“Two separate loads,” I said, pointing to the bags.
“Two loads,” he repeated.
“Cold water,” I requested. Although I had imagined walking over to the machines to show him the correct setting, his lexicon of laundry English was better than I had realized.
“Both cold?” he asked. “White and colors?”
“Yes. Both cold.”
Usually, I wash my own clothes. I am picky about how it’s done. I don’t trust the bubblegum pink industrial detergent that the local laundry uses; it reminds me of the mildewy antiseptic used to disinfect subway stations. Both make a halfhearted attempt to smell like candy.
Tonight, though, I’m packing for South Africa, and I don’t have time to sit with the laundry. I’m tired and stressed, and having difficulty remembering my manners, much less conveying them to the launderer in a limited shared vocabulary of gestures. I realize that I don’t even know his name, in spite of the hours spent together under these fluorescent lights, late at night, sorting and folding. When I found him this evening, he was standing in front of a triple load washer, a pile of rags at his feet. In spite of the summer heat, he wore a grey sweatshirt pushed up to the elbows and pale yellow latex cleaning gloves, labeled in long-faded, markered-on Korean characters on the forearm. I tried to connect the characters to the man, like a nametag, but before I could even imagine their sound, he had pulled off his gloves and picked up my bags, depositing them on the scale. He told me the price, $10.40, and wrote me a receipt.
“What time?” I asked.
He scratched the short, thinning black hair at the back of his neck as he consulted his watch. “Twelve?”
“Midnight?” I asked. “Can it be earlier?”
“What time you come?” he asked.
“Ten?”
“OK. I start now.”
I walked out of the harsh white of the laundry and back into the blue and orange of the humid Harlem night. Passing the precinct, brawny cops nodded in my direction. Two well-dressed women stood on the corner of 135th and Adam Clayton Powell. I had seen them on my way to the Laundromat, walking in the other direction, but now they had stopped to finish their conversation. The men who passed the afternoon at their chess tables along Seventh Avenue, casting a wide net with their catcalls, had given way to a younger crowd of smooth talkers. One of them calls “how you doin’”, and I call “hello” back, without slowing my stride.
I prefer any other chore to laundry: cleaning the kitchen or the bathroom, washing dishes, grocery shopping, even killing the mice that come up through the floor beneath the kitchen sink and get caught in glue traps. Those are mindless activities that I can do while listening to music or NPR. Grocery shopping in New York is never mundane; navigating piles of produce twice my height amidst hoards of other harried shoppers, conferring on their cell phones, debating the sharpness of cheeses or the weight of a fruit in any number of languages, holding up the lines with their very specific requests (a quarter pound of organic smoked turkey breast, thinly sliced, please; espresso habanero, half pound, coarsely ground) is entertainment enough to make the trip worthwhile.
Laundry, on the other hand, demands that I drag my suitcase full of clothes down five flights of stairs and two blocks, babysit them while they wash and dry, fold them, and then lug them back up the five flights to my apartment. At times I’ve taken papers to grade or a book to read, but I’m never able to accomplish much. I get distracted by the television, the Judge Judy and made-for-TV movies and Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The high drama of the game shows and the outrageous arguments on talk TV suck me in. Quieter moments on the television are filled in by the Pick-your-prize game, which repeats the same eight bars of driving, electronic videogame music over and over again in the background.
It could be a place of cleansing, of meditation. There is absolutely no possibility of substantive intellectual stimulation; I could let my mind go blank. Except that then I wouldn’t find out who killed that bleach-blond lady’s son, or the answer to the $25,000 question. I get a very snobbish pleasure from being annoyed by Judge Judy’s blatant sentimentality. The cold, fluorescent light and white floors highlight the dust bunnies and lint balls in the corners.
When I return for my laundry, the Korean launderer greets me excitedly. “I know your name,” he says. “It’s Kelly.” I try to remember having written it somewhere, but all I had told him was my telephone number. “How do you know?” I ask. From his desk, he carefully retrieves a small appointment card with my name and the date of the appointment written in a schoolmaster’s cursive. “It fall from the pocket. I go to throw it,” he demonstrates, chucking an imaginary card into the trash can, and making me aware of what else may have been lost from two weeks’ worth of unchecked pockets. “Then I see your name, Kelly. My daughter name also Kelly. I keep the card for you.” He tells me this while smiling broadly and handing me a garbage bag full of my clothes, folded and stacked into a neat brick. I thank him very much and tip generously, but forget to ask his name.
