9,855 Pairs Of Underwear

By Catherine Stratton

“What did you do? Wash my dirty underwear?”

My husband was pissed. We were leaving the lawyer’s office, and he had just found out about the alimony. He would apologize later, but his question made me wonder: Did I deserve alimony?

The truth? I did wash his dirty underwear. Had for twenty-four years. And, with 365 days in a year, that’s 9,855 pairs of underwear.

That’s a lot of underwear.

I folded it too — he liked his underwear folded. Who the hell folds underwear? I toss mine into a drawer. I washed his shirts and socks, and his towels, and he didn’t believe in using a towel twice or a shirt, and who doesn’t change their socks every day?

That’s an awful lot of shirts and towels and socks. I washed them all.

Come to think of it, I even bought his underwear — at Macy’s, in the Men’s Department. Calvin Klein white briefs, size 36 for the first few years, size 38 for the rest, although, by the tenth year, he really needed size 40. I didn’t say anything; I didn’t want to hurt his pride.

One time I bought the wrong style of underwear, and, of course, I was back at Macy’s the next day to return them. This could have been after I stopped at the pharmacy to pick up his shaving cream, razor blades, and toothpaste. He only used Crest. The original blue paste. He had strong feelings about lots of things. Things I had never considered before. There’s also a good chance I collected his dress shirts at the dry cleaner’s that day. Or, maybe visited Home Depot to purchase hardware for the curtains that needed hanging and which he promised to install but never did.

I washed his dirty underwear—9,855 pairs of it—between completing the taxes twenty- four times and filling out the paperwork to refinance the mortgage times four and paying the bills twelve months out of the year and hiring a plumber or electrician to fix what went wrong and trimming the bushes and purchasing lightbulbs and removing the storms and hosing down screens and all the other stuff that needs to be done to maintain a too big, too old house.

Did I deserve alimony?

He made most of the money, and money is power, and because I worked part time, and from home, it was up to me — a tacit agreement — to buy the food and cook the food. Twenty- four years of buying and cooking and throwing out food from the fridge that had gone bad, and a great deal went bad because he refused to eat leftovers.

“Did you serve leftovers when your son was growing up?” I asked his mother once.

“All the time,” she said.

I wondered about that.

I forgot to mention our children. There were two, and they needed lots of tending. He helped a bit, changed a diaper or two, bathed them at times and, as they got older, he would draw with them and take them to bookstores and out to lunch. He was a good dad in his own way, and I loved him for that. I really did, in between driving the kids to their doctor appointments and their umpteen activities: Playdates and parties, band practice, and ballgames, art classes, and music lessons — so many activities. I tried to love him, between helping the children with their homework and buying their clothes and teaching them how to tie their shoes or ride a bike or button a shirt. Kids have laundry too — lots of it. I washed it all.

Did I deserve alimony?

What happened? I grew up in the 1970s, the birth of the Women’s Movement. I devoured Ms. Magazine, got wise to the patriarchy, supported equal rights. I called myself a feminist. I still call myself a feminist.

Can I call myself a feminist?

Give away power, it’s tough to reclaim. Perhaps I knew this all along, but I still washed his dirty underwear — from the beginning, before children, even when I earned more money than him.

Near the end of our marriage I threw his dirty underwear in with the darks. They came out dingy gray. I doubled over his single-use towels into neat squares and tucked them back into the linen closet unwashed. His socks remained inside out, no longer wrapped in neat little balls.

Two months before we split, I said, “I’m not doing your laundry anymore.”

I finally found my power — one pair of underwear at a time.

Catherine Stratton is a writer and filmmaker living in Hoboken, New Jersey. Her work has appeared in the Delmarva Review, the Tahoma Literary Review, After Happy Hour Review, Literary Mama, and The Woodhall Press 2020 Flash Nonfiction Anthology.