Dirty Laundry

I returned to my apartment in Athens, Ohio, at the end of a summer spent elsewhere, to find in my closet someone’s dirty laundry. In a black garbage bag were two pairs of panties, a bra, a tank top, some shirts, a black skirt, and a pair of long socks.

Sarah, a young woman from Leipzig, had subleased the one-bedroom unit in my absence. She had moved out the day before I returned. She must have put the clothes in the closet and forgotten them, I thought; they certainly weren’t left there for me. We had not been lovers, or friends. We had barely ever spoken—never about our personal lives, nor about our underwear—but now, unlikely as it seemed, I was in possession of her underwear. I could do whatever I wanted with them. I could wear them or sell them and she wouldn’t know.

Rather than do these things, at least at first, I left the clothes as they were and wrote about them in my diary. I wrote, “It’s almost as though she’s still here. Something of her still hangs in the air, the air she breathed in July. It will haunt me until the day I leave, and I cannot take these clothes with me when I move out.” I was right about that last part. I would have to do something with Sarah’s clothes, but in part because I had never owned women’s clothing, I didn’t know what to do with them.

I knew I could throw the clothes away, but effort and money had been spent to create and then acquire them, so I felt it would have been wasteful to consign them to a landfill. I asked my women friends—I knew no drag queens—if they might like a free skirt or shirt. No one wanted them, though, or they doubted Sarah’s clothes would fit, so the bag remained where Sarah had left it, most of the time.

A month after I found Sarah’s long, discarded socks among her other things, I put them on. I didn’t think the socks would be sexually arousing to wear, or emotionally fulfilling, but I had never worn such lengthy socks and I was curious to know what I’d been missing for 23 years. They were thick and made of a fabric I couldn’t name. They were the first women’s clothes ever to interest me without at the time being worn or taken off by a woman.

They fit well and reached higher than my knees, but they didn’t belong on my feet. Their off-white color didn’t suit my skin tone—and it felt, as I pulled each one over an ankle, like I was doing something wrong, and not only because I had always worn shorter socks. My interest in Sarah’s clothes had gone too far. It was as though when I adorned myself with the forfeited garments I had put on vestigial pieces of Sarah, as if she should feel me wearing her socks. I took them off. I kept my distance from the bag in the closet, but I talked about its contents with my friends.

Most people, when I told them about Sarah’s abandoned laundry, were less interested in it than they were in other things, like movies and their own lives. A friend suggested I throw the clothes away—which would have been expedited by the fact that when I found them they were in a garbage bag. I wondered if Sarah had meant to throw them out but had forgotten to, in which case she would be upset to learn that I hadn’t done it for her and was instead telling friends about her clothes, even if I omitted their more sultry details for decorum’s sake.

When I told my friend Paul about the clothes at lunch, he asked why I hadn’t washed them and said it was the first thing he would have done. I admitted, puzzled, that it hadn’t occurred to me. At the...