y favorite bra disappeared three weeks after I moved into my Lady Friend's home. The night before it went missing, I tossed the bra into the washing machine with a load of sweatshirts. It was the last time I would ever see the bra.
I began to worry about the bra before I knew it was missing. On the bus ride to work, I was hit with a sudden jolt of panic that the bra was in jeopardy.
I had reason to be alarmed. I had left the bra completely at the mercy of my Lady Friend, who was determined to get control of my laundry. The reason for this, I think, was because she had so little control of any other area of my life.
I agreed to move in with my Lady Friend only after she accepted a list of demands, chief among them my insistence that she address me as 'The Ambassador' whenever we were in public, and that I be allowed to use her home to train goats to perform simple tasks, such as setting the table and waxing my legs. I also refused to merge our finances or mingle our belongings in such a way that would make it difficult for me to walk out of the relationship at the first sign of trouble.
For the first week, the system worked beautifully. I had my life, she had hers, and the goats had theirs. But then one afternoon, a laundry basket appeared in the bedroom.
'Just toss your dirty clothes into the basket, and I'll wash them along with mine,' she said merrily.
The thought of rooting through the laundry basket post-breakup—plucking my socks from her delicates—was almost unbearably sad. So, I refused her offer. I explained that I had to wash my own clothes because she didn't know the first thing about caring for bras equipped with underwire support.
Underwire bras are members of a small species of clothing that are classified as 'vertebras.' Like most things with a spine, they will not survive an hour in a dryer. Think of the horrible stories you've heard about people who toss their cats into a dryer. Now, just imagine what would happen if the cat was wearing an underwire bra. What a mess! ( For some reason, washing machines don't destroy underwire bras. I have no idea why. I'll leave it to you academic types to figure out. )
What my plan didn't take into account was my inherent laziness. When I lived alone, my clothes would sit in the washer for weeks before I worked up the energy to remove them. But, now, every day I came home to find my clothes folded neatly in a pile—evidence of my Lady Friend's covert laundry operations.
All day at work I worried that my Lady Friend had removed my favorite bra from the washer without a thought for the dangers that awaited it in the dryer among a gang of heavy cottons, the street thugs of the natural fabric world. I raced home and ran into the laundry room. My heart sank when I spotted my clothes folded lovingly. I rifled through them, searching for the bra, expecting the worst. But it wasn't there. Just then, my Lady Friend walked into the room.
'My favorite bra is missing!', I exclaimed.
'You have a favorite bra?', she asked, truly surprised.
Next time-Chapter 2: The biography of a favorite bra
