Today the laundry broke me.

II.

It’s not really about the laundry. Even if I say it was.

It’s like saying a marriage is over because he never does the dishes. It’s not really about the dishes. Even if she says it is. No one ends it because of the dishes.

The dishes are what breaks her.

III.

When I was a child, I thought the poor house was still a physical place families went when they couldn’t pay their bills. It was also a place children sent their parents: children who wanted Nike’s and gymnastics lessons, a new bike and Barbie’s Dreamhouse, an Atari and parachute pants, a Cabbage Patch kid and a Members Only jacket. Or children who broke their glasses and chipped their front tooth on a cafeteria table.

We always had one foot on the poor house’s front step. One box of instant potato flakes, one can of Treet, one box of frozen fish sticks away from inside.

IV.

In March 1962, Superior Steel closed in Carnegie, PA, and my grandfather lost his job. My father was 11. He said, “The day he came home, he looked like an old man. The house wasn’t paid for. He had bills, a family to take care of, and no money coming in” (Letter 2010).

The experiences of the grandfather, inherited by the father, are inflicted on me.

Who said life was fair?

You’ll eat it, and you’ll like it.

Be grateful for what you got.

Who do you think you are?

Stop crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about.

The world doesn’t owe you nothing.

VI.

Wednesday is laundry day because it makes sense in my schedule and because the laundromat is pretty empty on Wednesdays at 7:30 am.

Before I lived in Brooklyn, I did laundry on Saturdays, and if we were fortunate to have a washer/dryer in our apartment building, I did laundry whenever I fucking wanted to. This is only important to people who haul their laundry out and only seems small to people who do laundry at home.

I would never attempt the laundromat on a Saturday.

VII.

On whatever day it was before the laundry broke me, what wasn’t at the grocery store:

Potatoes - Not Russet, red, Yukon, fingerlings or new

Dried beans - No Jack Rabbit or Goya

Chicken

Ground Beef

Rice - No Lafe or Bombay. No Carolina, Uncle Bens, Lundberg, or Vigo

Kleenex

Cough Drops

Flour - Not Red Star or Pillsbury. Bob’s Red Mill or King Arthur. Gold, White Lily, Heckers or Aunt Jemima

Clorox Wipes

Sticks of Butter

Paper towels

Tylenol

Toilet paper

VIII.

When the steel mill shut down, my father and his younger brother did odd jobs to make money: collected pop bottles, cut grass, shoveled walks. Later, they lied about their ages and worked in the bowling alley downtown setting pins on Friday and Saturday nights when the leagues played. He said, “When the ladies leagues bowled, they were really nice to the pinsetters. At the end of the night, they would slide bags of candy down the lane to us as a tip” (Letter 2010).

IX.

On March 16, New York City public schools closed, but teachers had to report for several days of remote training the following week. On the 18th, S and I walked to her school to pick up packets and workbooks. It’s a short subway ride from Kingston to Utica Avenue and then the B46 SBS to Empire Blvd, but I didn’t want to ride public transportation. It was a sunny but chilly day, and we spent the 2 miles there and 2 miles back talking about school, crushes, and Splatoon, kids in her class. I asked her if she wanted to talk about anything, if she was scared, but she only shook her head and asked what animal I would be if I could be. A squirrel.

They say the only constant is change. I don’t know who they are, but the Internet told me it was Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher.

XI.

The laundromat is one block down and in the middle of one very long block over from our apartment.

The day the laundry broke me was a Thursday. In the “new normal” I have other kinds of responsibilities, but in quarantine Wednesday could be Sunday, and Tuesday could be Friday. A Cleveland news anchor recently instituted a “What Day Is It?” segment for viewers who have lost track. I’m not alone.

Even though we had been re-wearing clothes for the last 10 days, I still had a full cart.

The laundromat came into view: the rolling steel solid doors pulled down over the glass windows, a yellow steel bar secured with an industrial padlock blocked entry to the parking lot. I stood there. As if my presence on the sidewalk might magically produce an employee who was running late because of subway delays or a forgotten key. The laundromat was an essential business. The governor had said so.

XII.

When the mill shut down, the economic toll was felt, especially downtown where some stores closed, and others moved out to the ends of town where rent was cheaper.

Once a month, my father and his brother took the Radio Flyer wagon to the fire station where government food was distributed: powdered milk, navy beans, butter, peanut butter, and canned meat, sometimes beef, but usually pork. When they got home, my father emptied the beans into a big can leftover from potato chips. He said, “Every time I emptied the beans into the can, I thought of the potato chips that used to be in there and how they tasted and smelled” (Letter 2010).

XIII.

New York City public schools were slow to shut down. There was uncertainty and confusion. But shutting down schools for 1.1 million children wasn’t just about school learning. The coronavirus, like other crises, expose the underlying disparities in American culture, the chasm in our public institutions, the racism and inequity of systems we’re aware of but have ignored. In New York City: “Three-fourths of students are in low-income families, and about 10% are homeless” (Rosenberg “New York City Schools…” Mother Jones). There are families who rely on school for food, laundry, and heat. In addition, students often don’t attend their neighborhood school, taking public transportation long distances, and can’t access meals if their school is closed. Technology from district to district varies greatly, and there are students who don’t have access to the internet other than with a smartphone (Ortiz and Winter “Why New York’s public schools…” NBC News).

