Starting this week with a meditation on housework...

followed by "Gringolandia" (a new installment of Boardinghouse Reach), a poem--and a recipe for vegetarian lasagna

Menial Amnesia

I’m the first to concede that there is almost nothing redeeming or soul-enriching to be found in the heavy labor of cleanser, disinfectant, and bleach. If there were, right-minded and affluent people throughout the centuries would have done this work for their spiritual growth and emotional satisfaction instead of hiring other, less affluent people to do it for them.

Coming home to a freshly cleaned house is an enormous and not at all a superficial pleasure, as if one’s soul had just been freshly scrubbed. It’s like being able to breathe again after having a cold. It’s crawling out from the rubble after an earthquake.

Making the house that way yourself is nothing but hard, time-consuming labor. It’s not even servitude, as no one pays you to do it: it’s slavery. How many hundreds, thousands of things can I think of that I would rather do than clean a toilet? And yet a dirty toilet is not only offensive but demoralizing.

Women of my generation all too often feel guilty if someone comes over and their house is untidy: we feel a deeply personal sense of inadequacy if there are dirty dishes in the sink, or jam and egg stains on the kitchen counter.

Do heterosexual bachelors feel this link between their sense of self-worth and the state of their household? I don’t think so. There’s some sort of built-in excuse, some global legislation that tells them it’s okay: that boys will be boys. Maybe there’s even something in it that enhances reproductive success, on a biological level—something that signals the need for what has shamelessly been called through the ages “a woman’s touch.” People like my father might feel infuriated at a less than pristine home environment. But did he ever lift a toilet brush to make things better?

It’s my theory that women undergo a process of dissociation that allows them to get the housework done without fully acknowledging to themselves (and certainly not to others) that they’re doing it: a sort of menial amnesia.  It’s similar to the out-of-time phenomena of putting your hair in rollers or bleaching your mustache or taking a tweezer between waxings to your pubic hair. Time stops when you start these tasks—and God forbid that anyone should ring the doorbell with the expectation that you’ll answer. The clock only starts ticking again when the curlers are unrolled and put away, the bleaching cream is safely stashed and your pubic triangle is as perfectly edged as a well-manicured suburban lawn.

Your house is simply supposed to look fabulous without your seeming to have expended any effort to make it look that way (just as, in the best of all possible worlds, you look gorgeous and glowing, smell of soap and shampoo, are sipping a glass of red wine and reading a novel by the fire as your guests arrive for the three-course meal you’ve just prepared—and, of course, there’s not a dirty dish to be seen anywhere in the kitchen).

No man finds the sight of his lady love scrubbing the toilet to be in the slightest way erotic. Oh, perhaps there’s a fetishist somewhere who is really turned on by the sight of a rubber-gloved woman bending over with a toilet brush in her hand; but this is definitely not something that has entered the mainstream (nor would I particularly want it to).

So we scrub our toilets when we are alone: it is both shameful to scrub them and shameful for them to go for any length of time unscrubbed. We’re confused about our relationship to household chores—but they’re loaded with psychological portent for us.

I’ve noticed over the years that one of my initial lines of defense when feelings of malaise or inadequacy come on is to roll up my sleeves and clean the bathroom. It’s a futile journey for me into the past—an attempt to protect my mother and, by extension, myself from my father’s wrath, from overwhelming feelings of inadequacy and shame.

But, I’ll tell you: I’d much rather get a massage or a facial, or go out and buy some new lingerie, or do any number of uplifting things a woman of means is able to do. Whenever I have the money, I hire someone else to clean the house.

Photo by Crystal de Passillé-Chabot on Unsplash

***

Gringolandia

Very soon after Allison moved in, I got a call from one of the nursery school parents saying that she’d given my number to a friend who had a nephew newly arrived from Colombia and needing a place to stay.

