Chapter 10: Airing Dirty Laundry

It wasn’t my best idea. But having a glass of wine while hanging bedsheets outside, thirty-six feet up in the air, seemed reasonable at the time. After all, I’m retired, so why not?

It has been colder and wetter in Madrid than I expected, with temperatures dipping into the 30s on some nights. This makes staying inside to abide by the rules of the confinamiento easier. But it presents another challenge: getting the laundry dry when competing with the neighbors for laundry line space.

Whether it is because of the climate or the high cost of electricity, clothes dryers are a rarity in Spain. That, in itself, is not new to me; I have lived without a dryer before — in the early 2000s in the Bronx. But then I had use of a garage and a backyard, both with cat’s cradles of laundry lines that enabled me to hang my soggy washables in relative privacy. And I’m no stranger to communal laundering, either. Our apartment building in Manhattan has machines in the basement, with the upstairs-downstairs experience of learning which neighbors do their own laundry and which contract it out to domestic staff.

So I regard it as a step up that our apartment on a quiet street in Madrid has a washing machine. But the morning after we moved in, I heard a screeching sound that could have been mistaken for a barn owl with metal vocal cords. I had no idea what the sound was, but I tried to remain calm, remembering the time I called the NYC police when I heard a blood-curdling sound in the middle of the night; it turned out to be a frog.

I made my way to the kitchen, which not only houses the washing machine, but abuts the building’s interior courtyard in which the communal clotheslines are strung from railing to railing on old-fashioned pulleys. I peered through our casement window to see — and hear — our neighbor pulling his laundry in, the length of each screech matching the length of each tug.

The next day, it was my turn. Our online shopping spree had included several indoor clothes-drying racks, but today was bedsheets day, and I needed to brave the courtyard clotheslines.

I wasn’t exactly sure of the etiquette. Were the clotheslines that ran diagonally closest to our apartment door “ours,” or did we share all the clotheslines with the other three apartments surrounding the courtyard, first come first serve? Maybe a glass of wine would give me the confidence I needed, if not provide the answers to my questions. Besides, it was a Saturday afternoon on lockdown, so what possible harm could come from one small glass of Spanish tempranillo?

My time had come, and I was ready. I passed through the latched door to the courtyard, sheets and a laundry bag on one arm, basket of clothespins in the other. I put the basket on the window ledge and the laundry bag down on the tiles underneath the damp sheets. As I turned my attention to the line and pulley, I heard the sound of my three dozen clothespins crashing onto the tile floor behind me.

The quaint courtyard had become my rival.

As I dropped to all fours to gather my clothespins, I glanced around to see if my neighbors had witnessed my rookie mistake. Satisfied that I was alone in my humiliation, I rose to my feet and tried to look confident as I returned to the clotheslines.

I grabbed a sheet that I had folded accordion-style, cheering myself with the delusion that it made me look competent. But as I leaned over the railing to unfurl it, I felt my pulse in my stomach as I looked down into the three stories below and considered the potential consequences of an inadequately placed clothespin or two. So I discarded my plans to pin the sheet to the line and elected to simply heave it over two lines instead, justifying this cowardly act by reasoning that I may be saving lives. Humbled, I tiptoed back to my kitchen.

It was time for another glass of wine.

©2020 Kay Diaz