What Sloan and I see in Laundry Lines
We hang up laundry on the roof of our apartment, my mother and I. We do this, usually, in a burst of chatter: a gossip, a scandal, a whine. We move as one as we take out the damp clothes from a bucket, untwist it and give it a shake to remove its wrinkles, and hang it on the lines. My mother has a strict code for organising these clothes on the laundry lines: sheets in the front, underwear in the middle line, and clothes in the last one. I ask her why this matters. Modesty, she says. If someone else comes on the roof, they will see the sheets. If someone looks up from the road to the roof, they will see the clothes; no one will see the underwear. She is embarrassed for the fact that the public- an abstract public- will see, and acknowledge the fact that within that apartment block where ten families live, there is someone who wears underwear. I laugh, and tell her, tomorrow, I am going to hang the underwear with a sign saying who it belongs to. She mocks me and scoffs at my total lack of decorum and etiquette in deciding which laundry can be seen by an outsider.
John Sloan’s woman is doing laundry, all the clothes in shades of white and cream. Is that a shirt I see? A pair of bloomers? The woman stands on the balcony of her house- a New York tenement building- and hangs the clothes on a line. Next to her is a basket, with more white clothes peeking out. Behind her, on the roof of another building, more white clothes on a line. A city of people wearing only white clothes. A city of men waiting on others, women nursing and taking care of others. A city of tenement buildings populated by lives that are lived in white clothes that don’t adorn the bodies of the wealthy, but those of the servants of the wealthy: the butlers, the nannies, the nurses. Sloan’s woman washes clothes in a city that makes it way home in the early morning, rendered invisible by the glint of new money in an entrepreneurial nation, a home where a woman would have her caustic soda ready to scrub white clothes that have faded with the day’s polite labour.
But then, what of Sloan’s man? He crawls across the roof, gingerly, a cat across a roof. The tenement buildings lie in an afternoon haze. The peak of his cap is pulled over his face. There is no one who would recognise him here, but why take the chance? The clothes, now dried, flap in the wind the city throws up to the highest storeys, the same wind that in the morning made hanging laundry a troublesome time for another woman on her balcony. But now, in the afternoon, there is no woman on the balconies, no one on the roof either. Just a man reaching towards the laundry lines: one pull, and down comes a sheet, one more pull, and there’s a night shirt, oh a shirt! A noise! A quick turn to make sure the roof is deserted and one tug at the shirt. He sneaks off into the shadow of a chimney and hides the stack of clothes there. It will be much easier to come up in the dark to bring the clothes down and sell them at the store in the city where the woman asks no questions.
On weekdays, when I am home, laundry duties fall on me. No caustic soda, no wicker basket, just a washing machine and a plastic bucket to take the damp clothes to the roof. I am in my nightie, lugging the bucket on to the roof, and start untwisting and slapping the clothes against the air and hang them up. I have a code of my own, not about the underwear and where to hang them, but about on the delicateness of the clothes. My mother’s sari blouses next to her white cotton nightie. My t-shirt next to my father’s heavy trousers. My mother’s clothes hang together, pastel shades and light fabrics, while mine and my father’s are hung next to each other: large clothes, in heavy fabrics, dark colours. I feel like this is a testament to the people the clothes belong to, and I suddenly want to protect my mother from the roughness of her husband and her daughter. Which is an irony, because she is the one who has proven over and over again the mettle she is made of. It is her ‘fragility’ that keep us three together.
There is one more John Sloan painting on laundry, at least, one more I know of. A woman in a red kimono and brown slip-ons hangs white laundry on a rooftop. Is it a rooftop or a yard? The perspective makes me think it’s a yard. A wicker basket with white clothes stands behind her. Her gaze looks downwards on the line, and she holds a clothes clip in her mouth. Another everyday scene, another moment in a city of people who wear white clothes.
