The door closes behind you with its soft brass sound, and the warm air inside settles against your face like a cloth just taken down from a line. The fluorescent tubes along the ceiling give a yellow light, the color of old paper, the color weak tea turns in a white cup left on a sill. Two front-loaders along the back wall turn their slow circles, and you walk down the narrow aisle between the folding counter and the row of washers, past the bank of dryers with their round glass faces, to the plastic chair by the window where you set down your bag. Outside, the street is slick and empty, a single streetlamp doubled in the wet asphalt.
The linoleum under your shoes is the color of weak coffee, scuffed pale in a long soft path from the door to the machines and again from the machines to the folding counter. You follow the path without meaning to. The floor knows where feet go. At the counter you rest your hand on the formica, which is cool where your palm touches it and warmer a few inches away, where the nearest dryer has been running for a while. A length of gray tape mends one corner. Someone has pressed it down many times, each time a little flatter, until the tape and the counter are almost the same thing. You stand there for a moment with your hand still flat on the surface, letting the warmth under the formica find you.
From the dryers comes a sound like soft rain against a tin roof — buttons and zippers turning, falling, turning again. Underneath that, the deeper sound of the drums themselves, a low rolling hum that you feel more in your sternum than in your ears. One of the washers has entered its spin cycle and lifts a thin high note over the rest, a note that rises and steadies and holds. The machines are not in time with each other, but they are not out of time either. They make the kind of sound a river makes over stones, several small sounds agreeing to be one larger sound. On the wall, the clock ticks softly between them, its red second hand sweeping without stopping, too slow to be loud, too regular to be heard for long.
You walk back to the front-loader nearest the window and put your hand flat to the glass. It is warm the way a stone is warm in the late afternoon, a stored heat, patient. Inside, cotton turns and falls in slow tumbling folds, pale shapes collapsing against pale shapes. A blue sleeve appears, darkens with water, rolls under, shows itself again further along. You watch the sleeve come back three times before you lose it. The rubber gasket at the door's edge is dimpled and soft; you press it lightly and it gives, then remembers itself. Along the top of the machine the white enamel has yellowed a little, the way the tubes overhead have yellowed, the way the pages of a paperback left on a windowsill yellow through a summer. Every warm surface in the room feels as though it has been holding its warmth for longer than the cycle suggests.
The air carries the smell of warm cotton first, that clean slightly toasted smell that comes out of a dryer vent, and under it the powdery floral of detergent, and under that, fainter, the smell of the building itself — old wood somewhere behind the plaster, the faint iron of the pipes, a trace of soap that has soaked into the grout between the floor tiles year by year. On the folding counter, someone has left a single wooden clothespin, the spring loose with use, the grain worn smooth and darker at the pinch. You pick it up without thinking and turn it in your fingers. The wood is warm from the room. You set it back down at the edge of the counter, and the small sound it makes is absorbed at once into the larger sound of the drums.
Outside, a car passes once, its tires hushing through the wet, its headlights sliding across the window and along the ceiling and gone. The street returns to itself. The streetlamp hums faintly if you listen for it, which you do, and then stop listening, and the hum becomes part of the general hum of the place. Somewhere above the ceiling, water moves through a pipe, a long slow note that travels the length of the wall and fades. A moth is at one of the fluorescent tubes, circling, settling, circling again, its shadow passing across the floor in a shape no larger than a thumbprint. The tube flickers once and steadies. The moth goes on with its patient geometry. In the back corner, a vending machine gives its small cold click as a thermostat turns over, and then the refrigerator sound inside it starts up a fraction deeper than before.
A dryer at the far end finishes its cycle and winds down, the drum turning more slowly, more slowly, and at last coming to rest with a soft metallic settling. For a moment the room is quieter by one voice. The remaining machines carry on. You walk over and open the dryer door, and a gentle cloud of warmth comes out to meet you, smelling of cotton and of the powder that was in the water an hour ago, now nearly gone, only its ghost left in the heat. The clothes inside are a soft heap, still turning faintly in the air the drum has stirred. You reach in and the warmth closes around your wrist. You lift out a towel, fold it against your chest to find its edges, and carry it to the counter, where the fluorescent light falls on it plain and yellow and kind.
Folding is a slow thing. You match corner to corner, smooth the flat of your palm along the seam, fold again, set the square aside. The pile on the counter grows by small increments. A sock, its partner, another sock whose partner has not arrived yet and which you set along the counter's far edge to wait. A shirt whose sleeves you lay across its chest like hands resting. The motions are older than you, older than the counter, older than the room. The formica takes each folded thing without comment. Through the window, the rain begins again, so lightly at first that you mistake it for the sound of the spin cycle, and then the drops show themselves on the glass, small and round and catching the light, sliding down one at a time, joining, sliding further. The street darkens a shade and shines a shade more.
You sit down in the plastic chair by the window with the warm folded pile beside you. The machines turn. The clock sweeps. The moth circles and settles. The rain comes down in its thin unhurried way, pattering on the awning over the door in a sound so even that it becomes the sound of the room after a while, rather than a sound from outside. Your breath has slowed without your asking. The fluorescent light flickers once at the far end, and the moth crosses the flicker, and the light steadies again. On the wall, a flyer curls at one corner where the tape has given up. The curl lifts and settles in the slight draft from the door's gap, lifts and settles, keeping its own small time.
Across the street, a light in an upper window goes out, and the wet pavement loses one of its reflections. The streetlamp holds. The washers enter their last rinses, their notes lowering one by one. Inside the nearest drum, the water drains with a long soft sigh, and the clothes sink and settle against the glass. The warm air around the dryers thins by a degree. The rain eases. The moth has found a place on the ceiling near the tube and is resting there, wings folded, the color of old paper. You rest your head against the cool glass of the window. Beyond it the street goes on being a street, shining and quiet, and the light inside the laundromat goes on being yellow, and the machines turn more slowly now, more slowly, and the sound of them softens into the sound of the rain, and the rain softens into the sound of the room, and the room