Iron Lady

     I noticed her every time I walked in with my laundry. 

     She stood on the other side of the entrance, half hidden by the open door.  She had an older face sharpened by the straight cut of her black hair.  She always had a white pillowcase tucked like an apron into her black pants.  Short, trim, she stood firmly in her spot like a boxer.

     She was always ironing.

     No board; just a pile of frayed towels pinned together at the corners.  Her iron was antique, no plastic anything, no digital readout.  It had a chipped handle and a fat black plug.  A refugee iron.  The cord was kept off the clothes by a string hanging from a hook in the ceiling.

     Yet with this impossible weapon she was waging the war for all that is smooth.  The shirts on the pile next to her looked like battle rags, while the finished pile on the left was as neat as a victory parade.  I admired her, being something of a talented amateur myself, I took a quick photo of her for the album because, even though she was not a family member, she could have been.

      It was my mother who taught me to iron.  She was the one who told me to think of the board as an aircraft carrier and the iron as one of the airplanes.  Take off and land smoothly; no crashes.  And she taught me all the classic tricks: testing a corner first to see if the iron stuck and was therefore too hot for the fabric; using a spray bottle to mist the material; using the point of the board to get at shoulders and pockets; ironing on the inside of dark fabrics so they would not get a shine.  Ironing cuffs and collars from the edges inward, so they did not buckle.

     I never forgot those lessons and am unfazed by pleats.  My ties are flat as swords; no awkward ridges at the sides.  If pressed, I can even iron a ruffle without working up a sweat.  Of course, I rarely iron anymore because there are people like the iron lady to do it for me. 

     My mother did not teach me to iron to be a wimp.  She believed that people ought to be able to take care of themselves, to master the devices of the world.  She was an advocate of competence.  To her way of thinking, there was no excuse for being a victim of your own home.

     I thought of this as I watched the iron lady work a shirt.  She pinched along the upper edge of the fabric to clarify the shape, folded the hem that runs along the lower edge of the sleeve so that it faced up.  Then she deftly used the pads of her fingers to smooth out the surface and flatten lumps on the underside.  In just a few moments she had it all blocked out, the classic sleeve waiting to emerge, like a slab of granite already hinting at the figure within.

     With serious hands – short flat fingers and a wide palm; no polish on the nails, no rings – she glided the iron across the top half of the sleeve, then back across the bottom.  Along the way, in each direction, she swiftly moved the tip of the iron into the edge ripples and corner folds.  Two strokes was all it took and the entire sleeve was done.  It looked like a ski slope after the first snowfall.

     The front panel of the shirt involved a complex jitterbug, skating the iron down and in between every single button, then off at the bottom.  The creases vanished as the iron passed, a thrilling bit of ordinary magic.  She put the iron down, pinched the shirt at the collar and the end of the sleeve, then flipped it to the other side.  It billowed for a moment, then settled down for her to work on the back.  Like any master – potter, carpenter, weaver – it was a study in focused rhythm.

     My mother did not see why ironing was woman’s work.  Smoothing over, taking care, maintaining appearances...all that was a manly problem too.  And decent ironing involved some fancy spacial reasoning, a knack for the topology of surfaces.  Men are good at that, as everyone knows.  My mother watched my ironing as though I were in the batter’s cage.  Perhaps the iron lady too felt that she was carrying on a grand tradition.

     The back panel up near the collar was tricky because it was impossible to flatten the whole surface out.  She ironed this section in segments, as though the shirt were divided into invisible triangles, always folding the excess material back over the top of the iron itself.  Piece by piece she ironed a small area, readjusted the folds, moved forward, ironed a bit more.  When she was all done, she folded the shirt into an icon of a folded shirt, a museum piece, and grabbed a new old one.

     Her face throughout this campaign was calm.  No tension around the eyebrows, no crinkling of the cheeks, no crimped lip.  Smooth as a done sleeve.  Like a general who knows her stuff or a philosopher thinking about nothing, the great nothing.  Or maybe like a Zen master only focused on what she was doing.  Chop wood, carry water…that kind of thing. “Pay attention to what you’re doing!” my mother used to tell me.  But I presume she was more concerned about burning than Being.

     One day, I decided to say something to the woman at the counter because I assumed the iron lady did not speak English.  I had never seen her speak a word to anyone at the laundry.  Perhaps they did not get along since they were, in some sense, adversaries.  The rest of them were making the creases that she would spend her life unmaking. 

     “Good ironer,” I said, sliding my fist back and forth in the air.

     “Sure, as long as she’s got her soaps.”

     “She uses soap?” I asked stupidly.

     “Soaps,” the daughter repeated and pointed to a tiny TV set on a low shelf right in front of the iron lady.  I craned my neck to see it.  Sure enough, some soap opera was playing on it.

     “It’s the only way she’ll work,” the woman said.  “She really hates ironing.  I mean, big time.”