LAUNDRY

"There is a mystical rite under the material act of cleaning and tidying, for what is done with love is always more than itself and partakes of the celestial orders."   —May Sarton

My grandmother, Madeline Juliano, grew up in a shack in a place called Stoney Lonesome. Long since condemned and the land reclaimed by West Point Military Academy in the Hudson River Valley of New York, the house was set in the woods among rolling hills strewn with glacial erratics, large boulders pulled along by the mile-thick tongue of ice as it retreated north. At nearby Long Pond, at a small mouth where the spring-fed lake pours itself out, in the stream that flows over these rocks, my grandmother scrubbed clothes. She was taken out of school in sixth grade to care for her three younger brothers who remained in school, and was hired out to keep house in nearby Highland Falls for the wives of doctors and lawyers and officers from West Point.
     Every morning, in spring and summer and fall and winter, before she walked six miles to her job as a maid, my grandmother scoured her family’s clothes in a trickle of water, which when the lake froze, remained fluid. She spread the clothes on the rocks to dry like skins. I imagine her hands, chapped and raw from washing other people’s clothes and linens for years.
     At nineteen, Madeline married Clarence Starr, a groundskeeper at West Point, and they lived in a caretaker’s residence for fourteen years, with their three children, Barbara, Clarissa (my mother), and Skeeter. The house was set on several rural acres with peach and apple orchards, and through the woods was Round Pond, where my mother swam, and in the winter, ice-fished with her father. The house was large and elegant, with French doors leading to a flagstone patio, and a massive fireplace in the living room. They had no electricity even though it was the early forties, but the house and land were paradise and they were happy there.
     My grandmother and her two daughters, Barbara and Clarissa, washed clothes with a tub and washboard, using a hard chunk of Fels Naphtha soap or lye soap my grandmother poured into pans and sliced into irregular rectangles. They cranked the wet clothes through a wringer, careful not to catch their fingers between the rollers, then hung the laundry outside. In the winter, when the pants froze solid on the line, they’d bring them inside to finish drying, the frozen trousers standing upright as if embodied, as if they’d walk around the kitchen, collapsing as they warmed.

•••

Etymologically speaking, laundry was not always women’s work. In the 1300s, the word lavender, deriving from Old French and meaning “to wash,” was equally gendered: lavandier, the masculine, or lavandiere, feminine. But over time lavender slipped to mean “washerwoman” or “laundress.” Launder, the later form of lavender, referred to a person of either sex who washed linen, though in literature and common usage it rarely meant washerman, or a man who washes clothes (and if so, referred to a Chinese man). Since the chore of laundry was relegated to women, the word itself became imbued with gender, signified a sex.
     Feminists tried to sunder the chore from the sex. In 1975, the London Times reports, the Greater London Council changed the post of “laundry woman” to “laundry worker.” Still, on the website for the Maytag Corporation, the tiny cartoon people worshipping the appliances—washer, dryer, vacuum cleaner—are women; the only male figure is the lonely Maytag repairman, introduced in 1967, a domestic hero always available to fix the broken washing machines of troubled homemakers while the husband is at work and the children at school, just the two of them, the forlorn repairman and the lonely housewife.
     In television commercials for laundry detergent, the housewife sensually presses her face into a soft, warm, fragrant, fluffy towel which, along with a tidy bowl, signifies her success as a wife and mother, as a woman, her love for her family. Laundry signifies love.

•••

When my mother was ten, officials at West Point decided that the caretaker house at Round Pond deserved to be an officer’s home. My grandfather and grandmother bought a tiny house in Highland Falls. My mother loved the house at Round Pond and didn’t want to move. When the big truck came, she ran into the woods and hid behind a boulder, where her father found her hours later, asleep. She hated the smaller village house even though it had electricity, which meant they had a tub with an electric agitator to wash the clothes.
     Needing to help pay a mortgage, and closer to town, my grandmother returned to housekeeping part-time. She worked for Sadie Schwarz whose family owned Schwarz’s Men’s Clothing, and the Chirellis who owned the Chevrolet dealership, and one day a week for the Kopalds, who owned the boutique where my mother bought the Ship ‘N Shore blouses she ironed crisply and hung in her closet. My mother visited her mother at work sometimes. Once she found her at the Kopalds’ on her knees, scrubbing three rooms of wall-to-wall carpet with a hand-brush. My mother disregarded my grandmother’s worried scolding and opened the Kopalds’ refrigerator, where she discovered a leftover shriveled hot dog and crackers, the lunch Mrs. Kopald had left for my grandmother.
     In 1954, six years after they bought the house, my grandfather, Clarence, died of cancer, and so my grandmother, widowed at thirty-nine, began to keep house full-time. My mother was sixteen then, old enough to ignore the pleas from her mother not to phone Mrs. Schwarz, Mrs. Chirelli, and Mrs. Kopald. “With my father gone, my mother needs seventy-five cents an hour now,” my mother told them. This was a ten-cent raise, which the women agreed to, except for Mrs. Schwarz who called my mother “fresh.”
     After her husband died, after she returned to work full-time, my grandmother bought a fancy new electric washing machine and hooked it up in the kitchen, the only place it fit in their tiny house.

