City of Light (and laundry)

You may think you are what you eat, but the French tell us that you are really the spit-up stain running down the back of your favorite blouse.

By Debra Ollivier

Feb 3, 1998 | After hearing a recent litany of complaints about how laundry has created strife in my marriage, a friend gave me a book written by J.C. Kaufmann, a respected French sociologist and think-tank researcher. Called (roughly translated in English) "The Framework of Marriage: An Analysis of Couples Through Their Laundry," the book is a sort of treatise on the phenomenology of laundry. Half socio-anthropology and half psychoanalysis, it describes laundry as a dipstick for understanding the issues that drive wedges in marriages, issues that are deeply embedded in our childhoods.

Take my case, for starters. My husband grew up in a French village where laundry was done in wood-fired boilers, and he harbors deeply idyllic memories of laundry snapping in a country breeze; of the smell of fresh cotton, soap and pine wafting through the Loire Valley. Though this bucolic scene bit the dust forever with the advent of washing machines in the '50s, for my husband laundry remains sensual: the sudsy, stupor-inducing rhythm of it whirling in the machine; the fragrant forest of drying clothes and the humidity it forms on window glass (my husband tries desperately to prohibit the use of the dryer); the recalcitrant stiffness of line-dried sheets and the cozy order of perfectly folded T-shirts stacked like reams of paper in a wooden armoire ... all this imposes a homey sense of calm on my husband's otherwise chaotic, nomadic lifestyle and stirs memories of his halcyon years in the Loire. Laundry, in short, has the evocative power of Proust's madeleine.

I, on the other hand, have memories of pushing a shopping cart filled with dirty laundry up a steep hill to a laundromat in Los Angeles, where I sat through an endless inferno of spin cycles and avoided eye contact with a local lunatic ranting about the apocalypse and throttling the coin-operated machine slots for loose change. We were the only Americans on the planet, I was sure, without a washer and dryer, and I bore the weight of this domestic task with a certain incredulous resentment. Who did the ironing later? Who did the sorting? I have blocked out the memory. Today what remains is a deep distaste and disregard for the whole gestalt of laundry. I mix colors. (My white underwear turned off-pink long ago, and much of my husband's has come along for the ride.) I do not iron (and who needs to, with a dryer?). When it comes to energy-consuming laundry technology (another big bone of contention), I am profligate. For me, laundry is an odious burden and even the floral sheets hanging on lines in courtyards, those charming icons of Parisian street life, fill me with low-grade anxiety.

No surprise then, that laundry has become a battlefield in our marriage where other larger issues are sublimated. In fact, in his book, Kaufmann writes about "a veritable war" of identities and how laundry "carries the trace left by this war, revealing the intensity of combat and its cunning strategies." And border skirmishes, it seems, are raging all over.

Next Page: When laundry leads to divorce

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