My parents didn’t get a washer and dryer until years after
I’d married and moved away from home, and therefore many hours of my childhood
were spent in coin laundries, and yesterday—-for some reason—-I found myself
getting nostalgic about them.
I’m pretty certain that my mother doesn’t share that
nostalgia. When she finally got her own washer-dryer set—-a hand-me-down from my
grandmother, whose home was sold after she was moved permanently to a nursing
home—-she reveled in the convenience. And no wonder: the ritual of washing
clothes, all through my growing up, had been exhausting. Once a week, on
Saturday morning, Mom would gather up the entire family’s clothes into five or
six garbage bags, and Dad would load them in the bed of the pick-up truck. We’d
drive to the laundry, unload, and Dad would go to the attendant to swap bills
for quarters. Then, more often than not, he would leave for home or to do the
grocery shopping, sometimes with my brother, and Mom would start
staking out washers and measuring cups of powdered detergent.
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| From The Book Rack website |
We went to several different laundry facilities over the
years, but the iconic laundromat of my memory—-the one we kept coming back
to—-was in a small brick-clad shopping center with a diner on one end and a
grocery store on the other. One door down was a used bookstore called The Book
Rack. I spent much of the time my mom was washing clothes hiding out in that
dark, musty store, whose front room was filled with romance novels and comic
books, its second room with mysteries, and where, as a pre-teen, I finally
found the courage to venture into the recesses of the back-back room, a closet,
really, with a cardboard cut-out of Hannibal Lecter on the wall and several shelves
of beaten-up paperback horror novels. The Book Rack’s proprietress—-and she may
still be there, for all I know—-was an elegant looking woman with large glasses
hooked to a chain and hair that had been sprayed into romantic curls or
a puffy chignon. She was always kind to me, patient with my browsing (which was more like long sessions of simply sitting in the floor and reading), despite the fact that I had no compunction in those days about entering places of business with blackened bare feet.
The next door after that was The Family Dollar. Now, our
visits to The Family Dollar were always a matter of some controversy in our
family, because my mom had a predilection for going there and buying items my
father regarded as “doodads” or junk, and she was also a soft touch when it
came to her kids’ desire for doodads and junk. One of my most vivid
memories—-and perhaps this is why I thought of the coin laundry—-is of convincing
her to buy me a novelty Valentine’s Day item that I can’t easily describe in a
few words. It was a hollow plastic fox, covered with synthetic fur, lips
painted a garish red, with arms that had been molded so that there was a little
round opening where a vial of smelly cheap perfume was nestled. “Don’t tell
your dad I bought it for you,” she said. I agreed. Then, weighted with guilt, I
confessed to Dad as soon as I saw him.
And this is one of the associations I have with the coin
laundry: hours alone with my mother, hours during which my mother exerted,
however tentatively, her agency to spend cash and time as she liked, the two of
us occasionally making plans and pacts that, at least in theory, excluded my
father. My parents were, even by the standards of 1980s Kentucky, an
old-fashioned married couple, one the cash earner and unilateral money manager,
the other the full-time homemaker. My mother didn’t (and does not) have a
driver’s license, and so there weren’t many opportunities for her to go to a
store or a restaurant alone, unless she walked, and even then she wasn’t really
alone, because my brother and I were with her. So I suspect that she enjoyed on
some level the solitude of the work, the rhythm of wash and dry, the long
stretches spent in a hard plastic chair, warm in a patch of sunlight, reading a
book and drinking a bottle of diet soda and listening to the somersaulting
clothes. She clearly liked the time spent among other women, too: the
attendant, the other regulars. The coin laundry was a place where I saw black
mothers and their families and later Mexican mothers and families. Whatever
trepidations got expressed about race at home, at the laundromat, the
interactions were friendly, casual. Women chatted about the weather and passed
empty carts around. They warned one another about the dryer that wasn’t putting
off good heat. And though I don’t remember much rowdy play among the children,
we stood together eyeing the contents of the candy machines, invested dimes
hoping that the plastic egg with the advertised “good” toy would roll down when
we turned the crank. We sat in the lounge area together, eating Paydays and
bags of Lance Nip-Chee. We sized one another up, filing away our observations
for later consideration.
The laundromat, with a few rare exceptions, was a neutral
place, an in-between place. It was a place where we all waited and bided our
time. Some days that waiting felt like boredom, and other days it felt a bit
transcendent, in a falsely floral-smelling, mote-caught-in-a-golden-sunbeam
sort of way. The coin laundry of my memory exists always in summer, so that the
plate glass windows are saturated with white light, the aisle in front of the
dryers steamy, and everything is always revolving: the washers and dryers, the
lazy ceiling fans, the wheels on the metal carts. If my feet aren’t bare, they
are sweating in a pair of pale blue jelly shoes. I go to the RC machine, open
the little glass door, and test a couple of bottlenecks to see if this is the
day I get lucky and one slides free. It doesn’t, but there’s a puff of cold air
from the refrigeration system, and I press my face into it.
When I help, it’s with the folding, and usually with the
towels, working at a fraction of my mother’s speed. I tuck the towel under my
chin, pull the end up. She sets me to washcloths, and I make little squares and
stack them in a slanting pile at the edge of the table. When we’re finished,
she piles the clean clothes back into the garbage bags, we lug them to the
door, and wait for my father to return in the pick-up truck to take us home. If
the weather is fine—-and in my memories, it always is—-my brother and I will ride
in the back of the truck with the bags of clothes, but we have to promise to
keep our bottoms on the floor of the bed, and we can’t sit on the wheel wells
even if everybody else gets to.
There’s a point here, but it’s one that I may not have
the skill to make. And it’s something like this: I am grateful for those
steamy, in-between, light-filled Saturdays at the laundromat, and I wouldn’t
have had them if we’d been another kind of family. The laundry was what I think Heaven ought to be like: clean, glowing, and luxuriously dull,
and everybody is getting along, and the smell of chicken fried steak is wafting
in from next door.









