Laundromat Meditations and Eternal Minutes

Twenty-five minutes in little sticks of fluorescent green. Nora’s weekends, they were now reserved for laundry.

She looked up from her laptop at dryers 71 and 72, large and tunnelling eyes at the back of the room. Clothes going round and round, up and drop, white linen within tumbling like sea froth.

Mammoth task of going to the laundromat, Nora typed, when you can hardly get out of bed. My sheets, they still stink of last month’s night sweats.

She took a sip of the hazelnut espresso she’d bought from the boulangerie across the road, a bite of a pistachio macaron not entirely defrosted – if she was going to be stuck there, she might as well make an adventure of it. And usually that was enough – you know, the sense of novelty and urban aesthetic of it all.

That is, until the novelty wears off.

Living in my own filth. Should probably be more productive. New apartment? A landlady who isn’t a deranged sea urchin?

Nora had seen an ad online for a shared apartment with a musician and a scientist and a somebody else and two cats and a functioning washing machine and no clogged shower drain. She’d arranged a viewing for that week. But until then, she’d spend her Saturdays smacking away at her keyboard amongst the sweat and socks and soap of strangers.

There’s a storm cloud following me today. Everything insists on self-erasure. And self-erasure smiles, a seductress. I slept with someone I shouldn’t have last night because I was sad and alone and tipsy and, of course, my period was on the horizon which is—I might be noticing a pattern—when I most don’t want to be here. God, how do you even say that euphemistically? Verbal gymnastics just to breathe. Anyway, my breasts, the plump perfection of my breasts demanded a witness. Not my libido, though. Don’t think so, at least. I still don’t know if I’m numb or dissociative or simply a closeted lesbian. Who knows, maybe I’m all three. I lack desire without security, and now even physical intimacy with me means partaking in my self-destruction. Physical intimacy, it means falling out of my good graces for having made me fall from grace. Safety, then, is Atlantis.

Small round window, 72. Another world if you stared long enough. White cherry blossoms blossoming against a backdrop of black infinity as the drum drummed and drummed – dadum, dadum. Have you ever thought of being a bedsheet in a dryer? (No? Me neither). But the hypnosis, it wasn’t working today, and no matter how long Nora stared or daydreamed, the mobbish storm clouds refused to disperse – and though she attempted to empty herself of all feeling and all thought, she was filled like a bucket to the brim with this grey mop-water weight. And the weariness, it pulled like gravity, until even her heart and lungs and guts were all reaching for the tiles. Not that anybody noticed.

Rush of wet tyres outside, cool gust of wind. In came a middle-aged man with a black suitcase. Flapped open. Machine stuffed like a Molotov cocktail, white sleeve hanging like a wick.

“Sorry,” he said, approaching Nora. “Could I borrow some of your detergent?”

Borrow? as though it weren’t single use.

“Sure,” said Nora, handing him her bottle. She felt her cheeks go red, irritated that he had asked. Irritated that she hadn’t said no. Saying yes, it was a reflex.

She should have bought the laundry powder, just fifty cents in the quaint vending machine on the wall. It would have bought her a pristine sachet and five fun seconds of the coil coiling. Would have saved her this interaction, too. Most of all.

“Here you go,” he said.

Beep of buttons, ching of payment, rush of water, soapy little fishbowls encircling the room.

And then it was quiet again in the laundromat (as it ought to be!), faces buried in screens. The crinkle of reusable shopping bags. The hushed and rhythmic shake of maraca machines.

And typing.

Intimacy, it happens on autopilot. A natural progression. Intimacy, it’s a shrug. I guess old habits die hard (or not at all). And only rarely does anybody stop—you know, when they realise I’m not in my body—while some don’t realise at all. I’m not sure which is worse.

“Excuse me, miss.”

Nora glanced up from her laptop and found the middle-aged man. Had she dropped something? She patted her pockets, scanned the ground. No.

Had her machine stopped? No.

“Yes?”

“You’re big on dessert, huh,” he said, nodding towards the brown paper bag.

“I guess,” said Nora.

“No, I mean dessert.”

Nora laughed, swallowed.

The stranger returned an eager grin, and his brow danced with tacit understanding. Fisheye lens: nose swelling, eyes swelling, teeth swelling.

Nora shivered and averted her eyes, stomach all beat like an egg white. There were still an eternal eight minutes on her machine, the little green twigs taunting.

“So, what do you say?”

Nothing, her voice all ice-cream scooped out.

Dadum-dadum. Metallic clink of buttons like the scrape of knife against fork.

Suddenly, there was a basket on the table beside Nora’s laptop. Manicured hands, nails French-tip white. A woman, folding her laundry. She glanced at Nora, a brief exchange. And the stranger, he slowly retreated to his machine.

But Nora could still feel his eyes glued to her. She knew that behind that lascivious, knowing smile, he’d been consuming her, and probably still was. Her pants, they felt too tight. Her cardigan, too tight. Her lungs, too tight.

And when eternity elapsed, she felt the stranger’s gaze as she removed her clothes from the machine, shoving handfuls of underwear into her bag, squeezing them into amorphous things just to strip them of their intimacy. And a wet thong, it fell onto the tiles, hurriedly snatched up. And smile. Nora could feel him smiling.

And when she left, she would still feel his hand in hers – lingering there, somehow, on the detergent handle.