The Laundromat and the Vacuum

By Claire Orrange

If you were to ask her, “What’s so funny?”, she would not know how to answer, but would instead laugh at the question. Glenn was like that; she would never concede that things mattered because if she conceded, or rather, if they mattered, the joke would be over. The odd way that school was compartmentalized into academic categories was one of these amusing things. History and Art and Math and English began to structure the way she thought, a circumstance that any nascent brain would find itself succumbing to in the absence of some cool older sister telling it to transgress the “system.” Her nominal older sister, who loved to lay claim to those precious three years before Glenn’s arrival, did not tend to find as much promise in transgression as her younger counterpart.

Thus it was during her middle-school Science phase that Glenn learned about approach-avoidance in an article she printed in black and white off the Internet. It must have been one of those fleeting but only moderately rare instances in which the tied-up and sparkly information that surfaced in new books and posts and conversations could be put to use in a meaningful way. Learning about approach-avoidance made sense of many things. It is the universal tendency to fear that which comes nearer and nearer, she read on page one. Large mammals and other tribes approaching on the horizon first endowed the now vestigial trait in humankind, she read on page three. What transformed the revelation from mere trivia to something Glenn took note of, which was not to be taken for granted, was recent research suggesting that approach-avoidance spurred humans to avoid the nearer crawl of the abstract just as deliberately as things like hungry lions (page four). 

“Cars,” she later told her mother, “when they roar down the road and I don’t like it.”

“When you were a child, you would hide behind the garbage bins and tree trunks. . .”

“Mommy, I’m too big for that now but it hasn’t gone away and cars keep running along.”

Glenn had not made a habit of calling her mother ‘mommy’ but now that her heightened pulse and goosebumps had been endorsed by a scientist, especially when things were coming from behind and she could only feel the sound, she decided she might as well take extra measures against time too. Her mother certainly had.

“Your sister almost weighs as little as you do now.”

“Oh?”

“She’s been busy.”

Glenn’s mother liked to have home shopping channels play all day long on the television, for company. As she raised her first child, a girl, she was increasingly disappointed with the child’s failure to perform womanhood as she saw fit. It was not that she was a tomboy, the mother wrote in the journal she bought at the airport, where it looked calming and symbolic next to the lurid bestsellers that had an alarming number of expletives in their various titles, she simply did not participate in gender as one should. Boy or girl. She clambered when she should have pranced or strolled; held no opinion when she should have wanted this or that; pronounced interest in the ocean when all the boys were looking to space and all the girls were looking in the mirror. That Glenn did participate was no consolation, she scribbled, for Glenn was a boy. Right, journal, right? She always closed each entry with a hurried flourish even when there was no one there to interrupt her.

When Glenn told her mother and father that yes, they must dredge up memories of her infant tears and pink plastic, for she was indeed a girl, her mother wrote that she positively knew it despite the look of paralysis she offered as a retort. Television had conditioned her to expect honesty to sprout up like a weed when she was drunk or when she was lying in bed with her husband, and so when she found both circumstances fulfilled that night, she sighed and rolled over.

“We need to buy books on this, don’t we?”

Glenn could hardly direct the imaginary moderator of her transition, who resided in her head at all hours except when she dreamt, to hormones in order to account for the increasing daintiness of her affect or perkiness of her hair. She put scented lotion on her skin each night, the kind her mother would use in the morning, not only because of the person evoked by the smell, but because of triumph. For, at five or six, when one often found her in a bucket hat, she feared the approach of her supple and oily mother into the kitchen to make sure she was eating her breakfast each morning.

“It’s not you, mom. It’s the feeling.”

To be fair, their house was old and creaky and the perfect setting for a story about cannibalism or ashes and roses mixing if only it could be picked up and placed somewhere romantic by a giant sentimental hand. Glenn always knew where each member of her family was at any given moment and, according to their gait, which one was ascending and descending the stairs, which had a jewel-toned carpet runner and were wooden. Loud and creaky and wooden. That’s all Glenn cared to know.

Glenn’s sister, when they were finally adults, began to wear green because Glenn looked better in blue. Their father primarily made himself useful by performing the tasks that would otherwise accumulate in the background of the domestic lives of the women. One of which was to launder and sort the garments of the two, now three women who burnt through more than seven outfits a week each, during the season when Glenn was home from school. Blue and green–these demarcations were helpful–but the peculiarities of style that were held so important by his wife and daughters did not come easily to him, so the girls grew accustomed to finding the pressed and powdery blouse of one folded at the threshold of another’s room. Glenn read in something hopelessly second-wave (in her Gender Studies phase) that sometimes femininity means simply letting the information of the world wash over and through one's body, and her father certainly had gone through his share of things washing over and through, she decided.