•••

In colonial Massachusetts, laundry day was called Blue Monday, blue for the labor it involved—boiling kettles of water, stirring a soup of laundry, rinsing, wringing, hanging: an all-day task—and blue for the bluing women used to brighten garments. In the tomb of Beni Hasson, an Egyptian who lived in the 18th century B.C., there is a picture of two figures washing clothes much the same way as the Pilgrims did, as my grandmother did: by hand. The first patent for a machine that washed clothes was filed by Rodger Rodgerson in 1780, an Englishman. Why did it take thirty-six centuries to discover a labor-saving device for cleaning clothes?
      Washing machines were considered “lifesavers” for women, and early models were called “The Housewife’s Darling” and “Hired Girl,” though they still required hand cranking. The first “automatic” washers debuted in 1937. Whirlpool’s version was imprinted with the slogan: “Saves Women’s Lives,” and an ad for Horton Washers promised its machine would “keep wrinkles out of your face—keep you youthful.” A washing machine is a vast improvement over a stick, a rock and a stream, but women are not yet saved. According to Linda Eggerss, a spokeswoman for Maytag Corporation, women still handle laundry chores in 93 percent of American families, with only about a third getting help from a husband or child.

•••

At eighteen, my mother transferred from her job at the Grand Union grocery store in Highland Falls to a position with an affiliate, The Blue Stamp Company of New Jersey. There she met Sylvia Buglino, the wildest, most foul-mouthed girl she ever encountered. It was with Sylvia, and her friend Violet Trappani, that my mother first said “fuck.”
     My mother lived in Sylvia’s brother’s bedroom; he was in the service, so came home only occasionally. When he did, my mother rode the train and bus to Highland Falls and slept at home for the weekend. When she noticed more and more often how arthritis pained her mother’s hands and feet, she moved back home to help care for her younger brother, Skeeter. My mother found a job at Stewart Air Force Base in Newburgh, and with her increased pay, bought herself a used upright piano for thirty-five dollars, which she dreamed of playing. She moved the piano into the kitchen, right next to the washing machine.
     At Stewart Air Force Base in 1956, my mother met my father, Patrick—tall, black-haired, Irish. He was working on a top secret project, something to do with computer programming and missile launches. My mother invited him for dinner. After the meal he played the piano in the kitchen, and there she fell in love with him and gave up her dream of playing the piano for the man who could. They married, moved to Massachusetts where my father found a better job, and soon after, my sister Susan was born.
     When my mother moved out of the house in Highland Falls, my grandmother’s brother—my great Uncle Vince—chopped up the piano, which was the best way to get it through the low thresholds and narrow doors of the house. In the space where the piano was, right next to the washing machine, my grandmother installed her first dryer.

•••

I’m not surprised that the first clothes dryer was invented in England, which I think of as perpetually damp. Called a ventilator, it was a cylindrical drum with holes punched in the surface, which you turned by hand over a fire, like roasting a chicken over a spit. The clothes dried, but often smelled of smoke and were covered with soot.
     The introduction of automatic dryers to the market around 1946 worried consumers, who feared their garments would be scorched or shrunk, and so in 1950, Elaine K. Weaver, a Research Associate at the Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station, conducted the first comprehensive, scientific study. She published her findings in a bulletin called “Automatic Drying versus Out-of-Door Drying,” in which she determined, among other results, through the analysis of Micromation films, that line drying required an average of 625 steps and 57.5 minutes, while using an automatic dryer required only 3 steps and 9 minutes. “Less than 1/6 of the time was required for the operations of the worker,” Weaver wrote. “Walking was almost completely eliminated as were stooping, bending, reaching and lifting.”

