Laundry, a Hanging Offense

-- from Between X and Y, by Robert Hayes

You absolutely cannot hang laundry if you do not have two x chromosomes.  If you do not know how to hang laundry already, don't even try.  It is not a learned trait. There are no books on the subject, no courses at the Universities, no technical/vocational careers offered, no on the job training.  If your genetic heritage has betrayed you and, without prior consent or knowledge on your part, tainted you with one y chromosome, you are doomed.  No lawyer, no class action suit, will ever succeed on your behalf.  There is no recourse.  You would better use your time learning to birth bowling balls.  It is a feat completely undoable, a goal unattainable.  Hercules, if he ever had laundry, or the chance, could not have done it.  Yet, I try.

Most of my efforts are surreptitious.  I wait till my wife is gone for the day, or out of town.  Still, the inevitable will, must happen.  She sees what I have done before I can secrete it away. She spies it from afar as she comes down the road.   It dangles dangerously in the breeze, the shoulders of the shirts growing pinched, collars drooping, some unknown crease positioning itself for eternity in the sheets deep and palpable enough that she moans out in the night "oh honey, why do you even bother?"  And again "why do you even try."  Questions that cannot be answered -- correctly.  Another sleepless night filled with hopeless rejoinders "should I let them decompose?" and macabre visions of clothes rotted by too long exposure to UV, tattered by the wind. Whatever I do, however many pins and positions I try, I will fail.  "You could staple them to the side of the barn with better results."  The fact that the barn burned down years ago is irrelevant.   Yet, I try.

I say dam the rivers, mine the mountains, pump oil, and generate the power to dry clothes in the secrecy and sanctity of Laundromats and our homes.  Am I thus saved?  "No."   Only a double X can pound them on a rock at the side of a stream, fling them over a bush, and have them come out clean and wrinkle free.   A double X pins clothes precisely, deftly, with little effort.  A half breed Y can do no right.  I am cursed.  Not only can I not successfully hang laundry on a line to dry, I have less chance with laundry already dry.  I throw it in a basket for transport.  "No."  A garbage bag?  "No."  Hang it on the spot -- on hangars?  "No!"  Lightly fold it?  "Are you insane?"  I have now crossed the line.  I have devolved into some pre-cloth form of life that lives on the fibers of cotton and wool, desecrating and destroying all that has made us great.  I am unnecessary.  Yet I try.

Most Y's believe we are a nation of highly evolved beings and insist we stop hanging laundry at all --  in private, in public, certainly not from the balconies of condos.   Millions of dollars are made exploiting this fact.  Curious chemicals, mysterious materials, unknown substances, the odd fragrance,  none of it can help.   No machine, no amount of duplicity, will work.  Once I don a shirt that has been under my tutelage the best I can hope for is silence, a tacit silence that begs the question "Why do men even attempt to dry laundry?"

Yet I try.  The alternative is composting it.

© 2000 Robert Hayes

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