A Summer Sunday at the Laundromat

The laundromat was full that day. Full of light, of the tumbling railroad noise of dryers, of dust-bunnies and lint balls traipsing across the linoleum tiles, of single socks dangling in the back workings of the machines, of the clinking casino noise of the change machine, and full of people.

In the row of seats against the front wall, Natalie sat with a book in her hand. The light coming through the window behind her made the pages almost unreadable, but she didn’t mind – she wasn’t really reading, anyway. Her eyes hovered over the top of her book like bobbers on a fishing line. All of the feeling in her face had drained into her eyes – dribbled over her cheekbones and down her forehead and, like rain, found the lowest point. Anyone looking at her in the laundromat that day might not have even noticed her face, or the book shielding it. They wouldn’t have noticed that her hair was frizzy in the humidity of the room, or that there was a small soy sauce stain on the bottom hem of her t-shirt, or that her left shoe was untied, or what book she was reading. In that moment, she was her eyes, and they floated there in the melting nothingness of the rest of her face like ice cubes in a summer glass of lemonade, bobbing and shining, lolling around so that, no matter how you spun the cup, they never moved.

Her eyes watched the machine across from her, thirty feet across the linoleum floor against the opposite wall. They looked through the machine’s glass door at the clothes being tossed around inside – limp, wet and limp and soggy. She thought about how she knew exactly what noise it would make when she pulled the clothes out of the machine and dropped them into her laundry basket – that wet-thing sound, like dough on a kitchen counter or fish on the floor of a boat, and she played the noise in her mind. Plop! The quart yogurt container spilled from the fridge, the big sponge you wash the car with when you drop it on the driveway, Play-Doh on a table.

Her phone buzzed, startling her so much she dropped her book. A message had come through from Earl: “John says he left his bathing suit in with the laundry this morning.”

She sighed deeply. “Can you find it? I didn’t see it when I loaded the washer,” she sent back.

A minute or so passed before: “Not here, I don’t think he brought it.”

Goddamn, Natalie thought. She unlocked her phone and texted back: “The machine finishes in 23 minutes. Swing by then.”

She shook her head and bent over to pick up her book. She couldn’t remember where she’d been, so she opened it up to a random page and started reading. 

23 minutes later, and, sure enough, Natalie peeled a tiny little bathing suit off the inside of a fitted sheet. A little blue bathing suit with sandy-colored sand dollars printed on it, an orange shoelace drawstring dangling out of its two little eyelets. She set the bathing suit over on top of the dryer and dropped the sheet in her laundry basket – plop! She smiled.  She pulled each item from the washing machine in handfuls, checked inside the rubber seal for any lost socks, and dropped them in the basket with the sheet. Plop! It was really the first sheet that had been the strongest, the most authentic plop, but everything down to the socks had made a little noise when they landed, and that made her happy.

She stepped a few feet to the side and opened the dryer. The usual processes – emptying the lint tray, scooping out the few long, black hairs left behind by the machine’s previous user, dropping in a dryer sheet – and then in went her clothes. Plop! they all went against the metal cheese-grater drum. Plop plop plop! She found herself throwing the last few things with a little extra force, the straggling pairs of underwear and socks, just so they would make the noise too. She laughed. She liked it. In that moment, someone looking at her through the front wall of windows wouldn’t have focused on her eyes. They would see her mouth, and how her lips were spread a little in her smile so you could see a few millimeters of her front teeth, how her forehead still had a few little leftover wrinkles, and how the jeans she was wearing hit her in a lot of the right spots. 

Fifteen more minutes and Earl’s car pulled up outside, his windshield sparking light up against the wall opposite Natalie. She didn’t notice until the little one came in and wrapped himself around her leg.

“Hey buddy,” she said, drumming her fingertips against his head. “How’s the morning with Dad been?”

“Terrible,” he said without looking up at her. The way he pronounced it – tewwibow – reminded her that she needed to make an appointment with the speech therapist his school had recommended.

