I iron and I iron and I iron, and along about 4.30 the first afternoon it occurs to my cynical soul to wonder what the women are doing with themselves with the spare time which is theirs, because I am thumping that press down eight hours and fifty minutes a day. Not that it is any of my business.
Also along about five o'clock it irritates me to have to bother with what seems to me futile work. I am perfectly willing to take great pains with a white waistcoat—in one day I learn to make a work of art of that. But why need one fuss over the back of a nightshirt? Will a man sleep any better for a wrinkle more or less? Besides, so soon it is all wrinkles.
The second day I iron soft work all morning—forever men's underclothes, pajamas, and nightshirts. Later, when I am promoted to starched work, I tend to grow antifeminist. Why can men live and move and have their beings satisfactorily incased in soft garments, easy to iron, comfortable to wear, and why must women have everything starched and trying on the soul to do up? One minute you iron a soft nightshirt; the next a nightgown starched like a board, and the worst thing to get through with before it dries too much that ever appears in a laundry.
After lunch I am promoted to hospital work. All afternoon I iron doctors' and interns' white coats and trousers. It is more interesting doing that. But a bit hard on the soul. For it makes you think of sickness and suffering. Yet sickness and suffering white-coated men relieve. It makes you think, too, of having babies—that being all you know of hospitals personally. But on such an occasion you never noticed if the doctor had on a white coat or not, and surely spent no time pondering over who ironed it. Yet if a doctor wore a coat Irma ironed I think the woman would note it even in the last anguished moments of labor.
Irma did an officer's summer uniform once. I do wish I could have heard him when he undid the package. While Irma was pounding down on it she was discoursing to me how, besides papers, she had cravings for poetry.
“You remember that last snowstorm? I sat at my window and I wrote:
“Oh, beautiful snow
When will you go?
Not until spring,
When the birds sing.”
There were several other stanzas. And about then Miss Cross dumped a bundle of damp clothes into Irma's box and said, “Iron these next and do them decent!” I peered suspiciously into the box. It was my own family laundry!
“Hey, Irma,” I said, cannily, “leave me do this batch, eh?”
I might as well be paying myself for doing up my own wash, and it would look considerably better than if Irma ironed it.