Loose Women, Laundry Mats and Mammary Glands

While waiting for a home, if you’re an Army family, you will spend countless hours doing your best to ignore the unenlightened ramblings of strangers in laundromats. The only difference between this situation and the experiences of the millions of other Americans who are forced to wash their underwear in public, is that on an Army post, there is always one woman (it isn’t always a woman, but it usually is. Like, if I had to bet on it, it would be a woman) who believes in fate, and that because the she is in the laundromat with me at the same time, on an Army post, we must share some commonalities and that it is her duty to make me her Tide sister or something.

            Today, I was minding my own business, as introverts so routinely do, reading a book (Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood. It is so good. Which is why I was reading it all by myself in silence) while standing in front of my washing machine. There are only 10 machines in the facility and there are currently 40 homeless Army families in the area. You do the math. It was very busy. I was standing in front of my machine with my book propped open on a towel in order to take up the least space. You know, I was practicing the art of actively attempting to avoid being a nuisance. It was going pretty well. I was enjoying my quiet time with my book, cleaning lint out of dryers, and periodically pairing socks when this itty bitty, skinny woman in huge sunglasses (think Iris Apfel huge), a fluffy, white down coat, and 4-inch heels slams into the folding table with five shopping bags brimming with dirty clothes.

To really paint the picture, imagine Sarah Jessica Parker in that scene from Pretty Woman when Julia Roberts is waltzing down the street like, “Bitches, look at me now on Rodeo Drive with all my bags!” Except that this woman was hauling soiled blue jeans into a grimy laundromat in 20-degree weather in rural Bavaria. You see where I am going?

Anyway, I noticed her. She did lurch the folding table several inches in my direction as she dramatically fell into it. Maybe I am just a real bitch, but she chose to wear that ridiculous ensemble to wash her laundry. To even get into the laundry mat, you have to hike a block down a steep hill on a broken sidewalk with your hands full of baskets and bottles. She asked for it. I did not feel sorry for her. The rest of us laundresses, and one Serbian Soldier, wore boots and carried our laundry in sturdy burlap bags and bins like normal people.

But playing the damsel in distress is a way of life for some women, and it usually works, except in a room full of middle-aged women wearing North Face snow boots and heavy, winter parkas. I kept reading. The lady to my right never looked up. The Serbian Soldier, who had the hood of his Gortex cinched tightly around his face, snorted a little but went back to folding his t-shirts. We all just went about our business.

I’m not sure what it is about humans that makes us want to talk to people directly after embarrassing ourselves in front of them, as if our charming personalities will make the super-horrific thing we just did disappear, but this was her next tactic. I was standing closest to her.

“Ha. Ha. Gosh I really just made a mess of my jacket,” she said to me as she touched my arm and pointed to a smudge on her otherwise snow-white coat.

This touching my arm tactic she employed required I acknowledge her, very manipulative of her.

“Yeah,” Is what I said.

I didn’t really mean it as an insult, but there I was just trying to read my book when this Brittany-Spears-sized mess of a woman wearing stilettos came crashing into my world. What are you supposed to say when asked a question like that? My Nana would have told me to say something like, “Bless your heart. You have just had a day, haven’t you?” But if you are from the South, you know that really just means “Yeah.”

The next thing I know I am hearing all about her move to Germany. Listen, I am the world’s worst over-sharer. I have a nasty habit of talking too much when I am super-nervous, super-tired, or super-drunk, not while washing clothes with strangers in public, at noon and sober.

“We are staying at a hotel in Parsberg and it is really nice and there is a pool and we love it but I forgot that tops are optional in Europe and I think that these 'European women' have loose morals and are trying to seduce my teenage sons.”

Yep. It went just like that, folks. Needless to say, I was no longer attempting to read my book or ignore her. For better or worse, she now had my full attention.

Against my better judgment, I asked, “Who is trying to seduce your teenage sons?” I was honestly confused.

“Well, we go down to the pool — and see, we have vacationed in France before and some of the beaches were topless beaches, so this isn’t a new thing for us — we go down to the pool and the ladies were not wearing tops. I was like — to my husband — I was like, ‘Honey, these ladies are naked.’ He said that they were not ‘naked’ (she did the air quotes thing reenacting how her husband had spoken to her. She used a lot of air quotes for all sorts of things, not just quotes) and not make a 'scene,' but my boys were just standing there staring at the 'topless ladies.' I didn’t know what to do.”

“Why didn’t you just go back to your room?” I asked. Again, I couldn’t stop myself from engaging with this lunatic.

“Why should we? We have every right to be there, too. They should cover up.” Was her response.

“Why should 'they' cover up?” I asked using her affinity for incorrect use of air quotes hoping that she'd see I was making fun of her. She did not.

“Well, because it isn’t decent to show your breasts to teenage boys.” She seemed upset with my inability to grasp this simple concept.

“It’s OK to show your breasts to teenage girls or other adults though?” I asked. “What if they were strippers? How about nursing moms? Is there a time when boys can see mammary glands?”

“Well, I don’t … I … It isn’t right. I didn’t need to see that this morning.” She decided right then and there that I was not her Tide sister and turned towards another woman in the room and began telling the story from where I so rudely began asking logical questions.

Turns out these two women were genuine Tide sisters and they spent the next 45 minutes complaining about how "European women" are all succubae (is that the plural for succubus?) waiting to pounce on our innocent-minded boys.

I don’t understand this obsession with making the female form something shameful or wicked. I can't comprehend how a woman’s nipples are seductive while a man’s are allowed to wink at us from behind their hairy curtains from the sides of roads, construction sites, and in every back yard barbecue in America on July 4th. If anything, it is the male nipple that should be illegal and illusive. They are utterly (pun intended) useless and therefore should carry the allure. A woman’s nipple is a means by which babies eat. They are useful, sturdy, and stretchy. There is nothing stimulating about dripping, sore, female nipples. They are tools.

When I retold this story later to Chris and our boys, they all asked if we could find a room in that hotel. They insist that they only want to stay in the hotel for the pool, not the loose "European women" who hunt pool side with their mammary glands exposed. Truthfully, I wouldn’t care either way. I can’t imagine that looking at middle-aged women’s unclad bosoms would be incredibly interesting for very long. Especially, if I decide to unstrap my top and join them. See, Lady Godiva back at the laundromat was going about this all the wrong way. The best way to make sure that my boys aren’t being corrupted by topless women, is to join the pack of cougars splashing in the water, my breasts swinging free in the rays of sunlight streaming through the windows overhead.

I’d be willing to bet they’d never go near the water again.