Scrubbed hands

Louise’s family purchased their first washer-dryer machine, a GE, in the early 1990s. They had just moved to the apartment row bought with her mother's office salary, and they were going through a rotating deck of housekeepers. The washing machine was a cheery lime green, and it had a hose for water to flow in and out of. It was important that they aligned the knobs exactly on the marks, or else they would end up either losing clean water before they began or retain dirty water past the end.

Beddings, blankets, and most of their clothes went into the machine. Some of Louise’s earliest memories were trying to “balance” the dryer basket so that it could spin around as it wrung them dry. However, her household still preferred to launder garments made of delicate materials entirely by hand. Louise’s mother – Mommy – taught her, her siblings, and whoever was the housekeeper to fill a wide, shallow basin with warm water, and then to rub a bar of laundry soap onto the article of clothing. They would scrub the soapy garment on itself for around 10 to 15 minutes, before dunking it inside the basin to rinse. Depending on its material, they might skip wringing the garment altogether and simply hang it up to dry. The heat of the tropical sun would dry clothes and beddings evenly, with minimal fading of color.

Soon, school occupied most of her days and nights. Mommy found a housekeeper, and then a laundrywoman. Louise learned to wash her underwear in the few minutes before she took her daily morning shower. These would then go into the rest of the family laundry pile for handwashing and line-drying by the laundrywoman at the second floor of their apartment’s outdoor laundry area, which had a hole in the wall for the afternoon sun to enter and a roof above to keep out the rain.

During the summer months, the family housekeeper would take turns with the laundrywoman to return to their hometowns in the provinces. Mommy took advantage of this by corralling Louise and her siblings to do household chores. Louise would always ask to do the laundry and the dishes, because the time set for these tasks allowed her to imagine stories to write. Character scenarios and plot points would often mesh together while Louise waited for the dryer to shudder into a stop.

As Louise and her siblings grew older, they learned to fold, iron, and put clean laundry away in their proper cabinets and closest. She was, and remained, terrible at folding bed linens, but she was quick to hang clothing without a wrinkle. Afterwards, they would always apply lotion – but the humidity of the tropical city they lived in kept Louise’s hands soft, while making lotion uncomfortably sticky. To Mommy’s chagrin, Louise would only apply a thin dab only once a fortnight, if ever she remembered to do it at all.  

Louise loved holding the hands of her parents as a child; they kept her steady when her body could not cope with her energy. Her first six years of life was marked by numerous hospitalizations for hepatitis, dengue, typhoid fever, measles, and mumps. For the longest time, it was her mother’s hand that she held, because Mommy would always take time off her office job to keep watch at her hospital bed while her father, Daddy, was busy at work.

Mommy noticed early on that Mommy’s fingers were bony, with blue veins webbing through them. The skin of her hands was soft and always smelled of lotion; bottles of Jergen’s often cluttered her vanity table. Mommy would tell Louise stories about how they were always rough because of frequent washing, whether it was garments, bedclothes, or dishes. While she spared Louise the rod herself, Mommy’s stories were of her father – Louise’s grandfather – often slapping her hands with a leather belt or a piece of wood in drunken fits of anger. Her mother, by contrast, would only pinch them when she was being particularly stubborn.

When schooling overtook storytelling and laundry washing, Louise began earning medals and certificates. Her intelligence was a source of pride for Mommy, who had been clever enough to do well in school and then work her way up the corporate ladder by graduating with a bachelor’s degree in accounting. But as Louise grew taller, she also ended up disagreeing with Mommy about the importance of high grades and the kind of life she wanted to lead. Mommy expressed her anger by ignoring Louise, who would alternately answer back with sarcasm and yelling. She blamed Louise’s temperament on Daddy, who was once caught by Louise’s older sibling in a shouting match with Mommy.

While Louise was finishing university, Mommy moved her and her siblings into a three-story house in the same city without Daddy. He was no longer to live with them, though he was free to visit during important occasions. He was allowed to stay in the old apartment and keep everything that Mommy left in it, including the old washing machine which had faded to a very dull green-gray. Mommy bought a newer, larger washer-dryer machine of stainless steel to fit the longer, single-story laundry room.

Louise took Mommy’s lessons on washing delicate garments and self-care with her when she moved overseas. Louise married someone who lived in a country where communal washer-dryer machines were available for a sum, but also where outdoor clotheslines were only for homeowners. Her spouse wasn’t too keen on doing laundry, and she did it enough to understand why he wouldn’t do laundry if he could help it.

Her morning routine now went like this: Louise and her husband woke up, one of them cooked breakfast while the other took a bath and got dressed, they ate breakfast together, then he went to work while she would wash their garments at the laundry room. Whenever the clothing load was light or the sun was out, Louise would add blankets and bedclothes to the wash. She would still wash her underclothes by hand before taking a shower – usually while waiting for wet laundry as they spin in the dryer – then toss them into a laundry bag for a second round of cleaning in the machines.

The apartment row that Louise and her husband called “home” had its own communal laundry area, just large enough for washing machines and a large trash bin. The washers and dryers were separate units, four of each in total. It also had a vending machine for changing money into quarters, even if their landlords also installed a mobile phone app to activate the washing machines with for convenience. However, they had no way to line-dry garments and beddings outdoors, at least not without the risk of having them stolen.

During the first few weeks of their marriage, Louise’s husband would do the laundry together with her. But now, this and most of the household chores fell squarely on her, although he would be folding and putting away the clean laundry. The rest of her days are usually spent cleaning up the house, cooking dinner, and enjoying each other’s company. On the days when Louise would hunt for job opportunities, she would usually submit and follow up on her biodata, cover letters, and audition pieces through email, phone, and personal appearances.

Whenever her husband held her hand, which he did often, he would always look at her hands. Gone were the soft hands with springy skin; they had been scrubbed thin, bearing cracks and discolorations. At best, her wrists, palms, and fingers felt very dry and rough; at worst, they bore shallow cuts that would scar. He would remark that Louise ought to apply more lotion, and to do it daily. But Louise often forgot anyway, because there were other things to do like cook their meals, clean up the house, and look for work.

Today, the old, light green washing machine that Louise used to watch over still works; it whirs and spins in the same way it first did almost 30 years ago because of the tinkering and care of her father. But now her scrubbed, rough hands now bear the marks of doing laundry and other household chores, just like her mother’s own.