There was one teeny-tiny washing machine in the two-family house where I rented a room in New Zealand. The cellar door was on the far side of the house, off the steps that lead down to the backyard. Inside, there was enough room for an old mattress, two broken bicycles, and a petite washer rigged up to a switch that swapped the power source between the two residences.
Further down, the side steps lead to a weedy backyard. The extent of the landscaping began and ended with two metal laundry trees.
For most of college, I could manage to stretch my clean clothes as long as between school holidays. I would drive a trunk load of dirty clothing home for fall break and another at Thanksgiving. And if I came up short on undergarments, I thought nothing of a stock-up shopping trip.
That all changed when I studied abroad. I could only pack about two weeks worth of clothes, and I routinely tramped that limited wardrobe through the muck and unforgiving brush of the New Zealand wilderness. I had to get used to more frequent laundry days.
And I had to get used to them without a clothes dryer.
It was June and I was just hanging up what I knew would be my last load of laundry before I went home when the Wellington winds started to blow rain clouds in from the bay. In my rush to retrieve the t-shirts and towels I had just pinned up, wouldn’t you know it, I literally clotheslined myself. I got a “branch” of one of the trees straight across the bridge of my nose.
It took a long moment for my vision to clear, and then it was already raining. By the time I got my snarled lump of wet laundry up to my room, I had the beginnings of a black eye. I hung everything up, draping clothes over anything strong enough to hold the weight, flinching each time I felt something—surely blood—trickle along the inside of my nose.
Luckily, there was no blood. Just the shiner.
I took a picture to e-mail to my mother. The subject line was probably “I just need a little sympathy.”
(This is what I looked like when I was about thirty-five pounds heavier and making a face that wasn’t doing much to disguise it.)
That’s actually the second attempt at my self-portrait of pity. After I snapped the first shot, I flipped my camera over to look at the result. I added the pointed finger in the second take. Without it, the bruise was much too easy to miss. I suppose it hurt much worse than it looked.
When I see this picture now, I think about how solitary my life was during those last few weeks in New Zealand. I was stuck in the city because of my final exam schedule. I kept hours that rarely coincided with my housemates’. My American friends were in- and out-of-town, frantically crossing items off their “To Do Before I Leave” lists. My Kiwi friends were kicking back, not feeling pressed enough for time to do much besides drink, or they were making long-term plans that seemed too after-the-fact to interest me.
The plum-colored blotch on my nose turned a spoiled shade of yellow, became speckled with aqua, and then faded away. My nose was still sore when my friends returned from their road trips, but it looked completely normal. If I hadn’t taken this picture, it would have been as though I’d never been wounded.
I’m not sure if that’s more like It’s A Wonderful Life or “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”
I am quite certain, though, that dropping my laundry off down the street once a month has been hazard-free so far. And, the next time I get a black eye? It’d better have a better story to back it up.
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