Destined to Be a Sock or a Snake?
Balled-up black socks fall like fat ticks from a dead deer. How many loads of laundry were done by the wives of the men she’d loved? She was both attracted to and repelled by domesticity. One lover told her once, “Your domestic nature is what makes men want to stop sleeping with you.” And yet he was just another victim of the Madonna Whore Complex, where no one woman could ever make him happy, so he’d cleave them all in two with casual hatchets.
For years she’d escaped the burden of the basket, never hampered by the hamper. A life of Solo, like the laundry detergent, not the state of being alone. Proctor & Gamble merged Bold and Solo in 1993 to become New Bold. She was Bold & Solo, but consumer research probably showed that no woman in charge of laundry wanted to be reminded of what she wasn’t, and bachelors don’t want to be reminded of what they are.
On a Saturday night in the largest theater of the only independent movie house in town, she watched Hitchcock’s Rear Window alone in a cinematic arena of couples. It’s easy to exaggerate, “I was the only single person in the WHOLE room,” but indeed, she was the only single person in the theater of the paired. Not even the odd-numbered group of platonics threw off her calculations because none were there. As the movie star triumvirate swirled their snifters on the big screen, she lost her single self in the viscosity of brandy and was satisfied she’d separated from her longest companion yet: booze. As the lights dispersed the black-and-white past, her air of superciliousness returned more potent than the aroma of buttered popcorn that wafted around her.
Of all the aspects of her personality she had to be proud of, it was an odd myopia for her to settle on her single status. What anti-marriage propaganda pamphlets were passed out in grade school to convince her to crush on teachers twice her age instead of building wedding dreams with her classmates? Being infatuated with the aging janitor is a sure way not to be noticed by peers your own age, but knowing who she is now, she figures that the boy who was into the girl who was into old men was probably just the boy for her.
The smell of Gain eclipses the unscented clarity of her organic detergent and slows her meandering memory, bringing her back to the present. She snaps each worn wad of sock with an agile wrist, unrolling it cleanly. Doing your partner’s laundry is less a chore and more a meditation on mating. A wool-blend abacus of days and a cotton-boxer calendar of years. She established immediate dominion over the laundry room at the start of their relationship. Not so much a binary division of labor, but the act of taking the left behind and making it whole again, like stitching a quilt from the ecdysis of snakes.