It started with a cross-country trip in high school, the first time I had ever left my hometown. My teammates and I were slightly jittery, them with the anxiety of competition, me with the restlessness of escape. I was the only day student on the cross-country team, and it made me feel like less of a guide, and more of an outcast; I couldn't be a condescending outsider. I couldn't scoff at the small shops of the town, the crazy old man who spewed forth TS Eliot on the street corner from memory, and had lent me a dollar and five cents for bus fare once when I was nine. I showed them my favourite pancake house one time, but the fried eggs couldn't compare to the street corner fare of whatever cities they hailed from. But I knew all the paths through the woods, so they followed me during practices, and I led them through some of my favourite places in the woods sometimes, looking for the small tree trunk that I had cut my ankle on once. The others kicked up a storm of autumn leaves and talked about whether or not Lindsey Cohen had gotten a boob job, despite being a freshman.
As the bus rolled out of the town, I strained my neck to take it all in, forcing myself to remember as much as possible, convincing myself that I was in a new world, that I had exploded out from behind the curtains, and was faced with centre stage, full of faces and talent scouts. A few birds flapped overhead, and a tree in the distance looked as if it might be waving back at me.
"Hey Cooper, when you gonna get a car?"
"Uh. I dunno. My parents might get me one for college."
"Whaaaa... what the heck ya supposta do til then?"
The team had realized, after the last race, that the local college frats were having parties just down the street from our school, but that they had no way of getting to them. And being that they weren't allowed to own cars, had been trying to devise all manners of ways to sneak off from under the housemasters' noses and make their entrances unfashionably early into college house parties.
"Doesn't your brother have a car?"
"Yeah, doesn't he go there too?"
"What the hell, Cooper, you never told us you knew someone on the inside."
My brother lived at home and was too busy, from what I gathered, trying to keep up with his molecular biology class to really go to any parties. Dad had told him that if he didn't get into the med school program, Mom and him couldn't afford to keep paying for him. When my brother wasn't at home, he worked at the grocery store down the street sweeping leaves out the door, trying to compromise his hatred for customers with the Hippocratic Oath. Part of him wondered, he had mused to me once, what he would do if some old lady had a heart attack in the aisles. I told him it would probably depend which aisle she was in, and we laughed until Mom told us to shut up so she could watch TV, or fall asleep, maybe both.
For good luck, since the race today was at our rival school's track, we had all decided to shave our legs, except for Tommy Lin, who hadn't even begin sprouting above his upper lip yet, much less anywhere else on his body. We also decided in an act of fraternal solidarity to write our names onto each other's shoes, squeezing them in between leather swooshes and suede stripes, testing out signatures with little consistency. We told Tommy Lin he should colour himself a moustache.
The bus rumbled into the campus of our rival school, Kensington Prep, and I thought about how much it looked like our campus, and how all the guys looked like the guys that went to my school. All the girls were decidedly better looking. There was a momentary lapse in the conversation as the others came to the same conclusion. I tried to focus on the buildings, as I was already prone to getting involuntary erections in moving vehicles anyway, and I certainly didn't need any more motivation while wearing running shorts.
The bus came to a jolt and coach ordered us off, with our senior captain Hayden Hamilson strutting his stuff, trying to get us motivated, and fluffing his black scruffy hair in the way he only did when we ran past the girls field hockey team during practices. Word was that he expected to get into Harvard next year, on account of his family legacy there. He got a lot of crap from the other guys on the team, but I figured it was mostly because he had gotten caught with his hands up Ali Diller's shirt last month, and had almost gotten kicked out for breaking parietals if his parents hadn't donated a new wing to the library. Point is, everyone wanted their hands up Ali Diller's shirt, and Hayden was not in the least disconcerted about having been caught. Rather, it seemed as if he had only gotten more notoriety because of it, and Ali Diller herself had simultaneously achieved a certain social standing with the other girls in her dorm, while earning the derision and title of slut from the girls of Grinmore House, but that was just because nobody ever asked Grinmore girls out anyway. They were all damned good at field hockey and chemistry, but were generally agreed to be busted. Either way, Ali Diller had earned a reputation for being easy, and now that the boys knew she put out, there was a line to her bedroom door and window.
As races go, the one at Kensington Prep that day was rather lackluster, marked only by a moment when Roberto Downing had screamed at the top of his lungs as we ran by some couple making out on the far end of the campus pond. As they had scrambled to cover themselves and discern the direction of the yell, the girl had tripped over the flares of her jeans and fallen right into the pond, which I later found out was manmade anyway. We all laughed about how that guy was ever going to make it up to that girl, and what if it were their first date, and was she wearing a white shirt? Did anyone see?