•••

In 1960, when my mother was twenty-one, she pushed me out of her body and into the world. “When I had you, I said to your father, ‘That’s it, I want a dryer.’ The third one will put you over.” My sister Susan was two, Sally was one. My mother had three babies in diapers. By the time I turned one, Sue was toilet trained, but then my mother bore Joanne and so she still had three babies in diapers: heavy wet stinking shitty ammonia-smelling cloth diapers that she washed in her washer and dried in her new dryer. One baby will soil over 5,000 diapers before being potty-trained. If the third one will put you over, what will the seventh do? After Joanne there came Patrick and Barbie. Even by the time Mikey was born in 1970 when I was ten, my mother was still using cloth diapers. Which means that she washed over 35,000 diapers in her life.

•••

My mother ordered paper dresses once, from an ad in the back of a magazine. Disposable clothing promised relief from the endless loads of laundry. The day the dresses were delivered, she put one on immediately. The material was not much thicker than a sturdy paper towel, plain blue, sleeveless, the hem just above her knees. She looked like an inmate, a paper doll prisoner. Wearing the paper dress, she set about her regular routine of chores, bending, picking up, stretching to make eight beds, for we were slothful children who did not put away our toys or clothes or make our beds unless scolded and punished, and even then fell quickly back to indolence. The paper dress slowly tore and ripped and shredded until my mother’s bra and patches of her underwear were exposed and she trailed ribbons of parchment, and then finally the dress slipped right off her. It didn’t last until dinner. I remember her disappointment.

•••

My mother moved quickly around the house doing chores, a cleaning dervish.
     “Ma!” we’d yell up the stairs if we needed her.
     “MA!” we’d scream out the back door.
     Down in the cellar was a good bet, one of the few places she stood still for any length of time: washing, folding, ironing. “Why didn’t you answer?” I’d ask when I found her there, quiet, hiding, a cool sanctuary on a summer day, sorting a mound of dirty laundry nearly as tall as she, which fell from the chute two floors above.
     “What do you want?” she’d ask. “I’m busy.”
     You got the idea that whatever you had to say had better be good and not whiny.
     There in the basement, over laundry, my mother imparted to me womanly knowledge—menstruation, reproduction, body parts—while she folded and ironed my father’s shirts. I sat in an old inflated tire tube on the cellar floor and impatiently listened to her speech. I was more fascinated watching her sprinkle water over the shirts on the ironing board from a glass bottle fitted with a metal spout, like a garden watering can, an antique implement that had belonged to her mother, Madeline Juliano Starr.
     This was just before my parents divorced and my mother went to nursing school for a year and then back to work, and then all of us, except for Mikey who was two, were suddenly responsible for our own laundry, even Barbie, and she was only eight. That’s when it became fine to use a towel five or six times. Before, when my mother washed the laundry, we’d take two towels to shower, one for our hair only, and throw them both down the chute, away and out of sight, not to be regarded again until they were plump and folded and magically restored to the linen closet.
     When we became responsible for our own wash, laundry wars commenced. We’d remove each other’s still-wet clothes from the dryer and leave them in a damp pile, usurping the machine for our own loads. I pilfered clean bikinis from my sisters’ drawers. We hoarded towels, hiding them in our closets and dressers. Most often, I’d have to fish around in the damp heap of dirty laundry under the chute in the basement for a towel that did not smell too mildewy and might be used one more time. That’s when I learned how to do laundry, just after my parents separated, just after my mother told me the facts of life, just after I started my period.

