Laundry, Russian Style

I took my faded lavender panties off the clothesline in the kitchen and sniffed: as I suspected, they smelled like last night’s fried cauliflower. (The rest of the cauliflower sat on the table ready to be served cold for breakfast). I was nearing the end of my semester in Moscow, and I had long since given up trying to dress like a Moscow girl—short skirts, bright synthetic fabrics, high heels (read: slutty)—but laundry was another story.

There was a small washing machine in our apartment on Donskoi Street, but I wasn’t allowed to use it. Truth be told, I never asked. I just assumed Elena Mikhailovna didn’t want me to use it, even though she probably bought it with a previous exchange student’s rent money. So I became adept at washing my clothes by hand: fill small plastic tub with water and detergent, insert clothes, and rub the fabric between your thumbs.

Most Russian apartments have enclosed balconies where people hang their laundry, but our building, being closer to the center of the city, was older and didn’t have balconies, so we had to hang our laundry to dry in the kitchen. Somewhere along the line, I decided it was easier to hang my sweaters in my bedroom, where they would be out of the way.

During my first few weeks in Moscow, Elena Mikhailovna and I would spend hours at the kitchen table chatting over tea with lemon about everything from politics to romance. She told me stories of her pre­-perestroika days as a geologist including the research trip where she spent months living in a tent in frozen Yakutsk. As time wore on, familiarity sunk in, and the conversations became less frequent. Elena Mikhailovna seemed irritated with me, greeting me in the mornings with a frosty “dobre utra, Liz,” and I asked myself, “What did I do?”

Things finally came to a head one Saturday in November. I had just returned to the apartment after spending a few hours at the Central House of Artists, Moscow’s museum of contemporary art. I went into the bathroom and found one of my sweaters hanging on a hook in the shower, which was not where I had left it: I had hung it on the doorknob in my room. A knot wrenched my gut. I was in for it now.

Elena Mikhailovna called me into the kitchen for dinner. Dinner was the same as always: soup, followed by sosiski or kotleti or whatever we were eating that week, and tea. We had tea with lemon and cookies like usual. She said nothing. I thought, for a moment, that she wasn’t going to say anything.

“I thought you were here for lunch,” she said, “and I opened the door to your room and saw where you hung your clothes. You know it costs $200 to redo the floors?” (Muscovites always quote prices in dollars). Shit. I was caught. I waited for her to go on, for the axe to fall.
“It struck me that that wasn’t the first time you did that.” It wasn’t. “Why did you do that?”

Now I had to try and defend myself: “Well…I’m just…used to doing things…that way…” In my head I was already counting down the days I had left until my flight home. Thirty-five.

When she excused me I went off to my room to cry.

It was only a misunderstanding, though I still think, since it was her house, she should have given me clear instructions about where to hang laundry from the beginning. Other students had much worse things happen with their host families: one friend of mine got drunk, and picked up what he thought was his fox fur hat to vomit into it. Only it wasn’t a hat, it was the cat, and his host mother looked at him with disgust and disbelief. He tried to make up for it by giving the cat a bath, but the cat got angry and scratched him.

Living in someone else’s house is hard. Doing it in another language doesn’t make it any easier. Misunderstandings are to be expected. So though I messed up when I hung my laundry to dry on the doorknob, at least I didn’t vomit on the family pet.