It hadn’t happened for a long time – for such a long time, in fact, that I had begun to forget the horror, the pain, the feelings of shame. As the bad memories receded, my vow never to let it happen again faded in strength also. I should have known that the clothing gods would punish me for my arrogance, and sure enough, when I reached sleepily into my underwear drawer early this morning, what to my heavy-
lidded eyes should appear but the ghastly greyed-out specter of The Pair. The Pair, born in a Hanes For Her factory lo these many years ago, has no elastic left in its legs. Its fabric has grown frail and thin from repeated washings, and tendrils of raveling thread snake up from its tired waistband. The Pair, friendless and alone, lurks in the back of the drawer and plots its next act of sagging-in-the-
front-while-simultaneously-making-a-home-for-itself-in-my-crack retaliation, and whenever I grow complacent about doing my laundry and put off the odious chore repeatedly, I slide open the drawer to find only The Pair left. “You pushed me to the back,” it cackles, “and rejected me – but now you have to wear me, lazy girl! Vengeance is mine! Mwa ha ha ha haaaaa!”

I won’t bore you with the travails of actually wearing The Pair, and I always do wear it, because I just can’t bear to “fly free,” particularly not on a weekday during the course of which I will spend at least an hour sitting on the subway, and I’d rather have The Pair as a last line of defense between me and whatever little creatures the previous occupant of the seat may have planted there than just my boot-cut pants. Suffice it to say that I spend much of the morning squirming, yanking at myself, and walking as though a hornet had flown up my pantleg. Then I get home, and before I do anything else, I have to do laundry (or go out and buy new undies – just as time-consuming, and, given the vagaries of The Pair, not nearly as attractive a prospect as staying in my own building where I can liberate my two-hundred-and-twelfth wedgie of the day in private). First, I open the cabinet under the sink and get out the detergent and bleach. Then I spend a good fifteen minutes trying to pry a fascinated feline out from under the gooseneck of pipe in the cabinet, because the cat seems to find that cabinet extremely seductive (probably because, due to the presence of various yummy-tasting poisonous chemicals therein, I don’t allow him to go in there), and he can tell when I have opened the door and arrives there in a flash and muscles his way in, the better to lick the nozzle of a can of Raid, and I have to pull him out by the hind legs and ruin his fun. Next, I marshal a supply of quarters while the cat squirrels into the laundry bag, which already weighs close to a metric ton because I haven’t done the wash in so long, and when I try to pick up the bag, it weighs twelve pounds more than it should, and I have to put it back down, open up the drawstring, dig through two weeks’ worth of sweaty shirts and balled-up socks and shorts with spaghetti sauce on the hem, and yank out the cat, and the cat digs his claws in and pulls out a good half of the contents of the bag with him, and I stuff all the things he pulled out back in while he glares at me, and now in addition to all this dirty laundry I also have a pet with enough accumulated static charge to power a box fan, and he smells like an armpit as well.

I lug everything – detergents, quarters, giant Santa-esque sack of stinky unmentionables – out into the hall and ring for the service elevator. I have to take the service elevator because I won’t fit into the regular elevator with all this dirty clothing, and even if I did my wash once a week like a normal grown-up, I always wind up buying the five-gallon jug of bleach that comes with a hand tap, and that bad boy won’t fit into the regular elevator either. I get off the service elevator in the basement and stagger towards the laundry room, and once I arrive at the laundry room, the real fun begins. And now, a brief sidebar on human behavior. After years of dormitory laundering, which involved standing guard over my loads of laundry to prevent against the bra and panty thefts I had suffered on various occasions, not to mention deterring people from removing my still-wet clothing from the dryer, dumping it unceremoniously on a floor that had not seen the business end of a mop since before the invention of television, and using the remainder of my paid-for dryer minutes for their own clothes, and of course the “shoppers” who would stop by their local laundry facility to acquire new duds for themselves from the piles of unattended t-shirts on the folding tables, and after more than a few months of hauling my gear eight blocks to the nearest laundromat, squeezing into the tiny storefront to load the machines, reclining on cases of detergent with a paperback to wait for the cycle to finish, and seeing the exact same amoral behavior from paying customers, one of whom stuck his head into one of my machines, fished out a black bra, and whipped it around on his index finger while saying, “Ooh la la,” only to get booted out of the laundromat by the proprietor, and let’s not even talk about the time I whipped open a lint trap to find a little family of mice sleeping inside – after all this, I thought that when I moved to a building with an in-house laundry facility, I could kiss all of these aggravations goodbye. I thought wrong.

My fellow residents have a number of deeply strange ideas about how one undertakes a load of laundry, starting with the correct number of items to place in the washing machine or dryer at one time. A lot of people seem to believe that putting only one or two items in each machine will get those items cleaner, or let them dry faster, so I often enter the laundry room to find all of the washers and dryers occupied, not by full loads, but by two t-shirts and a pillowcase each. Apparently, it hasn’t occurred to some that, in a building with more than 250 residence units, not everyone who lives here will fully appreciate the brilliance of the “minimum density” theory. Add to this the usual smorgasbord of idiocy – tenants phoning the maintenance line in a huff because Dryer 12 doesn’t work and saying things like, “‘Put a quarter in,’ you say? Well, I never,” for example, or wondering aloud why the washer hasn’t started when they haven’t closed the lid – as well as the exact same inexplicable rudeness I had to put up with in college, and you’ll understand why I can’t deal with the laundry room. Should I have to explain to a fifty-year-old woman that, no, she cannot take my clothes out and put hers in, because my clothes have not yet dried, and furthermore, I PAID FOR THAT HALF-HOUR? No, I don’t think I should. Should she then expect me to respond favorably to “well, I need the dryer”? No, I don’t think she should. The laundry room does have its amusements: the woman on the fourth floor whom I call “Princess Tatiana” in my head, who once asked me if I knew how to get a ballpoint pen mark out of Russian lynx, or the little lapdogs that accompany their owners to the laundry room and have a wild time stalking tumbleweeds of lint, or the cleaning lady who marched in with a set of curtains still on the rod and tried to stuff the whole kit and caboodle into a front-loading washer, rod and all. But I could really do without the people who flood the whole basement by pouring more water into the washer to dilute the bleach, or that guy sitting there in his undies waiting for his jeans to dry. And frankly, I could do without folding. I don’t like folding.

I could send my things out to a cleaner’s, I suppose, but I have certain fussy preferences for how I like my laundry done, and I don’t like other people touching my underwear, and now that the Biscuit has come back to the city for the summer, I have to deal with his laundry idiosyncrasies too, namely that certain t-shirts can’t go in the dryer and I have to hang them in the shower and fan them with a palm frond. Besides, I can’t deny the cat the pleasure of burrowing into the still-warm towels and falling deeply asleep. But like so many other household chores, something about the essentially futile repetition of the laundry prevents me from doing it as regularly as I should. I’d save myself a lot of trouble – and confrontations with The Pair – if I just did it once a week and had done with it, but no. I always wait until I have nothing left to wear but The Pair and a grungy t-shirt from field hockey camp. On the plus side, I tend to forget all about certain clothing items until I do laundry, and then I have a happy reunion with them when I do the folding, and it’s like getting new clothes.

Still, when I lay around daydreaming of the day when I could “do grown-up stuff,” I wish someone had told me that “grown-up stuff” meant pressing my khakis with the Baseball Encyclopedia because I don’t own an iron.

Gets whites even whiter.

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