49 Laundromat, 4:30 p.m., 1 May 08

On the way home from work I stop at a laundromat to wash my clothes.  I am able to do this because my laundry basket has been in my trunk for almost a week, taunting me.  

Inside, two women are complaining about how hard it is to get their husbands’ work clothes clean.  One woman, so large she sits down to fold her laundry with her thighs serving as a table, says that her husband works on a farm, and “Sometimes that man get home, he be lookin’ like he spent the day rollin’ ‘round in oil.  I sure don’t like washin’ these clothes, but nobody else is goin’ to do it.”  It turns out the other woman, rail thin, has a husband who works on the road for a local utility company; he fares just as poorly at keeping his clothes clean.  

Then I miss a transition in their conversation, and before I know it they are loudly and vehemently agreeing with each other about how people just don’t respect their elders anymore.  They go on at length about the benefits of respect (someone’s aunt just covered a $500 payment for something, just because someone has always been respectful), and the obvious dangers.  The conversation is far from over when the thin woman’s last load comes out of the dryer and is folded about 20 times faster than I can fold clothes.  She leaves, and the laundromat is silent except for the machines.  

After a couple minutes I set down my laptop and tell the woman still there that I teach school in Tchula and every day I see exactly what she was talking about -- if people don’t respect their parents, how are they going to respect anybody else?  We agree on that for a little while but it clearly doesn’t have legs as a conversation topic between us. 

So I ask where she stays.  Belzoni, she says, on Ladybird, a notoriously unpleasant street where at any given moment at least two or three of Chimaobi’s students are doing something they’re not supposed to.  

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She doesn’t like it there because people are always trying to break into houses and stuff, but “when you don’t have much money and want to buy a house you take what you can get.”  After a moment she adds that she does her laundry during the week so she can be home on the weekends to watch the house because there’s always something going on outside, just people standing around selling drugs.  She doesn’t like it at all.
  
I mention that I wash clothes only at this laundromat (on Highway 49), not the other laundromat located uptown near a corner where people frequently loiter and hang out, because it seems like a lot more than washing clothes goes on at the other place.  She says it’s right of me to come to this laundromat--at the other one there are too many people wanting a dollar or fifty cents, and I never could leave my computer on a chair to check on a load of clothes.  It would be gone before I could turn around.  That’s why she comes down here whenever she has enough gas in her car to make the one-mile trip.    

As our conversation wraps up, she says, “I got to go home and cook supper now.  I don’t like doing it, but nobody else is goin' to.”  I tell her that I hope it turns out well and the food tastes good.  She waves her hand and says, “Oh, he eats pretty much whatever I cook.  He’s just like that.  That’s how I got so big, because when you be cookin’ so much like that, you got to taste the food.  When you always around food, you just get big.”

With those words hanging in the air, she opens only one of the two doors and gracefully exits with her laundry bags or any part of her massive body touching neither door or frame or anything but the sunshine.