We won the race easily. There really wasn't much competition with Kensington Prep in that regard, and we figured they kept up the rivalry mostly for posterity's sake, so they could coax more money out of the alumni that came back to visit in the spring, who wanted to relive their high school glory, which in reality, probably comprised less of track team victories and more of having their hands up Ali Diller's shirt. But whatever keeps the school rolling in it, man. Nobody could argue with Hayden Hamilson still being around even after he had been caught last year selling pot to some freshmen from Taiwan.
Nevertheless, it was my first victory away from home, and I felt a bit like I imagined Alexander the Great must have felt, riding a horse through ancient Mesopotamia.
I slept most of the bus trip back, waking up only briefly whenever my head bounced off the glass pane when the bus hit a pothole. The others were mostly quiet too, most likely exhausted. A few guys in the back made small talk about some class they were taking, and what teacher they thought used to be a spy for the government.
As I got back to campus, I remembered I had promised my brother to go over to my aunt's house that evening. She was lonely these days, after she had separated from her husband, or ex-husband, I guess, and whenever he had the kids, she mostly moped around the house, trying not to think about what to do with the temporarily empty room upstairs. Was it a guest room? Was it still the twins' room? Were they now guests in the house? She couldn't figure it out, and to help her get her mind off things, Mom sent Tony, my older brother, and me over once a week with some kind of dessert and movie to keep her busy. I think what she was really sending over was us. Sometimes it was just my brother, when I didn't feel like going, or when I was genuinely busy with a paper, but most of the time he practically begged me to go with him, since he never knew what to say to my aunt. We usually joked about the implausability of scenes from whatever movie Mom had picked out for Aunt Sharon and always managed to get through the evening more easily than we figured it would go. Aunt Sharon always stared speechlessly, but we doubt she ever watched anything.
When I came home that night after Aunt Sharon's, though, I was confronted with a thumping noise coming from the laundry room, and I thought at first that someone was washing towels and blankets again, and that the load was spinning lopsided inside the machine, throwing its weight around like coal miners in a bar brawl. But this time the thumping was less damp and thudding, and I realized it was coming from the dryer and not the washing machine. It never occurred to me what was inside.
I opened the door and saw my running shoes tumbling around inside, bright as the day they had been bought, but with a sad worn look about them that one sees in hospital patients trying their best to perk up for their family members stopping in (my only memory of my grandfather, actually). When it finally hit me what had happened, I started yelling uncontrollably at my mother upstairs, knowing full well she was on her way to television-induced slumber.
"What are you yelling about at this hour!"
"You washed my shoes? Who does that! What were you thinking, Mom!"
"What did you say? I'm trying to sleep up here!"
I stormed upstairs and demanded an answer out of her. When she realized what all the commotion was about she snapped at me to leave it be and go to sleep for godssake and when I bought my own shoes to run through the mud with, I could track my grimy soles around anywhere I damned well please, and would I now just shut up and for chrissakes just go to sleep. She threw a slipper at me, aiming more for the door than my head, and I realized I had no more say in the matter.
I went back downstairs and stared at my shoes, deciding that I was going to do my own damned laundry from now on and who the hell did she think she was anyway, doing everyone favours. She could rot in front of that television set for all I cared, because that cathode tube radiation couldn't turn her into any more of a bitch.
Sure enough, all the names had rubbed off, except for the "ksh" in Christian Yorkshire's name.
I definitely was going to do my own laundry from now on, I decided.
And I'm in college now, having little choice but to do my own laundry. These days I don't really have time to give a rat's ass about separating my whites from my colors, or my underwear my overwear like Jenny Lang used to do in high school. All the girls used to bitch about her taking up the washing machines in the dorm basement all afternoon as she managed to separate one basket of clothes into 4 or 5 separate loads. That's what I heard anyway.
No, Mom and Dad have threatened me now that they'd cut my funding if I didn't get into a good graduate law program, so I've been working my ass off studying for the LSAT in a few months. I stopped by one of those frat parties once, and I swore I saw Lindsey Cohen there, with her rack looking better than ever, being the life of the party.
