Searching for the Perfect Pop Chip - A Story of Doing and Failing to Do my Laundry

Every washing machine I have ever used since moving away from home (the first time, that happy hopeful freshman year of college, before the subsequent fallings-apart and starting-overs) has disappointed me. More than they should, perhaps. Even the washing machine that my parents bought that first fall, to replace the one we had for twenty years, our longest-lasting household appliance, did not measure up.

I remember visiting on the weekends, walking back inside our house after being away for what felt like a lifetime but could not have been more than a month, and being struck by how beautiful everything was, and how quickly everything had changed. The smells sharp and clean, the hardwood floors shining, our old living room rug venerable and rich. The windows that could actually open to let in the crisp autumn day. My father and sister so much older somehow, my mother blessedly the same.

I gave the dormitory laundry a fair shot, but found the public nature of washing my period-stained underwear in front of other random girls too stressful. I was also convinced that the temperature of the water was shrinking my shorts, although I couldn’t tell that to anyone else without hearing about the freshman fifteen. What a lazy, insidious expression. I did not experience the freshman fifteen. Perhaps it would have been healthier than what I did have, which was a losing and re-gaining of the same five fretful pounds, marked by Mondays and Tuesdays of bland, disciplined cafeteria eating that alternated with Thursday afternoons of shame-ridden Chipotle binges and whole bags of (flavor-packed, air-fried, low calorie) Pop Chips, which I cannot look at to this day without feeling the urge to exercise until I feel faint and pure once more.

By spring break I was leaving every weekend to go home because I was tired of feeling lonely. And when spring break ended, it was just easier to stay at home for the rest of the semester. The new family washing machine was okay, but it was louder and slower, and it eventually ended up flooding over into the garage. At some point in between the purchase of the first and second washing machines, companies discovered they could make more money by making things sleeker and more complex and fragile to the point of uselessness. Like (flavor-packed, air-fried, low calorie) Pop Chips, these appliances have no lasting value, and we buy them knowing deep down we will be disappointed. But they are available, and we can afford them, and there is a hole inside that sometimes feels a little smaller right when we first manage to slip our fingernail into the tight, clean plastic.

The hole, and the plastic, the inevitable disappointment. There is a promise of purity and perfection with each new object, each new resolution, that gains power from our shame and loneliness.

The fourth washing machine was the only legitimately awful one - sophomore year I moved back to campus, determined to make friends (or at least lose my virginity). I found a co-op, a man (or man then co-op? the sequence may be open to debate), and a spotty co-op washing machine at the end of a spotty co-op hallway. At least I had my own room in which to spread out my clothes to dry.

I diligently followed through on my resolution and had sex - joyless, seemingly endless encounters that left me colder and lonelier than ever before. He rarely even came. I never washed the fabulously trashy outfit that I donned in anticipation of that first time. I didn’t have the heart, and I wasn’t sure the thin purple material would hold up on even a gentle cycle. I should have given up with that ill-fated halter-tank-crop thing, but I continued, still striving for the perfect body, so I could finally wear an outfit that would make me feel worthy of the kind of love that I still daydreamed of, that would make him see me the way I wanted to be seen.

Instead I got mono and an irregular pap. The birth control I was on combined with my own genetic tendencies and by the end of sophomore year I was sliding into what would become a years-long battle with depression, presenting as an always-present, sometimes-debilitating anxiety. I moved back home once more. I have since come to learn that my mother at least partially believed that the yellow-gray knitted cardigan I wore during that period was the source of my malaise. I do remember that she was careful to always wash it when I couldn’t be bothered.

I don’t remember the fifth washing machine. I got in a landmark fight with my dad one year later and moved back to campus, to a different co-op, and I know I must have been doing laundry because I had an internship by then and I was killing myself to make a good impression. But for the life of me I can’t remember where in that building the machine would have been, or when I would have washed my clothes in between the crying spells. I remember the burning heat of the sun from the Texas September, but I can’t remember light.

Things are better now. Time has passed, and the loneliness has eased. My seventh and hopefully far from final washing machine is a piece of crap that has already needed replacing once in the three years we’ve lived here. It’s one of those that you put the detergent on the bottom, then your clothes, and then run the water at the very end, as if that will be enough to spread the detergent evenly throughout the entire load. Yeah right. My husband claims they all work like that. He thought it was funny when I explained how the good ones work. I still remember that first machine, how you put the clothes in first, then filled it up with water, then poured in the detergent at the end so the soap only touched the clothes after it had been dissolved a little bit. I remember telling my little sister that only people with low self-esteem did it any other way.

Maybe the clothes really did get cleaner that way. Maybe one day I will be certain once again that I’m doing it right. For now, I’m learning to live with good enough.I’m making it work. As I write this, there is a pair of grey work pants hanging over my dog’s crate with a fairly prominent yellowish stain that I have failed to remove for over a year. I still wear them to work on days when I think it unlikely that anyone will notice. I have found that I like them more with the stain than without. I like that I would notice if someone tried to switch them out with a different pair. Part of me knows I should just take them to the cleaners, and I leave them out every once in a while with a vague intent of doing so. But another part of me says to just let them be, that nothing will ever be perfect and very little will feel pure, but that some things, for now, are entirely mine.