Rafael was a thirty-three-year-old business student with the listless good looks of someone who knows that he will always be taken care of. Possessed of fluent although somewhat formal English, he gave the impression of having gone straight from boyhood to a self-satisfied middle age, by-passing altogether anything resembling turbulent youth. He was the youngest son of a family connected to the president of Colombia. Although he’d already launched himself in the business world in his own country, his mother was supporting him during his sojourn in Gringolandia, as I later overheard him refer to our household in a telephone call home. The room suited him; he moved in the day after our interview.

Colby was in Santa Cruz all this time, working on a job. The flu I’d been fighting during the move simply felled me once I was in the new house and had my full complement of boarders. I welcomed everyone, promised I’d start cooking again soon, and then went to bed and put my head under the covers like a sick ostrich.

***

The house my parents bought in Orange County was a model home, which meant that the window trimmings, rugs, light fixtures and other elements of the décor were already in place when we moved in.

For the first time in my life, my brother and I were to have separate bedrooms. His was trimmed in orange, with heavy orange drapes, an oval orange rug and a nubbly, burnt-orange bedspread. He spent most of his time in that bedroom when he wasn’t in school, reading Edgar Rice Burroughs novels or gluing together a fleet of plastic model airplanes suspended by monofilament from the ceiling.

Gabe was fourteen years old when we moved to Orange. Not only was he afflicted with asthma and adolescence, but he had been whacked and shaken many times by my father during the course of what must have been a dreadful childhood. My mother had accused him at least once of being a coward for not defending her when my father’s fists flew her way. I remember that Daddy had Mom backed up against the wall in the hallway. I can remember the texture of the white plaster, how it stood out in relief. It must have been nighttime. I can remember the sight of Gabe cowering in a doorway, frail and impossibly thin, and Mom’s face distorted by crying, looking sideways down the hallway toward my brother, and the accusation that was not so much hurled as sobbed. And yet I could feel it land like a blow from a fist on my brother’s face.

In the suffocating heat of summer, with his window closed because the breeze and the pollen and everything in the outside world seemed to aggravate his asthma, my brother’s room smelled of old socks and semen. He didn’t have a lot of friends. He was always luring me inside his room with promises of games or mysterious allusions to things we could look at under his microscope. We spent long hours behind his closed door while he applied whatever bribes he could think of to get me to scratch his pimply back, and tried to talk me into touching him as he stroked himself into a grotesque state of engorgement and I looked on with repulsed fascination.

In the course of recalling some other event from those years, my mother told me how Nana, on her visits to us in Orange, would ask her, “What the hell are they doing in there alone for so many hours?” I don’t think it was a question my mother, in her numbed state of being, ever seriously entertained.

My bedroom was done up in shades of purple. I was quite enamored of the light fixture that hung down from the ceiling near my bed—it was made of twisted strips of aluminum that were silver on one side and shiny magenta on the other, and cast kaleidoscopic shadows when the lamp was spun on its cord. I spent a lot of time in my room reading, but also dug up the gravel in the side yard outside my window, under the clothesline, and planted a bed of spindly pink carnations whose perfume drenched my dreams on very hot nights.

Soon after we moved in, before the school year started, we were grilling those salmon steaks on a hibachi in the atrium. My dad was working as advertising manager for a grocery store chain—which was why we’d moved to Orange County in the first place, so he wouldn’t have to make the long, treacherous commute on the freeways from Los Angeles every day. He often got to take home the food that was used in the market’s photo spreads (if it hadn’t been spread with something toxic to make it shinier or more colorful)—that’s where the salmon came from.

After we’d picked the bones clean, my father held me on his lap and reminded me how I’d begged and begged him and my mother to have another baby. And now, he told me softly, they were going to have one.

I murmured something to the effect of, “Oh, that’s wonderful,” paused for a few decorous moments, and then made a beeline for my room, where I cried with my face buried in my quilted purple bedspread.

