Between Wash Cycles

Between Wash Cycles

1The laundry room was the smallest room Renata had entered since moving from Peru to the United States, but it was the easiest place to disappear. The machines faced the wall. People watched their clothes spin instead of watching one another. Renata could sit behind her basket without having to find the right English words.

2Back home, she had been the person who explained card games to cousins and asked shopkeepers about unfamiliar fruit. Here, she practiced a question in her head until the person she meant to ask had gone. Her mother worked downstairs in the building office, so Renata had offered to handle their laundry. It was one task she could finish without a conversation.

3On Thursday, a paper sign covered her usual washer: OUT OF ORDER. Renata recognized each word, but together they seemed to describe something arranged incorrectly. Beside her, a neighbor folded towels. Renata opened her mouth, then bent over her basket instead. She decided that choosing another machine would be simpler than asking.

4The next washer accepted her coins but stayed dark. Renata pressed its buttons until her thumb hurt. The neighbor looked up. “That one needs the lid pushed down firmly,” he said, demonstrating with his own machine. Renata nodded as if she had understood everything. She pushed the wrong button again.

5The neighbor returned to his towels, leaving the space between them quiet. Renata lifted her basket to leave. Then she noticed that he had stopped folding and was waiting, not reaching for her washer. For once, someone had left enough silence for her to put a sentence together. She set the basket down.

6“Could you say it slower?” she asked. He repeated the directions and pointed to the lid. This time she pressed it shut, and water rushed into the drum. Before he left, she pointed to the paper sign. He explained that the first washer was broken. On the back of an old receipt, she wrote the whole phrase, then its meaning. There was room beneath it for another question.

7The following Thursday, Renata brought the receipt with her. The words on the machines had not changed, and she still rehearsed a greeting before speaking. But she moved her basket off the chair beside her. When the neighbor entered, she looked up before he could pass.