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LAUNDRY

 “This shirt,” announced her husband cautiously, “makes me look like a dork.”

She glanced over at him as he stood uncertainly in the doorway. His uneasy waiting watch broke her heart. Everything about him broke her heart recently. And it was true, the shirt was terrible – a white, short-sleeved button-down with a front chest pocket that begged for a pocket protector. “You’re right,” she agreed, smiling to let him know she wasn’t upset, “that shirt does make you look like a dork.” His tense face relaxed a bit and they smiled at each other. “There’s dry-cleaning in the trunk of the car,” she told him, “with tons of shirts. I’ll bring them in later.” She noted he was also wearing white socks with black pants. He saw her gaze flicker to them, but neither of them said anything. He’s afraid, she thought, he’s afraid to mention it because he knows that socks don’t come from the dry cleaner.

Her husband went to change out of his work clothes – a habit installed long ago by his mother that had been coming in handy lately. She heard him slip on the polished wood floor in the bedroom, curse quietly to himself. She busied herself making dinner. He came back out again and settled down to read the paper. Such suburban bliss, she marveled. Look at us, a nice young couple. A nice young couple who were turning their underwear and socks inside out to get an extra wearing out of them.

Her husband shook the newspaper. “New cleaning place in the mall,” he ventured. “Does fluff-and-fold.”

She stirred busily. Took a deep breath. “Expensive?” Her husband shook the paper again and did not reply. Of course it was expensive, she said to herself. It was a luxury, to have all your laundry done elsewhere. Especially since she was not working herself, and had a perfectly good washer and dryer (a wedding gift from his parents) sitting in the laundry room. She clattered a lid on a pot and her husband peered at her over the top of his paper. She smiled, apologetic. “I’ll do laundry tomorrow,” she promised, as she had, every day. Her husband disappeared behind the paper.

She stood in the bedroom the next morning, eyeing the laundry hamper. Or what could be seen of it, which was very little. Dirty clothing was piled in and on top and around it everywhere. T-shirts, underwear, socks, jeans, jerseys spilled out from it in mute accusation. As she had so many times before, she grabbed an armful of it and started sorting: white, colors, darks. She sorted steadily through the pile, breaking it down into three smaller piles. A smell of lemon wafted faintly from her hands. Then she took her laundry basket and put as much of the dark pile as she could into it. Always do darks first, she heard her mother say, so that you don’t use up the hot water early on. She stopped putting the laundry into the basket, her hands suspended in mid-air. That made no sense, she suddenly realized. Why not do whites first, when you had all the hot water, and then do darks last, when all you had was cold water anyway? She frowned in concentration. Surely there was some reason? She took the dark clothes out of the basket and put some white clothes in.

She picked up the basket and bumped the bedroom door open with her hip, stopped to pull it closed behind her. Not that it did any good, always closing doors behind her when she was alone in the house. Her bare feet made loud slapping noises as she swayed down the hall with the basket on her hip, heavy with intimacy. The floor and walls around her shone with eerie squeaky-clean brightness, not a single dust mote swirled in the bright light from the windows.

She stopped in front of the laundry room door. It was a big wide door, originally an inside/outside door that had abruptly been turned into an inside/inside door when the laundry room was built onto the side of the house. When the realtor showed them the place he had made a show of saying how great that door was, because it was wide enough to walk through easily with a heavy load of laundry or a baby on your hip, without worrying about bumping into the sides of the doorway. Condescending bastard, she thought, as she carefully put the laundry basket down in front of the door.

She walked back out to the living room. She carefully swept, then dust-mopped, then wet-mopped the shining wood floor, then worked her way into the bedrooms and the dining room and kitchen and hall. She moved the laundry basket, swept and mopped under it, moved it back into place. She polished all the furniture, then used lemon oil on the wood. She got out the vacuum and vacuumed the upholstered furniture, taking all the cushions off and vacuuming them carefully on all sides, then running the vacuum extension deep into the seams around the arms and back of the sofas and chairs. She cleaned the many windows of the house, scrubbed the walls, wiped the countertops.

