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Laundramat City : (Picture Gallery below) They are in every city and most towns. With bright lights, hand lettered signs, and bulletin boards with posters announcing events long past and notices shouting "I lost 100 pounds in three weeks! Ask me how!" Strewn around on low tables are tabloid newspapers with headlines screaming "Three-headed Boy Barred From Chess Match : Unfair Advantage, Say Opponents" and "Bible Predicts End of World Tomorrow!" Some laundramats create community among regulars. Others are filled with isolated individuals who hardly look at one another. There are students, new couples, elderly men and women, travelers, apartment dwellers, and sometimes well-to-do people who need the extra capacity washer or dryer for a king size comforter. For the most part the laundromat provides an illustration of Robert Putnam's analysis of American social life ("Bowling Alone") and our increasing isolation from one another as traditional forms of communal life vanish. Come to the laundromat. What do you see? Long tables stand in front of rows of machines. At one table a man has just removed his laundry from the dryer. Across from him is a woman. Further down at the next table there is a student with a portable music device and headphones. They don't look at one another. They often don't speak to one another beyond a nod and simple greeting. They are fixed on the task at hand. They are sorting laundry to be washed or folding clothes just out of the dryer. There is a strange intimacy in this public place. The woman is folding her lingerie, bras, and panties. The man is rolling his tee shirts and boxer shorts. Such intimate private articles of clothing that point to places on our bodies we hide from strangers. So no one looks, at least not directly. It is very like men in public restrooms. They stand almost touching, shoulder to shoulder, facing gleaming chrome and porcelain receptacles. They do not look at one another, and if strangers, do not talk to each other. A private act in a public place. The laundromat is often like that. She glances quickly at the man's laundry. Does he separate the lights and darks before washing? Are there women's clothes in his pile? Does he fold neatly? Are the towels folded in thirds? What is their condition? Is he careless? neat? fussy? She will tuck this information away. If she sees this man in other circumstances, she will know something about him, about whether he notices and cares about small things. She does not gather and store this information instrumentally, with an agenda. It is how she navigates the world and understands it. It is how she cares for the world, and sometimes judges it, the small part of it in which she dwells. The man has been doing his laundry like this for many years, yet he is slightly uncomfortable in the woman's presence. He wants her to see that he does his own laundry, and does it properly. Yet he is afraid that he's doing something wrong, and will be judged by her. This is a woman's place, or so it feels to him. He has to always think about what he's doing. Did he remember to bring the soap or the bleach? He often forgets something. He sometimes feels foolish in this place and doesn't know why. They do not talk. Their eyes barely meet. They fold their underwear. They finish, nod to the other, and each leaves in turn. I have lived where the wash is done outside on rocks at a river or a pump or spigot, where the most obvious thing is that no one is ever there alone. I have never seen only one person at a wash site, no matter how early I've gone. The women arrive in bunches, and with bunches of children. Here the local news is aired out along with the laundry. They tell and listen to stories. The kids play. They laugh and shout and splash in the water. The older girls help their mothers and covertly thrust newly developing parts of their bodies to the sun as older boys pass by on foot or bicycle. And they giggle and blush and laugh at each other. The generations work and mix easily. They hold the world together, connect it with the past, and give it spice in the public washing places. In the laundromat, too, you sometimes see kids, toddlers, or slightly older. They love to run around the laundromat. They shout and chase each other. The mothers read about the three-headed boy and let their children play. It's a respite for the mothers. Sometimes they talk to each other about the three-headed boy and say, "Sometimes, one head's too many." They laugh and think simultaneously in gladness or complaint about the unmentioned "other head." They do not talk about the big events of the nation. Instead they may talk about celebrities or their daughters' weddings, or about a neighbor who's moved. College-town laundromats sometimes spark romance. The boy knows he's got a future when the girl he meets there and likes to talk with looks at his pile of laundry and says, "That's so little. Why don't you throw them in with mine?" And his underwear joins her bras and panties in the suds. Later, they stand at the table next to each other. They fold their clothes together and talk easily. Sometimes their hands will touch. She holds up one of his grey tee shirts and laughs, "Don't you separate your wash? Or do you just throw everything in together?" At other times she would think, "Clueless jerk." Now she thinks it's cute in that helpless-male sort of way. He blushes, embarrassed, and either shrugs his shoulders with that "cute-helpless-male" smile, or goes on the offensive with bluster: "What difference does it make? Clean is clean, ain't it?" Elderly people plan their time at the laundromat carefully. They don't want to be there when kids are running around. It makes them anxious and uncomfortable. They wish the mothers would control their kids better. They work with methodical precision, do one load only, counting every quarter. They say hardly a word. At night all the adjacent stores are closed, locked, and dark. Darkness settles and covers everything with blue then black softness. But, suddenly there is the laundromat: it looks like a space ship just landed-- lights blazing in the darkness, rows upon rows of glass-windowed cubicles and metal boxes. What is inside those round-windowed machines? The advance scouts of an alien civilization? Human space travelers in cryogenic sleep waiting a thousand light years to awake and re-populate? Even when vacant, the laundromat pours light out its windows; it hums and vibrates, as if the people who use it are episodic and impermanent, while the machines remain forever. Edward Hopper's Night Hawks. Without the people.

Laundramat City

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