I’m not even sure why I cried, and I don’t think it was because of anything so simple as reluctance to share my new room. Even though my father had what we euphemistically called then a horrible temper, and regularly throttled and struck both my mother and brother, he had never made me the victim of his violence. Perhaps I feared that I would lose my protected status when I was no longer the youngest child.

I adored my father, who was handsome and soft-spoken and sensitive when he wasn’t in one of his rages. He and I walked everywhere hand in hand. We sang sea shanties together on long drives. He taught me how to draw. He and my brother and I made sun-prints out on the patio in the old house. He gave me a pocketknife and a bar of soap when I was about eight or nine and taught me how to carve.

Life would have been much simpler to fathom, in childhood and later on, if my father had been merely hateful. I remember him sitting me in his lap one day and with tears in his eyes postulating that people as we were today would perhaps eventually come to be seen as the missing link between animals and humanity. He was the family’s arbiter of taste, the one whose brains and artistic talent I had supposedly inherited. I even looked like his side of the family. Long after I was grown, my father would tell me with a conspiratorial tone meant to flatter me, I think, that by the time I was seven I was my mother’s intellectual superior.

I have no doubt that he conveyed the same stupid message repeatedly to my mother throughout my childhood. Combined with my immunity to his violence and my physical resemblance to him, this set the stage for an impossible relationship between me and my mom, who was always proud of me but never seemed to like me very much. Long after they were divorced, her words to me were full of the bile meant for him, saved up but unspoken for the twenty-three years they were known as man and wife and she lived in fear of him.

One of the rooms off the atrium was designated as my father’s studio. He kept his drafting table and art supplies there. The room always had a wonderfully evocative smell of ink and turpentine—it was a little spot of Bohemia in our suburban tract home. Daddy also kept several rifles mounted on the wall. I wasn’t really afraid of these guns, as he’d taught me to shoot them even before we’d left Crestwood Hills. That’s how far apart the houses were there—we shot at targets and swinging cans in the backyard, something that would have been unthinkable in our new tract.

It seems faintly absurd to me now, but my father the flaming liberal belonged to the National Rifle Association, and he’d go out to rifle ranges, sometimes in Orange County, for target practice. But I never went with him, as far as I can remember. The studio was the place where he’d retreat after his anger had peaked and he’d hit someone, and my big fear was that he’d go in there one day and shoot himself.

***

My general approach to the daunting amount of housework required by our new abode was to hope that my boarders would see fit to help me with it. Allison, immediately recognizing my need—for instance, it was impossible for me to do the dishes and put Kyle to bed at a decent hour—fashioned a beautifully crafted chore wheel mounted to a magnet and posted on the refrigerator door. The outer circle divided all the household chores into four parts; an inner wheel displayed our names. So, week to week, we each had a different set of chores and, in theory, at least, everything would get done. Shopping and cooking, which were my special jobs, were not on the list.

The trouble was that both Paco and Rafael grew up in a world where all the menial work was done by domestic servants. Rafael used to go outside to the driveway every night after dinner to smoke. When I suggested that perhaps he could put out the kitchen garbage at the same time, he looked at me as if I’d asked him to lick the toilet seat.

Allison, strongly schooled in democratic principles and of a generation that takes feminism for granted, was convinced that the chore wheel would make everything right: Rafael would surely see the justice of doing the same chores that the rest of us were doing. But it was truly as if we’d asked the president of Colombia himself to bus the dishes at a state dinner. Emptying the garbage was not only a repulsive and inappropriate demand; it was simply out of the question. Rafael was most annoyed at me for asking, and sulked for several days. Finally, to demonstrate that he wasn’t an unreasonable human being, he began to load dishes into the dishwasher one week a month on the evenings when he’d dined at home.