It was on a breezy day, during spring or winter or summer break that Glenn’s sister, who could not have been named anything but Wolfy, stomped over to her father, not with a defiant as much as with a lumbering step, to proclaim that ‘this’ was not hers.

“Throw it on your sister's bed then.”

She took his words literally, and the lightweight dress descended onto Glenn’s sheets like an expired leaf hesitating before landing on the chalky autumn ground. It had embroidery along the neckline, that’s what Glenn first noticed. It was not hers, and had to be her sister’s and not her mother’s because of its unequivocal non-fast-fashion origin, for one thing, but, more importantly, for its size. Only, it fit the gamine perfectly, which was not to be taken for granted considering that the vast majority of sundresses were tight around her broad shoulders and refrained from venturing beyond the mid-panel of her thighs. Wolfy surely does not look this good in it, nor is it her style, she thought before she promptly disrobed, and hung the dress amidst the rest of her wardrobe.

As a general rule, Glenn struggled to make conversation with her mother. She decided that bringing up the pretty little dress for the sake of winding up her mother to life was worth her total disinterest in the woman’s response.

“Oh, I would love to see, Glenn.”

It hugged the underside of the girl’s breasts with a pleat and emphasized the gild of hairs running along her forearms. There was a transparency that took hold somewhere around the latitude of her navel, and from there her legs cascaded down like a gradient of warm sand out of a cloud of muslin. 

“Your grandmother’s wedding dress, the one that was turned into the teddy bear in your sister’s room, I can see nothing but that in it.”

“At what point did it become a teddy bear?”

“Well, I suppose it was after she died.”

Glenn imagined a shabby white dress enclosed in some damp working-class basement, cocooned for years and emerging from a waxy shell as a stuffed animal upon the snap of her grandmother’s neck. She smiled in spite of herself.

“Mommy, I’ve always appreciated how cheap your wedding dress was. I’m going to wear this for my wedding.”

“That was a million years ago. And that, my dear, will be a million years into the future.”

Glenn felt nauseated by this prospect. She considered the whereabouts of her future husband and decided on a timeline: t-minus six years, fifty-six days, four hours, and seventeen minutes, until I am to first brush by him. At this thought she swallowed hard. Her heart was racing and she went to her room and changed into a jersey with her high school’s mascot.

Thus the dress factored into the petty dramas of Glenn’s childhood home. Wolfy humored the garment after her father repeated his mistake and left it in her room, and became endeared by the subtle show the dress made of her innocence. It must have been summer for, while Wolfy lay by the pool with a hamburger, a droplet of ketchup hit the fabric. She frowned and went inside to find her stain stick. Glenn, encountering her sister on the stairs–her headphones in, she had recently begun to relax her supervision of vibrations and steps up and down–mumbled something condescendingly about Americans, giggled, and joined Wolfy by the pool. They never felt more love for each other than in those months.

Naturally, Glenn was afraid of men. Women did not typically interest her, but podcasts about murder and horror movies did. Her life, when not suspended in liberal arts incubation (as she imagined a flushed pink radio host describing her college with disgust), was indeed rather boring. She would have never said so herself, but violence tethered her to something too interesting and haphazard to be found in her sleepy town, where she had lived all her life. Lives snuffed out and things not given the time to develop from one to the other—that was her satisfaction. Men were too attracted to youth, something too short, she often worried, and one is never quite sure when it has subsided, and that she could not indulge. Murder was concise. Eighties thriller camp was funny. Stephen King novels always came to an end. All bore her back into the past-tense. With Wolfy and Louise and Ivy she consumed variants of this digital gothicism and remained as happy and self-satisfied as an old man changing the channel or a dog chasing a ball that was never thrown.

Her return to school shattered this interwoven fragility and replaced it with something that would become her new normal, or so she told herself in a preemptive strike against the normal that would have approached upon her anyways. She decided against bringing the dress in her luggage because her arms had gotten considerably more squishy those last few months. The dress would be too easy anyway. At school she was rewarded for the visage of femininity in spite of odd clothing and lanky sprawls across second-hand couches, and she knew the dress would be out of place. In order to cope with the change she tried to think of time as a distance to be traveled. Her friends were knotty guideposts on old dirt roads; her path to maturity was, obviously, the slow recession of melting icebergs . She embarrassed herself with a private yearning or two for arrival, which meant death, or at least something very, very bad.

