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Only about half of the washers work on any given day. Some of them won’t start at all, some will start but make a horrible metallic clanging when they get to the spin cycle, and some refuse to drain. All of them will take your money, of course, and only some have an “out of order” sign scrawled in mostly-dead marker on printer paper and affixed to the ancient machines with painters tape. Some of them have been broken for weeks or months, but others are temperamental—they’ll clock into work some days, but on other days, go on strike in protest of being on the schedule every day without a day off. The regulars, Ben included, know which are the chronically broken, and they’ll warn each other when one sometimes-reliable machine is acting up on a particular day. It’s a tiny sliver of community, a crumb of camaraderie.
That’s how he meets her.
Occupied with scooping out his wet, newly clean clothes, he doesn’t even look up at her properly at first—just registers out of the corner of his eye a person approaching the washer to his right. “‘S broken.”
“Sorry?”
He detests the feeling of wet fabric in his hands. “It’s not draining.”
“Oh.”
“You c’n use this one, just a second.” He plops the last of the load in a plastic laundry basket to transfer to a dryer on the next row over. It isn’t until he turns, carrying his basket, that he sees her properly.
There’s nothing about her that doesn’t fit. Jeans and sneakers and a tank top under a half-zipped hoodie, and lank, unstyled hair and no makeup and no smile. A description that fits about 80% of the laundromat’s customers. There’s nothing about her that doesn’t fit, except everything.
He’s never seen her before. He sees dozens of people at the laundromat, and he wouldn’t be able to pick the vast majority of them out of a lineup, but he knows he hasn’t seen her before. Because if the image of her had ever been burned onto his retinas before, like the fluorescents are doing now, he would’ve seen her every time he closed his eyes.
He stares for too long, until he realizes that he’s standing there blocking her from the washer he’d just told her she could use. He doesn’t realize it until her eyes flick toward it, and he hastily steps aside and carries his basket toward the end of the row, heartbeat thumping in his ears.
It’s not, he realizes as he’s throwing his clothes in the dryer, that she was beautiful. She might be beautiful, that is—he’s not even sure. He would have to look at her again if he wants to figure it out. It wasn’t beauty that had staggered him. It was just a feeling, a certainty, though even that’s too weak a word, that she was, or is, or will be, someone to him.
“Hey, thanks,” she says from behind him.
His heart jumps as he slams the dryer door shut and turns toward her.
The barest ghost of a smile quirks the corner of her mouth. “Saved me wasting two-fifty.”
He swallows. “Yeah, sure.”
She hesitates, seemingly deciding whether to go on. She twists her wedding ring with her right thumb and forefinger. “How did you know?”
“That it wasn’t draining right? The person before me told me.”
“Who needs a sign, I guess, right? If someone can just tell you.”
“Yeah. Now you have to tell the next person.”
“That’s the rule?” There’s no humor in her voice or on her face, but he knows she knows it’s a joke.
He nods. “That’s the rule.”
He almost smiles.
It isn’t until hours later, when the ground has stopped spinning beneath him, that he realizes the wedding ring. It isn’t a surprise, or a source of dismay or joy or any emotion at all. It’s simply a fact, like her hoodie or her sneakers. It hadn’t occurred to him to hope that it wouldn’t exist before he saw it does, and now that he knows, it doesn’t change anything. The neurons programmed with her are in a whole different part of his brain from the ones programmed for romance or dating or even sex. He doesn’t want to have sex with her. He wants to meet her naked on a riverbank and press the front of his body to hers and melt into intermingled mud and make fossils with her.
(It’s a very strange category of neurons.)
“You don’t fold it?”
He’s shoveling his hot, dry clothes into his laundry bag when she asks.
He shrugs with one shoulder. “I do when I get home. Sometimes.”
“But it gets wrinkles in the meantime?”
He looks down at the bag, considering. He picks it up and dumps it out onto the top of the nearest washer. He picks up a t-shirt and starts folding it.
“I didn’t mean to make you.”
He glances at her. “You didn’t.”
“So why are you doing it?”
“Someone told me one time that if you wait until you get home before folding it, it gets wrinkles.”
He doesn’t look up to see her reaction, and she doesn’t answer, for long enough that he thinks she’s not going to.
But then: “They must’ve been pretty smart.”
There’s still no smile in her voice, nor his.