As Rebecca Solnit says, “The first lesson a disaster teaches is that everything is connected” (“The impossible has already happened…” The Guardian).

XIV.

We need toilet paper. We check the grocery store on different days at different times, and even though there is a 2-package limit, toilet paper is elusive. The fancy market I walked to was out. The Walgreens was out. There are no deliveries to our zip code from Target. No stock at Amazon.

We have 4 rolls left.

XV.

I wheeled my laundry cart back in the direction I had come. Tomorrow, I told myself. They would be open tomorrow.

A young man wearing a face mask wheeled his laundry cart toward me. He waved at me to follow him. I don’t usually follow a beckoning man anywhere, but it felt like he knew something.

On the corner at New York Avenue, he turned to say that two blocks up and over, there was another laundromat. He had already researched a backup, just in case.

XVI.

Americans are optimists. There is a strong belief that overcoming adversity makes us stronger, more resilient. And in looking forward, there is always hope. The hope your children will be more successful than you. The hope that next year will bring more economic stability.

It’s the one constant I latch on to in hard times, both personally and as a nation, even as a cynical Gen X’er. In the land of opportunity, we believe tomorrow will be better.

I am thankful.

People have lost their jobs, and A and I can work from home. I’m thankful.

People are waiting in food lines for hours in that span miles only to leave without a box to feed their children, and we have food. I’m thankful.

Children of first responders are scared and worried about their parents, and S feels safe and happy. I’m thankful.

Children are trying to learn without having resources, and we have reliable technology for S.

I’m thankful.

But I’m also human. And humans are complex. We can feel more than one thing at one time. I can be thankful and grateful and blessed and lucky, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t also feel overwhelmed or worried. We have our jobs now, but what happens in three months? What happens at the start of fall semester? Our parents are all older with varying health conditions. People are sick. People are dying.

I feel aggression and anger. Anger at unequal systems, at people who don’t vote their best interests, at food systems that make us sick, at government officials who lie, at a health care system that profits from illness, at the idea that all we need is hard work to succeed, that after this crises is over we won’t fix anything.

And I’m sad. Every morning when I read the news. For the woman who lost her husband, for the health care workers collecting iPads so the dying can say goodbye to their loved ones. I cried the morning Nicholas Kulish’s article was included in The New York Times Daily Briefing about food bank lines and shortages. To close the article, Kulish writes, “The delivery truck had enough boxes of food — produce, bread and milk — for 200 vehicles. Some 400 showed up. Ms. Smrcka recalled feeling apprehensive at the prospect of walking car to car with nothing more than a flier describing alternative resources, thinking she might get yelled at. But that’s not what happened. ‘After sitting in their car for an hour and not receiving any food, they still said thank you,’ she said, recalling in particular a father who had left work early and picked up his three daughters, and who departed empty-handed” (Kulish “Never Seen Anything Like It…” The New York Times).

A and I acknowledge the unfairness of the systems, the slow response, the economic fallout. We tell ourselves it will be fine when we have no idea what happens tomorrow or next week or next month.

XVII.

When my grandfather lost his job, they sat around the dinner table that night. A table usually filled with talk about school or a funny incident at the mill. But that night it was quiet, until my grandfather finally said, “Things will be okay.”

XVIII.

I followed the young man to his researched backup laundromat. I had passed it many times on my before-coronavirus days walk from the coffee shop to the subway. People waited outside with their clothes on the busy street. Inside, every washer and dryer were being used. People waited for over-soaped washers to finish.

I fed my bills into the change machine, the quarters plinked. And I waited. It was only fair to let the young man go before me; this had been his backup plan. I waited. I texted A. The washers continued washing, the dryers drying, the people waiting. I felt panic. I couldn’t stay.

I couldn’t.

Quickly I pushed my cart out of the store and across the street, trying not to cry. A texted, Just come home. I crossed the street and called to say I was on my way, my voice tight and cracking, trying desperately not to cry on the public sidewalk, in a city that sometimes feels like it will crack open and swallow you whole.

XIX.

Solnit says, “Hope offers us clarity that, amid the uncertainty ahead, there will be conflicts worth joining and the possibility of winning some of them… Ordinary life before the pandemic was already a catastrophe of desperation and exclusion for too many human beings, an environmental and climate catastrophe, an obscenity of inequality. It is too soon to know what will emerge from this emergency, but not too soon to start looking for chances to help decide it” (“The impossible has already happened…” The Guardian).

XX.

My father wrote, “It’s funny, but I think that was probably the best time for us. Sure there was no money, but somehow we had food, clothes on our backs, and a place to live” (Letter 2010).

My grandfather worked odd jobs until he landed a mill job with J&L Steel in Pittsburgh. My father said, “Things got better and life didn’t seem so hard.”

XXI.

So today the laundry broke me, but it wasn’t really about the laundry.

Even if I say it was.