•••

Cleanliness is next to godliness. Ancient Egyptians laundered not only their own clothes, but those of idols representing ka, a spirit they believed resided in the body and survived after death. The "edas, sacred Hindu books, decreed the washing of clothes essential to physical and moral well being. Muhammad commanded Muslims to keep their clothes clean, and Moses furnished the Israelites with detailed laundering instructions:

Where there is a stain of mould, whether in a garment of wool or linen, or in the warp or weft of linen or wool, or in a skin or anything made of skin; if the stain is greenish or reddish in the garment or skin or in the warp or weft, or in anything made of skin, it is a stain of mould which must be shown to the priest.
     The priest shall examine it and put the stained material aside for seven days. On the seventh day he shall examine it again. If the stain has spread in the garment, warp, weft, or skin, whatever the use of the skin, the stain is a rotting mould: it is ritually unclean.
     He shall burn the garment or the warp or weft, whether wool or linen, or anything of skin which is stained; because it is a rotting mould, it must be destroyed by fire. But if the priest sees that the stain has not spread in the garment, warp or weft, or anything made of skin, he shall give orders for the stained material to be washed, and then he shall put it aside for another seven days.
     After it has been washed the priest shall examine the stain; if it has not changed its appearance, although it has not spread, it is unclean and you shall destroy it by fire, whether the rot is on the right side or the wrong. If the priest examines it and finds the stain faded after being washed, he shall tear it out of the garment, skin, warp, or weft.
     If, however, the stain reappears in the garment, warp, or weft, or in anything of skin, it is breaking out afresh and you shall destroy by fire whatever is stained. If you wash the garment, warp, weft, or anything of skin and the stain disappears, it shall be washed a second time and then it shall be ritually clean. —Leviticus 13: Laws of Purification and Atonement. New English Bible. Oxford University Press, 1970.

•••

The King James Bible (Old and New Testaments) contains the word “wash” 161 times and “clean” 245 times, referring to souls and hands and feet and bodies and “inwards” (private parts too sinful to identify) and garments and vestments and clothes. In the Bible, people are washed in butter, in wine, in blood, in milk, in tears. In water.
     Once when I was in college at the University of Massachusetts, I saw a group of students from the Campus Crusade for Christ being holobaptized in Puffers Pond in Amherst. As my friends and I slothed around on blankets, getting drunk on cheap beer, inductees walked fully clothed into the pond, and waist deep, as the preacher blessed them, fell backwards in the water and emerged reborn, swaddled in towels on the shore.

•••

In 1984, a year after I graduated college, I met Steve, an electrician, and moved from Massachusetts to Michigan with him. Steve was responsible and mature, unlike my previous boyfriends. He carried a handkerchief in his back pocket like my father had, which made him seem like a man and not a boy. I loved that Steve was domestic, that he washed dishes and vacuumed and was in many ways more fastidious than I. Steve separated whites from colors, folded towels in a precise and uniform manner, and there was comfort in this routine, in this domestic partnership with Steve, the man I was sure I would marry.
     We did our laundry together every other Saturday at the laundromat in Saline, a block from our apartment, and in the quiet time while we waited for our clothes to dry, I wrote in my journal.

January, 1985. Saline Coin-Op Laundry. Two small boys are zooming around the laundromat on invisible motorcycles, revving, and gripping imaginary handlebars, running in short little steps with their miniature legs. The two kids are going brrrm brrrm and doing wrist motions. Now one kid is going brrrm brrrm and spitting on me.
  The motorcyclists’ younger brother keeps popping his head around the Ms. Pac-man machine and sticking his tongue out at me. I admire his courage. I would never dare approach a complete stranger and stick my tongue out. Now he has just opened up his mouth really wide and showed me his little piece of chewed-up pink gum. Now he just walked right up to me and touched me, as if I were a movie star.
  One of the little boys tries to lift a box of detergent that weighs as much as himself. He sees me watching him and thrusts his middle finger at me vehemently. When I don’t respond, he looks at his finger to see if it’s the right one, and satisfied that it is, shakes the finger at me again. I continue staring at him and he stares at me until his mother comes in and picks up her basket and off they go.

I love to watch mothers and their children in laundromats. It makes me wish that I had children, and glad that I don’t.

•••

Laundromat is one of those proper nouns turned common, as common as the people who use them (renters mostly, about 89 million in the U.S.). Formerly, Laundromat was the brand name of an automatic washing machine sold in 1943 by Westinghouse: like Kleenex for tissue. The proper term for a public laundry facility was launderette, ette designating the noun as feminine or diminutive (kitchenette, bachelorette, brunette, coquette, suffragette). It’s not so simple to extract the feminine from laundry.
     My mother has never washed clothes in a laundromat. A washer and a clothesline or a dryer have followed her throughout her life: marriage at nineteen, divorce at thirty-four, remarriage at sixty after a twenty-five year relationship, widowed at sixty-one. In her second marriage, as in her first, she performed most of the domestic chores. She washed and ironed Ed’s shirts for work, as she had my father’s, and she even ironed his jeans as he was a meticulous man who liked a crease in his pants. In forty years of being a wife, a mother, a nurse, my mother never learned to play the piano. I told her when she was widowed that she should take piano lessons.

