through the trees to where Ivan would be sitting by the fountain, crumbling a leaf between his fingers.
“Hey,” Ivan said when he saw her coming up the path. “Look, I can’t stay long.”
Magdalena coughed so he wouldn’t know she was breathing hard. Lina’s trick was to look a man straight in the eyes while writing his name with her tongue on the roof of her mouth. She’d read it in a magazine somewhere. Magdalena tried it, just lightly tracing the letters with the tip of her tongue across her palate. It was supposed to look seductive. Magdalena didn’t know what effect it had, but it helped keep her mind off the text that looped around one of Ivan’s eyes, making him look, Magdalena always thought, a little like a Dalmatian. She was afraid she might start understanding the Russian letters if she saw them too many times.
“I shouldn’t even be here,” Ivan said. “I told Phil I was doing the inventory.” Magdalena noticed she was writing Lina’s name instead of Ivan’s on the roof of her mouth. She also noticed that Ivan’s lips seemed suddenly too big for his teeth.
Ivan offered her a cigarette and tried to tuck his lips in at the edges. He bit the top one, then the bottom one, then he put a cigarette between them to take up the slack.
“Shit, I’ve got to get back. Listen, I didn’t want to tell you in front of everyone—” Magdalena had an enormous itch from writing with her tongue on the top of her mouth. “So look, you’re not on next week’s schedule,” Ivan said. “It’s not my call. They want to try that new girl. And it’s not just you, Kaylee’s going too.” Ivan blinked. It was like he had two faces. His eyes were somewhere else, while his mouth hopped from word to word like they were hot.
Magdalena dotted the i in Lina’s name on the roof of her mouth.
“Okay,” she said.
“Yeah?” Ivan said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. He nudged her toe with his foot. “Nu?”
“Nu, blyat,” Magdalena said, like the Russian men used to shout after them, spitting the word through her teeth.
“Right then,” Ivan said. His lips fit more snugly now around his mouth. “Like I say, it’s not my call.”
After Lina and her mother left to live with Lina’s grandmother, Magdalena and her mother used the illegal washing machine as a table, but they never did get someone to hook up the hoses, and after a while Magdalena’s mother sold it to one of the doctors at the hospital where she worked.
With the washing machine gone the evolution of the stain on their ceiling was frozen forever and Magdalena and her mother’s fortunes were fixed. Sometimes her mother would still look up at the kitchen ceiling after she’d come home from a night out with her boyfriend, but she stopped telling Magdalena what she saw there. It was easy to see that the news was not good.