November 19, 2005--Saturday Story: "The Washing Machine"

The Washing Machine

As difficult as it is to imagine, even in Brooklyn, a place that has everything, there was a time during my life when there were no washing machines. I don’t just mean no one had one. I’m saying, they didn’t even exist.

And since disposable diapers also didn’t exist, this meant that doing the wash was an arduous and very messy business. True, those who had some money had diaper service, which meant that their dirty diapers were kept for a week in a sanitary hamper and then picked up by a service and a new supply was delivered. And even people of more modest means arranged for their bed sheets and towels to be professionally washed and pressed—I remember that the Cascade and Pilgrim Laundries divided the territory.

But everything else needed to be washed by hand—men’s dress shirts, underwear, all children’s clothes. Quite a weekly load. And quite a smelly situation if you didn’t have the money for the diapers.

I of course was fascinated by all the laundering, fascination being a luxury for me since my job was simply to pass my mother the clothes pins as she leaned out her bedroom window when hanging the clothes out to dry on the clothesline that was attached from the window frame to the pole in the back yard. Better yet was my other job—hauling in the clothes when dry. It was even more fun in the winter when the clothes came back less than dry but frozen solid. But best of all was when the line broke from a year’s use and I had to climb the laundry pole out back and thread the new line through the pulley hooked at the top. Perched high up above what passed for a back yard garden, I dreamed one day of flying in a plane, or at the minimum working for the phone company where most of the work was at the top of telephone poles. This was thus either a form or escape or early career training.

For my mother of course, who did all the washing, none of this was either fascinating or fun. It was just hard, hard work.

The kitchen had a double sink. On one side my mother washed the dishes and on the other she washed the clothes. To do so she used a Wash Board, which was a rippled glass sheet about 14 inches wide by 20 inches long, enclosed in a wood frame. She would stopper the drain, fill the sink half way with hot soapy water, place the wash board half submerged in the sink, leaning it back against the rim of the sink, and then proceed to scrub the clothes up and down on the rippled glass. In a version of what women did in rural India--they beat their clothes against stones in a river; my mother did it against the wash board. It was that basic, that “primitive.” And it was going on in my house and virtually every other house all over Brooklyn. It didn’t get more exotic and thrilling than that! For me I mean.

This was a lot of work at any time, but during summers that were as hot as fire, where the word was that you could fry an egg on the asphalt street (some actually tried and occasionally got their pictures in The Daily News), doing the wash in the kitchen was like working in a boiler room. My mother was someone who never seemed to sweat, but when bent over her wash board in August, scrubbing my undershirts, she was as wet all over from the heat as her hands and arms were from the water. This sight, even for me, was a little less fascinating and fun.

It was an era, sad to say, when we took this for granted. My father made the money and expected his shirts to be washed and pressed; I went through fresh underwear faster than a speeding bullet but didn’t give much thought to how they seemed to keep showing up in my dresser cleaned and folded. And my mother never wavered or questioned that this was her “woman’s work” (proverbially and literally, “never done”), her role or, more biblically, her lot in life. In fact, she took great pride in how spotless and neat we and everything were. In a neighborhood where there was little opportunity to be consuming conspicuously (who had the money for that?) the competition among families was as much about their wash as their kids’ grades in school. Maybe more so.

Things proceeded without much change, with life continuing pretty much as we knew it. No one seemed to make much progress—very few managed to do well enough to move away to the emerging suburbs; even fewer had enough money to be able to buy a new-new car; when a kid got to be 17 or 18 he went into whatever line of work his father was in; the girls would get engaged and marry, most typically moving into a basement apartment on the block or at most around the corner. There wasn’t much striving or even the imagining of a different future.

In consequence there wasn’t too much hope on the loose in East Flatbush. But in compensation, things felt settled and secure. Even the larger world did not intrude excessively. We knew things were tense and even dangerous in other places, and at some point we became aware of the fact that there was the possibility of a sneak atomic attack to be concerned about. But even about that there was some assurance—all you needed to do to avoid the consequences of an A Bomb being dropped on Times Square was to dive under your school desk fast enough to survive, or when the sirens sounded go down into a Fallout Shelter in the basement of one of the nearby apartment houses.