These days, all I really want from my laundry is that I can take care of it all at once. There's not much more that bothers me than running out of clean socks and having enough shirts to last me til the end of the week. I try keep a rough inventory in my head to know what to ask Mom for when I go to the store with her on school breaks. I'm pretty close at this point, having a few extra boxer briefs throwing off the equation, but that's actually a rather good thing, because it gives me something to wear when I'm actually doing laundry. God knows there's no better feeling than slipping into some hot clothes straight from the dryer, trying not to burn yourself on any metallic zippers or buttons.
I threw those old shoes away a few months after they were washed.
As the bus rolled out of the town, I strained my neck to take it all in, forcing myself to remember as much as possible, convincing myself that I was in a new world, that I had exploded out from behind the curtains, and was faced with centre stage, full of faces and talent scouts. A few birds flapped overhead, and a tree in the distance looked as if it might be waving back at me.
"Hey Cooper, when you gonna get a car?"
"Uh. I dunno. My parents might get me one for college."
"Whaaaa... what the heck ya supposta do til then?"
The team had realized, after the last race, that the local college frats were having parties just down the street from our school, but that they had no way of getting to them. And being that they weren't allowed to own cars, had been trying to devise all manners of ways to sneak off from under the housemasters' noses and make their entrances unfashionably early into college house parties.
"Doesn't your brother have a car?"
"Yeah, doesn't he go there too?"
"What the hell, Cooper, you never told us you knew someone on the inside."
My brother lived at home and was too busy, from what I gathered, trying to keep up with his molecular biology class to really go to any parties. Dad had told him that if he didn't get into the med school program, Mom and him couldn't afford to keep paying for him. When my brother wasn't at home, he worked at the grocery store down the street sweeping leaves out the door, trying to compromise his hatred for customers with the Hippocratic Oath. Part of him wondered, he had mused to me once, what he would do if some old lady had a heart attack in the aisles. I told him it would probably depend which aisle she was in, and we laughed until Mom told us to shut up so she could watch TV, or fall asleep, maybe both.
For good luck, since the race today was at our rival school's track, we had all decided to shave our legs, except for Tommy Lin, who hadn't even begin sprouting above his upper lip yet, much less anywhere else on his body. We also decided in an act of fraternal solidarity to write our names onto each other's shoes, squeezing them in between leather swooshes and suede stripes, testing out signatures with little consistency. We told Tommy Lin he should colour himself a moustache.
The bus rumbled into the campus of our rival school, Kensington Prep, and I thought about how much it looked like our campus, and how all the guys looked like the guys that went to my school. All the girls were decidedly better looking. There was a momentary lapse in the conversation as the others came to the same conclusion. I tried to focus on the buildings, as I was already prone to getting involuntary erections in moving vehicles anyway, and I certainly didn't need any more motivation while wearing running shorts.
The bus came to a jolt and coach ordered us off, with our senior captain Hayden Hamilson strutting his stuff, trying to get us motivated, and fluffing his black scruffy hair in the way he only did when we ran past the girls field hockey team during practices. Word was that he expected to get into Harvard next year, on account of his family legacy there. He got a lot of crap from the other guys on the team, but I figured it was mostly because he had gotten caught with his hands up Ali Diller's shirt last month, and had almost gotten kicked out for breaking parietals if his parents hadn't donated a new wing to the library. Point is, everyone wanted their hands up Ali Diller's shirt, and Hayden was not in the least disconcerted about having been caught. Rather, it seemed as if he had only gotten more notoriety because of it, and Ali Diller herself had simultaneously achieved a certain social standing with the other girls in her dorm, while earning the derision and title of slut from the girls of Grinmore House, but that was just because nobody ever asked Grinmore girls out anyway. They were all damned good at field hockey and chemistry, but were generally agreed to be busted. Either way, Ali Diller had earned a reputation for being easy, and now that the boys knew she put out, there was a line to her bedroom door and window.
As races go, the one at Kensington Prep that day was rather lackluster, marked only by a moment when Roberto Downing had screamed at the top of his lungs as we ran by some couple making out on the far end of the campus pond. As they had scrambled to cover themselves and discern the direction of the yell, the girl had tripped over the flares of her jeans and fallen right into the pond, which I later found out was manmade anyway. We all laughed about how that guy was ever going to make it up to that girl, and what if it were their first date, and was she wearing a white shirt? Did anyone see?