“Terrible?” she asked, affecting shock and awe. She cupped her hands under his armpits and hoisted him up, plopping him down in her lap, saying “Plop!” as she did it. “How about that?” she asked.

“I left my bathing suit at home,” he said, and she smiled. His little eyebrows curved down around his eyes like adolescent peach fuzz, so blonde and pink in the end of summer that they were barely even there. 

“That’s awful,” Natalie said. “That’s the most awful, terrible thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Daddy says you have it.” The little one used his arms to push himself off her lap and down to the floor. His sneakers squeaked against the linoleum.

“Wow, it sounds like your Daddy was right for once,” Natalie said, still in her tone of fake excitement even though John had run a few steps away to watch clothes turn around in one of the machines.

Behind them, the glass door of the laundromat swung open and a few heavy steps made their way over to the chairs. 

Natalie glanced over her shoulder. “Right, maybe, but not on time.”

“Good to see you too, Nat.” Earl was big, lanky and long with pendulous, oversized hands that fit well around the neck of a guitar. His shoulders were more slender than they should’ve been, which gave him a kind of bowed silhouette, and the shoulder seams on his t-shirt hung three inches down over the tops of his arms. His shorts were the longest cut and still ended a few inches shy of his knees, and when he sat down you could see the tan line left from going on hikes and working in the yard. 

He sat down next to her, stretching his legs so his feet projected more than a foot farther out into the room than hers.   “It’s summer,” he said, “you can’t be late on a Sunday in summer.” He spoke slowly.

“I said the cycle would finish in 23 minutes.” Natalie looked forward as she spoke, her eyes on the little one watching the washing machines like they were TVs.

Earl nodded, his chin pumping up and down like the piston on an oil rig. “I never said I’d get here in 23 minutes. You’re just stressed, everything’s fine.”

“I’m not stressed.”

Earl tossed back a laugh like it just floated out of him. “Look at you, you look like you want to snatch him up and keep him in your pouch like a baby kangaroo.”

She nodded absentmindedly, a routine motion while she thought. “I’m fine with you having him.”

Earl returned her nod without looking at her. It was a conversation in peripheral vision. “I know. We talked about it, with a mediator and everything.”

They sat without talking or moving, just their gentle nods slowly curtailing back into stillness in the progressively more diagonal sunlight. The dust-bunnies and tufts of lint tracked their way on the floor and someone put an old plastic cup under the soap dispenser, the little one watched the washing machines turn, and through it all, the pair sat there and tacitly watched it go by.  Earl glanced over and saw her staring at her son like every moment was a drop of water she had to collect before time dried her up.

“You got the bathing suit?” Earl asked after a few minutes.

She nodded. “Yeah, it’s right over there. Dryer 12.” She used the tip of her book to point it out.

Earl stood up, his long bones making the process look like it was being done by a marionette doll or an articulated fossil in a museum. “Which dryer?” he asked.

Natalie rolled her eyes. “Dryer 12, Earl. I just said it.”

“I know you did, Nat, I was just giving you a chance to correct yourself.”

Now it was Natalie’s turn to stand up. “Correct myself? I know which dryer I’m using, Earl.”

Earl took a deep breath. “There’s no bathing suit on dryer 12.”

“You can’t see that from over here.”

“Nat, I’m nine inches taller than you. I can see the dryer from here, and there isn’t a bathing suit on it.”

The two stared at each other, Natalie’s eyebrows cinching in towards her nose while Earl’s drooped outwards. The solid tap tap tap of Natalie’s foot joined up with the thrums and drumming noises already filling up the laundromat, the heat and humidity of the room making all the sounds flow like syrup. 

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll just go get it then.”

Earl nodded. “Good luck.”

Natalie bent down and petted John’s head on the way over to the dryer, and his towheaded hair felt like corn silk in her fingers. Baby hair is always so soft, she thought, and she had to remind herself that John was already five. She had to stop herself from closing her eyes as she got close to the dryer because of how much she was afraid to look at it. She wanted him to be wrong so bad. She was willing to be wrong if it somehow meant he would be wrong, too.

