Sofia Martinez

They say children thrive on routines, and my mother always told me I had been a good baby. Woke up on the dot at 7:00am for my bottle, ate every 2 hours, didn’t cry a minute before, burped and pooped on command, had me down with the same lullaby for my nap at 3:00pm and for bedtime at 8:00pm, and if that didn’t work, we knew the scene I’d fall asleep on if she put on Mulan. I was a good baby, the best baby, a good daughter, a good older sister, who did as told, followed the rules, had no creativity for pranks nor mischief. And besides the lack of critical thinking or imagination, I guess I was thriving.

The house is dark with the grayness of a cloudy, rainy day, and silent with the absence of my mother’s beckoning. A Wednesday afternoon after school, Alana, Kendra and I have done our homework and have returned home feeling orphaned without the expectation of our parents’ arrival. For the first time, they’ve left us behind on a trip to my older half-sibling’s graduation. Tonight, our grandmother is to supervise us.

“Alana, Kendra, come here please!” 9-year-old me calls. 

“Pa’ qué?” Alana interjects.

“We gotta do laundry, traigan sus hampers!”

We get to work on the piles of dark, light and whites. We make sure the socks aren’t turned in, nor the end of jeans. We find our uniforms of the week, the white polos with our initials in the back so we aren’t mistaken which ones belong to whom, and the skorts our ultra-Christian school makes the girls wear for P.E.. I scour the bathrooms for hand and floor towels, and the kitchen as well. 

I bundle the first heap of clothes when the front door opens and bounces as it shuts in a familiar “tan-tum”. I hear a quick shuffling to the kitchen.

“What’s going on here?” Abuelita Tata inquires from the door frame. Wispy white hair and saggy cheeks, her voice is sweet and curious with amusement at seeing tres piojitos working like well-trained bees. Laundry is how I learned to prioritize, so I begin putting the dark pile of clothes first into the machine.

“Why do we do the dark pile first?” I’d ask my mother once.

“Well, it usually has all the pants and important stuff and we want to make sure those are dry.” 

“It’s Wednesday.” I tell my grandmother, the answer being enough for me, but not for her. “It’s laundry day.” 

Abuelita’s chuckle erupts high pitched from her chest like the sound of bells. Her laugh is like a Christmas carol, deep and joyous. She laughs easily and generously, and asks, “well do you need any help?”

“No, I got it!” says my third-grade ass. “But you might need to help me put it in the dryer later.” I look up. “I can’t reach.”

Decorated pine trees and golden twinkly lights. “Okay, dear.” She shuffles to the room she is sleeping in with her Crossword Puzzle and Sudoku book under her underarm.

A week later, I’m walking the steps that lead to Abuelito and Abuelita’s porch. The wooden door glides and sings against the relief of the red tile’s pattern, and I give a polite smile towards my family sitting under the fan, in a round assembly of miscellaneous furniture Abuelito probably took from our neighbor’s sidewalks when they put them out as trash. 

“Pero es que eso sirve todavia!” I’d heard him argue once with Mom and Dad as they rolled their old armchair out. In truth, I’d love that armchair and was saddened to see it go, but Mom insisted that a turning chair that couldn’t turn was garbage. 

“Pues cogela, papi, dale.” Dad said in defeat. Then he helped him carry it up these very steps. 

“¡Mira quién llegó! Hablando de la reina de Roma,” Says Titi Joan. She has a long necklace around her neck with a silver chain, a statement ring on her right hand, her thin brown hair in an elegant ponytail. Titi being good humored toward one of us was always a bit rare. She always treated my sisters and I like we were one too many at once, and that she couldn’t risk being on our good side lest we want to stay over more. 

“About what?” I looked around unnervingly at the suggestion that they were speaking of me. 

“I was telling them about last Wednesday!” Jingle bells. “Pues mira, I go into the kitchen and all I see is a mess of clothes on the floor and immediately I say, ‘What’s going on here?’ y la piojita esta me dice ‘It’s Wednesday; it’s laundry day!” Amused laughter fills the balcony. Even my grandfather’s belly moves up and down, the fan caressing the thinness of his hair. I spot the comb he carries in his pocket on the coffee table. My grandpa, the perpetual dandy. I cower shyly on my grandmother’s lap, aware this story isn’t for me, and only a little bit about me. 

“Liza, hiciste muy bien con tus niñas. They are very, very well-raised.” My mom smiles at me proudly.

“Conste que I didn’t tell them they had to do that! I left no instructions of the sort!” She says, and the conversation dies.

Gazing at the plastered smiles on everyone’s face, I couldn’t put my finger on the rising need to explain myself, nor on the injustice I felt at this anecdote about my Pavlov training. I had done something exceptional, pleasing, rewarding, without being aware of it. Been trained, conditioned to do it. How exceptional could it really be, then? 

To be quite honest, I wasn’t aware there was an alternative. An alternate Wednesday when clothes weren’t washed and we did it on a Saturday instead. An alternate life when the week wasn’t for the routines we hated, and the weekends for the once we disliked less so. All my life, up until that point, Wednesdays were Laundry Day, so that Sundays could be about airing it out.

My pink Crocs were battered and sweaty. I felt simultaneously dumber and older. Ámbar, my cousin and Titi Joan’s youngest, is sitting next to Abuelito, uninterested in anything but the plate of arroz y gandules before her. Alana asks Mom if she can ride her bike, and mother nods. Ámbar tells her to wait for her, and I get up as well to join. Half included only. The three of us aware that there was a distinction between us now. That I had become the 9-year-old that did laundry without being told to, and it was somehow unsavory to be my equals today.

Because although an alternate Wednesday afternoon that day hadn’t been an option to me, there is the matter that my sisters wouldn’t have done the laundry if I hadn’t urged them to. For them, the option to be children was clear. But older sisters learn quickly that every rule has exceptions. That ultimately they were the rule and their siblings, and their parents, and the entire world, had exceptions. But not them. Never them. 

Older sisters know that without the rule, the world crumbles. Without the rule, I knew there had been no uniform for Friday’s P.E. class, no socks for next Monday. That simply could not be. That’s what Tata didn’t get, hadn’t known. 

And I see now, of course, I see now, the value and the innocence of having an assigned day for this. I’ve learned, obviously, I understand, the imperative need to plan around the systems that make life doable. But my mother’s “I didn’t leave any instructions!” felt bitter in my mouth. No instructions need be left. If I didn’t follow the rules the world would crumble.

Except if I hadn’t followed the rule this time, this time it would have been okay. It wouldn’t be an anecdote; it wouldn't even be of note. Now I knew. Knew there was an alternate way to live my days. Knew, also, that I wouldn’t be aware of the exceptions until I was the cute emblematic story of submission and obedience on a Sunday afternoon again.

The three of us ride our bikes up and down the street in a circle around each other. Bored, we gather like a coven at the sidewalk, our bikes laid around us like fallen soldiers, and we decide what we’ll be doing. 

“Guillotina?”

“We don’t have a ball.”

“Escondite?”

“It takes too long!”

“Pillo y policía?”

“What are the rules?”

“I’m not sure.”

They tit with their mouth and we fall silent.