We won the race easily. There really wasn't much competition with Kensington Prep in that regard, and we figured they kept up the rivalry mostly for posterity's sake, so they could coax more money out of the alumni that came back to visit in the spring, who wanted to relive their high school glory, which in reality, probably comprised less of track team victories and more of having their hands up Ali Diller's shirt. But whatever keeps the school rolling in it, man. Nobody could argue with Hayden Hamilson still being around even after he had been caught last year selling pot to some freshmen from Taiwan.
Nevertheless, it was my first victory away from home, and I felt a bit like I imagined Alexander the Great must have felt, riding a horse through ancient Mesopotamia.
I slept most of the bus trip back, waking up only briefly whenever my head bounced off the glass pane when the bus hit a pothole. The others were mostly quiet too, most likely exhausted. A few guys in the back made small talk about some class they were taking, and what teacher they thought used to be a spy for the government.
As I got back to campus, I remembered I had promised my brother to go over to my aunt's house that evening. She was lonely these days, after she had separated from her husband, or ex-husband, I guess, and whenever he had the kids, she mostly moped around the house, trying not to think about what to do with the temporarily empty room upstairs. Was it a guest room? Was it still the twins' room? Were they now guests in the house? She couldn't figure it out, and to help her get her mind off things, Mom sent Tony, my older brother, and me over once a week with some kind of dessert and movie to keep her busy. I think what she was really sending over was us. Sometimes it was just my brother, when I didn't feel like going, or when I was genuinely busy with a paper, but most of the time he practically begged me to go with him, since he never knew what to say to my aunt. We usually joked about the implausability of scenes from whatever movie Mom had picked out for Aunt Sharon and always managed to get through the evening more easily than we figured it would go. Aunt Sharon always stared speechlessly, but we doubt she ever watched anything.
When I came home that night after Aunt Sharon's, though, I was confronted with a thumping noise coming from the laundry room, and I thought at first that someone was washing towels and blankets again, and that the load was spinning lopsided inside the machine, throwing its weight around like coal miners in a bar brawl. But this time the thumping was less damp and thudding, and I realized it was coming from the dryer and not the washing machine. It never occurred to me what was inside.
I opened the door and saw my running shoes tumbling around inside, bright as the day they had been bought, but with a sad worn look about them that one sees in hospital patients trying their best to perk up for their family members stopping in (my only memory of my grandfather, actually). When it finally hit me what had happened, I started yelling uncontrollably at my mother upstairs, knowing full well she was on her way to television-induced slumber.
"What are you yelling about at this hour!"
"You washed my shoes? Who does that! What were you thinking, Mom!"
"What did you say? I'm trying to sleep up here!"
I stormed upstairs and demanded an answer out of her. When she realized what all the commotion was about she snapped at me to leave it be and go to sleep for godssake and when I bought my own shoes to run through the mud with, I could track my grimy soles around anywhere I damned well please, and would I now just shut up and for chrissakes just go to sleep. She threw a slipper at me, aiming more for the door than my head, and I realized I had no more say in the matter.
I went back downstairs and stared at my shoes, deciding that I was going to do my own damned laundry from now on and who the hell did she think she was anyway, doing everyone favours. She could rot in front of that television set for all I cared, because that cathode tube radiation couldn't turn her into any more of a bitch.
Sure enough, all the names had rubbed off, except for the "ksh" in Christian Yorkshire's name.
I definitely was going to do my own laundry from now on, I decided.
And I'm in college now, having little choice but to do my own laundry. These days I don't really have time to give a rat's ass about separating my whites from my colors, or my underwear my overwear like Jenny Lang used to do in high school. All the girls used to bitch about her taking up the washing machines in the dorm basement all afternoon as she managed to separate one basket of clothes into 4 or 5 separate loads. That's what I heard anyway.
No, Mom and Dad have threatened me now that they'd cut my funding if I didn't get into a good graduate law program, so I've been working my ass off studying for the LSAT in a few months. I stopped by one of those frat parties once, and I swore I saw Lindsey Cohen there, with her rack looking better than ever, being the life of the party.
These days, all I really want from my laundry is that I can take care of it all at once. There's not much more that bothers me than running out of clean socks and having enough shirts to last me til the end of the week. I try keep a rough inventory in my head to know what to ask Mom for when I go to the store with her on school breaks. I'm pretty close at this point, having a few extra boxer briefs throwing off the equation, but that's actually a rather good thing, because it gives me something to wear when I'm actually doing laundry. God knows there's no better feeling than slipping into some hot clothes straight from the dryer, trying not to burn yourself on any metallic zippers or buttons.
I threw those old shoes away a few months after they were washed.
