As the topaz lights of Paris retreat into a nocturnal summer, the sun also rises over the brick landscape stretching from behind my balcony. And on that balcony hangs a flag: the grey flag of resignation.
The flag is not actually a flag in the same sense that the Stars and Stripes compose the American flag or that the tricolor stands for France. They are, in fact, a pair of gray skinny jeans, wrinkled and disheveled, clinging to the 10th-story balcony for a shred of life after defeat.
I’m attempting to air-dry my pants — along with about 70 percent of my wardrobe — because I have struggled an immense amount with the laundry process here. As I write, every non-bed surface in my room bears a shirt or a pair of pants spread out, limited to the whims of evaporation.
You see, on my very first day, my host mom went through her apartment and explained all the basic logistical items to me: which shelf space was designated for me, which dishes to use and so on. Naturally, most of it sounded like someone mashing random letters into a keyboard.
I came to understand almost all of the ground rules in time. Over the following few weeks, synapses started to fire in my brain, French words automatically translated and concepts began to form, but the laundry machine and its set of commandments stood ineffable, mocking me every time I passed it.
The first time I tried to do laundry, my host mom stopped me in the hallway before I could even get it done. I could tell from the tone of her voice that she was being pleasant, but nothing stuck.
I tried again the next day. This time, I was permitted to put my clothes into the machine, and then I spent about four minutes trying to figure out how to turn the damn thing on. The Celsius scale made another cameo appearance as I tried to set it to wash on “cold,” and I guessed that a friendly-looking word would not destroy my clothes.
Half an hour later, Madame knocked on my door to inform me that she stopped the machine halfway so that the noise wouldn’t disrupt her sleep. I asked her when would be a good time for me to wash my clothes in the future so as not to disturb her, and she said Monday evening.
“Lundi soir”! That’s Monday evening! I understand!
I was wrong.
When I woke up, my clothes had teleported over to the dryer, which, it turns out, roars like an infernal battle tank piloted by the Minotaur when it gets up to full speed.
So that’s why Madame doesn’t want the machine running too late at night.
Fast-forward a week. I’m out of clean underwear (and yes, my first mistake was not packing more than one week’s worth of underwear). Laundry time again, and again, I fail.
I had put the clothes in the beast Monday evening like I thought was correct, but when I came home from class Tuesday, Madame was waiting. Immediately, in a stern voice, she requests my attention.
“A remark,” she starts. And it all goes to hell after that. I’ve violated one of the several rules for using the machine, but I don’t know what I did wrong because I can’t understand what the rules are and because when I ask for a simpler explanation, I can’t understand that.
I take my clothes out of the dryer and put them in my room, but they’re damp, and she notices they’re damp, and then she says…something else. I don’t know what it is about laundry-related vocabulary, but I’m convinced by this point that she’s speaking an oral version of Wingdings.
Laundrygate will be my undoing, I say.
But then something happens, and hold on, dear readers, for here comes the cheesy revelation at the end that I learned something through all of this: I surrender. I wave my gray pants-flag. I confess to Madame over dinner that frankly, I have no idea what the rules for the laundry machine are, that I’ve been desperately trying to understand, that French continues to elude my grasp.
And you know what? She laughed a hearty laugh, one with warmth in her eyes and then broke down the laundry decrees into four-word sentences: Machine make much noise. No use at night. Laundry in Monday night. No turn on. I turn on Tuesday morning. You put dryer. All done Tuesday afternoon.
So you see, Madame was actually reasonable the entire time. Like most lessons I’ve learned over here so far, the key to overcoming the laundry machine was simply to admit my failures and to communicate my needs. In short: it’s okay to ask for help.
That, or beat the thing into little scraps of metal with a baseball bat. That’s still on the table.
