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10. HOW TO DO LAUNDRY

BY BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT

y father is congenitally incapable of doing laundry. When I was a child, this deficit in his
knowledge, in his complete understanding of all the things in the world and how each of them
worked, was little short of shocking. He would try to do laundry, and he would fail, abjectly, a
high percentage of the time. He knew, for example, to check each and every pocket of every clothing
item before consigning it to the washing machine, and yet he consistently laundered ballpoint
pens—consistently as in pretty much every time he did laundry. He always carried a pen (a grown-up
thing), and a pen would find a way to sneak in. Safely inside the washing machine, inundated and
churning around, the pen would work its way out of its pocket, divest itself of its cap, then have its way
with all the garments in the load—inking up stuff in a seemingly celebratory way, freed from the dull,
controlled world of words into a glorious aqueous spree. That this would lead to the end of the pen—its
lifeblood spilled and its shell consigned to the old bucket that acted as the basement trash
can—concerned the pen not. While it lived, it truly lived. It ruined clothes.
My father, back before he was banned from doing laundry, also had a small but calamitous problem
with sorting the light clothing from the dark. While segregation in general is to be very much avoided, in
laundry it is a hallowed principle; it keeps your lighter clothes from slowly turning gray from the
leaching dye of the darker clothes. My father could sort lights almost completely—his white dress shirts
and T-shirts and underpants, mom’s unmentionables and blouses, our smaller white socks and so
forth—but, more often than seems believable, he would accidentally put in something bright red. It
always seemed to be a T-shirt. Why did we have so many red T-shirts? The result: pink. Pink underwear,
pink undershirts, pink everything in that load of laundry.
To be fair, my father is color-blind. This was a source of endless fascination to us when we were kids.
Was the world like a black-and-white movie to Dad? How was, for example, the banananess of a banana
compromised by such a deficit? What did he SEE? We were given to understand that it was a genetic
thing, and that it only happened to men (the arbitrary mysteries of science). My brother was not color-
blind, or so it seemed—but how could we, in truth, know how any other person saw anything? The mind
reeled.
Meanwhile, there were many practical matters to be addressed. How did Dad know whether a traffic
light was red or yellow or green? (Answer: The colors on a traffic light are always the same, top to
bottom.) How could he get dressed without looking like a clown? (Answer: My mother arranged—she
still does—the clothes hanging in his closet in sections according to what went with what, so he could
dress in a kind of multiple-choice manner; same with the socks in his sock drawer. Somehow he still
ends up with mismatched socks from time to time, and the sight of one of his ankles dark blue and the
other brown fills me with a kind of tenderness I find difficult to describe.) We would badger him with
tests: What color is this? What about this? Some weren’t so much of a problem for him—orange,
yellow—but still he always seemed like he was guessing, answering gamely but with a question mark at
the end. With purples and maroons and forest greens and darker colors down to black, he was certainly
guessing, and he often guessed wrong. It never occurred to us that this was a minor but real disability,
and that he might not enjoy entertaining our questions about it; he was invincible, a superhero, even if he
didn’t know what color anything was.

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Most bizarrely, my dad was unable to grasp the nature of bleach. Bleach was bleach; it said what it
was, right in its name. My father, having sorted lights from darks, would splash in a healthy amount of
bleach. With the dark clothes. He did this more than once. Having discovered his latest travesty of
laundry, my mother would wail his name—Dan—mournfully from the basement: “DAAAAAAaaaaaan!”
Bleach removes color. If you add a little bleach to a load of whites you’re washing in hot water, it makes
them whiter. If you put bleach on anything colored, it makes indelible spots of no-color-anymore. My
father’s difficulty with this basic principle was confounding. I asked him once about this: Why did he
put bleach in with colors? “I thought it would brighten them up,” he said sheepishly.
My father was barred from laundry, and when I was around 9 or 10, my parents contracted me to be
the family’s laundress. For this, I received the princely sum of $10 a week (which was more money back
in the last century). I sorted lights from darks; I checked pockets (and got to keep any change or bills left
behind); I used bleach on whites only; I folded clothes still warm from the dryer in the cool dim of the
basement. (I got less afraid of the basement.) Dad’s briefs were big enough to fold over into fourths.
Mom’s blouses and Dad’s dress shirts went on hangers, hung on the edge of the ironing board. I
laundered without incident, and with a small amount of pride.
Laundry has remained likable—and like most things, it’s even more fun when you’re not a kid
anymore. In college, my roommate and I would have laundry parties: Along with the quarters and the
detergent, you just need a jug of wine, which you drink to while away the laundry time. (We washed our
whites together, and the pile of nice fresh socks commingling afterward was called the Sock Party,
which is funnier when you’ve had some jug wine. Still: There’s something funny, something sweet,
about the clean socks of two friends in a pile.)
When my roommate went to France for a year, I did laundry with my goth friends Curtis and Elsa.
They always seemed to have hash, and along with the washers and dryers in the dorm basement, there
was a stove, so we’d do hot knives. It was weird and fun, just like Curtis and Elsa.
And in a situation where you have to go to a laundromat, you can get some good reading done and
maybe make friends with the old guy who runs the laundromat and learn about all the potted plants he’s
got growing there. Or your laundromat might have the name Tiny Bubbles, which is something you can
think about with a little glow of joy for the rest of your days: Tiny Bubbles.

How to Actually Do Laundry

WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

• Dirty clothes (machine washable—check the labels)

• Laundry detergent (powdered, in a box, means one less thing for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch)
• Bleach, maybe (See Note)
• Quarters, as required
Separate light-colored dirty clothes from dark ones. (Red counts as dark.) Launder lights and darks
separately, unless you want all your clothes to converge on a uniform grayness.
Fire up the washer. Cold water is fine, in general, on normal cycle. Let the water start to fill the
bottom of it, then sprinkle in your laundry detergent. (You can use a little less than is recommended on
the box. They want you to use more than you need, because: $.)
Add the clothes loosely. Do not cram. (Crammed-in clothes or an overfilled washer means nothing
really gets clean.)
Close the lid. Enjoy a book or something to drink or both. (If you are at a laundromat or using other
nonprivate machines, it’s sad but true: You never know when someone might steal all your clothes. You
probably want to stand by.)
You say the washer is done? Clean out the lint trap on the dryer (this prevents annoying fire and
improves dryer performance). Put the clothes in the dryer. Make it go (medium temperature should be

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fine). Enjoy a book or something to drink or both.

Ding! That’s it. For added niceness, fold while still warm, unless you’re in Arizona or something.

A NOTE ABOUT BLEACH

Bleach is added, a quarter cup or so, along with the laundry detergent to the water in the washer
before the clothes go in—white or very light clothes only. Use hot water for more
whitening/brightening power, but be warned: Stuff that’s new that’s washed in hot water may
shrink.

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