DC PLACES ISSUE Lyn Lifshin   LADIES ROOM, NATIONAL ARCHIVES, WASHINGTON DC as if part of history too, the wooden toilets still have pull chains, marble floors you can see what the traffic's been by the way the shiny black veins are dull. It's hard for more than two to wait in the narrow space, air thin as fingernails on a mummy. If there were ghosts of any dead presidents' wives, they'd pick this bath- room I imagine, shadowy, genteel. Echoes of well dressed women laughing. Now hardly anyone at the noon film isn't old, wearing brown or rose madder, slightly frayed like the room. Everything in this light is muted, flung into the past so when you take the 5th floor elevator down to exit on Constitution or Pennsylvania Ave, the bright light stings     Lyn Lifshin is the author of over 100 books and editor of four anthologies. Her latest book is The Licorice Daughter: My Year With Ruffian (Texas Review Press, 2005). Her books Cold Comfort and Before It's Light, both from Black Sparrow Press, won Paterson Review awards. In June 2006, her book Another Woman Who Looks Like Me will be published by Black Sparrow. Her website is: www.lynlifshin.com.   Published in Volume 7, Number 3, Summer 2006.