El Palo Más Alto​

by Kathleen Wheaton

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​    I have known Mark longer than I’ve known my husband. Mark, Marina and I were all in the same freshman dorm. He was from Chicago, big, blond and handsome. He played football for the first few weeks of fall term, then quit, but he retained what I thought of as a football player’s personality. He cheerfully claimed he’d never willingly entered an art museum or read a book for pleasure. He also said majoring in foreign languages was frivolous--but with such a broad, sunny smile, it was possible to believe he was kidding.

    During that first September in college, he proposed that he and I do our laundry together. We were down in the basement with our separate baskets, when he eyeballed mine and said that if the two piles were combined they would make one full load. This would save us both the quarters that were more valuable than their monetary worth. Already I suspected that my roommate was helping herself to the bowl of change I kept on my dresser.

    “Aren’t we supposed to separate whites and colors?” I said. 

    “That’s an old wives’ tale,” he said. “As long as you aren’t washing anything that’s new and red.”

    “Well, okay.”

    “You run along and I’ll stay until the cycle finishes,” he said.

    Guarding the clothes was necessary because people were liable to dump your clean, wet stuff on the floor if all the machines were in use. 

    I went back upstairs, feeling a frisson at the thought of his boxers and my panties sloshing around together. Some of them were stained, and I hoped my blood wouldn’t get onto his clothes, turning them tell-tale pink. 

    Of course it didn’t, and soon I became used to the idea of Mark’s All-American-quarterback hands smoothing my nightgowns and bras, balling up my socks. He was planning to declare a major in mechanical engineering, and he folded everything with geometric precision. 

    It could be said that dealing with his clothes presented the more daunting task: his stiff blue jeans and massive, hooded sweatshirts. Tight white briefs as well as boxers. Jockstraps. I worried that the way I folded them might reveal how unfamiliar I was with male bodies. At home I had only a sister, and our mother did all our laundry so that we could concentrate on our studies. 

    Once, having mounted the basement stairs with my basket piled high, I saw Marina standing in the middle of the corridor. She was acknowledged to be the most beautiful girl in the dorm, maybe in the freshman class. She was a chain smoker, very pale, with natural purple shadows all around her dark eyes. She spoke of Derrida, Foucault, de Beauvoir, as if they were family friends. When Mark made that comment about foreign languages, in the dining hall, she’d glanced over at me and raised an eyebrow, though I doubted she knew that I intended to major in Spanish.

   “So Mark’s got you doing his wash,” she said.

    “We’re trading off,” I said, aware that I sounded like a sap, like Mark’s mark. “Next week, it’s his turn.” The pile listed a bit and I clamped it down with my chin. By this time Marina had gone into the bathroom, leaving a puff of smoke behind, like a genie. 

    Mark and I didn’t interact much outside the laundry room. We’d meet at the appointed time--Tuesdays at four, I think it was--then alternate monitoring the end of the spin cycle and transferring the clothes to the mercilessly hot, industrial dryers. There were a couple of mishaps: a lambswool crewneck of mine that shrank to the size of a potholder, and a pair of maroon socks that he insisted were polyester and wouldn’t bleed, though the lavender tinge they bestowed on our whites wasn’t a problem for me. How did my freshman year best friend, Jonathan, feel about the supposedly good-natured joshing about gayness Mark received before his t-shirts faded again? I realize I have no idea, since Jonathan didn’t come out until law school.

    Mark did problem sets while he waited for our wash; I listened to Spanish tapes and practiced asking and answering their hectoring questions: Where are you going? What did you do last night? How much did that cost? The basement was warm from the machines, bright with humming fluorescent lights--these had been installed, rumor had it, after a girl was raped in a dark laundry room some years earlier. 

    One night, towards the end of fall term, I was awakened by my roommate attempting to creep noiselessly into our room. It was near dawn--I could see her snub-nosed profile, the fall of her long, straight hair, the outlines of our chairs and desks, though everything was without color. I sat up. 

    “Are you just now getting back from the library?” I asked. It was open twenty-four hours during the week before finals. I didn’t really care where she’d been--we weren’t friends, particularly--I was simply making conversation. 

    She froze, then approached my bed and sat down on the end of it. “I’d better tell you before you hear it from someone else,” she said. “I spent the night with Mark. He told me, and I hope it’s true, that the two of you are just friends.”

    “Hardly even that,” I said.

