Member-only story
The Irony of Life
Instructions for carrying on
I’m at the laundromat on a Tuesday afternoon because my building’s washing machines are once more out of order, and the super continues to assure me that they will be fixed as soon as next week, next week. The store is filled with the scent of detergent and burned fabric—perhaps a polyester shirt left in too hot. There is a man ironing his clothes over the table by the window, going at a very leisurely pace with each garment, straightening wrinkles that are probably unnecessary. He’s wearing a suit jacket with sweatpants. The jacket looks expensive, tailored. The sweatpants have a stain near the knee.
My darks feed into machine seven. A sock drops on the floor, and when I stoop to pick it up, I see the tile’s cracked in a pattern that looks almost intentional, like someone had deliberately broken it to be that way—spiderwebbing out from the center of the room. I realize it’s merely damage: the settling of water or foundation, or decades of people carelessly dropping heavy bottles of detergent. But for a moment, it appears to be art.
The man in the suit jacket is folding a shirt the way my old man folded shirts—with the same care department stores use—slow and methodical. His cell phone rings on the table. He looks at it and doesn’t pick it up. It rings again. He folds another shirt.
