I walk into Zippy Dry Cleaners on Elizabeth Street to pick up the cushion cover for my two thousand dollar Design Within Reach sofa I just bought for five hundred off of a guy named Frank in Park Slope. The mid-twenties are a transitory time and I am currently unwilling to invest in anchors. In LA, a car is an anchor. In New York, it’s an expensive sofa or a mattress. These are the things that tie you down.
Inside, a blonde man and a blonde woman raise their voices within reason. I think they are Nordic in some capacity. Swedish, maybe. A suede shearing coat is splayed out on the counter and they are arguing with the Asian woman behind it about how the coat looks worse than before they brought it in. They say that there are more stains on it now and the Asian woman says that is impossible. I resist the urge to tell them to forget about the jacket because it’s ugly anyway. Life goes on and hopefully their taste will improve. But I refrain.
Instead I laugh to myself because the same thing happened to me eight years ago when I was still a freshman at NYU. I took my light tan, suede jacket into some random dry cleaner on University Place to remove a few spots. One or two at the most. I didn’t do my due diligence finding the best possible dry cleaner in the neighborhood. Yelp didn’t exist yet and I only used CitySearch when I was trying to find a nice restaurant for when my mom was in town or when I wanted to find a d-baggy place to grab drinks with my bad fake ID. At the time, my only reason for picking the fine establishment was because it was in between my dorm room and where I got lunch after my last class.
At first, I couldn’t quite pinpoint why I had lost the desire to wear the jacket again after I had picked it up. Suddenly it occurred to me. My bastard dry cleaner had drastically altered the state of my precious suede. Before I went in for stain removal, the jacket was a benign Pottery Barn tan. Afterwards, it lent itself to a shade closer to a nearly moldy orange. There’s a big difference between tan and orange, especially when it comes to an article of clothing. By the time I realized that they had turned my nice coat into the sartorial equivalent of a dead Oompa Loompa, it was too late. And besides, dry cleaners refuse to admit defeat. The customer is always wrong when it comes to dry cleaning. Always.
Back to the jacket destruction at hand. In order to not allow this argument to play out further in front of a potential lifelong customer (me), the Asian woman asks how she can help me while she ignores her in-store complainers. She puts my cell phone number into a computer and then digs through a cramped rack to find my cushion cover folded nicely behind thin plastic. I observe that it is not orange. Score one point, Team Zippy.
Once home, I remove the cover from its tidy dry cleaning plastic and its tidy dry cleaning hangers and begin to pull it over the cushion.
Hmmm, that’s weird. This fit before…
As I get one end of the cushion inside of the cover, I notice that there is no way in hell the other end is going to have enough room to fit comfortably, if even uncomfortably. God. Damn. It. I asked these people to DRY CLEAN for a reason. You add water to cotton and toss it in a dryer and you (A) Shrink the hell out of a what is widely recognized as a temperamental fabric (B) Have just done something I can do myself at home (C) Ignored what I asked you to do (D) Charged me $10 to ruin my sofa.
Ugh.
I should have just Fabreezed the damn thing and ignored the slight wear of the sofa’s previous owner. I can deal with the light blue stains of denim dye. I can handle a couple French bulldog hairs. What I can’t deal with is if the insides of my newly purchased couch cannot fit in its appointed cotton shell. I give pause for a moment, only the tiniest moment, and try to assess if I am hopped up on coffee and should slow my roll before I call these people and lay into them. I plan my speech out in my head. It goes something like this:
“You ASSHOLES. This is a two thousand dollar sofa that I cannot purchase the cushion cover for any longer because the company does not actually produce said sofa anymore. So while I would like to hold you financially responsible for this egregious mistake that you surely will make no admission of, I think I am probably just going to have to live with the fact that my couch is only seventy percent coverable.”
The speeches in my head are always better articulated and more heavily peppered with swear words than the speeches that get processed/ diluted/ watered down for exit through my mouth. After I stare at the sofa and determine that I am indeed correct in believing that these people have shrunk this priceless piece of DWR cotton, I call the phone number on the slip and reach the same woman who handed me my damaged goods and then had the balls to take my not-so-hard earned cash into her hot little dry cleaning hands.
“Excuse me? Hi. I just picked up a cushion cover from you guys and I specifically told you to dry clean it and I’m pretty sure that it’s been washed because it doesn’t fit on my sofa anymore. Like at all.”
The woman keeps saying something about how I didn’t ask them to stretch out the fabric for me. Huh? This makes zero sense. I try to explain to my dry cleaner the mechanics of dry cleaning. I inform her that with dry cleaning you shouldn’t need to stretch fabric because it doesn’t shrink to begin with. Stretching is a nonissue. This is why I went through high school dry cleaning all of my jeans: there was very little room for shrinkage when you’re 5’10. I never had to stretch my jeans after getting them cleaned then. That was the freaking point. Has dry cleaning technology devolved in the last ten years without my knowledge?
We go back and forth on this for another minute before I realize that this is a rather silly war and one I can’t be bothered with fighting on a cold Saturday afternoon. She tells me to come back if it doesn’t fit and I get exasperated as I imagine myself walking down the street carrying a five-foot seat cushion and putting it on her crowded countertop to complain and point frustratedly at a cover that makes the cushion buckle into an L shape while she tells me that she’s sure that happened before I brought it in to her cleanery.
I hang up the phone and think that I’ll just deal with this later and get used to staring at the three inches on either side of my couch that are now exposed because my couch cushion is being squeezed into submission like a fupa in a pair of Spanx.
For more from Jenny, click some of the fun buttons below…
Past work on FlipCollective.com.
To follow her on Twitter.
more room for spare change.