Domestic Flight
Good housekeeping? What, the magazine? Housekeeping, the novel by Marilyn Robinson? Or do you mean cleaning house, Martha Stewart’s favorite topic? Sorry, but I never enjoyed it. By my twenties I understood the saying, “Housework is never noticed until it isn’t done.” My daughters clean regularly to feel better about their surroundings and themselves, which is a mystery to me. I prefer detachment, mind over matter.
For forty years now I have lived in an old hatchery, a real redwood tribute to family and fertility, a conversion my second husband had almost completed on the day he walked out. I finished the exterior with my own DIY shingling job and found it more satisfying than other chores, certainly more fun than housework. Under the topic ‘More Fun’ I would also include traveling, knitting, gardening, reading, writing, you name it.
Perhaps my aversion to domestic maintenance is connected to my Anglo ancestors and their bookish disregard for household routine. Consider this quote from Quentin Crisp, by his own account “one of the stately homos of England” and author of The Naked Civil Servant as he described maintaining his flat, “There was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years, the dirt didn’t get any worse.” Closer to home, the American comedian Phyllis Diller said, “Housework can’t kill you, but why take a chance.” and “I’m eighteen years behind on my ironing.” My guru Phyllis also said, “Cleaning the house before your children are grown is like shoveling snow in the middle of a blizzard.”
Much of the comedy at the beginning of the Women’s Movement was based on a resistance to the notion that women should be happy with housework. Women in the 1960s were not expected or really welcome in the marketplace. I view those comediennes who first mocked housekeeping and the traditional views of women (Diller, Totie Fields, Joan Rivers, and later Roseanne Barr) as pioneers. Back then, unfortunately, many of their jokes mocked women themselves, their bodies, or their status as housewives. What their humor offered then was another point of view, resisting the life of the household drudge. The dutiful housewife sends her children outside rather than risk their “tramping dirt in the house.” She does not listen to them or cuddle them; she is cleaning.
On weekends I like Book TV and recently watched a speech by Cambridge scholar Ha-Joon Chang, who said, “The washing machine has changed the world more than the Internet.” He was referring to how appliances and other technical advances have improved the daily lives for half the planet: women. I suspect that many men have benefited from these home advances as well. Consider that great American soul, Henry David Thoreau, who lived simply in a state of nature, but still found doing his laundry so distasteful that he left Walden Pond every week to take a bundle of soiled clothes to his mother for her to wash. Was this transcendence?
For another example of a man’s view of the laundry, I recently read a review by Rachel Aviv of Peter Trachtenberg’s The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and its Meaning, where the author disclosed that once “he attempted suicide because at the moment it seemed more appealing than folding laundry.” Modern life has wrested hours out of every day once taken up with scrubbing and sweeping, duties that now require only minutes.
I would add the obvious corollary that clothes dryers have changed the world as well. I refer here not just to finishing the laundry, but also to the use of the dryer as a substitute for ironing. Very few women iron anymore. Now they use hand held steamers or the dryer to fluff their clothes to rid them of major wrinkles. I iron perhaps two or three times a year now, but then that’s just me. Millions of women count every minute away from the ironing board as blessed.
As a child I watched my working mother rush through her tidying, tossing any stray items into a hamper or onto a clothes hook in the closet, saying “Out of sight, out of mind,” and that became my maxim. I can count all the homes of my childhood and the apartments of my twenties by the secret hiding places I made, laundry being my first ‘dirty little secret,’ with ironing a close second. At my worst I used a screened porch for this task, a space reserved for an old washer and a dirty clothesbasket. I didn’t want my children wearing dirty clothes, so I did laundry frequently.
My husband believed he could speed things up by creating a drain where the landlord had not. Instead of hiring a plumber, my spouse drilled a hole in the floor, bent over, and inserted the washer’s drain hose into the new aperture. This project was probably the masculine equivalent of ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ However, when bamboo began to sprout through the gap and the heater vents, he decided it was time to move to the country. This is the same ex who left while building my place, but that’s another story.
