One Wednesday morning roughly halfway through my time in Paris, at what should have been the endpoint of your average laundry cycle, I went to open the washing machine and found I could not. The simple one-armed technique I’d usually rely on for such a purpose didn’t seem to be working, so I planted my feet and pulled with both hands. Space was tight in the laverie, and the women at the machines on either side of me quite naturally began to eye me strangely. I looked up and smiled, trying my best to be self-deprecating in a foreign language as I politely explained that it might be just me but it seemed that, well, ça ne marcherait pas. The friendly woman on my right, who looked to be in her mid-thirties and had her straight blonde hair pulled back, smiled back and tried to help. No luck.
Living alone in a foreign place inevitably involves an infinite amount of small trials and triumphs. For me, doing laundry inspired a particularly irrational amount of worry. After stuffing my laundry into a shopping bag, I had to carry it out of my apartment and down seven steep flights of stairs, then around a corner and through the tourists and lunchers lingering in the middle of the Rue de Buci. The duress was not only derived from the physical carrying, but also from the psychological stress of trying to carry off the appearance of competence with something like grace.
There is something quite vulnerable about carrying one’s bedsheets and undergarments through crowded streets, and I was constantly afraid I would embarrass myself by dropping something and having to stoop to pick it up off the street while the fabulous French women on their way to the laverie strutted past me in their heels, effortlessly concealing their lingerie from the masses. I knew I would never succeed at looking French, but I spent most of my time in Paris hoping to diminish my appearance of being totally out of place—my awkward laundry schlep, I was afraid, brought me precariously close to damaging any progress I’d made. By the time I got there, my arrival at the laverie itself was nothing short of triumphant.
Despite my uncalled-for anxiety about the whole process, I had never before had any such technical complications as those I was facing, with all my belongings on this side of the Atlantic literally locked inside a foreign machine. But, as even the French woman could not get the door open, I told myself that this whole situation was probably a result of bad luck and not a reflection of my incompetence, which was some consolation.
In what I interpreted as a good sign in terms of her faith in my French skills but a bad sign in terms of her faith that the door would ever open, the friendly blonde woman suggested that I call the laverie’s help line. Unfortunately, the man on the other end of the line (I imagined him to be some kind of French bureaucrat at the Bureau of Laveries), informed me he would not be able to send anyone to assist me until later that afternoon. Then, a flash of hope, as the kind woman to my right finally pried open the black door. I thanked the bureaucrat for his time and told him that the problem seemed to be resolved. This was wishful thinking at its finest.
Though the cycle had finished, the machine would not open because it was continuously, and for no apparent reason, filling itself with water, gallons of which now poured out onto the floor of the laverie and attracted even more stares, equal parts judgment and pity. This was clearly not something that happened every day, and though I’m still not sure what on earth I could have done to cause it, my fellow laundry-doers’ looks only confirmed my sense that this could only have happened to hopelessly un-Parisian me.
Thankfully, the saintly woman to my right had a plan. She marshaled the help of a somewhat-reluctant dark-haired woman nearby and secured the sympathies of an older gentlewoman who was able to cheer us on with her constant affirmations that what was happening was, indeed, an horreur, ooh là là, but that, as she repeatedly exclaimed, my neighbor’s plan was nothing short of génial! The older woman wore heels and a very Parisian-looking scarf tied perfectly around her neck. I realized with some amazement that while the real and flawless Parisian women whose judgment I’d so feared were here in the laverie watching my every move, only some of them were judging me. Others, particularly these three, were actually on my side. If anyone could help me out of this situation it was going to be them—certainly not the fictitious Bureau of Laundry, and certainly not myself.
The plan involved keeping the door of the machine just open enough for just long enough to pull my clothes out, then flinging them into a wheeled plastic container (a permanent fixture in the laverie whose purpose I had never understood) and shutting the door for good. Careful not to slip on the now-wet tiled floor, we subsequently wrung out each individual item of my clothing over the small plastic container. At one point, the dark-haired woman got frustrated and said something to the effect of “why don’t you know how to wring out clothes more efficiently?” but the kind blonde on my right came to my defense and reminded her that most people in the twenty-first century do not need to wring out their clothes by hand, which even the older woman had to agree with. I was still self-conscious of my clear lack of skill in the realm of clothes-wringing, but I continued to follow the women’s lead and do as I was told, though truthfully they did most of the dirty work.
I have never used the word merci so many times in the space of five minutes as I did then, watching in awe as two complete strangers sorted through my soaking underwear. Maybe the ability to deal with these things calmly, accept help, laugh, and move on, was exactly what I needed to master if I ever hoped to make progress in my quest to look like less of a non-Parisian. The kind woman’s response to my repeated remerciements made the moving on easy to do. What happens in the laverie, she assured me solemnly, stays in the laverie. Everything, that is, but the gallons of water I had to empty into the street.
Amy L. Weiss-Meyer ’15 is a history and literature concentrator in Kirkland House. She does laundry at Harvard more gracefully than she does in France, she promises.
