Victor’s definition involves absolutely everything perfectly in its place (except for the eight thousand wires and extension cords sticking out from every electronic device in our house, which are all apparently invisible to him). It also includes all of this happening magically, without his actually ever being involved in the cleaning at all (except for the one time when I ran into the living room because I thought I heard him doing whip-its,1 but turns out he was just spraying furniture polish. It’s amazing how alike the sound of canned whipped cream squirted directly into the mouth and lemon-scented Pledge can be. I’d felt guilty for a second that Victor was actually cleaning without me, but then I realized that he was just polishing the gearshift of his car and I went back to watching zombie movies).
My definition of a clean house is much simpler. I’m fine with the clutter of mail and magazines and toys lying around as long as it’s clean and sanitary underneath the clutter. As far as I’m concerned, a house should look lived-in, and I consider it clean as long as I don’t stick to it and it doesn’t give me cholera. I can ignore the piles of clothes on the guest room bed because I know they’re all straight from the dryer and just waiting to be folded. Victor, on the other hand, will glare at the growing pile and huff loudly over and over until I finally break down and ask him why he sounds like he’s deflating. We look into the same guest bedroom and see two entirely different things. Victor sees a dangerous volcano erupting with clothes that I must be intentionally refusing to hang up because I’m lazy and am purposely trying to make him have a nervous breakdown. I see it as a personal achievement . . . a physical manifestation of all the laundry I’ve done over the last few months. It’s like a strange trophy made of clothes that I’ve forgotten I even owned. Victor says it’s like a crazy person lives in our house and is sculpting Mount Vesuvius out of the sweaters that need to be in storage. This is when I remind him exactly why doors were invented, and I close the guest bedroom door. “See?” I say. “Problem solved.”
“You can’t fix a problem by just not using rooms in the house,” he argues, and I point out how ridiculous he’s being, as I use that room all the damn time. I use it as a giant drawer for clothes that need to be hung up. And also to store my elliptical trainer. Victor then points out that I’m no longer even using the trainer “for its intended purposes,” and I calmly explain that he’s wrong, because I’d bought it years ago intending to work out with it until I got bored with it, and then to eventually use it as a frame to air-dry our freshly washed comforters and coverlets. If anything I should be getting points for being so farsighted, and also for not shrinking all of our comforters in the dryer. If it were left up to Victor we’d all be sleeping on comforters the size of hankies. I’m not even sure why I even have to explain this. Victor says he’s not sure either, but I suspect we’re not talking about the same thing.
This exact conversation was still running through my mind this morning when I was cleaning up the house. I’d loaded and turned on the dishwasher, but a few minutes later I noticed that the laundry detergent container was out on the counter next to the dishwasher, even though I hadn’t done laundry in days. I felt a little sick to my stomach as I thought, “Fuck. Did I just put laundry detergent in the dishwasher?”
And this is when I kind of panicked, because last year I’d accidentally put hand soap in the dishwasher, and when I came back the entire house had exploded in foam. It looked like one of those foam parties that teens have at raves, except not as awesome, because Victor was pissed and I didn’t own any cool techno music or Ecstasy. It had been a nightmare to clean up, and I was terrified that I’d just done it again, so I prayed that Victor would just stay in the bedroom and I logged on to Twitter. (For those of you who don’t know what Twitter is, it’s like Facebook except easier, and you can use it to tell people what your cat is doing and also to ask for advice. It’s like accessing the hivemind and it is both great and horrible.) I logged on to Twitter and wrote, “Hypothetically speaking, if I accidentally put laundry detergent in the dishwasher will that make my dishwasher explode? I kind of need to know as soon as possible.” Half of the people responding were all, “Oh, you’ll be fine, dumb-ass,” and the other half were like, “THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE. GET OUT NOW.” One guy wrote, “Actually, it’ll help remove the bloodstains,” which just made me wonder what he uses his dishwasher for. But I was still worried, so I wrapped a comforter around the dishwasher in case it started to leak, because comforters are a lot like giant maxipads. I felt pretty proud of my ingenuity. This pride lasted for about ten seconds, until Victor walked in and said, “Why in the hell is there a comforter wrapped around the dishwasher?” and I didn’t want to explain it, because he still hasn’t stopped talking about the last time I set the oven on fire, and that was years ago, people. Like, let’s live in the present already, right? But then I remember that in the present I may have just destroyed our dishwasher by dumping a bunch of Tide into it. I wasn’t ready to admit that yet, though, because it was still vaguely possible that I’d used the right soap all along, so instead I just told Victor that the dishwasher was cold, and he was all, “What. The. Fuck?”