The Laundromat

The white guy at the laundromat speaks Spanish and reminds me of Ryan, my ex-boyfriend. Ryan can’t speak Spanish.

Inside a polling place in the one-truck stop town nearest our house, Ryan votes for Trump. I vote for Hillary. We are the youngest people in the room, and he says we may as well have not come at all. At home he hovers over me, peels off a belt and jeans. A chore. Sometimes I think I like it. I imagine being snowed in with the same person for the rest of my life, fucking on the same floral couch in front of a space heater that’s made to look like four logs on fire.

We cancel each other out—that’s why it doesn’t work, this prescriptive love.

The white guy at the laundromat brings his kids with him: a boy, a girl, a baby his wife holds close to her chest. One little arm undoes itself from the swaddling, grabs for a lock of hair. We are on 39th Street in Kansas City, where October wanes into ice, snow, potholes.

 My second-floor apartment sits three blocks to the northeast. The small act of returning to this place, a parking lot, is familiar now—something known in the way the kids slide slow through a fuzz of headlights, their shadow-selves grabbing for one another across the sidewalk. Exhaust from a few cars—the silent, collective waiting—curls from pipes all around us. I shut off the ignition.

A white truck pulls in next to me and the driver steps out from a mountain of trash stacked up to the cab’s ceiling, the slope of paper precarious. He’s mid-height with ashy hair. Ordinary. I follow him over the cracked pavement and through the door, which he holds open for me.

We side by side toss our wet things into holes that surround the room in a perfect square. Between throws he looks me up and down. I pretend I don’t see it, wonder what it would be like if the lights went out and we were left alone to mechanically pick up socks and put them back down again. Would our clothes merge together? Would he go home with a part of me, me with a part of him? Who would I be if I slept with the man I met at the laundromat? But here he is—privy to all my unmentionables.

 I climb into the white truck like a need that’s been met. It’s impossible, the universe now an unbreaking wave of receipts, takeout boxes, Mountain Dew cans. Whole galaxies shaped like gelatinous Tide pods. The song from the pizza joint across the street plays, again, underwater this time, and I’m buried in the disposable evidence of this man’s life. My own body a throwaway, piled against a window like some long-forgotten marker at the edge of a life. Not alive at all. Not dead, either. Existing in this laundromat like Schrödinger’s cat.

All this from boredom.

The laundromat is a limbo place where the brain allows reality to slow down and become fantastical, as if inside a lucid dream. I choose not to go home with the ashy-haired man. As if there was ever a choice 

The white guy who reminds me of Ryan speaks in Spanish to the older woman at the washer across from him. They seem to know one another, but then again, everybody inside the limbo place seems to know one another. I make up lives for them. I am hypercritical, jealous of the white guy’s easy smile. He’s doesn’t have to try to be sincere. I wonder where he picked up Spanish. I have beef with the older woman because she blocks me from using the change machine. Later she gives me a dollar in quarters when I try to trade her a nickel and two dimes.

Ryan still texts me on my birthday in June. As much as I don’t want to admit it, I always reply.

Emily Anne Standlee claims Columbia, Missouri as her hometown and is a Durwood Fellow in the MFA program at UMKC, where she contributes to New Letters. She lives in a 100-year-old apartment building in Midtown KC and in the past, has worked for The Missouri Review. Emily edits nonfiction for Number One and Nashville Review and has work forthcoming in Passengers Journal and Tampa Review.