•••

Eighteen months after I moved to Michigan to live with Steve, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The oncologist prognosed that Steve wouldn’t live more than two months, so advanced was his disease, which had started in his liver and spread along his spinal column, which caused him excruciating pain. The domestic chores we’d shared fell to me: cooking, cleaning, shopping, laundry.
     One Saturday, a year after the oncologist predicted Steve would be dead, my coworker, Vicki Norfleet, called me and said, “Can I borrow your dirty laundry for the afternoon?” I was touched by her generous offer, and would have appreciated her help as I was exhausted from my job and from taking care of Steve, who’d grown increasingly weak and sick. But I declined Vicki’s offer because I was too embarrassed to let her handle each piece of my laundry. I did not know her that well.
     There was another reason I declined Vicki’s offer, which I did not admit back then. Going to the laundromat was an excuse, a legitimate, guilt-free reason to escape Steve’s and my tiny apartment for a few hours. Washing laundry was simple, a chore I could handle, a relief from taking care of Steve who was dying swiftly for a thirty-year-old, though it was also a slow, lingering death. Doing laundry was repetitive and mindless, purposeful and perpetual; clothes would always need laundering, now and forever.

•••

A week before Steve died, we moved from our little apartment to his parents’ home, the house in which he was born, and had left at eighteen. Michigan was enduring a month-long heat wave in August 1987, and so for the last several weeks of Steve’s life, he wore only a pair of yellow, red, and blue polka-dot boxer shorts. The morning he died, reclined in his La-Z-Boy, in a bedroom of his parents house, his bowel ruptured, and so I removed the boxer shorts to clean him. At six a.m., when the funeral home people took his body away on a stretcher, he was naked.
     The next day, I picked out a shirt and pants for him to wear to his funeral. (Steve never wore underwear, and what would it matter anyway? Socks, too, were unnecessary.) After, I moved in with my sister in Ann Arbor, and went back to work full-time. Some weeks later, when I was forced by a lack of clean underwear to schlep my clothes to the laundromat, I came across the yellow, red, and blue polka-dot boxer shorts, which looked so tiny in my hands. A joke gift from Steve’s cousin after he’d first entered the hospital, the boxers were 100% cotton and had shrunk, so Steve did not fit into them until the end of his life when he carried only a hundred pounds on his six-one frame. I washed the boxer shorts, and a handkerchief, the last two pieces of Steve’s laundry, which I still have.

•••

"pril, 1988. I am sitting in the Super Suds Laundry in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This laundromat is clean, has a non-smoking section, Christmas decorations year round, candy machine, soap machine, sink with paper towels, and a four-foot long taxidermied swordfish mounted on the wall. Wednesday is Senior Citizen day at the Super Suds, twenty-five cents off each wash. Laundromats should have Singles Nights, wash your laundry, drink wine and eat cheese, meet other desperately lonely souls. When Steve was alive, I dined alone in restaurants often, thought nothing of it. After he died, when I ate in a restaurant alone, I felt as if lonely were stamped across my forehead in large red letters.
     Some people dress up for the laundromat. Will they meet their lover here? Are they hoping this will be the day, the moment, the cosmic second when their soul mates, like lost socks, will enter their lives mysteriously? Will they converse with their future mate while folding intimate articles of clothing, trying to hide the girdles, the ripped, holey women’s briefs? There was a shift in my life that I can’t pinpoint exactly, but is evident when my laundry is accumulated before me: the transition from bikini underwear to briefs. I don’t remember consciously making this decision, but it seems to have occurred around the same time that store clerks began to call me Ma’am.

