Suds and Duds
Life down at the Suds and Duds Laundromat is usually pretty boring. Most patrons cram their frontloaders, then head down to the Diner a quarter mile away for a cup of coffee to while away wash time. It’s customary for the next customer to pile the wet finished laundry into plastic bins if folks aren’t back yet. Other than some vintage Newsweek magazines, some dogeared Peoples, an occasional 3 day old newspaper or a busted-spine paperback, there isn’t much to make the coin-op anything but the sterile fluorescent-lit hell it is.
Doris, the usually absentee owner, tried mounting a television set on a wobbly table in the back by the big commercial dryers, but it went AWOL the first week. When she siscovered the theft she flung her half smoked Marlboro on the linoleum disgustedly and ground it like she’d imagined the face of the thief, then machinegunned a volley of obscenities that made Willy Branson scuttle crabwise along the row of agitating Maytags and out into the gravel parking lot until she’d settled down.
Maybe it’s the wear and tear of busted fanbelts, leaky hoses, burned up motors, two bad marriages with a 3rd on the rocks that has given her a tendency toward a philosophy that life’s glass isn’t just half empty, it’s got a broken jagged top. Maybe that’s partly what gives the place, even on a sunny day, an energy akin to a small town funeral.
A lot of the housewives shuttle back and forth to nearby homes, preferring the Spartan comforts of their rental trailers to the alien sterility of the Suds and Duds, even if it means waiting an extra turn for an available machine. The bachelors sometimes hang around, but rarely inside. They climb into the cab of their work trucks and drink the beers they bring along with a box of Brand X detergent. Occasionally, if a couple of them show up at the same time and the weather is nice, they’ll share the picnic table at the side of the building and banter like two strangers on barstools, once in awhile getting up to drop more quarters in a dryer or grabbing the next Cold One from a cooler in the cab of their truck. They keep a watchful lookout, not so much for passing sheriff’s cars, but for Doris who has made it plain on notices inside that she’s fed up hauling their empties to the recycle, yet another flat tire on her short road to hell.
Like I said, the S&D is usually as exciting as grass growing in a cemetery. So when Maggie Winston came back last week to find her laundry scattered on the top of the big dryer half dried and her machine tumbling Billy Jean Sandstrom’s sheets, her mental drum hit Final Spin when she confronted Billy Jean calmly sipping a diet Coke half filled with rum down by the change machine. No one else was in the place, but by the time the deputies’ three squad cars had arrived and separated the two washerwomen, sudsy water was rolling out the front door, detergent was strewn from pop machine to toilet and Maggie and Billy Jean had shredded each other’s lingerie and sheets and blouses and were as wet as two spaniels fetching downed ducks.
The story that made the Gazette was concise: South End Women Fight for Dryer. Rumor down here was a bit more incisive based on superior investigative reporting. Billy Jean, it turns out, had been seeing Maggie’s husband — in a carnal sort of way. No doubt a dryer was the last straw, but as always, the truth was a bit more convoluted. All I know is, like the adage says, it all comes out in the wash eventually….
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