The Man Who Never Washed Anything
Episode 1 of 3 of The Two O’Clock Wash by Nora Feld
“You’re back.”
He looked up like I’d caught him at something. “I’m back.”
That was the whole conversation, the first six times. I’d say you’re back, he’d say I’m back, and then he’d carry the green duffel to the row of chairs under the broken television and sit down with it on his lap like a dog that wouldn’t settle.
I work overnight at a laundromat on Sixth. Ten at night until six in the morning, Sunday through Thursday, which is the shift nobody wants and the shift I asked for. The machines make a sound at two in the morning that they don’t make at noon. Lower. Like the building is breathing.
Most of my customers are nurses coming off the eleven to seven at Mercy, and a man named Raúl who washes restaurant aprons in industrial loads and tips me in leftover flan. There is a woman who comes on Sundays with four children and does nine machines at once and runs the place like a foreman. Nobody talks much. It is not a place people come to for company, and that is the entire reason I like it.
I took the job in October after I stopped being married. I am thirty six. My sister calls the shift a symptom and I call it a preference, and we have agreed to leave it there.
He started in January. Tuesdays, two o’clock, give or take four minutes. Green canvas duffel with a broken zipper pull that he’d replaced with a paper clip.
Here is what took me until week six to notice.
He never washed anything.
He’d sit for an hour and ten minutes with the bag on his knees. Sometimes he’d open it and look inside and close it again. Then he’d stand up, say goodnight, and carry it back out into the cold with everything still in it.
Week seven I put it to Dana, who has the Friday and Saturday overnights and knows everything about everyone.
“Green bag guy?” She was refilling the soap dispenser. “He came in on a Saturday once. Same thing. Sat there like a lump.”
“He doesn’t wash anything.”
“So?”
“So why come to a laundromat?”
Dana screwed the cap back on and looked at me with the particular pity she saves for people who ask questions with obvious answers. “Because it’s open.”
That should have been enough. For a while it was.
Then week eleven he fell asleep.
It was maybe three in the morning and the rain had gone sideways and there was nobody else in the place. One machine was running, a single load somebody had left at midnight and never come back for, and I was doing the crossword out of Sunday’s paper on Wednesday, which is a thing I do.
I looked up and he was out cold in the plastic chair with his chin on his chest and the duffel still on his lap, both arms wrapped around it.
I did what you do. I let him sleep. I turned the radio down and I went back to nineteen across.
Around three thirty a nurse came in with a laundry sack and saw him and gave me a look, and I gave her one back that said he’s fine, and she shrugged and loaded two machines and left them going and went out for a cigarette. That is the entire social contract at that hour. You decide somebody is fine and then you leave them alone about it.
At four he woke up all at once, the way people do when they’ve fallen asleep somewhere they didn’t intend to. He looked at the clock. He looked at me.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s a laundromat. People sleep here.”
“Still.”
He was gathering himself to go, and I don’t know what got into me, I really don’t. Eleven weeks of you’re back and I’m back, and I heard my own voice say it.
“Can I ask you something?”
He stopped with the bag half lifted.
“You never wash anything.”
He set the bag back down on his knees. Outside a car went by with one headlight, and the sound of it going through the water on Sixth filled up the whole room, and then it was quiet again.
“No,” he said. “I don’t.”