To an outsider, there might be a poignant sadness in the fluorescent lights of a nearly vacant Laundromat after dark. The way the lights shine seasick yellow across grimy laminate floor while Tide and Clorox promise redemption and your whitest whites.
To the nineteen year old girl sitting tired, waiting for her Alamo Freeze uniform to complete the final spin cycle, the Laundromat is not poignant, nor is it some broad metaphor for commercial purity and post-industrial decay.
It is just a place, for washing clothes twenty-five cents cheaper than the place down the street.
When Tyra returned home after her freshman year at UT Austin, she thought in metaphors and social commentary. She had long believed the world to be bigger than Dillon, TX and her first year at college had proved it to be true. She saw Dillon for what it was: a snowglobe where political, economic and social tensions were brought to bear on the residents without their knowledge or choice.
That summer was the sweetest she could remember. All the small-town dust that had been suffocating throughout high school was made quaint by the promise of leaving in August and she spent the warm nights drunk on the pride of being one of the ones who made it out. But still, when she returned to school that fall, she vowed that she would only ever return to Dillon as a visitor.
But in making that vow, she seemed to set off some kind of fatal machinery, spinning her life course back towards Dillon. It was that first week of her sophomore year when she signed up for a discounted membership at a new gym across town, where she picked up a MRSA infection in a cut on her leg, which prompted a prescription for rifampicin from the university health clinic. And it was in that first week that her boyfriend Dave found an expired condom under his backseat and slipped it in his pocket instead of throwing it out.
The rifampicin screwed with her birth control pills and the expired condom broke and soon she was staring down the barrel of two pink lines on a positive pregnancy test.
There were the requisite tears, and sleepless nights and money quietly borrowed from her sister for the abortion. Dave drove her to the Women's Health Clinic both times. The first time when she had a panic attack and couldn't even get out of the car and the second time when she made it all the way to the waiting room before she broke down and the panic set in. He left after the second time, warning her that if she was going to keep it, she was going to do it alone.
But she kept it, and she did it alone. In her second trimester, she returned reluctantly to Dillon, moving in with Mindy and the twins.
And so she came to be sitting in the Main Street Laundromat at 10:30 PM, waiting for her uniform to dry.
It isn't so bad, she tells herself, being back in Dillon. You sister is here, and your mom and they are both so excited about another baby Collette. And you have a place to sleep, and a job, for now.
But it is that bad. It is that bad walking around knowing that you have fulfilled everybody's lowest expectation of you. You run into your high school History teacher in the frozen foods section and you see the look on her face when her eyes flit down to your stomach. Not surprise, but some kind of satisfaction or relief, like the world makes sense again because you really are everything that everyone ever thought you were: just a stupid small town slut who gets pregnant before her 20th birthday and raises her bastard children on Mountain Dew and Doritos. You want to say something, to defend yourself, but she posts a wide false smile and congratulates you before you can say a word. So you just nod stupidly and walk away.
Watching her uniform spin, Tyra tries to keep time with the rhythm of the washing machine, rocking back and forth like a child, singing herself a lullaby. You will be okay, you will be okay. But she doesn't believe her own words. She is caught in the mean panic of lying to herself and realizing that no amount of self-deception will free her from the crushing weight of losing her dreams, of losing herself and nothing will ever be okay ever again because she can't fight the rising fate that is her life in Dillon, TX. Her heart begins to speed up and her breathing quickens and grows shallow.
Just as darkness starts to crowd the edge of her vision, the door to the Laundromat jingles open. Tim Riggins walks through, carrying two months worth of dirty plaid shirts.
Tyra, what are you doing here?