But inevitably but gradually there were some inklings of change. A World War II veteran who had been a radioman in the Army built his own version of a TV set, hand-soldering all the wirings. He would invite us to his basement apartment where we huddled together before a flickering image of what looked like a puppet’s head or a reptile. It was clear from even just that that the world was shifting on its axis. And then someone got a window fan, less tectonic to be sure, but we knew from that that life in the summers would be more endurable. Another bought a Victrola phonograph and Caruso sounded as if he were in the other room, which made that walkup apartment sound like the Metropolitan Opera itself. And the Leshowitzs acquired an electric coffee pot; also in its own way life altering since Mr. Leshowitz drank at least 20 cups a day; and between making him coffee and washing his clothes (he weighed 300 pounds and just one set of underwear, suffused with the sweat that only he could produce, took half a day to wash), with the efficiency that gadget brought, Mrs. L experienced an early form of liberation.

But most amazing, after still more years, one of us, Aunt Helen, who had made her way to Long Island with her husband and children, Helen was the first to have a washing machine. Talk about life altering!

Her husband, Uncle Jack, was a legend in the family and some suggested in the wider world. This status was the result of his prowess in business and his great success. Financial success. At the end of the Second World War, for example, when every Jew in America refused to buy anything that had “Made In Occupied Germany” stamped on it, he had the vision and ability and ambition to put the living memories of the Holocaust behind him, and as a self-assigned agent of the German rehabilitation process, though this was never discussed or acknowledged (Jack was “out of town” again), he ventured there and came back with lucrative deals to manufacture cheap watches and imitation cuckoo clocks in the newly rebuilt factories of Bavaria.

He was remarkable, not even having a problem at Temple on Saturdays, as long as his contributions to the building fund or rabbi’s health care plan were among the leading donations. And when the rabbi at Great Neck Jewish Center showed up one day driving a Mercedes, Uncle Jack was among the first to understand. (He on the other hand refused to even be driven in a Germany car!)

All was forgiven Uncle Jack, the only male child in a family of six. The last born to boot, and thus the child of both his mother and his five sisters. He could do no wrong, with the possible exception of when he was discovered thinking about marrying a divorced women, a women from Cuba no less. This was such a potential family tragedy that three of his sisters traveled to Havana by boat (they had never ventured west of New Jersey) to get the goods on her, suspecting something fishy—why would a 35 year old floozy with bleached hair be interested in a 26 year old who was a full head shorter than she? It was obvious--because of his money.

They came back filled with pride—they had found out that she worked in a night club in the Tropicana Hotel. Not as a singer or cigarette girl, if you know what I mean. And when they reported this finding to their mother, their beloved mother, Jack’s angel, she summoned him to the kitchen table and in her Polish accented Yiddish told him what to do—find a nice Jewish girl to marry.

Which he did—Aunt Helen. Equally glamorous and tall but Jewish and from a good family. In other words, they were German Jews (not machies) and were “comfortable” (they had money). (It was only 25 years later, in my snooping around, that I discovered that Helen too had a “past”—she too had been married to someone other than Uncle Jack, which I must admit made her much more alluring to me. But this was never spoken about. Whispered about, yes, but never spoken!)

They had a Ranch House on a full acre of land, with trees that were theirs (they were the first people I knew who owned trees). They were also the first people I knew who had a separate dining room where they actually ate—everyone else huddled around tables adjacent to or in their kitchens. And so it befell them to host all family occasions—Passovers and Thanksgivings were theirs exclusively to organize and provide. And to pay for. No matter that it took three hours to drive out there on those holidays, the traffic was so intense. “The mole hill was summoned to the mountain,” as my father felicitously put it, and schlep there we did.

On one such Passover, Helen took my mother to her laundry room (who else had one of those?) to show here her--brand new washing machine.

