The Only Laundromat in the World
very short fiction
Our washing machine broke and Home Depot said they couldn’t deliver a new one until Friday. So my husband and I carried baskets of our darks and whites two blocks to the local laundromat.
“I haven’t done this since college,” my husband said as he poured detergent into a machine.
“Do you remember those assholes who’d take your wet clothes out of a dryer and dump them in a basket?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Bunch of hyenas. Goddamn scavengers.”
“And how about the ones who’d take your clothes out of the dryer,” I said. “Even when they weren’t dry enough.”
“Like vultures circling a pile of quarters,” my husband said.
But we were alone in the laundromat that night. We’d both grown up in poverty but had become successful enough to choose our doctors. I think that might be the most important choice there is. We’d looked at a list of healers and picked one. Every healer eventually loses, of course, but you hope you choose one who is gifted enough to keep you alive for at least 75 years. That’s the minimum goal for any American, right? Give me 75 years! It’s still not enough time but it’ll offer you enough days to take a good look around the world.
Then the laundromat’s radio started playing a love song from the early years of our marriage—from our courtship. It wasn’t “our song,” but it was a cousin of that song, so we slow-danced. We shuffled. Our shoes slid across the detergent powder that had been spilled that day and had only been partially swept away.
My husband kissed me when the song ended. I kissed him back.
“Get a room,” a teenager yelled at us through the open door as he walked past the laundromat.
That teenager laughed. We laughed. Our son and daughter were on the other side of the country at their colleges. They were mostly happy, I think.
My husband folded his pants and shirts. I folded mine. And we worked together to fold a fitted sheet into a neat square. Yes, we were well-practiced in that particular form of domestic origami.
Then my husband wrapped my shoulders in a towel fresh from the high-heat dryer and I let that warmth carry me back home.
I imagined a radio just always playing. Hmmmm. A radio plugged into the wall that has always been playing in that laundromat. Nobody even remembers who plugged it in it. Might have been a previous owner. Might have been a customer who brought the radio, left it begin, and was forget they’d even brought it at all. Maybe the radio had been there since radios were first invented. Maybe the laundromat was built up around the radio. The eternal radio—the one that always knows when to play the song you most need in any given moment.
It’s a beautiful story, yes. Thank you for the happy undertones.
I hesitate to say something about sad art, but in fact I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. These are difficult times. So many of us are sad, artists and non-artists alike. I’ve been thinking about one of my favorite characters in literature, the doctor in Camus’ The Plague. I’ve always loved the way he stood by the bedside of dying people, knowing that he could not save them, and still sitting by their side because he knew that, as a doctor, that was his role in life. I’ve often thought lately that writers might do the same, once in awhile, now when so many of us are hurting. Artists are the doctors of our souls. Stories are the magic that can lift our spirits, even when (especially when) they don’t pretend that all is right with the world, yet still find a way to lift us up.