Early motherhood extended my inattention to domestic duties. Hiding my freshly laundered clothes was my greatest flaw as a housewife. This practice frustrated my daughters, but they eventually learned to retrieve and to iron, then to hate ironing, and finally to go to the cleaners or use a dryer to ‘fluff their stuff.’ More than once over the years I dedicated an entire room to contain my family’s clean, but un-ironed garments. When it was clear that certain items had not been worn in six months or more, I bagged them up and took them to the Goodwill. I saw this as a good thing. I felt clean, organized, and charitable.
When my children were in elementary school I set up the ironing board in front of the TV and we all watched PBS for our edification, or Soul Train for their footwork, and the distraction kept me from noticing how awful ironing was. The children were safe with me as I held court there beside the clean clothesbasket. If I began the same duties in solitude, I would daydream, get weepy, or mutter to myself as I suspect generations of women did before me. So I began listening to my radio’s mix of news and music as I worked. Now I have changed my loyalty to NPR—such loyalty that I cannot bear to be distracted by ironing and all the disciplined dedication that it requires.
Ah well, let us change the subject and move on to closets. Let me peek inside …perhaps not. Very few readers are old enough to remember Fibber McGee opening his radio closet, but I can still hear the clickety-clatter and clashing cymbals as all the contents came crashing down in those old broadcasts. My closets are not that bad or that congested.
Perhaps it is better to discuss the kitchen, which is an area where I can truly say that I have shown improvement over time. This was not always the case. Since my culinary skills have not increased over all my years of cooking, I burn a pot every now and again. I always soak it. Why linger over the dishes if you have to toss dinner in the garbage? I say scrape and toss the scorched contents, soak the pot, and make a quick salad. My first husband had a problem with this rule, and, come to think of it, so did the second. Hmmm, I think I’m discovering something here.
Men of my generation did not help with the dishes, and did not cook, either. So why should I have revealed where I put the soaking pot? How long it had been there? Please. I chose the oven for the first day or so. When I suddenly encountered it after an unplanned delay, the odor was always a surprise. Then I would take it outdoors to toss the stuff not already welded to the sides of the pan into the garden and return to scour it. This process left just the burned residue, which in turn called for another soaking, another hiding place. One needs to be resourceful when choosing a different spot… the back porch, maybe.
When I went to deliver my son in 1964, the hospital stay was five days, and my mother-in-law came over to help by cleaning my house. She discovered a sequestered soaking pot after it emitted a low belching sound from the bottom of the storage shelves on the back porch, and saw its bubbling and frothing away as the sign of growing bacteria and all around negligence. There was no end to the story. The pot was still waiting for me when I got back home with the new baby.
I am a responsible, daily dishwasher, and also have a novel way of washing the floor. I recently scanned through a November 2010 issue of Good Housekeeping, and found an article on Jamie Lee Curtis and her super-organized home. She is systematic, but still manages one bit of kitchen cleanup the same way I do: she scrubs her floor by using damp white cleaning cloths under her dancing feet. I did this forty years ago, telling my children what fun it was and then suddenly we were all together in the kitchen skating around on ragged old towel scraps with the radio up, laughing at each other’s moves. With the children grown, cleanup is once again a solitary venture, which may be a clue as to why any social being would hate being confined to the domestic front. Females are not homebound anymore.
When I was a kid, I only had to help my mother out—to play a small part in a larger team. When I married at twenty, a whole mountain of household maintenance tasks fell on my shoulders, in addition to my job and then childcare. I developed a rash after a few months of washing dishes, a dermatitis that erupted under my wedding ring and spread upwards. After one dermatologist described it as dishpan hands, the allergy grew worse and worse. The light began to dawn on me that something could be wrong with my life when the rash approached my armpits. Years later I got a prescription for hydrocortisone ointment, but in the mid 1960s I was amazed that right after separating from my husband, and tossing that wedding ring down the toilet, the rash disappeared. Possibly it was a better ointment, possibly it was removing the ring that I suspect caused the outbreak, but my cure worked for me.
As my children went out into the world, I worked toward completing my first goal of becoming a teacher, then switched to school counseling before I retired. I was able to develop a life of reading, traveling, gardening, and having some fun along the way. So in the end, I was not a household drudge. My children turned out to be good people even though I lived my life with a nod to domestic maintenance, not as a slave of it.