Around this time, mid-fall, while she mused about teenage cheerleaders facing the blades of a chainsaw, the colors of the sky and the state of her relationships to her friends prompted her to recalibrate and eventually land on a new way of doing things. Perhaps it was a remnant of her primary school tendency to absorb herself into a way of compartmentalizing life along odd, scholastic lines. She was not stupid, not in a lack of attention to detail nor in a misunderstanding of the vast significance of life, but she did wholeheartedly buy into the notion that these critical junctures, in which she changed her clothes and her friends and her interests, would be lasting. The cyclical nature of the whole thing, which reiterated itself at least once a year, was lost on her; although she might have just thought it was a big joke. 

Her phone case went first, followed by the posters on her dorm’s wall, up through the hierarchy of materials through which she constituted her identity, until the vacuum was clogged with the friends who bored her and the activities that had the wrong color palette. During this time she decided that she certainly had not been doing enough drugs, and her coursework could surely be attended to with more vigor. Had a ghost followed her back to school, trailing the smell of her perfume, or perhaps to return a favor, he would surely have been amused at this descent into solitude. Nevertheless, she was happy.

In many ways, some explicit and some obscured by velvety folds of that particularly damp complexity that all young women humor themselves into believing that they possess, that quality which is valorized by middle-age men who can not seem to help but write about fifteen year-old girls, Glenn was defined by what she noticed and what she did not notice. Names and faces were neglected, but music was not. Glenn worried about the day when her aloofness would stop being cute, but she could not picture herself without the shortcoming, and of course the substances only made it worse. She concluded: All I am is what I notice. She wanted it spelled out in a public health campaign where a young girl playing soccer scored a goal while the mantra was repeated. You are what you notice. She wanted Michelle Obama to wear a soft pink jacket while earnestly exhorting the camera. You are what you notice. And the inverse: what Glenn did not notice could not hurt her. In holding this warning at an arm’s length, she remained happy (nevertheless).

“But you seem so glazed over.”

“You should try it sometime.”

“And your room smells like weed. And essential oils.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

It was because their mother had begun to sour that Wolfy now found herself with a packed bag at her sister’s dorm room door. It was not like the decay of a flower or fruit, for it was not a physical change. In fact, their mother was quite beautiful, all things considered. But she had started to make their father cry with more frequency than Wolfy was accustomed to. She berated the girl for her infantile clothing and lack of a job. She spent most of her time at the office or calling Glenn, whom she preferred for the sole fact that the younger sister reigned in the excesses that her husband and first child did not interpret as calling out for attention and rebuke.

“I’ll sleep on the ground. It’ll only be for a few days.”

“How was your flight?”

“Someone launched into the air and hit their head when the plane hit some turbulence. And there was a baby that wouldn’t shut up.”

Glenn’s pupils dilated and she laughed. “Just don’t wake me up in the morning. Use my ID if you want food, although I know you probably won’t. I don’t tend to leave my room, so you’ll be seeing a lot of me.” 

Wolfy was one of the only people who could stand to have had more detail written into her genes, Glenn had always thought to herself. More detail so she could notice less. As much as they bickered, and as much as the companionship that saw its height that past summer had faded with time and distance, Glenn felt no dread at the prospect of sharing her life with her sister for a few days. It might even be mutually beneficial, like the bumblebee and the daisy. She needed some stories to tell. Something more to put in her arsenal. They started with alcohol and worked their way up from there. Glenn found the task of accessing the inner life of her older sister much more difficult than anticipated. She decided she did not have the patience to chisel away at the undertaking, and pivoted to something much easier and more important; making the girl pretty was easy–ciswomen being held to such low standards–and nearly all Glenn had to do was pluck Wolfy’s dark eyebrows and style the blonde hair whose particular dirty shade was shared by the two of them. I’ll just practice good posture by example, and my work will be nearly finished, Glenn told her mirror.

That night they watched All About Eve while curled up in Glenn’s bed. Glenn had seen it before, so she was lost in her thoughts, contemplating buying an antique dollhouse, but, more importantly, trying to not think about her sea levels rising and swallowing up the towns that existed in her mind’s eye like alters to her vanity. Wolfy liked the melodramatic background music. It added the significance to her thoughts that was necessary for her to feel entitled to sharing them: 

“Are you trying to replace me?”

