Dandle

dandle
verb, transitive. To move a baby or young child up and down in a playful or affectionate way. To move something gently up and down.

He kept his own counsel and simply observed her. She was her usual garrulous self, smiling and chatting about whatever popped into her head. His fascination was enhanced this time because of what she was doing: she had decided to dye her chambray skirt a dark indigo and was carrying out the plan in a fiberglass Sears utility sink. She caught his eye and launched into another slightly risqué story as she dandled the mass of fabric in and out of the inky fluid.

Later, he would be unable to recall a single sentence of the gossip she repeated; indeed, not a single word stayed with him. He was too transfixed by the sight of her ungloved hands, growing a darker shade of bluish gray each time they emerged from the dye bath, and the way the dark liquid sloshed up on the walls of the sink, leaving a stain behind.

As the skirt’s fabric took on the dye, he began to wonder how she was planning to transfer it from the utility sink to the clothesline outside. Surely she had a washtub. He pried his eyes away from her and her task for a moment to search the basement room, but didn’t see one. The only container vaguely suitable for what she would have to do was a plastic laundry basket--the kind with sizable holes pierced all over its sides--white, of course. His heart began to sink when he realized that the dye-saturated garment would be so heavy that she was probably going to demand his help to carry it to the line when she decided that the fabric was dark enough. He glanced down at his khaki Dockers and sighed.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.