Aristophanes Airs His Dirty Laundry: A Eulogy for Love
Sue rips open the bag, dumping her soiled belongings on the scuffed floor of the laundromat.
“Some people have no self-respect,” says Celia as she watches from over her own folded laundry.
People have their routines. Every week Sue rips through her trash bag, and every week Celia looks over her pristine towers and makes her pronouncement.
But this is Tuesday morning at the Wash-n-Go. Wednesdays, Bernie’s there with her three kids, on Thursdays Bill brings his daughter, and Fridays are always a crapshoot.
But on Tuesdays, despite her mess, Sue is quiet. And because Sue is quiet, Celia is quiet. Celia has a lot to say about most things, and while she fights the urge to blurt them out at any given moment, the mutually feigned disregard lends itself to a companionable silence.
(On Wednesdays, she’s an old bitch, on Thursdays, she’s rude and some people are just like that, sweetie, and on Fridays? Well, she doesn’t quite like Fridays.)
Celia discreetly flicks a particularly scandalous pair of underpants off her loafer. Despite herself, she admires that while Sue brings her dirty laundry in something so uncouth as a trash bag, she insists on taking it home in a different creased and clean trash bag. Celia prides herself on giving credit where it’s due, as rare as it is. And, rarer still, is it Sue who’s wrenching praise from her arthritic fingers. But watching Sue stuff the bag with twisted knots of clean laundry relieves her in a way. She’s glad to see that the other woman had grown a lick of sense after all these years.
Sue kicks off her boots. She peels off one sock then the other before putting them on the pile of clothes that she Never. Ever. Sorts.
Celia rolls her eyes.
“You know,” Sue says, interrupting the audible static of radio and road and washer and dryer and the refrigeration of the vending machine, “it doesn’t hurt to be a bit nicer.”
Celia huffs as she watches Sue unclasp her bra from beneath her shirt, then unimprisoning one arm, then the other, before pulling the thing through the armhole of her threadbare tank-top.
Sue laughs and asks, “Like what you see?”
“Far from it.” Celia secretly and not so secretly admires many things about Sue.
Sue’s brown nipples are clearly visible beneath her shirt, and whereas Celia has conflicted feelings about her own, as well as the papery skin on her arms, the droop of her gut, and the flatness of her own breasts, she’s always drawn to whatever Sue puts on display. But, of course, Sue knows this.
“Come on, live a little,” Sue says, wiggling in her direction. “How long has it been since you washed that crusty old thing?”
“As you well know, I wash my delicates by hand.”
“I also know your hands aren’t what they used to be.”
Celia ignores the bait. She crosses her legs and opens her book, the tight ache in her fingers exacerbated by the large hardcover. She desperately pretends to ignore the other woman. Sue is in one of her moods. How long has it been? Celia scoffs to herself. Despite her marriage of many, many years, she reckons that Sue has callers of all types at any time of day. Perhaps she just left one. He or she or they could have dropped her off on their way to the racetrack.
The light in the laundromat shifts, the weight in the air grows heavy.
“Come on,” Sue says. And, while Celia refuses to raise her eyes, she imagines Sue—her un-reversed mirror image—shedding the rest of her clothes, her fine lines accentuating an age identical to her own but complemented by a freedom that Celia never affords herself.
Celia is staring at the same word in the same book she has been trying to finish for hours. “Would you please—”
Yes.
Yes.
The text vibrates on the page and the pulp of the paper swells as the ink wisps away like dusty, black pollen.
Y E S hangs in the air.
†
“They say time slows down in laundromats,” Sue told her that first Tuesday morning.
Celia had continued folding her clothes as if she didn’t recognize the woman’s voice, as if the reverberation of those vocal folds were not more familiar than her own.
“Do I know you?” And, as if they never parted, as if they were never split like a sycamore reeling from a lightning strike, she could see Sue’s smile, the flesh and blood ghost of that which once smiled behind her.
†
The difference between Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays at the Wash-n-Go, when it comes down to it, is the company. Celia is not good company, never has been and never will be. She knows this. She also knows that it’s not her company that Sue seeks out Tuesday after Tuesday, but a reconvergence.
“There’s room for you now,” Celia said once. “At the house, I mean.”
“I have a home.”
“I am not your home.”
There was a time when that wasn’t true. When their fingers intertwined and their spinal cords wove together like delicate ribbons. When one spoke, the other heard; when one created, the other witnessed.
But now, as their lungs work in conjunction with each other, and their hearts beat in complementary unison, they sit in conversation. Things are different now. Bodies change. Muscles atrophy. Dispositions shift. They align themselves in harmony, one a simple shadow of the other, but now, as it was in the beginning, it’s impossible to tell who shadows whom.
†
The door opens; the air is sucked out of the laundromat.
They look up, a beat out of sync, before returning to the book.
Yes.
The word floats on the page in all of its disparate parts.
The stranger grunts at the mess on the floor.
“Sorry, those are mine,” they say. Only they can recognize the harmony in their shared voice for what it is.
Yes.
The stranger checks the time on their dryer before leaving again, lighting a cigarette before stepping out the door.
†
They reacquaint themselves in bored reticence. Bodies are strange and fickle things, and the millions of microscopic changes made over the course of a week take an eon to cherish and memorize.
They pick up where they left off: Celia entertaining one of Sue’s moods, and Sue reminding Celia of all that she had been searching for.
Celia’s bra falls to the floor, a respectable nude in cotton and spandex atop Sue’s silky lace things. They breathe with ease, whole and unencumbered.
It took Celia twenty-seven years to happen across the right place on the right day at the right time. Twenty-seven years of “just running errands,” and “got turned around on the way home.” Twenty-seven years of excuse after excuse as she sought Sue out. She lied to the man she married, to her grown children, to every person who cared for the old bitch. And now, every week for decades, she and Sue wash their dirty laundry in relative silence, entangled long enough to enjoy the company of one another, until that company repositions itself in space, in that odd little way it does.
A laundromat is neutral ground. Eventually they release one another, sinew unfurling like tendrils, like fiddleheads, like apprehensive embraces. Until they part in silence, Sue with her garbage bag, and Celia with her carefully folded trousers, an exercise in extracting order from the chaos of being.
© 2023 Bastian Hart
About the Author
Bastian Hart is a queer, Black, and mixed-race librarian who dabbles in “The Capital W” Weird. They were raised in a city named after a shopping mall and think body horror is an abject form of self-love. Whereas their day job keeps them somewhat respectable, when they’re off the clock they can be found lurking Michigan’s wetlands or furiously drafting their monster fucking manifesto. Their work spans the breadth of speculative fiction but ultimately indulges in the novelty of being human. They can be found at bastianhart.com.