04.17.23
At exactly 9am, I receive an email from a West Coast-based coworker, who clearly scheduled it to be sent on Monday morning at East Coast start of day. I find this to be a criminal offense. The timer on my phone has two and a half minutes left. I ignore the email (for now) and start gathering myself to move my laundry along in the basement.
I haven’t set out to do all of my laundry in a day in a while. I tend to fish out my highest priority items for one load when I’m finding myself low on socks or underwear, or strip my bed and change to a different set of clean sheets from the closet without immediately washing the ones I just removed. Or, if I’m strapped for time, I will dump everything without hang-dry instructions into a nylon sack and drop it off at the laundromat around the corner for Wash & Fold. I don’t do this often, as it’s obviously more expensive than just doing it myself in the basement, but it feels like a luxury worth investing in sometimes. Today, though, I take several trips to the basement. I’ve gone running five of the last seven days (please hold your applause), and I’m out of exercise clothes, so better to just get everything done for once.
When I first went downstairs, just after 8am when the elevator will again allow you to go to the basement, with only one load-worth of laundry in hand (I hate using the word “load”), I found the room empty of other tenants. I put my first load (ugh) in and went back upstairs to get a second to put in at the same time. I generally don’t like to use more than one machine at once, as I find it frustrating when one person is taking up more than their fair share of space, but if no one is down here, I’ll use two machines instead of one. I have a lot of laundry to get through this morning.
Later, carrying down my third and fourth loads in a flimsy laundry basket that is split in two places, I sweat. It’s cool out, after several days of it being — I’ll say it — too hot for April, but the humidity hangs on. Being in the basement doesn’t really help the situation. I move my first two loads of clothes out of the washers and into the dryers, cleaning lint traps and re-inserting my card several times to get the machine to register it. When I first moved into the building, I didn’t have a laundry card, and the card machine in the room was out of them. My super at the time gave me an extra one that he had, because he didn’t know how long it would take for the company to come and restock the machine with new cards. I thought that was very generous.
The smell of Tide reminds me of my ex-boyfriend. Our relationship smelled like laundry because he didn’t have a lot of free time, and was often checking off a list of weekly chores in the time he spent with me (which was fine — this is not a read). He would sweep his floors and make grocery lists while I worked on my laptop on his couch. He had brown, square laundry baskets and used dryer balls over dryer sheets. I would go with him to the basement of his building in New Rochelle, even though he would have only been gone for a couple of minutes, most often because he’d ask me to come down with him, which conveniently satiated my desire to follow him around like a puppy dog. I didn’t want to show my cards then, or at the very least didn’t want to vocalize the cards I was holding, but I wanted to be near him as often as I could, even if that meant some unnecessary elevator rides between the basement and tenth floor. I didn’t really do anything to help in the laundry room itself, but I would help him fold things when we got back to his apartment with the balcony view of the city. The wafted smell of Original Tide reminds me of those afternoons, with Winter and Spring sun streaming in his blinded windows, giggling and looking for matches for his socks, playfully arguing about the merits of duvets versus regular blankets. He was always very diligent about washing his sheets.
When I get back up to my apartment, with all of my non-white clothes now in the washers or dryers, I find a lone black sock on the floor, next to the pile of my white sheets and towels, which will be my fifth and final laundry installment (I can say that instead of “load,” can’t I?). God dammit. There’s always one loose sock somewhere, isn’t there?
