SITTING IN THE LAUNDROMAT WITH A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN
by Francesca Leader
This piece alludes to Lucia Berlin’s short story collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women, which contains two stories set in laundromats. In both pieces, the laundromat serves as a kind of limbo, a place between places.
On the day the dryer breaks, my teen daughter and I flee the house with baskets of wet laundry, which we heft through the doors of the Sud-n-Duds, the men watching because we look soiled-sheet pale and worn from mistreatment, whereafter we sit in cool fiberglass chairs, I stroking my unopened book while she scrolls the splinter-screened phone that mirrors her tear-fissured face, the phone her dad threw in his rage at the broken dryer, his broken life, and the women who broke it, and though I’d hoped for solace in the symmetry of re-reading “Angel’s Laundromat” or “Carpe Diem,” I find myself unable to do more than stare at the tossing clothes, smelling the hot perfume of detergent, thinking I’d like to climb right on into one of those spotless steel drums, and take my daughter with me.
Francesca Leader is a self-taught writer and artist originally from Western Montana. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Five South, J Journal, Wigleaf, Milk Candy Review, HAD, Stanchion, Literary Mama, Bending Genres, Drunk Monkeys, Door Is a Jar, and elsewhere. Learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com.
by Francesca Leader
This piece alludes to Lucia Berlin’s short story collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women, which contains two stories set in laundromats. In both pieces, the laundromat serves as a kind of limbo, a place between places.
On the day the dryer breaks, my teen daughter and I flee the house with baskets of wet laundry, which we heft through the doors of the Sud-n-Duds, the men watching because we look soiled-sheet pale and worn from mistreatment, whereafter we sit in cool fiberglass chairs, I stroking my unopened book while she scrolls the splinter-screened phone that mirrors her tear-fissured face, the phone her dad threw in his rage at the broken dryer, his broken life, and the women who broke it, and though I’d hoped for solace in the symmetry of re-reading “Angel’s Laundromat” or “Carpe Diem,” I find myself unable to do more than stare at the tossing clothes, smelling the hot perfume of detergent, thinking I’d like to climb right on into one of those spotless steel drums, and take my daughter with me.
Francesca Leader is a self-taught writer and artist originally from Western Montana. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Five South, J Journal, Wigleaf, Milk Candy Review, HAD, Stanchion, Literary Mama, Bending Genres, Drunk Monkeys, Door Is a Jar, and elsewhere. Learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com.