God I love Carol. The value of her qualities astounds me, and I’ve often seriously considered taking her in to be appraised, one of those back-alley, swinging-door appraisers with the low lighting, dusty ceiling fans and familiar yet unidentifiable muffled music that provides a soothing sensation like water washing over rocks.

The monetary value of these qualities is hard to say, but with the assistance of a board-certified, state-employed expert of some kind, there’s little doubt that attributes such as humor, wit, proper hygiene, and the soft, empowering nature of full, well-formed breasts could easily fetch $50- to $100,000.00. Which, in today’s market, is absolutely remarkable.

She talks to me in ways no one else has ever before. It’s arousing. Have you ever thought about living in the hull of a ship? Seriously, she asks, wrapping yourself in thin, green blankets, watching your breath trail delicately in a carefully sculpted haze, but taking in the smell of rust and the open sea, feeling the movement, closing your eyes and holding your breath for hours until finally opening them and gazing at the Georgia O’Keefe calendar taped to a nearby wall. I never have, I reply.

She intimidates me. God how she intimidates me with her collections: Interstate 10 gift shop silverware, perfectly preserved Redbook and McCall’s magazines stacked in columns giving tremendous character to her living room, and those cereal boxes—cocoa pebbles, bran wheat flakes, honey cluster flaxseed kernels, fruit tarts, and peanut butter granola honey-dipped banana rings thumb-tacked to the walls in fantastic murals igniting scenes of long-lost battles, forbidden romances, and the joys of every biological evolutionary facet of life on display to be gazed at and appreciated.

Say cheese, she’d say, taking my picture with that beautiful Kodak Instamatic Cyber-Shot in front of the cereal boxes, the aroma of distilled monoglycerides, canola oil, zinc, iron, and whole-grain brown sugar phosphate swirling about my nose and causing the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up, as we moved to the kitchen to develop the film, framing the images and placing them on the open shelves throughout the home, until there was only the infinite honeycomb of cardboard landscapes.

It’s washing machine season, which means the annual car ride to the event. Cars are theater to me, better in fact, with Carol talking eloquently about the under-appreciated artistic and social triumphs of terrorists. Damn masters of media she’d say, pulling forth wrinkled pie charts from her purse, swerving the car to avoid the sluggish, crawling animals and reciting percentages as if they were poetry, melodies and all, epic songs examining their role in improving hydro-power, radiation monitors, turbine control systems, oil exploration, and steam condensers.

There was the smell of potatoes everywhere, and I asked Carol about it but she didn’t answer, giving me the brief fear that she had gone deaf right there before me in a matter of seconds, and frustrated at myself for knowing that even if she were deaf I wouldn’t try to get her attention out of politeness or shyness, a problem I had possessed for so long, and we’d probably end up crashing for one reason or another, her blank face looking at me trying to speak, but hearing only the occasional rattled chime from the snow-like shards of shattered glass.

We soon arrived at the location. Deflated banners allowing the building to smile slightly, an old bus station, its hallways painted from the cigarette-stained fingertips of anxious recovering addicts, their suits and skirts matching the chipped wooden floor, empty water coolers concealing expertly crafted dust, floating geometry that presented new formulas, fantastic equations. I thought, they have to mean something, I’m going to get a picture and study it later.  But being distracted by the noise of the nearby television, glowing with all its might, letting the strands of hair and balls of lint sprout forth, a glorious garden that wrapped itself around the legs of an old man, slouching with cavernous wrinkles, the kind you could crawl into and hide, watching CBS’s breaking news of Finland’s name change to Borisburg, named after a dog that had saved a woman from drowning.

I could smell the soap, and we dropped everything and made our way to the main showroom.

Carol had started using her right eye, which meant she was thinking. It’s her favorite eye, mine too, and lets her left eye rest in protected darkness while surveying the rest of the room. God she’s a maniac when she does this, but I love it. I love the mechanical movements of it, its dryness and inability to blink, but moving so precisely, capturing the presentation booths covered in blue cloth and tiny description cards, ornate calligraphy that you have to bend down to read, the kind only women notice, and the kind Carol was perfectly suited for.

