15 March 1999: Doing Dishes

When my father visited RDC and me in Denver in the fall of 1996, one of the first things he said about the house was "So you've got a dishwasher." Yes, we had, and it made me so happy that the fact of its existence was the only thing I immediately registered from his comment, which was accompanied by some kind of smile. So I replied, "Yes we have, and how I do enjoy it." Later, I wondered at his tone as well as his words. Why would he mention it? Who knew.

In the week he stayed, he scrupulously washed his breakfast dishes in the sink. For lunches he was generally out, and I cleaned up after supper and ran the dishwasher--a loud one to be sure--at bedtime. The interesting thing about his washing was that no matter how diligently he approached the task, the saucepan and bowl and cup in the drain always had a streak of oatmeal or coffee on the outside (and I would put them in the dishwasher). I figured he was trying to be a tidy guest or had a thing about leaving breakfast dishes in the sink all day.

My father has tics of fastidiousness that I consider typical of smokers, current or former. He made the bed neatly every morning, as a good guest ought. He arranged his toilet articles with military precision, as a Green Beret ought. Every evening, he laid out the clothes he planned to wear the next day on the top of his suitcase. From my point of view this last is, strictly speaking, untidy, but whatever. Maybe not leaving dishes in the sink for twelve hours was another tic. I knew he had these weird things and that it wasn't only part of his ex-smoker personality. His mother ironed underwear, belying to me a woman with too much time on her hands rather than with an admirable element of hausfrauism.

Not before time, he departed, and I called my sister to relate all the stories and to be comforted. "And he washed all his dishes by hand. Does he have some thing about dishes in the sink all day or was he just being an overattentive guest?" By this time, I was ready to analyze and interpret his every word and quirk.

"Don't you know?" my sister asked. "Don't you remember how mad he was when Mom bought the dishwasher? He hates dishwashers."

The idea of such an irrational hatred is so far beyond the pale of my definition of insanity that it had never occurred to me, not even to apply to him. "You're kidding."

"Nope."

"In that case, I wonder--just idly now--why a man who loathes dishwashers never washed a single plate during our childhood, not even when such an action might have kept the appliance from darkening his doorstep."

We burst out laughing.

My mother bought the dishwasher when I was in fourth or fifth grade with money from her first post-me full-time job. I didn't know at the time, or didn't remember eighteen years later, that this was a source of argument. For years I thought dishwashers hadn't been invented yet in the mid '60s when they built the house and that afterward they couldn't afford one. When I was in high school my mother had the house valued, and I remember the appraiser asking whether there was a disposer in the sink. My mother ejaculated bitterly, "No, my ex-husband didn't believe in any of the modern conveniences." Which is why that outhouse is in the yard (I exaggerate).

When CLH later visited our father and his girlfriend at their new house, which was probably built in the '70s, I was curious to know whether a dishwasher was present. Yes it was. "So do they use it, or does Sheryl do all the dishes?" CLH blurted, "I think he might do them." My jaw dropped. He doing dishes with a woman, his woman, present? We concurred that this relationship has wrought a marvelous change in him. He might still be insane (not to use a dishwasher) but at least he takes enough responsibility for his weirdness that he doesn't make her suffer for it.

Or for that particular element of it. He's not above making the dog suffer for it. Apparently Sam is not allowed to scratch. "Dad, that's a dog," my sister reminded him. He insists the dog doesn't need to scratch that much (but consciously chooses to vex him) and sheds too much on the rug, which is a new concern of his now that he operates the vacuum cleaner. Hearing that, I had to sit down and I insisted upon verification.

CLH elaborated. "I think he does the dishes because when I would use a glass to have a drink of water and then set the glass by the sink for a drink later, that glass would be gone, washed and put away, when I wanted another drink. And he's home now so who else would it be?" (Our father is retired; his girlfriend holds an outside job.) And in a miraculous transmogrification, he understands that a retired man can keep the house so that a woman working 40 hours at one job needn't fulfill a second at home. At this point I had to lie down.

This is why, CLH theorizes, the dog is not allowed to scratch, which thereby increases our father's workload. Suddenly it all became clear. Our father learned from our other grandmother (his mother--I call her my other grandmother to clarify my favoritism) that you serve the furniture, it does not serve you.

That is one thing, anyway, that he and my mother had in common. Everyone knows that the arms of a couch are its most comfortable perch, that a table is more comfortable to sit upon than a chair, that the counters in a house should support a body's weight. Everyone, that is, except my parents. Confessing that my furniture serves me, not vice versa, reliably marks me as a product of the post-Depression Era. My parents are too, but only first-generation; I came along late enough to rebel instead of mindlessly obey these alien tenets. I am willing to take a modicum of care with my furnishings, for instance not to spill spaghetti sauce on the carpet (as my father did the first evening of his visit), but I do use the furnishings.

Unlike my paternal grandmother, who had a rug with a nap to it upon which one was permitted (grudgingly) to walk, so long as one left no footprints. Those vacuum-cleaner tracks had to remain intact and trackable from one vacuuming to the next, giving a (grudgingly) visiting grandchild who had not mastered that rice-paper walking trick from "Kung Fu" about two minutes--those immediately preceding the daily vacuuming--to stir.

With your water heater set at a prudent temperature, does a dishwasher use an unconscionable amount of electricity? Thoreau would say yes, except you could then ask him how many nails he built his cabin with. As far as I know my father has no problem with clothes-washing machines, probably because his mother had owned one--they weren't newfangled in his day. I myself think clothes-drying machines are ridiculous, as is the drying cycle of a dishwashing machine. Why use energy to do something that will happen anyway? (I have the same problem with drying dishes by hand: it's a waste of time.) A dishwasher, on the other hand, is a labor- if not energy-saving device and one of the perks of Usan living as far as I'm concerned.

By the way, you get a star if you recognize that today's title is taken from Maurice Sendak's Alligators All Around. If you didn't know that, how did you learn your alphabet? Chris van Allsburg's The Z Was Zapped? Edmund Gorey The Ghastlycrumb Tinies?