Washerwoman
By Claire Hanlon
@loveyclairey
1. Lint
In college, I collected dryer lint. There was a certain dorm on my campus, behind which slabs of lint would accumulate. How it ended up outside the laundry room I never figured out. Did students dump it back there? Did it blow in from elsewhere like fluffy tumbleweeds? Also: how were college kids washing enough clothes to produce that volume of lint? I myself only did laundry once a month. But as I walked to class every day, I eyed up those dusky clots of fiber and hair and dust and contemplated how to discreetly gather them without outing myself as a total weirdo.
Clothes dryers were a fairly new phenomenon for me. For most of my childhood, my family had hung our laundry to dry, an endeavor that required time and attention: one must stay attuned to humidity, precipitation, cloud cover. Line-dried towels have a crispy, abrasive quality that I still miss.
Midsemester, I conceived of an art installation that would justify my lawful visitation of every laundry room on campus. For a week, I raided the lint traps and trash cans of every dorm I could finagle access to, ending up with a garbage bag full of rainbow hued lint that I tied to a tree. Yes, a tree. Every day for two weeks, I visited this tree and extracted a grapefruit-sized hank of lint from my garbage bag. I held it to one of the knotty, low-slung branches and wrapped it with string, affixing it there like a hematoma. I returned every day and added another clump, sometimes building up an existing patch, sometimes adding new ones. The poor tree looked tumorous. By the end of the semester, the lint had mostly dissolved in the rain.
After college, I got married and stopped making art. Laundry was my job, as was cooking, washing dishes, sweeping, scrubbing the toilet, grocery shopping, bill paying. I don’t remember a discussion wherein this was decided. We both worked outside the home. I was a marginally better cook and the first to cave in a chore standoff, because, unlike my husband, a dirty house deeply offended my sensibilities.
I still collected lint. I stored it in a Ziploc bag next to the detergent. I liked how the color varied, load to load, sometimes slate blue, sometimes dirty white, sometimes pinkish. I liked how the colors stacked up inside the Ziploc, like geologic stratification. I maintained a vague expectation that I might still return to art. Perhaps I would sew the lint into a book about my life, the layers adding up to some kind of meaning that was, at present, unreadable.
The demise of our marriage was, surprisingly, unrelated to the chore differential. After the divorce, my portion of our house’s contents filled up one side of my parents’ double car garage.
The conclusion of my marriage had been sudden and traumatic, and it took me a year to finally screw up the resolve to sort through my SUV-sized pile of boxes. Among the paintings and pots and pillows, I found my old bags of lint. I held them up, admiring the colors. I still found them deeply appealing.
When my son and I had moved in with my parents, I was surprised to observe my dad washing dishes, sweeping the floor, spot-mopping; I was more surprised to realize that this was not new behavior. I had observed him performing those same chores all throughout my childhood. How easily eighteen years of egalitarian example had been overwritten by six years of living with a man who believed chores were a woman’s job, who wouldn’t help even when I begged.
2. Detergent
I started using unscented detergent after reading the whole internet in search of comprehensive cloth diapering instructions. I was thirty weeks pregnant and had just scored, for twenty bucks, a hefty stack of newborn-sized cloth prefolds from a dreadlocked dad in a Craigslist parking lot meetup. That encounter says a lot about my life during this period. I was twenty-six years old and resourceful in the way that only long-term, extremely broke people can be. I washed and reused Ziplocs, for example, long before most of the world cared about single-use plastics, and not because I cared about single-use plastics but because Ziplocs were expensive. My husband used cash exclusively, which meant that my budget never balanced and I never knew where our money was going, due to his lackadaisical way with receipts. I bought store-brand everything and considered ice cream too fancy for the grocery budget. My husband, as it turned out, considered every kind of alcohol just the thing for his budget.
After this windfall of cheap prefolds, I cashed in my hefty stash of emergency change (one benefit of a careless husband who only uses cash), turned to Amazon and bought: four re-sizable waterproof diaper covers; a pack of plastic diaper fasteners; a “wet” bag to hold the soiled diapers; a lidded metal trash can. The internet advised that newborn poop is water soluble. It’s a butt-to-bin-to-washer operation, folks. No need to rinse, just toss them right into the washer with a healthy scoop of OxiClean and the aforementioned unscented detergent. Wet bag and all! Line dry, and the mustard yellow baby poop stains will be bleached away by the sun.
