That was one of the many social distinctions that crisscrossed Willow, the one between people who had basements converted into recreation rooms, with panelling and carpeting and easy chairs, and those who, like Owen’s family, the Rausch-Mackenzies, still had cellars, with a sinister bin of filthy coal and cobwebbed shelves of preserves in Mason jars and a spatter-painted old washing machine, tub-shaped and fitted with a wringer of rubber. The wet clothes would emerge from between the two cylinders of white rubber like giant wrinkled tongues and slowly spill into the wicker clothes basket. Owen, when younger even than when Alice Stottlemeyer kissed him, and not yet envious of families with easy chairs and dartboards and electric-train tracks set up on plywood tables in their basements, was enchanted by the plugged-in washing machine’s powerful, rhythmic back-and-forth beating action, stirring up a mass of bubbles, and by the smell of soap flakes, so strong it seemed to scour clean his head and sinuses, and by the woody, springy scent of the wicker basket, with its handles so far apart he could not at first reach both at once. It was inevitable that some day he stick his fingers in the wringer. In a quick rush he felt the relentless pressure climbing toward his wrist, and screamed in terror. It was one of those moments when the hungry chasm beneath the sunny daily surface of things rises up, like the gunshot before dawn, but not as bad; a safety device popped the wringers apart even before his mother could dart around him and reach the release lever. In the way of childhood confusions her alarm, and the look of horror that distended her face there in the barebulbed cellar light, and the scolding she gave him afterwards got lumped with his moment of pain, as if she had caused it. Still, he remained an admirer of the process, the wash travelling through the wringer into the basket and up the cellar stairs through the bulkhead door into the back yard, where the white bedsheets hung about him like the billowing walls of a fragile castle, a jungle palace he was exploring all by himself. A shift of breeze would cause the clothes pole to lean in a different direction, so that his face was brought into abrupt contact with the towering, damp, light-flooded cotton.