Glenn rolled her eyes and paused the movie. “If you’re set on seeing it that way then there is nothing I can do to change that. . .” Here she paused for a moment before continuing. “But I know that you don’t want the life that you have right now. You know, at first it was like, wow, maybe you can be a model for me,” she frowned, “and I understand that there’s not exactly a precedent, in books or movies or real life, in which one’s younger brother becomes a reflecting pool or a Kardashian clone or something of the older sister.”

“Maybe the Greeks had a story like that which has since been lost.”

Glenn smiled. “Yeah, maybe the Greeks.”

“You know, one of the only things that I can say made this fucking anthropology degree worth it was this class I took about Greco-Roman art and culture. Apparently, all those pearly white statues from antiquity, like Venus of Milo and stuff, well, they painted them with these garish colors. Like, the Greeks adorned their homes with these ugly, colorful sculptures. Decked out like real housewives. But today the paint hasn’t survived and it’s like everyone’s been fooled into thinking Western civilization has this bedrock of smooth, bland ivory.”

“I wonder what Venus of Milo looked like in the middle, like in the Middle Ages. Maybe the colors were faded and soft, not what they once were but still hanging on.” Glenn muttered this more to herself than to her sister.

“I don’t know. Maybe things just are, and still are, until they aren’t any more.” What Wolfy didn’t say, but what Glenn had learned was entailed in any lapse in specification on the part of someone she was talking to who had known her before, was how Glenn was a boy until, until she was a girl, and, sure, she was in the process of transitioning, but the label, the identity, it didn’t seem like there was any faded pastel there. This Glenn heard very loudly and clearly.

“Wolfy, do you remember that dress, the one that popped up out of nowhere last summer. The white one?”

“I packed it. I thought I would wear it to a party. That was before I found out you decided you were a recluse.”

“That would’ve annoyed me.”

“Yeah.”

“Can I try it on?”

“Yeah.”

They both did. They gave each other a fashion show until Glenn inevitably spilled wine all over it. The rusty stain left by the ketchup turned maroon. It was an accident, she said. I’m high, she said. But they both knew it would happen. Let’s finish what you started. Wolfy was laughing. Wolfy was never the one laughing, Glenn thought while they poured out more wine for each other and sifted blue and green eyeshadow over the delicate design of the dress and drew on it with the markers Glenn had bought for writing notes to herself.

“Your laugh, the real one, makes a surprising sound. I wasn’t expecting it,” Glenn sounded jumpy.

“I miss mom. You’re a lot like her, you know. God, when I’m that age, who knows what I’ll have to do to get by.”

“If I knew the laugh was coming, the sound would have been scarier. But it came and I didn’t know. . . and now I want to hear it again.”

Wolfy stared into the glossy black screen of the laptop. “I’ll move out. That would give them space, but it would also give you space, somehow. Away. Might never see either of us again. I’ll move out.” Wolfy nodded her head.

“Mommy can be insufferable, is that what you said? But like, it’s her money we’re spending, like tuition and food. And we, me and you, we owe her a lot. Right? We’re spoiled, after all.”

“She always liked you more. She likes that you don’t take anything seriously, but I don’t think she realizes that you’re just laughing at her.”

Glenn lay quiet for a while before finally responding. “Not laughing, becoming. She needs a friend, Wolfy. And anyways, don’t be bitter. You had twenty-one more years than I did to cultivate something with her, woman to woman or whatever. Could have had a whole garden, and a half. Besides Wolfy, it might as well be the year 3000 and who is to say that mother and daughter categorically can’t be friends? Once you ignore her vanity, strip it back, and tend to the seed she has, like, planted in us, nourishing it despite the fact that it’s a parasite or something, you know, you realize she’s pretty badass.”

“You lost me.” Wolfy laughed and finally made her point with a sense of humor. “I don’t know how you do it, Glenn, but you just do. You haven’t grown up and yet somehow I feel like the younger sister. Like a vessel for you to—”

“I love you too.”

While they embraced Glenn realized she had forgotten to take her turquoise hormone. It went down with more wine and laughter in their little reverse Laundromat that the Greeks might have consecrated with a story that prophesied the origin of a god of sisterhood or gender or maybe coming-of-age films. Glenn did not think any of it was funny. The joke had ended and she laughed even harder.