My mother sat transfixed throughout the rest of the evening, as if she had witnessed a miracle. So totally transfixed that she didn’t even, as she always did, jump up to pass around the platters of brisket or to bring Jack a second helping of kuggel. And on the way home she neither slept nor belched (“cooking with gas” my farther always said) which were always her wont. Rather, she sat in the back seat, nestled against the window, gazing out at the snarled traffic and slowly passing scene. She had seen life as she had always wished to live it, but ruefully knew was still out of reach or even imagining.

Life went on as it always did and always seemed it would. Bumps and scrapes, strep throats and socks that needed darning. One business failed that my father was in with his Uncle Herman; but together, without missing a beat, they picked themselves up and somehow managed to find the money to buy a parking garage in Park Slope (some would suggest that Uncle Jack helped finance that). It largely remained empty, eating overhead, and thus it too failed. But at least they could say they had a business of their own. Just like Jack. However, that is where the similarities ended.

One day, after yet another business needed to be abandoned and my father was faced with the prospect of either sending my mother back to work as a substitute teacher or his having to go to work for his brother Ruby, he came home wearier than usual. The future in truth looked bleak. Neither prospect felt good to him. Either or both would be one further blow to his manhood. (Having his prostate removed two years later would finish the job.)

He dragged his body up the stairs to where my mother was waiting. This took him aback a bit because she never met him that way, always so busy with her chores (today we would call it “work”). What was making her so happy when he was feeling so defeated??

Her new washing machine!!

It resided gleaming in all its porcelain brilliance in the kitchen, right beside the icebox with its rubber hoses connected to the water taps in the sink.

I stood there too, full of thrill and awe. The 20th Century had just arrived at East 56th Street, clearly thanks to Uncle Jack who, it turned out, had bought washing machines for each of his sisters. And through this amazing new appliance I would begin to partake of this new era.

Even a TV was now a possibility! Uncle Milty here I come!

My father glared at it and then at me and then, then at my mother. He squared his shoulders, turned, and headed for the living room where he collapsed into his green corduroy chair.

He sat in that chair for two full days. Uttering not a word. Eating nothing. Maybe not even going to the bathroom. Totally unresponsive to any of us.

“Can I bring you some water?” Nothing.

“Do you want something to eat?” Nothing.

“What’s wrong dad?” Nothing.

“What’s wrong David?” Less than nothing.

He sat and sat and sat as night followed day which led to night and then to another day.

He had withdrawn into silence many times in the past—over very little things such as my not doing well in a Spelling Bee or my mother serving something he didn’t like—the liver was overcooked and tasted like shoe leather. But this endless silence and accompanying sadness was unprecedented.

His depression was so deep and so profound that we knew it could only be about the washing machine.

On the third day, when I came home from school, I saw that my father was no longer in the living room. But I heard what sounded like sobbing from the other end of the apartment.

I ran there and found my mother slumped on the floor of the kitchen, clutching her knees to her chest, moaning as if someone had died.

I of course thought my father had, of starvation or thirst. But a glance at the washing machine told me what had in fact happened—

He was still alive, very, very much alive. But the machine was destroyed, totally, savagely destroyed.

The rubber hoses had been slashed and sliced into chunks and slices. The enamel surfaces, all of them, top and sides, were pockmarked with deep violent dents, and chipped as the result of what had clearly been severe hammer blows. The door through which the machine was loaded had been ripped off its flanges.

It was carnage. The literal death of a machine.

My mother was inconsolable. In fact, for the rest of their lives she could not be consoled.

My father returned later that day and my mother said not a word to him. Or for more than a week, not even a good morning or good night.

But then life as we knew it, the surfaces of it at least, slowly resumed—my father did in fact go to work for his brother; my mother did in fact resume her teaching; I moved from school to school and then to a separate life of my own; and of course my mother resumed her housework—meals got cooked, the house was always clean, family members visited, and yes clothes got washed and laundered, even in a washing machine that he bought some years later.

It just appeared one day.