Alone in my daughters’ bedroom, I unpack their folded laundry,
emptying two unicorn backpacks. Lavender scent in their laundry.
My ex-husband’s new wife, his dead brother’s widow, had sent
my children home from a week-long visit with clean laundry.
Grateful for any help, I wept. My ex-sister-in-law. My friend.
I had screamed Shame on you. My enemy holding my laundry.
She and my husband of twenty years, Paul, the man who’d rolled
in my sheets. My musician, my first love, hung me out like laundry.
Daughters gone, I now live in a studio the size of a small hotel room.
I teach online, eat my spinster salads, wash and dry my own laundry.
I’m looking at my students on a screen, begging some to turn on
cameras. Others slouch in p.j.s, morning hair tousled like laundry.
I’m trying to read Hamlet with the seniors, but no one cares about
a Danish prince. Even to me, the play is tedious as doing laundry.
In hopes of making Shakespeare more relatable, perhaps to wake
these tired seventeen-year-olds, I share my worst wrinkled laundry.
My husband’s younger brother died of a heart attack at thirty-seven.
My husband divorced me. His brother’s wife washes his laundry.
I don’t speak of my grieving daughters or my doubts. Did I criticize
too much? Was I ever sexy? My head spins—a dryer full of laundry.
I end my story—Nine months later, Paul died too. Students stare.
Ms. Gnup, no longer just a teacher. A woman with dirty laundry.
Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin on Unsplash