I sit in the steps to the hostel garden. A cat rolls in the grass, taking in the warmth of the waning day. A girl hangs her laundry under the coral-jasmine tree. Tomorrow, she will find blossoms on her clothes. She wrings her clothes before spreading them on the line: a flannel pyjama set, a white dupattah. On another line, my own bedlinen dries: white sheets, white pillow cases.
A city of people who sleep on white sheets.
I hastily sketch her laundry line, wonky teddy wears in a pair of blurry pyjamas.
In yet another painting, Sunday, Women Drying their Hair, three women are on a rooftop, their hair open to the breeze. Behind them, on a laundry line, hang white clothes. The women too wear white. One imagines the scene: neighbours, maybe sisters, just finishing their baths and doing their laundry. They come up to the roof to hang the clothes and lounge around on the roof, chatting, giggling and drying their freshly-washed hair before going downstairs to cook and clean or perhaps go their evening jobs.
My mother is not home from work yet. I have brought down the clothes from the roof, now dried and crisp to the touch, still warm from the day. I fold the clothes and put them separate piles: mother, father, me. My parents’ ‘outside clothes’ go into a new pile meant to be pressed. Mine are shoved into a cupboard. I am used to folding only my clothes, the vastness of it. When I turn my clothes inside it, I feel like my arms can move within them. When I do the same to my mother’s clothes, my arms are constricted, her thinness restrict my arms’ movement. For a fraction of a second, my body prepares to fit itself into a kurti three sizes too small for it, before my mind tells it that I don’t have to wear it. I am merely folding smaller clothes.
My constricted breathing eases as I feel my arms within my own baggy clothes. I think to myself how in other families, mothers pass on their clothes to their daughters, but in mine, I outgrow- horizontally- my clothes and pass them on to my mother. The only garments we can share are saris- she wears her to fit her petite frame, I wrap mine around my body in a shapeless silhouette, wishing away my flabs and my fat.
Laundry lines offer a view of domestic lives hung out in brief snatches of time before being tucked away in dark cupboards. Frayed edges, greying armpits, patched holes that are hidden on a person’s body by modesty and deliberate covering up suddenly stand out like glaring mistakes, though smelling of detergent and fabric softeners. When they hang out in the sun, flapping in gentle breezes or convoluting in heavy gusts of wind, they take on an existence of their own, away from the humans who wear them, and then, suddenly one can see Remedios the Beauty fly away into the sky with them.
This fascination with these most mundane parts of human existence is something I share with Sloan. Art reveals us to something more than mere beauty; you see beauty because someone else has captured it for you the way you see it. Sloan looked out from his studio’s window and captured the stories unfolding on city rooftops in the clothes hung out to dry. He is not the only one. John Singer Sargent and Charles Curran are just two other artists for whom the white fabric on lines becomes a site of the play of light and shadows. But in Sloan’s works, I see what I see in my own family’s laundry lines: labour, social codes, transgressions. His laundry images are depictions of who does the work, and a cheeky thief. In my laundry, I see my family’s delicate balance being established through what we wear, and especially in my mother’s and my clothes, I see how the both of us relate our womanhoods and to each other’s: her’s, constructed within elegance and negotiating tradition with modernity, and mine, trying, fumbling to remain shapeless.
But unlike Sloan’s, my family’s laundry is multi-coloured. We don’t have a wicker basket either. What we do have though, just like in Sloan’s world, are white sheets. Lots of white sheets.
PS: Sloan has plenty more works where laundry lines form an important part of the piece. I especially like one Woman and Child on the Roof (1914). A woman and a boy lie under hanging clothes; the boy holds a little kitten, while the woman, her head resting on her elbow, looks upon him fondly. A quiet moment amidst the clamour of early 20th century Manhattan, I imagine. I also imagine the nights I spend on the rooftops of my dorm building in university. When the night darken over me and the noises of happy girls fade away, all I hear in the cool air are the sound of waves in the distance, and the immediate flapping of the drying clothes.
