This woman in her 60s was at the Laundromat around the corner when I went there to wash some comforters just now. She asked me a lot of questions about how to use the washers, and her tone was always exasperated and rude, as if I had personally made the machines complicated to torment her. After I ducked her by moving to another area of the Laundromat, she found another young woman to ask for help/blame for her frustration.

Finally, her loads in the dryers, she sat on a bench and proceeded to call a number of people. To each one, she repeated these statements:

“I’m here at the Laundromat. I tell you, it’s torture. It’s torture, and it’s highway robbery, is what it is.”

“I would never subject Ben to this. It’s just torture.”

“I’m never doing this again. I told Ben he had better get that washer fixed or else buy a new one. IF he wants clean clothes.”

“You wouldn’t believe how much it costs and how long it takes. You have to just sit here with it. I mean, no one wants your laundry, you don’t have to worry about that, but things can get mixed up, you know.”

“I’m being tortured.”

Apparently, her listeners were sympathetic to her shocking experience in the Real World. The families in the Laundromat, who don’t have a choice but to launder there at “Torture Central,” ignored her stupid conversations. Most wore iPods. I think that’s where I went wrong; I had an available ear. Anyway, I tried to orient her to the triple-loaders as best I could before deciding her entitled attitude was more than I wanted to deal with. In a way, I did feel sorry for her. I think the Laundromat is a cool place, and I can’t imagine feeling like Laundromats are alien establishments contrived for their clients’ persecution. I thought of this woman at home in her lace-curtained laundry-room, a lonely prison of comfort, folding Ben’s undershorts and feeling like she had control over everything in her environment. It didn’t sound like such a great life to me.

Things that are cool about the Laundromat:

My neighbor’s dad owns it, and sometimes I see him there, in which case he monitors my laundering and scolds me if I fail to follow the directions on the machines in precise order. He also provides advice about how to build wealth in real estate, and, while I’m not interested in this per se, it’s nice to learn things from the wise.

There’s a candy machine.

Front-loaders. LOVE ‘em. Watch the Laundry Show.

I can stock up on quarters for meters (sorry, Laundry owner guy, I am ashamed).

It’s sunny in there with a nice breeze.

It’s clean.

People smile at you.

Sometimes there are cute kids running around being all cute.

Laundromats are places where all walks of life are accepted. While I was there, I shared the place with a couple of Spanish-speaking families, the other young woman who helped Ben’s wife, this young woman’s husband, a young man in his early 20s who was very attractive and extremely thin, a man in his maybe late 40s with a beard washing a lot of T-shirts, all of which looked new, a HUGE fat man in shorts and very white sneakers, a man who walked in off the street with all of his stuff in a dilapidated baby stroller who tried to get stains off of clothing he had in plastic grocery bags, and the attendant, a woman who is very nice and who does laundry-by-the-pound. There was a tone of contentment in there, a hum of productivity. Who doesn’t feel happy with a basket of clean clothes in hand?