•••

Nine months after Steve died, I bought my first house, in which I lived for five years before I moved back east. My house came with a washer and dryer, but in spite of the convenience, I missed the regular trips to the laundromat. I still went sometimes, especially when too many clothes piled up and I wanted them washed all at once, instantly, a baptism. I’d hog two Texas Jumbo Washers. (Do they have more laundry in Texas, bigger pants, towels the size of blankets for which they need six-load washers?) And then I’d dry everything miraculously in twelve minutes by hogging seven or eight dryers. I’d watch my clothes tumble around in an endless relay race, socks handing off to shirts or pants. It was relaxing, like watching a fish tank.
     Laundromats are pure efficiency, lovely spiro-gyro machines at your disposal. I love the machines that dispense miniature boxes of soap, which remind me of the individual cereal boxes my mother rarely purchased for me and my six siblings. It was truly a special occasion when she did indulge in the variety pack of twelve tiny cereal boxes—the kind whose bellies you slice open as if performing surgery, a cesarean section, then pour milk in and transform the box into a bowl: ergonomic, economic, thrilling. The same sense of pleasure blooms in me if I’ve forgotten my economy-size laundry soap and I get to pay fifty cents or a dollar for a box of mini-Tide or mini-Cheer or mini-Bounce, identical to the huge supermarket-size boxes, an offspring.

•••

Women, according to Roman legend, discovered soap around 200 A.D. Washing clothes in the Tiber River at the foot of Sapo Hill, rubbing the fabric with clay from the river’s banks, they noticed their garments became cleaner in that location. They deduced that ashes and animal fats were responsible, remains from sacrificial ceremonies atop Sapo Hill, which were washed by rain into the river and clay bank. Saponification, the chemical process for soap making, is named after Sapo Hill.
     As a nation, we wash about thirty-five billion loads of laundry per year, spending five billion dollars on detergent, which ranks fifth in sales of mass market household products, after carbonated beverages, salty snacks, beer, and cold cereal. Soap is big business, which is probably how the Soap and Detergent Association landed Jack Kemp as a keynote speaker for its 75th annual meeting in Boca Raton.
     New Yorkers purchase the most laundry detergent, perhaps because New York City is a “veritable fantasia of filth,” as Eliza Truitt wrote in Slate. She tested the efficacy of laundry detergents by hurling underwear into Second Avenue, dragging them through gutters, smearing them with barbecue sauce from a restaurant called the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, squirting them with raspberry jelly from Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and finally sticking them in a plastic bag for a few days before laundering them. Unlike the folks at Consumer Reports, Ms. Truitt did not have a radiation spectrometer to gauge the whiteness and brightness of laundered fabrics, which is perhaps why she found the differences among the detergents to be “negligible,” and concluded that “it doesn’t really matter which one you choose: It’ll all come out in the wash.”

•••

The only time since I was twelve that I did not wash my own laundry was a two-year stint when I was thirty-three to thirty-five and my job and commute kept me so exhausted that I was loath to spend Saturdays washing laundry, so instead I dropped my heaping baskets of soiled clothes at Lilliana’s Laundromat on Munjoy Hill in Portland, Maine, and paid seventy-five cents a pound, about twenty-five dollars every other week. The man who worked Saturdays at Lilliana’s was an Italian with milky white skin, black hair and eyes, hirsute, in his late twenties, the son of the owner, Lilliana.
     At first, I withheld my underwear. The son, the monochromatic young man, was a student at the Bangor Theological Seminary. How could I have allowed him to see my accursed, blood-stained underthings? Eventually I grew tired of washing my own underwear when I was paying fifty dollars a month for someone else to deal with my dirty laundry, so I’d push the underwear to the bottom of the basket. At least I’d be long gone when he discovered them. I figured: he’s a divinity student; he’ll forgive me.
     Shoving my laundry off to someone else was a pleasure, but not without guilt. Toil and scut work and labor are my heritage: my maternal grandmother, Madeline, the maid; her husband, Clarence, the groundskeeper; my paternal grandmother, Margaret, a cafeteria lady; my grandfather, Patrick, a forklift driver. My father was the first in a couple hundred years of ancestors on both sides of my family to employ brain instead of brawn.
     Service is in my genealogy.
  Perhaps that’s why I like going to laundromats, the venue of the poor and the working class, the unpropertied, because toil and labor are somehow pure and good for the soul, or at least are penance, thus promise redemption or absolution: cleansing. Laundromats remind me of from whence I came, allow me to honor the labor of my grandmothers, humble me. In first grade, my sister told my mother that I’d boasted to our neighbor, Mrs. Hobaica, about receiving straight As on my report card. I was scolded for bragging. In my family, pride was a sin, especially for girls.