People came from all over to view the washing machines. The crowd’s hushed whisper of fantastic as the curtain was drawn, fluorescent lights flickering like rushing electric water, illuminating the devices, crafted by dirty, dry hands in the basements and sheds of the Midwest, the smell of hanging metal tools and fresh-cut grass adding degrees of personality to the machines that made some more attractive than others, and the crowd knew it.

They would be judged in several areas: clothes capacity, detergent use per normal load, watts of electricity per load, motor HP rating, motor amps being drawn in wash, spin cycle RPM, extraction force, type of drain cycle, inner drum DIA, and machine weight among other things, with the winner taking home $50,000.00, and being featured in The Tile Standard, the prominent East Coast appliances periodical that I was told had poor writing but worthwhile pictures. No one could resist the pictures.

Jaspar Owens will win, Carol said, chewing on a carrot she had pulled from her purse, the smell of leather, eye shadow, and plastic zip-lock bags consuming all surrounding oxygen and making it nearly impossible to breathe. My God I’m going to die here, I thought, biting my cheeks and slowly inhaling and storing every fleeting speck of breath under my tongue, letting it mix with the evaporating saliva, and waiting to lie down in the unknown realms of eternity, amongst faded shirts, scuffed shoes, and dusty hats that spent their lives in the dark confines of rarely opened closets, only emerging once a year for events such as this, their yellow tags nauseating, text nearly unreadable, made in places that were real in books, but not here.

His ring finger is the longest of any of the other competitors, she said. It means he has the highest levels of testosterone, and also probably the largest genitals. He reeks of fertility, will probably suffer from immune dysfunction later in life, but will father many children. Damn he’s fertile, and his machine’s looking good. The inner drum’s vital. He needs at least two cubic feet of usable volume if he’s going to do it. I think he’s got it. It’s all in the fingers.

God Carol amazes me, but frustrates me as well. I mean, what an unfair advantage. How is a lay person like myself, having never been to such an event, nor possessing an advanced understanding of anatomy and biology, supposed to take that into consideration? Should not the judges recognize these limitations and offer a pre-show meet-and-greet where the audience is allowed to examine and caress the hands of the competitors, taking in their strengths, feeling their emotions, listening to the sighs of exhaustion and the screams of victory, the knuckles’ scrunched faces, the scars, moles, and burrowing veins, blood rushing, giving color to the fingernails, some of which were designed in ways that would seem impossible?

I wanted to bet. I brought $100.00, but Carol advised against it so we continued to watch in near silence.

These were our salvation, I thought. Rushing, white, bursting bubbles chasing, outrunning the black water, noises never before heard, the grunts and groans of competing gladiators, sleek in every aspect of design, stainless steel automatic dispensers of up to 850 RPMs punching the delicate motors, temperatures fluctuating, inflicting unbearable pain, rinse time, spin time, gallons upon gallons of fragrant detergent seeping into the onlookers, resting on earrings, loose buttons, and the coffee machines, left nearly dry, their orange lights blinking, government code cutting through the cigarette smoke, a fading beacon leading to the exits, but attracting no one. God I feel the earthquakes now. Are they the machines, or outside bulldozers sent here by the concerned neighbors tired of their block being turned into something far too strange? They don’t recognize the innovation, but we do, and continue to watch, all of them now blurring into music, sucked through the open windows in a high-pitched howling of whistles.

Carol was right. Jaspar Owens won, holding his check high above his head, allowing his ring fingers to answer all the questions.

Back on the road, we drove at a great speed, the kind that always made Carol’s perfume come alive for me. I stared at my hands, and realized my index finger was longer than my ring finger. Did I lack testosterone? God that can’t be. Maybe I’m holding them wrong, I thought, and held them up to the sunlight, cutting through the hardened dirt of the windshield, making everything glow, and turning my hands into a blur, pulsating colors and cutting my fingers off entirely.

Carol turned the radio to Jackie Wilson, drumming her hands on the steering wheel, as we continued to barrel towards the distant, looming red mountains ahead.

Story by Matthew Vasiliauskas
Photography by Agnes Samour