My wife plunked a Pledge hankie in my hand and I slapped the car keys in hers. “Good luck,” we said in unison. She then drove to work and I cleaned the house. It was her first day as a go-to-work mom, mine as a stay-at-home dad.
To be honest, instead of cleaning the house, I sat down and avoided cleaning the house by reading a book about cleaning houses — Is There Life After Housework? by Don Aslett. By pouring through the book for several days, I had the beatific experience of feeling productive without lifting a finger.
Finally I swung into action. Aslett recommends first cleaning the main bedroom, mainly because it’s already clean. That’s because in the main bedroom you’ll find the wife and not the children. By cleaning a clean bedroom, the husband gets a psychological boost. “What a good job I’ve done, even though I haven’t done anything!”
The first order of business: get a weapon. I fashioned one by wrapping the Pledge hankie around the sweeper. Then I jabbed the sweeper into a ceiling corner and demolished an inchoate cobweb. I chortled like a lunatic.
Flushed with the power of my weapon, I then lunged beneath the bed. When I yanked the hankie out, my blood coagulated: the hankie was as black as a Joe Esterhaus lung. What shenanigans were going on down there? As I twisted and peered beneath the bed, dustballs big as chore boys ricocheted around.
I got angry. I wrapped another hankie around the sweeper and attacked. Within seconds, the dustballs overwhelmed the hankie. I wrapped and unwrapped five more hankies before the dustballs capitulated.
I gleamed. Here was progress. As a school teacher, I never knew if I made an impact on people. Kids came into my room either smart or dumb and pretty much left that way. But here my mark was profound. I was changing the world in a radical, gleaming, immaculate way.
I smiled and ran downstairs with the final hankie, dustballs clinging to it like monkeys. I waved it in front of my wife who, as the husband, propped her feet on the ottoman, sipped a Manhattan, and read the paper. “Look, honey,” I crowed, “Look at the filth I have found!” I felt so proud of myself, like a cat presenting its master a dead mouse.
My wife peeked up from her paper and said, “Nice.” And then she continued reading.
“What do you mean, ‘Nice’?” I demanded. “Nice is for sweeping the kitchen floor. Terrific is for diving under that bed and eradicating pestilence!”
“Joe, let me explain something to you about the wife and husband roles. It is the job of the wife to do all the cleaning. It is the job of the husband not to notice the wife is doing all the cleaning.”
“Wait a minute,” I stammered, “what kind of role-playing game is that?”
“It’s a game you’ve played very well for nine years.”
Was she joking? The next day, to be certain, I cleaned the house as though I were an octopus with vacuum tentacles. Besides the usual floors, walls, and ceilings, I pounced upon an unlikely cleaning candidate: spice bottles. Under the faucet I plunged each one, then dried and polished them. On the rack did they ever dance and glitter!
Then I stuck my head into the puny pit of hell: the microwave. A Jackson Pollock painting of tomato sauce, oatmeal, ground chuck grease, and the entire leftover tray. A garbage can of maggots would have been more appealing.
“These are my sins,” I shook my head. “The sins of my gluttony.” Rather than shirking responsibility, however, I ran to the basement and returned with the requisite tools: scouring pad, putty knife, snorkel and goggles. For an hour I scrubbed, scraped, rinsed, and wretched. Afterwards, the place shimmered like a palace.
Finally the pièce de résistance. Grabbing a clean diaper, I dusted all the books in our bookcase. First the spines. Then the tops. Then the spaces between the books. Am I a madman, or what?
Then I waited for my wife to come home and gush encomiums about the crystalline house. “Hello, honey,” I shouted.
She kissed me, breezed past, and sat down to sort through the mail. I then noticed something: I noticed that she wasn’t noticing the clean house. I folded my arms and simmered.
She said, “How was your day?”
‘My day? You’re asking me about my day? Isn’t that ironic.” When I am peeved I always say ironic, because I don’t know what it means.
“Oh, oh—you’re using the word ironic. What’s your problem?”
“Oh, now I have the problem? Me? Interesting. Hey, have you read any books lately?”
She was right. The husband doesn’t notice a clean house. Although I resorted myself to being a husband and sulked for a week, always saying “Nothing,” when she asked me what was the matter, I have learned to love cleaning not for her approbation but for the lesson that dirt has taught me.
Namely, that dirt will prevail. I could clean the house for two months, then lock the kids in a dungeon, then swathe the house in Saran Wrap, then launch it into outer space for five years. Upon the house returning to earth, I could step into the kitchen and find several crushed Cheerios.
Dirt permits the illusion of being conquered. Dirt must be cleaned, but an hour later dustballs roll in and tomato soup splatters in the microwave. Dirt keeps a man humble, even one armed with a weapon.