•••

Since the first launderettes (a.k.a. washaterias, laundreezes) appeared in the United States in the late 1940s, people have long wanted to make them into something more than what they are. Enterprising proprietors (there are some 35,000 coin laundries in the United States) have offered ancillary services such as tanning beds, shoe repair, and mailboxes. Mobil of Japan has recently launched a gas station that offers one-hour laundry services; they plan to open twenty such facilities over the next five years. Laundry Lounge, Inc. in Canada is a laundromat et coffee house. Dirty Dungarees in Columbus, Ohio is a laundromat and bar. I lived in Columbus for three years during graduate school, but I never washed my clothes at Dirty Dungarees. A laundromat with “dirty” in its name did not seem promising, and I imagined my clothes would smell of cigarettes and beer, or that I’d have to fend off inebriated men lewdly eyeing my delicates.
     In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Helpy-Selfy, a laundromat in Fort Lauderdale, offered topless dancers in its rear lounge. Helpy-Selfy went under, and today a conservative morality has crept into laundromats. Lucy’s Laundry in Torrance, California (whose top executives do not include anyone named Lucy), wants to be “a gathering place for the family,” says Simon Smith, senior vice president. They aim to “keep the entire family entertained” by offering play areas for children and convenience stores in every unit. (Convenience stores are entertaining?) They vow to keep the “wrong element” from loitering, and won’t stock violent video games.
     I’ve patronized laundromats for seventeen of my twenty-two adult years. I’m a laundromat purist. There’s not much more I’d add to the basic set-up of washers and dryers and carts and tables. But going to the laundromat could become obsolete in the future. SpinCycle, Inc., the nation’s leading chain in the five billion dollar coin-operated laundromat industry (five billion dollars: 20,000,000,000 quarters) has recently introduced "otal "aundry "are. A customer dials a toll-free number or logs onto a website to place an order for laundry pick-up. SpinCycle’s "otal "aundry "are personnel (eight to ten “well-trained” attendants at each facility) arrive at your home, pick up your dirty clothes, then sort, wash, dry, fold, and deliver your clean laundry to your doorstep.

•••

Laundry is deeply private, which is why doing laundry in public is intimate, almost shameful, a form of public atonement. Most people arrive in laundromats dirty. They have worn all of their nice clean clothes and so arrive wearing holey, stretched-out sweat pants. Occupied in the task of laundering, people shed their carefully constructed personas and masks. They are honest. Vulnerable. Once I saw a biker folding clothes. He did not look so tough handling undershirts and socks. When the ritual is over, our clothes are clean and folded, and a kind of lesser order is restored. Dirt is gone; life starts anew. The bodies we put into these fresh clothes may do something different this time around. I’ve had a fantasy of taking home someone else’s load of clean clothes and wearing them all week, exchanging lives in a way, for what are clothes but costumes?
     Laundry reveals who you are: Were you kneeling in the garden? Eating barbecue? Painting? Do you wear synthetics or natural fibers? Do you have a baby, a husband? Does he work in a gas station, in construction? Does he wear boxers or briefs? Are you gentle-cycling your lingerie? Is there romance in your life? Are you airing your dirty laundry? It will all come out in the wash.
     What does my laundry disclose?
     Towels, far too many towels. Most I inherited from Steve who always liked a plump, absorbent, freshly laundered towel which he used once then threw in the hamper. Gluttony. Some were gifts. A towel as a gift. Steve’s sister gave me a huge navy blue towel for Christmas once. I thought it was a strange present, but then realizing how poor and utilitarian she and her husband were (hunting frogs, squirrels, duck, muskrat, deer, rabbit, to stretch the food budget), I understood it was a luxury item to them, this oversized, plush, brand new towel.
     I have a small white towel indelibly stamped “American International Hospital,” where Steve was treated for cancer. I don’t remember taking the towel.
     My mother bought me a set of red and black towels after I bought my house. The house came with a red toilet seat and that became the theme for the bathroom: shower curtain, area rug, toothbrush and soap holder, black and red, the color scheme of a bordello.
     I confess to hoarding towels. I can’t resist a sale, a deliciously low price on stacks and stacks of thick-pile, almost moist, teal or pink or lavender towels that promise warmth and sensuality. The last time I moved, while unpacking boxes, I counted: I own over twenty-five bath towels, not hand towels, washcloths, or kitchen towels, which I’m sure would bring the total to over fifty. I’ve thought of having a cocktail party after which everyone leaves with (or in) a towel.

