Laundry on a Sunday is always a busy place. Plus, it is the best place to find out about building gossip. Want to find out who’s having an affair with whom? Do laundry on Sunday. Want to find out which tenant got a gig on a new show? Do laundry on a Sunday. Want to know who is leaving the building because now they’re fancy after having landed a role in a major TV series or movie? Yep, do laundry on a Sunday. I walked in and was glad to find the room only half full. Even better, not all the machines were full, so I quickly took over two machines and separated my darks from my lights. I put in some detergent along with my quarters and waited for the laundry to finish its final spin cycle.
While I waited for my laundry to finish, I read my iPad. I checked outThe Timesto see if there were any stories I should hear about. Nothing really popped, so I checked outThe Postto see if they had any salacious gossip I needed to know about, still nothing that urgent. I finally opened the new pages I’d been emailed from Aarya and set about reading. Most of the changes were minor and didn’t impact my part of the show, which made me happy. I really didn’t want to spend my day off learning new lines.
“Hey, stranger.” I looked up from my iPad to see Kirk holding a laundry basket. “How was your date last night?”
“How did you…” I said, catching myself. “I forgot I saw you when Bootsy escaped.”
“How is the little guy today?”
“He stared at me all morning wondering why I had to make noise and disturb his sleep.”
“I hate to admit it, but some days I do the same thing when someone wakes me up.”
He found a couple of empty washing machines and loaded his clothes into them.
“What did you end up making last night for dinner? I left before you made your decision.”
“A full-on gourmet meal with all the sides.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound fishy at all,” I said, narrowing my eyes.
“We ordered Chinese.”
I cracked out a laugh. When I recovered my breath, I asked, “What about all those groceries you bought?”
“They’re for food during the week. After doing all that shopping, I couldn’t bring myself to cook any of it.”
“I notice you avoided my question. How was the date?”
“Abysmal,” I admitted. “Well, the date part was amazing. The show is horrible. I wouldn’t want to force my ex-boyfriend to watch it.”
“It’s that bad, huh?”
“It’s that bad and then some. I’ve seen a bunch of trash at the theater over the years, but this was a new level of ‘what the heck are they thinking.’ I even said to Ralph—“
“Ralph?”
“The jerk I saw the show with. But we’ll circle back to that little disaster number. Anyway, I said I felt bad for the people working on the show because a lot of those people will be unemployed soon.”
Once Kirk had finished unloading his laundry into the shiny metal washing machines, he plopped in the requisite number of quarters and came to sit next to me on the row of empty chairs. I ran down a laundry list of everything wrong with the show after making sure no one in the room was working on the show. I had made that mistake once. I’d been doing laundry and was talking to Johnny when I started mouthing off about how bad a show was. I was brutally honest and hadn’t seen the poor girl who was in the show until she burst into tears and ran from the laundry. I hadn’t seen that poor girl again. I always wondered if I scared her back to whatever flyover state she’d come from, hoping to make it big on Broadway.
“So, what about Ralph?” Kirk asked.
“He was perfect. He was gorgeous, he said all the right things, he kissed me good night, and I felt like it was a complete princess moment.”
“Princess moment.”
“You know Anne Hathaway inThe Princess Diaries. In the movie, Anne has this line that goes something like, ‘You know, in the old movies, whenever a girl would get seriously kissed, her foot would just kind of…pop.’ And the next thing she knew, she’d be standing on one leg as her knee bent and foot sailed into the air. You know, the foot-popping kiss.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen that movie, so I’ll take your word for it,” Kirk said with amusement and skepticism.
“It’s a real thing! I swear. Girls are taught about the foot-popping kiss as kids. We want the foot-popping kiss. And there I was, in full foot-pop mode, and I wanted to swoon. If he’d asked me to run off with him to Paris, I would have done so in a heartbeat.”
“So, how did you go from foot-popping, which I’m still not sure is real, to thinking he’s a jerk in less than twelve hours?”
“Oh, I went from foot-popping to jerk mode in under twenty minutes.” I told him how I forgot Bootsy’s food, so I went to Duane Reade only to find the jerk talking to his wife on the phone after he’d slipped on his wedding ring.”
“Could have been his twin? I mean, if it was one of those old movies, wouldn’t the guy have had some explanation for why he’d done what he’d done?”