    Usually, before Mark and I exchanged our dirty clothes and quarters, we’d spend a few minutes chatting--we were, after all, doing each other a favor.  But these conversations were pretty impersonal. He played on several intramural teams and often had an injury to a muscle that I wouldn’t have been able to locate on a chart of the human body. However, I’d coo sympathetically, and then moan about some deadline I was up against: having to read a hundred pages of the Quixote by next Monday, or write a twenty-page paper on the sonnets of Garcilaso de la Vega. Maybe those tasks did sound hair-raisingly impossible to him, like I’d been locked with a spinning wheel in a room full of straw, or maybe he, too, was being polite. 

    That spring, in our Spanish theatre class, Jonathan and I wrote and performed a skit about the bedridden Generalissimo Franco, who’d finally die later that year. Jonathan played the Spanish dictator, whose impressive but erratic erection, el palo alto, was represented by a yardstick under a sheet. I was his wife, Doña Carmen, who kept trying to revive the old boy by talking up my melones, my jamones, my salsa picante, in a salacious, ditsy voice. Our professor, raised in Cuba by Spanish-exile parents, loved it and gave us an A.


    One subject that interested all of us freshmen was the question of how we’d been matched with our roommates. Similar personalities, academic interests, diurnal habits--none of these were dispositive. And as our first year of college passed, it was clear that while some roommates were destined to be lifelong pals, others--fewer, to be sure--hated each other’s guts. Most of us fell somewhere in the middle: sharing a cinderblock cell for nine months with a more or less endurable fellow human. It’s a small thing, over a lifespan--I don’t now recall my freshman roommate’s last name, though I can conjure her waist-length, shining hair. 

    But at a time when you’re hungry for any clue as to who you might turn out to be, it was dispiriting to realize that the criterion the university housing office used to match us was what we’d noticed the first week of orientation: that each couple was almost exactly the same height. Unstated, but as obvious, was the fact that the roommate pairs had about the same degree of physical attractiveness.

    Which explained why Mark and Marina, who were both quite tall, had been put into the dorm’s two closet-sized single rooms: they were incomparably good-looking. 

    Studying my roommate’s pert features as she fingered her silky locks into braids and pigtails and ponytails, I deduced that I couldn’t be flat-out repulsive--plus, if I were, wouldn’t Mark have wanted to avoid touching my clothes?  And yet something about me wasn’t right. This doubt also beset me when I was with Jonathan, who’d snuggle beside me on my bed while pouring out his latest heartbreak, but who never made any move of a sexual kind. And he had a new girlfriend every month.

    Following the success of El Palo Más Alto, I told Mark about the skit, translating some of the lewder lines while trying not to blush. Surely this would show him that I wasn't just some prim little laundress.

    He was quiet for a moment and then he said, “Isn’t it kind of mean, to make fun of a dying man like that?”

    “He’s a fascist,” I said.

​    “Well, sure,” he said.

​    I went upstairs, mortified.

    I avoided all but the briefest conversations with Mark after that, though our arrangement continued through June. The next fall, he joined a fraternity, and I lived in a vegetarian co-op on the edge of campus. We’d pass each other in the shaded loggia of the quad or on our bikes, and say hey if our eyes met. Often, I pretended not to see him. 

    The next year I spent in Salamanca, and when I returned, Mark had become a big deal. Relatively, that is--he was running for senior class president. And won, of course he did. During the campaign, which never seemed the least bit in doubt, he expanded his greeting to me to a jovial, “Hey there, laundry partner!” 

    I wondered if he remembered my name.

    But I’d gamely call out the same, in response, and explain our unusual relationship to whomever I was walking with. It had become an amusing window into in the past, not unlike when, a few years later, I was in j-school at Columbia, and used to notice a skinny, moody-looking guy sitting alone in the Hungarian Pastry Shop and writing in a notebook. Some years after that, watching his speech on the fierce urgency of now, I realized that that leather-jacketed loner had been Barack Obama.

    Around the time Mark ran for statewide office, word spread that he’d cut quite a swath along the freshman girls’ corridor. I wondered, in the wake of the gossip, whether Marina and I were the only two he hadn’t had sex with. 

    That is--I don’t know for a fact that Marina didn’t sleep with Mark freshman year, but given her deflating condescension every time he opened his mouth, and also that, by October, and for the rest of the academic year, she’d basically moved in with a graduate student who lived in a commune in the nearby foothills where Joan Baez sometimes dropped in for tea--I doubt it.