Evening arrived. Her husband came home. He eyed the laundry basket as he walked past it. He sidled up to her later as she was cooking. “Doing laundry?” She nodded and smiled and he stopped for a moment to put his arms around her, kiss her gently on top of the head, stroke her back. Her heart clutched in despair.

 She was facing the laundry room door again. Days had gone by and her husband had caught to the fact that the pile of laundry in the bedroom was getting no smaller. He had attempted a lame joke: “Think I’ll have to start going to work naked soon?” but smiled nervously as he said it, afraid that to mention it, even in joking, would crack her apart like an egg. Like before. She took a deep breath, picked up the basket, put it down again. She stepped over it to the closed door and leaned against it with a soft moan.

The doorknob was hot in her hand, squirming under her palm like a living thing. It made an audible thunking sound as she turned it. She leaned her weight, quivering, into the huge door and pushed it open. The air coming out of the room was bright and sharp and bleach-smelling. The white washer and dryer loomed out of the darkness, their edges blurred with a light film of dust. She snapped on the lights and their bluish glow puddled in the corners of the room. The soft susurration, the noise that only she could hear, grew louder, more insistent. Her face felt numb and her eyes pricked with tears. The sound pressed in on her, soft and wooly and linty and suffocating, thousands and thousands of voices whispering with no words. She gasped for breath and drew in only noise, clotting in her throat and lungs. She backed away, tripped over the laundry basket, crashed to the immaculate floor. She shoved the laundry basket into the laundry room with her foot, then stumbled to her feet and slammed the laundry room door shut, panting.

Her husband came home and loitered casually on the sofa, with the television on but watching her out of the corner of his eye. She was used to it by now, being watched. She’d been watched 24/7 for months; her husband’s nightly vigil was nothing compared to that. Except that his sideways glance, his nervous peeking, was a far cry from the detached clinical stare of the other watchers, who stood and looked and made busy notes on their clipboards. Her husband’s hopeful eyes on her were like a stab to her heart.

She could no longer bear the burden of her husband’s love. She stood in front of the door, steadying herself, then quickly grabbed the knob and turned it. It writhed and twisted under her hand as she lunged into the laundry room, desperate tears beginning to stream down her face. She stumbled towards the washing machine, pushing through the wall of noise as it rose in pitch, from whisper to wail. She heard another noise too, a panting whimper, and realized it was herself. Her skin was twitching and jumping, as if it were being plucked by thousands of insects. The noise was flowing up her nostrils, into her ears, down her throat.

She found the detergent, threw some in the machine, started to throw clothes in blindly on top. She was sobbing, each hiccupping sob sucking in another small part of the sound. It was filling her up, moving into all her secret places, filling every crack and crevice like slushy sand. It rose in pitch again, from wail to shriek. Unbearable, it was unbearable.

She screamed at it. She screamed at it that it wasn’t there; it was all in her head. She clutched her face in her hands and chanted at it Not There Not There Not There, but it was there, it was killing her, it was drowning her, and no one, no one would ever believe her. They would send her away again, they would convince her that the noise wasn’t real, that it was all a psychological reaction to the stress of marriage. But there was no stress in her marriage except for the noise in the laundry room, the ever-present insistent noise, the horrible dense suffocating noise. She collapsed, wailing, drawing in huge fluid soughs of sound.

Later, her husband came home. He went into the bedroom and she heard his startled exclamation. He came out again, rushing to her, clutching her tight in his arms, his relief spreading out from him in a widening pool. She said softly “There wasn’t enough room to put it all away, so I left some in the laundry room.” He patted her hair, resting his head on top of hers.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, “I know it was silly.” She looked up at him, smiling, clear-eyed. He hugged her again, relief so palpable, like sound in waves throughout the room.

A while later, he looked around the edge of his paper. “What?” he asked. “Did you say something?”

She could barely hear her own voice through the roaring, roaring, roaring that washed through every cell, every vein and nerve and muscle. “No. Nothing.”