Throwing in the Towels

Saturday is laundry day. Each week, we do our clothes. Every two weeks, we wash the bath towels (neither of us is particularly grubby, so we get away with not laundering them weekly). And every four weeks, Ter brings home “the horrible work towels” and fires them through the nuclear cycle to kill the plenitude of germs inevitably housed in the crusty crinkled folds.

Every workplace kitchen has them: the donated tea towels that some folks use to dry their dishes and their hands (or wipe their noses—who really knows?), that are tossed into a bucket under the sink for washing only to reappear, miraculously clean and neatly folded, in their assigned drawer, on Monday morning. I work in an office where a scarce half-dozen towels serve forty-five people. I refuse to use the towels, employing the compostable paper ones instead—I’m not afraid of germs, but I’m not stupid, either. In the dead of winter, when everyone is sneezing and coughing, those kitchen towels become hazardous waste containers.

Ter’s office has two working kitchens. Their towel output can fill a Hefty bag with ease—and does, since she brings one home when she can no longer stand the backlog under the sinks (or can’t find a clean towel to dry her teacup).

This is where I get small: we pay for our laundry, and given the amount of pain she endures at that office every day, over time I have become increasingly resentful of her willingness to wash their damp, sticky, germy, smelly, horrible towels. Nobody else seems to do it; in fact, I know nobody else does it, given the weight (and pong) of the load she carts home every month.

Not so long ago, she brought them home bi-weekly, in a plastic grocery bag. Laundry was my gig at the time, as my bones didn’t mind the stairs and I often happened on a neighbour or two in the back yard. Social critter that I am, I actually enjoyed the task ... except for the “horrible work towels”. At some point, I grew so vocal with my disgruntlement that Ter finally lost it. She would do the horrible work towels separately, to spare me the angst of touching them (she wasn’t too crazy about me including them in our hot water load, either, which indicates how toxic they might actually be). I argued, not only because I felt somewhat guilty at continually beating her up about it, but because—and here I get small again—a separate load would cost us another buck-fifty. I didn’t like doing them, but there was no valid reason why I couldn’t do them. So, on horrible work towel weeks, I would sneak them into the hot water load and take my lumps when she busted me. It wasn’t hard; she usually dropped the grocery bag on top of the hamper when she got home on Friday, so I’d grab it and dump the contents—touching as little as possible, of course—into our load on Saturday.

This practice came to a head one weekend, when I took a bag of kitchen garbage to the dumpster. Ter had been cleaning out the fridge (another weekly chore), so when I saw the plastic grocery bag, its top heavily knotted, by the back stairs, I grabbed it on my way down to the laundry room. I threw it in the dumpster, put the cold wash into the dryer, started the hot cycle in the washer, and went back upstairs. When our laundry was almost done, Ter asked me where the horrible work towels were. “I don’t know,” I replied. “Wherever you usually put them, I guess.”

She frowned. “They were in a bag at the top of the—What?”

I had gasped, and my hands were flying toward my open mouth. She gave me the shark Finn look and repeated:

“What?”

My voice leaked, tiny and trembling, between my fingers. “I thought it was garbage.”

Her eyes widened. “What?”

“I thought it was garbage.” I started to laugh, a little wildly. “I threw the bag in the garbage!”

Her own hand rose but couldn’t stifle her own laughter. “Ru-thie!! You threw the horrible work towels in the garbage?!”

I managed a sheepish smile. “Freudian slip.”

“You think?”

We fell about laughing and replenished some of the stock from our own cupboard, but after that, she refused to let me see the horrible work towels, and sometime after that, she started using the Hefty bag to conceal them.

I haven’t had to wash them since. I’m pretty sure I can’t be trusted.

Heh.