Once a baby starts eating solid food, their poop changes. It solidifies. It stinks. Because it’s no longer water soluble, the laundering process changes too. The poop must be scraped into the toilet, flushed. The soiled diaper must soak in a bleach bucket. My husband, barely on board with the cloth diapering to begin with, flat out refused to dunk poopy diapers in the toilet. I conceded. I washed the diapers for the last time, stacked them neatly in an empty printer box, and moved them to the garage.
Two years later, I stood sweating in the July heat of my parents’ garage, surrounded by possessions from a former life. I was having a panic attack. There were too many memories, and I was miles past the threshold of decision overload. What would I need for my next life? Should I keep the bathroom scale that was never accurate? What about the sheets and pillows that were still serviceable? The pillowcases that had absorbed so many of my tears? The cloth diapers for another baby that would probably never be conceived? I still had a scarcity mindset, reluctant to spend money on replacing things that were still usable.
I lowered the garage door and retreated to my small bedroom and my single bed. I hugged my toddler. I got through the panic attack. The next day when I returned to the garage, I had a rule for myself: only keep what is beautiful. I would build a new life, on my own, when I was ready, and I would only allow beautiful things in, no matter the cost.
3. Sheets
Half of last week’s linens load sits atop the washer, beyond the range of one cat who likes to piss in baskets. The other half is in the dryer, cold, having been at first too damp, then forgotten, then fluffed, forgotten, fluffed again. That was days ago. Now the washer has sung its tuneful little song of completion and my husband’s clothes are in need of drying.
I open the door and find a neat log of sheets. I slide it into the basket and appreciate its shape, which is smooth and dense and the precise size of a year-old child. I carry it, grimacing, to my room. Laundry folding is my second-worst chore, right behind laundry-putting-away. Emptying the basket on my side of the bed is an insurance policy that usually works; I will have to fold the load before I can go to sleep. This time I start right in, unexpectedly eager to unroll the sheet-log. Behold: the flat sheet hugs the other linens like the pastry portion of a pig-in-a-blanket. The pig, in this case, being a very rumpled fitted sheet. Inside one of the fitted sheet’s corners, condensed into a brick of wrinkles, is my favorite sleep shirt. Inside the shirt is a dryer ball, the grain of sand to this laundry pearl.
I am an expert fitted sheet folder. I learned the trick from my mother, when I was young and newly married for the first time: stretch the sheet, lengthwise, and leave two corners right-side-out; invert the mirrored corners and fold the sheet in half; tuck the inverted corners into the right-side-out corners, creating a pleasing unit of three nestled sides and one straight crease, the elastic forming a saggy u-shaped lip in the center. Fold in thirds, lengthwise, then in thirds again the opposite way. The result: a neat package, sized to sit just right under the top sheet’s more predictable dimensions.
The man I am married to now does his own laundry. When I cook, he cleans up. He meets me at the trunk of my car when he hears the garage door open, ready to carry in groceries. He offers help, unsolicited. He doesn’t believe that chores are a gendered responsibility.
4. Washer/Dryer
This evening my husband and I are heaving my old washer and dryer out of the garage so they can be sold. In the life we are building together, there is overflow: his appliances, my appliances, multiple sets of pots and pans, the cloth diapers that have sat unused for eight years. Our garage is full of excess.
In our house, lint moves straight from the dryer to the trash. I don’t save it anymore; I no longer need to search for hidden meaning in a life already overflowing with warmth and love.
I still use unscented detergent, and, I find, I prefer to fold the fitted sheets on my own. It is a useful skill, and I relish the satisfaction that comes from expertly completing a task. Better still, though: the peace that comes from knowing that the scales of my marriage are in balance. That when the weight shifts from one side to the other, we will adjust, together, because it is a partnership.
Will I pass the sheet trick on to the next generation? Sure. I will teach my son, just as soon as his hands are dexterous enough to negotiate elastic sheet corners. But to my daughter, if I have one, I will say: don’t waste your time on sheets, baby. I have better things to teach you. By the time you are a woman, you will have the voice that I did not. I promise.
Guest essay written by Claire Hanlon. Claire lived in five countries by the time she was seventeen; she has settled for good in North Texas, where she resides with her husband and son. She is slowly earning a Master of Library and Information Science degree, after which, at some point, she hopes to work as an Archivist. In the meantime, she works in hospice administration, reads a lot of fiction, and writes essays. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Blood Tree Literature and Blood Orange Review. Writing is a bloody business.