There’s a smile inside him, though, so big it strains against his ribcage.
She brings a load of sheets and towels one day. She’s stuffing them, freshly warm from the dryer, into her laundry bag when he says, “I can help you fold them. Only if you want.”
She looks over at him in a quiet, emotionless way that he thinks is appraisal, and nods.
She extracts a flat sheet and grabs one edge, billowing it sharply up so he can catch the other. They both find their pair of corners and bring them together. He watches her to see which hand she’ll reach down with to grab the fold, and he mirrors her. The fold again, then step together so he can hand his corners to her and bend down to retrieve the new lower corners, and when he hands those to her too, they’re standing closer than they’ve ever been and the sheet is folded.
And something is tangibly different in her universe because he exists.
“Did you grow up here?”
He leans his hip against the washer and nods. “I was born here, anyway. We moved when I was eight.”
“Why’d you move back?”
It’s a fair question. It’s the kind of town that the people who are lucky enough to get out of don’t come back to. He doesn’t have a good answer, though. “I figured I might as well.”
She looks at him searchingly—or rather, in a way that he’s come to recognize as searchingly. Her expression only ever changes about two percent, but he’s recalibrated his eyes to see it.
“What about you?” he asks.
She looks away. “He got a job here. My...”
(They neither of them say the word husband.)
“Do you like it here?” he asks, inviting her silently to share in the joke that such a question is. This town isn’t liked, it’s existed in.
But her eyes look faraway, ten miles behind the back of his skull, and she blinks and doesn’t answer.
He never dreams about her. He rarely dreams at all, or at least he rarely remembers his dreams, but she’s never in them.
Maybe it’s because his subconscious is afraid of mischaracterizing her. How could his brain presume to make another version of her, when there’s one already. There wouldn’t be room for two of her in the whole universe.
Some days she talks to him, and some days she doesn’t.
Some days she wears her gray hoodie, and some days her navy one.
Some days she peels postage stamps of her life from her tongue and sticks them to him.
Some days her eyes are swollen and red.
Some days she almost barely smiles.
The laundry never ends.
It’s raining hard the night he hears the doorbell ring and goes to open the door and finds her on the stoop.
He steps back automatically to let her in, and she stands there silently dripping as he shuts the door behind her.
He doesn’t say anything, and neither does she, because there are a million questions he could ask and a million explanations she could give and he doesn’t know if this is an hour or a night or a lifetime, but words don’t exist tonight, or if they do, they don’t need to.
He steps toward her until the ends of his sock-clad toes touch the tips of her sodden sneakers and he bends his head down until his forehead touches hers and they stand like that, sharing breaths.
He closes his eyes and is.
His palms turn upward on this own, and his fingertips float gently up until they meet hers, and her breath hitches but he doesn’t open his eyes. The ends of his fingers brush hers, back and forth—not grasping, not entwining, just cells sliding over cells.
She tips her head back the slightest bit, and he feels as her forehead pulls away, so he opens his eyes and straightens up enough to look at her.
Her eyes move from one of his to the other and back again, and she doesn’t look away when her hand finds the zipper pull of her hoodie and tugs it down, so slowly that he can hear every metal tooth of the zipper as they separate. He doesn’t touch her except with his gaze as she shrugs off one heavy, drenched shoulder and then the other, and tugs her hands from the cuffs and her arms from the sleeves and lets the wet hoodie fall to his floor with a whump.
She doesn’t take so much time in toeing off her sneakers, nor in unbuttoning her jeans or pulling her tank top over her head and discarding it on the floor, but there’s no rush either. She undresses like she would undress alone at home, because she practically is alone, since the universe messed up somehow and gave them two sets of lungs and two hearts and two everything instead of just the one they need.
She walks toward the hall and his bedroom still in her unbuttoned jeans, and he follows behind, and when she reaches the side of the bed she unzips her pants and peels them down off her legs, then steps out of them and pulls down her underwear and steps out of them too, and he never makes his bed, so she doesn’t need to fold back any covers to get in.
She lies there quietly and waits as he shucks his own shirt with the same calm routine that she had, then his socks, and he walks around the bed to the other side and gets in wearing just his boxers.
They lie side by side, both on their backs, not touching, watching the ceiling. Listening to the shadows, and the rain, and their own breaths and the ones that are theirs but happen to come from other lungs.