At about five feet away, Natalie saw that there was no bathing suit on top of the dryer. 

“Find it yet?” Earl asked, calling across the room.

Natalie stared at the dryer. She could see the wet mark where it had been sitting, the little shorts-shaped splotch that picked up the light. She could swear she even saw a grain of sand or two that had slipped out of the mesh lining. 

“I’m,” she said, stopping. “It’s…”

She turned around and looked at him, and his expression made her skin wriggle on her body like sound waves, or Jello. She could see so clearly that he didn’t care. Earl had had no investment in this whole thing, whether the bathing suit was there or not. And then she realized it wasn’t even a “whole thing” even though she was calling it that. It was just a size 5 blue bathing suit not on top of a dryer.

She walked back over to Earl. “It’s not there. Someone must’ve taken it.”

He nodded. “Gotta watch your things in places like this. It’s fine, we’ll swing by the store and get him a new one.” He turned over towards the boy. “How does that sound, Johnny boy? You want a new bathing suit?”

“Yeah!” John leapt up from the linoleum tiles and sprinted over to his dad, wrapping himself around Earl’s leg. “I like new!” Natalie could see a few of Earl’s leg hairs that pressed up against the little one’s cheek. She could practically feel them.

She looked up at Earl. “You’ll drop him off at school tomorrow, and I’ll pick him up. Right?”

He nodded his oil rig nod, slower in coming back up than going down. “Yes.”

“Okay.” She nodded, hers a quick, indicative nod, her eyes dropping down to the kid again. “I just wanted to check, you know. ‘Cause it’s the first time we’re doing this and I just want to- “

“Nat,” Earl said. His branch of an arm reached out, resting its hand on her shoulder. After a second or two, she decided not to shrug it off. “I know. I get it. It’ll be fine.”

She nodded. “Okay. Alright. You’re right. It’ll be fine.”

The oil rig nod. “It’ll be fine.”

Natalie breathed for a second, pulling back in the tears that wet her eyes and made everything seem amber and syrupy in the afternoon light. She knelt down and tapped on the little one’s shoulder.

“Come here, sweetie.”

He let go and stepped the two feet over to her, his sneakers squeaking on the floor.

“You’re my little plop, you know that?” He nodded. “’Cause that’s what you do,” she tickled his belly, “plop plop plop plop plop!” He giggled and contorted a bit, wrapping in around her arm and smiling. His corn silk hair rubbed against her forearm.

She stopped tickling and hugged him. “I’ll see you Monday. Love you.”

“Love you too, Mommy,” he said. Wuv you too.

“Alright buddy, let’s go.” Earl reached down and grabbed John’s hand, leading him towards the door. The two men walked right next to each other, the little one’s arm almost pulling him off the floor as it reached up to hold onto his dad’s. Natalie could already see how they walked similar, and it gave her a little warm feeling inside, though she couldn’t tell if it was comfort or a little sickness.

“Don’t keep him up too late,” she called.

Earl turned half-way around, his shoulders rotating just enough for his head to look back at her. “He’s five, Nat. I’m not keeping him up to watch the 11 o’clock news.” She nodded, and the two walked out the door. She watched as Earl opened the back door of his car and hoisted John up into the seat, buckling him into the car seat they’d bought together last year when he got too big for his old one. A few more seconds, and they drove away.

Anyone looking into the laundromat right then would’ve seen how the sun caught her cheekbones and chin in the way it slid through the window, and how her shoulders slumped forward a little so her neck had to compensate to hold her head up, and how her left hand was jammed loosely in her jeans pocket, her fingers picking at the loose stitching around the edge.

After a few minutes, the buzzer went off on dryer 12, and Natalie went over to empty it out. The dry clothes all made the same noise when they tumbled into the laundry basket – a thump, soft and pale, and a little sad.