 All the men who ate at my table, including Colby, paid homage to the situation by doing dishes—that is, they would rinse off the dirty dishes and put them in the dishwasher. Wiping off the counters and stove, or washing more than the insides of the cooking pots, was not part of their concept of what it means to do the dishes. Men, in this regard, are perhaps more literal-minded than women. I would come upstairs, after putting my little night-owl to bed, and wipe up the spills of food, wipe down the table and placemats and wash the pots over again.

In truth, I was grateful for all the help I got. Allison was the only one who, when it was her turn, did a really stellar job in the kitchen. She was also the only one, besides me, who did any of the other chores on our wheel of work, vacuuming, dusting, mopping, cleaning bathrooms. Colby, although he often took other people’s turns doing dishes (and always took mine), wasn’t even on the chore wheel. This seemed to be out of a general sense of denial that he was really living with me—even though he slept in my bed every night except on nights when he was working out of town. He didn’t have Rafael’s squeamishness about putting out the garbage—but he was no more inclined than either of the other two men raised south of the border to don rubber gloves and attack the household chores.

***

The Letter to My Brother I Will Never Send

I was thinking about how we competed for artichoke leaves,
dipped in lemon-laced butter. Or to liberate the most pomegranate seeds
from their pale honeycomb of flesh.

Each treat became rarer and more wonderful
because of our rivalrous delectation and greed.

Five years older than I, you were the only star I had to follow
in those earliest years. Listening as you played your guitar,
tagging along with you and your friends, I failed to notice
when the way you looked at me changed.

Fourteen years old when our baby sister was born,
at the mercy of the memories we shared
and an onslaught of hormones all your own.

There was no moral compass to follow within our family’s
secret, ugly spaces, a maze with a Minotaur,
a place where you and our mother
shared the role of the monster’s victim.

He beat you and she shamed you,
when all you wanted—like any child—
was their love.

Our sister sees me as the one who failed to protect her,
who abandoned her in the labyrinth.

Was it anyone’s fault? The Minotaur himself was made
from his parents’ sins.

Three siblings who haven’t seen one another
in over a decade, bereft of the comfort that comes
with mourning a loved one who dies.

We were a family once, at least briefly,
in other people’s eyes.

Copyright ©️ 2024 by Barbara Quick

Going Green

Vegetarian Lasagna

This is a recipe I developed while I was pregnant with Kyle, when my prenatal yoga teacher told me that it’s very good to eat kale. I can’t remember precisely why—something to do with calcium, I think. Anyway, it’s the sort of food item that can be difficult to serve in appetizing ways, especially for people who are nervous in the presence of green leafy vegetables. All my boarders have agreed, though, that this is the best lasagna they’ve ever tasted—and it’s just loaded with kale.

Ingredients

3 sheets of fresh, uncut pasta

1 large bunch of organic kale, lightly steamed, well chopped and drained

2 bottles of marinara sauce or the equivalent amount of homemade

1-1/2 tubs of ricotta cheese (fat-free works just fine if you’re concerned about calories)

about 1/4 lb of Romano cheese, grated

1 lb part-skim mozzarella cheese, shredded

Assembly

Coat the bottom of a glass or ceramic lasagna pan with sauce (a couple of ladlefuls). Unroll the first sheet of pasta; trim to fit (save trimmings for final layer). Put about a third of the shredded mozzarella over the pasta, followed by dollops of ricotta, about a third of the chopped kale, and a layer of sauce, which you’ll sprinkle with the grated Romano cheese. Start over again with another sheet of pasta. End with pasta, sauce, and Romano cheese (the final layer can be pieced together out of the trimmings, depending on the size of the pasta sheets and your lasagna pan).

Cover with foil and bake in a 350 oven until bubbling, usually about 20 minutes; uncover for the last five minutes or so.

Eat it and feel that you’re nurturing the part of you that is always pregnant (whether you’re male or female). Eat it to strengthen the bones of your resolve, eat it so that all the parts of yourself that you want to nurture will grow beautifully inside you. Eat it and dream of your potential.

Photo by Margarita Zueva on Unsplash