    Shortly after Mark won his first primary, it was announced that he and Marina were engaged. It made a kind of sense--their powerhouse pulchritude, their almost-rhyming names. And Marina has turned out to have a charming, natural-looking way of waving and smiling, in addition to her resonant, tobacco voice. She’s spoken on TV about how hard it was to quit.

    I wasn’t invited to their wedding--it was courthouse, family-only--though I did receive, along with some other members of our class, the cream-colored, embossed announcement. My mother tucked it away with pieces of mail she deemed significant, for whenever I came back from the Amazon jungle. That was where she insisted on telling people I lived, though I’d explained to her over and over that Manaus is a city, with buses and pharmacies and supermarkets, as well as an opera house where Caruso once sang. I didn’t tell her I was treading water and broke. The editors of the newspapers I freelanced for said they could only run so many stories about the forest burning down before readers stopped paying attention. 

    You were waiting for me to show up, my husband says. Which he did, four years into my Brazil gig. I was covering a Congressional delegation that had stopped in Manaus before they continued on to the Earth Summit in Rio. I could tell they were moved--everyone is--to crane up toward the lacy tops of the mahogany trees, to hear the ghostly roar of the howler monkeys, to feel that shadowy chill at midday. 

    You suddenly know how a bug feels.

    Ten minutes into the rain forest tour, my as-yet unknown husband appeared out of nowhere, in a plaid sport shirt, toting his boom mic and tape recorder. “Sorry I’m late,” he said to the delegation. While looking at me. 

    When I was seven, my grandmother predicted that I’d marry a Spaniard. Actually, what she said was--after I’d made my sister cry by not letting her win even one game of Old Maid--that she guessed a Spanish husband would keep me in line. This was in 1964, in Whittier, California. We were Quaker, and poor after my dad died, and we didn’t know any Spaniards. Maybe she was thinking of matadors.

    My husband isn’t Spanish, but he speaks the language, and his Portuguese is as good as mine. Also: he’s the nicest man I’ve ever known.

    The second-nicest, that would be Mark.

    I’d swear it on a stack of U.S. Constitutions.

    The woman besides my roommate who told me she’d she lost her virginity to him said that she’d tapped on his door late one night and sweetly asked him to fuck her. She and I were standing at the bar at Mark's campaign headquarters--it was still early on election night, though she appeared to have had a few. She looked at me, then at my press badge, and said, "But of course this is off the record." ​

    "I promise I won't use your name."

    “So I told Bonnie McKinnon,” the woman continued, “and a month later, she did the same thing.”

    “Bonnie McKinnon said fuck?” I said, to cover my astonishment. “I can’t even picture that.” After graduation, Bonnie had joined the Maryknoll nuns.

    Evidently, it wasn’t the whole girls’ corridor--just those three.

    “Fuck sure sounds weird coming out of your mouth,” the woman said, in a not-nice tone, and it all came back, like morning sickness: that feeling of being left out.

    “People change,” I said, which I do not believe, and walked away before she could. 

    Maybe if I'd had any female friends freshman year, I'd have known that we were all more alike than not. Were we the last generation to be told that our hymens were precious as jewels? I hope so, but I don’t know, because I have two sons, to whom I began harping, bewilderingly, on condoms when they were in elementary school. But there we were, in the smoggy, scandal-weary mid-seventies, burdened with our ridiculous millstones. We didn’t want boyfriends, not yet, we wanted to seduce an obliging guy who appeared to know a thing or two.

    And now here comes Candidate Mark: silver-haired and trim, stepping onto the dais with lovely Marina and their tall, blooming family--their trans daughter center stage--and the crowd explodes with hope and joy. He holds up those hands which capably folded my clean panties and which might one day steer the fate of the free world.

    “Friends,” he says, and peers out towards the farthest corners of the room.

    In that expectant hush, I flip a page of my notebook and click my pen--I’m old-fashioned that way. 

    What I mean is, I haven’t changed, but my story has: Freshman year I was seventeen, having skipped second grade. I don’t know why I thought this was something to brag about. Anyway, a year later, I met a young man who made me laugh. Then I was off to the races.     

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Kathleen Wheaton is a 2024-2026 Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.
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​​​​​​​​​​​SHARE - Issue: 1.8 / April 2026