•••

"ebruary, 2000. I am at the Summit Street Laundromat in Columbus, Ohio. This laundromat has bright blue walls—a color that can turn you crazy—with wrought iron fencing over the windows for security. During the week, in the middle of the day, it’s nearly empty. The manager is a man with no incisors, only canine teeth, so he looks like a vampire, a shriveled, short, drunk and feckless throat-sucker. He sits at the picnic table in the laundromat and every minute or so spits great greenish gobs into the waste basket, drinks can after can of Budweiser, and smokes.
     The drunken manager approaches me as I pull sheets out of the dryer. He talks to me, pressing himself close, with cloying, sweet alcohol breath. His face is so near mine that I imagine kissing him, and then I am repulsed. (I call this Opposite Reaction Syndrome, which I suffer from: when the thing you least want to think or do is exactly what you think of doing: laughing at a funeral, thrusting your hand down a churning garbage disposal.)
     “The people in Boston are more prejudiced than in the south, but they pretend they aren’t,” he says.
     Why has he deemed me to hear this message at this time?
     Sometimes I wonder what all the people in the world are doing at a particular moment: how many people are sitting on the toilet right now, are eating potato chips, are being born, are dying? Are doing laundry like me? How many people are fucking right now?
     I sometimes wonder that.
     What is going on in the universe the moment the drunk laundromat manager delivers his wisdom: volcanos erupting, regimes being toppled, infectious disease breaking out, new mathematical formulas being discovered, stars dying, casting out their final light.
     A crazy man comes into the laundromat to get warm. He holds up a dirty dime. “Want to taste this?” he asks.
     “No,” I reply, as if his offer is utterly sane.
     “My mother wants me to taste it,” he says, puts the dirty dime in his mouth.
     I wonder what it tastes like.
     A disheveled woman comes in with her short-haired terrier on a leash. She lights a cigarette, stares out the window, and says, “So many people driving by on Summit. All those people—I’m glad I’m not them. God made all those jillions of people and he has to take care of them. He is guilty in a way. I don’t know what’s going to happen to them, all their pain. It bothers me, but I guess he must know.” She finishes her cigarette and walks out.
     A couple comes in dragging four huge garbage bags of clothes. The woman smiles apologetically, says to me, “We just moved here. After paying first and last month’s rent, $500, we had to wait two weeks to have enough money to do our laundry.”
     I hear her confession. Go forth and launder.

•••

Thus spake Moses when he came down from Mt. Sinai. He gave the Israelites the Ten Commandments and the people said, “Whatever the Lord has said we will do.” Moses returned to speak with God, and God said, “Go to the people and hallow them today and tomorrow make them wash their clothes.” They had to prepare for the Lord to descend upon them, and so Moses hallowed the people, and the people washed their clothes.

•••

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII and his astronomer, Clavius, calculated that the calendar they’d been using (the Julian calendar, after Julius Caesar in 46 B.C.) was eleven minutes and four seconds longer that the solar year, and so by then the calendar was ten days out of sync. The pope and his astronomer solved the problem by producing the first Gregorian calendar, to which they made an initial adjustment; they omitted ten days. In 1582, the date following October 4 was October 15th. Just like that: time lost.
     I’ve spent approximately 576 hours attending Mass, which I ceased in my early teens after my parents divorced: twenty-four days of my life from which I gained very little. Since I began washing my clothes at the age of twelve, around the time I quit attending church, I’ve logged an estimated 2,016 hours doing laundry, 84 days of my life so far. The laundromat, for me, has become a kind of sanctuary. I put my quarters in the dryer and buy time in twelve-minute increments and life is slowed and altered by the simplicity and singularity of the task.
     The laundromat is one of the few places in which I allow my mind to wander. I sometimes feel like crying in laundromats. In laundromats, I am sometimes moved. In the laundromat, as I conduct the most ignoble chore, I find myself pondering the cycles of life, the structure of time, the nature of humanity: how we all need clean garments, clean sheets to sleep on, how we are all alike ultimately, walking around in our clothes, covering our bodies with fabric, as if that could protect us from anything.