She reaches down for the corner of the sheet, to pull it up onto herself, and he mirrors her from habit, but this time they don’t fold it. This time, she rolls over toward him and takes the sheet with her so she can stay underneath it when her breasts press into his chest and her leg settles between his. He skims his palms over her hips, her sides, her arms, her shoulders, to her cheeks, to push back her wet hair, to try to take the droplets into his skin and leave her as warm and dry as a fresh load of laundry. It doesn’t work, but it doesn’t much matter, because she tugs the waistband of his boxers down over his erection and pushes herself up by her hands planted on his chest and straddles him all the way and guides him inside her as she sinks down, and then they’re not accidentally two bodies anymore.
She doesn’t take her eyes off of his as she rises up and pushes down again, insistently joining them. Her lips separate in a quiet pant, but she doesn’t make any other noise, and nor does he as he watches her.
If he believed in a god it would be this thing that they’re doing together.
His hands reach down, intending to find her hips or her thighs, but instead his palms hover just beside her calves, not touching. He cups the air she warms as if presenting her to the universe in gratitude, in relief, in exultation. This is as it should have been. This is as it should be.
She moves slowly still, pushing and retreating without moans. He could last for hours like this, or she could whisper come and he would obey on her next thrust. She pauses often at the bottom, pushing herself onto him so hard he can feel innermost bounds of her strain against his cockhead. It’s a serious business, this recalibration of existence, and she doesn’t smile, not that she ever does.
He gives his being over to her silently.
It’s not sex.
It’s mud, and fossils.
He watches her sleep.
Her face is softer this way, less guarded. Tiny fractions of expressions flit across it, and he wonders if she dreams.
She wakes before dawn.
He’s looking at the ceiling, not at her, but he can hear when her breathing changes. He doesn’t say anything, but he knows she can tell he’s awake too.
She clutches the sheets up under her chin with a hand that has a wedding ring on it.
He thinks about the other lifetime—the parallel universe one, where everything is the same except laundry isn’t the only thing he gets to do with her.
She doesn’t say anything, and in her silence he hears an apology. Because what can she say? What can he bear?
This time, when she rolls toward him, it’s nails and teeth and ragged grunts, and when he plants a seed inside her he cries to water it.
She holds him.
They hold each other.
He hadn’t thought he owned a lot of things, but when he has to fit it all in boxes, it seems like a lot. He surveys the empty living room and fingers the key in his pocket that the landlord told him to leave behind the broken flowerpot.
He’d considered leaving without telling her, but how could he do that to her? Either way is impossible.
He parks his truck, laden with boxes and tied-down furniture, on the curb outside the laundromat.
He hesitates on the sidewalk when he sees her inside. She feels his eyes on her and looks over and sees him, and sees his truck behind him, and he knows through the glass and all the air that separates them that she knows. She understands. He could stand there for another minute and they could look at each other and he could nod and she could nod and he could get in his truck and turn the key in the ignition and drive away.
But that’s not what happens in this universe.
He goes inside.
She’s standing beside the washer that her current load is occupying.
She stares at him, barely blinking.
“So this is it?”
He ducks his head. “Yep.”
“Oh.” She chews her bottom lip, and her eyes fill with a glassy sheen, but she blinks it back.
“I—” He fumbles for words big enough to occupy the same space as what they are to each other, and finds none.
She nods curtly. He thinks this is how everything will end, in silence, but she blurts out, “Is it because I’m married?”
He tries to understand the question and fails. “What?”
“If I weren’t married, would you still ... if I weren’t?”
It’s the closest thing he’s ever seen to fear in her eyes: this raw apprehension. “If you weren’t married, would I leave?” His mind reels wildly. “No. Never.”
“Oh.” She blinks, and with it a tear.
“But you are. So.” He kneads a thumb into the opposite palm.
“In another life, huh?” She smiles, the first he’s ever seen, but it’s not a smile.
“In another life,” he agrees.
There’s nothing more to say, so he stands there for another minute and she wipes away the occasional tears that insist on falling and they look at each other.
And then he nods, like he planned, and she nods, and he turns around and walks to the laundromat door, and pushes it open and crosses the sidewalk and gets in his truck. And he turns the key in the ignition and puts it in drive, and he pulls away and doesn’t look back.
He bets the Ben in that other universe is really happy.