ja n et won d r a
Cleaning Theory
Bits of planets, burst stars have sifted down,
Dust from remote globes of the universe
Drops in our closets, piles in corners softly
—gjertrud schnackenberg, “Dusting”
S
ometimes i like to think about cleaning. Please do not confuse thinking
with doing, though. Who would prefer mopping to trimming the sails while
rounding the point of a small tropical island, for example? Or lounging in a
coVeehouse or even in front of the TV—which is not to say cleaning lacks its own
peculiar satisfactions. But it is, ultimately, a chore, a repetitive activity that bears
within it the seeds of its own undoing.
Furthermore, thinking about cleaning doesn’t occupy my mind any more than
the inXuence of the jet stream on weather patterns in the United States or risk
theory or the enigma of thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. Of course I meditate on
cleaning as I clean, but I would prefer for my thoughts to wander without a dustcloth in my hand or a canister of scouring powder. Cleaning is best contemplated
while reclining, with a clean house surrounding you. I’ve found (and I’ve been at
this for years) that one’s thinking is subtly disrupted by newspapers scattered on
the Persian carpet and the nearly imperceptible ringing as motes of dust strike the
Wling cabinet.
What fascinates me is the lore of cleaning, the secret society created when
women talk about housekeeping as one cog in the complex machinery of their
lives, and the very gendered question of cleanliness as an ethic. There are speciWc
rules for cleaning, ones that are sometimes not inherited by the next generation
or are mistransmitted—some untidy synapse in the brain of the orderly world.
Normally these rules are handed down on the distaV side, as we used to say, from
grandmother to mother to daughter, from time immemorial and onward into
eternity. If we ask why—why Comet instead of Ajax?—there may be a speciWc
answer, but just as often the reply is, “Well, that’s what your grandmother used.”
But cleaning theory is always evolving, even if we are unconscious of the innovations. We no longer throw sand on the Xoor, as pioneer women did, using it as a
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primitive polish as a well as a matrix to trap even Wner grains of dirt when sweeping, nor do we use it to scour pans. Yet I like to feel myself linked to these foremothers even as I suspect they would be appalled by my cleaning habits.
To be honest, one of the challenges of this essay is to talk and think about
cleaning without revealing too many embarrassing details about my own practices. From birth, women are taught, through means direct and indirect, that their
value as romantic partners, as moral agents—in fact, their very femininity—can
be assessed through a close reading of their household habits. While a man’s home
is his castle, a woman’s is a moral register. I remember my second get-together
with the man who would be my partner for nearly two decades. The day before,
we had agreed to meet in a coVeehouse in the Haight-Ashbury and were so mutually enamored that I was delighted when he called me the next day. But when he
suggested he should come over to my house within the hour, I panicked. I knew
this fresh romance would wither if he saw my apartment before I had vacuumed,
dusted, cleaned the windows and stove, and Wled the piles of poems, essays, and
correspondence stacked high enough in the living room to provide additional
seating. You can never undo a Wrst impression, our mothers teach us, and I would
have risked compromising this relationship in bloom rather than expose my slovenly ways. Instead we met in Golden Gate Park, which is at times untidy but at
least is not my responsibility.
Even today I take elaborate evasive measures rather than allow a new friend or
acquaintance to enter the house before it has been cleaned. Sadly, this cuts down
a good deal on my social activity, for like most women of my generation, I work
more than full time and have much on my mind besides housekeeping. I am not
Harriet Craig, the woman obsessed with household order in Dorothy Arzner’s
Wlm Craig’s Wife, who asks, “What else has a woman but her home?” I am not
house-proud, but I am house-ashamed. Even when someone comes over whom
I have known for years, if the house is a few days past clean (which it always is), I
say, “The house is a mess, but come on in.” Somehow this statement indemniWes
me; the implied message is, “This is my home, but this is not my idea of a clean
house.” Plato would be proud: somewhere, hovering in the air like a celestial cop,
is the idea of the Immaculate, still intact. Our little dwellings on earth are just
dim, imperfect recollections of some ideal antiseptic bathroom, smooth bed with
hospital corners, and perfect dining table adorned with fresh Xowers centered
on unspotted linen. While scrubbing, I sometimes think of my home economics teacher from junior high school, the stylish, haughty, and improbably named
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Miss Couture, who pronounced that a kitchen is not truly well turned out until
the sink is both wiped clean and thoroughly dried. Someday I’d like to drop into
her kitchen unannounced.
Unpacking that hovering image of the Immaculate, I detect the Virgin Mary
against a backdrop of cloudless blue sky, for the condition of a woman’s home is
intimately tied up with a vision of her sexuality, her bodily house. It is no wonder,
then, that words like slob, slovenly, and slattern—the frightening slur of those
Anglo-Saxon sl’s—slide right into slut. (Indeed, the earliest recorded meaning of
slut in English, from Hoccleve’s “Letter to Cupid,” published in 1402, is a woman
of dirty or untidy habits or appearance, although by 1450 the word has already
shaded into a condemnation of female sexuality.) The sexual revolution and feminism have carried us to the point where we may sleep with whom we choose, but,
by God, the sheets had better be clean when we lie down and the bathtub free of
embarrassing rings when we arise to wash the evidence from our bodies.
Men clean, too—some do—but they do not hold themselves to the rigid standards of past female generations, nor are they party to the private discussions
women hold about household order, although some gay men may be the exception. Recently I have taken to asking women about their kitchens: Do they have a
silverware drawer and a junk drawer, the latter containing items such as a carrot
peeler, an eggbeater, and a can opener, all thrown together in a jumble? I learned
this organization from my mother, who learned it from hers, so I have duplicated
the kitchens of two generations of my female relations—maybe more—in every
house or apartment where I’ve lived. For this line of questioning, I am indebted
to the mother of my former partner, for I remember visiting her house for the
Wrst time and, while I was helping her prepare a meal, locating her kitchen junk
drawer. Her Wrst impulse was, not surprisingly, to apologize about the disorder,
imagining, I suppose, that my own kitchen looked like House Beautiful. I reassured her, “It’s the junk drawer. It’s supposed to be a mess.” Sometimes I boast I
can walk into any woman’s kitchen and Wnd the silverware after opening only two
drawers, three at most. I exaggerate, though, because I only know about middle
class kitchens, but I suspect working class ones are much the same, for my knowledge of housekeeping is Wrmly rooted in that familiar tale of immigrant forebears
rising—up to a certain point—through the American ranks. The rich, for all I
know, have no junk drawer because they send their eggs out to be beaten.
Just the other day, in asking a friend about her kitchen arrangements, I revealed
that for many years—until I was forty—I didn’t have a silverware organizer.
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Finally, I bought a nice, old wooden one at a garage sale. She was incredulous, this
woman in her midtwenties. “How could you manage?” she asked. “How could
you Wnd anything?” I was a little taken aback. What a bohemian act, what a wild
woman! To open a drawer and identify a fork by its shape rather than its location!
Like the “little lady” in the western, women are still taking the mad disarray of the
world, whether it be unruly silverware or the vast, disorganized landscape of the
Wild West, and straightening it out, putting the forks in the fork spot and tidying
up the streets of Dodge.
Good housekeeping is based on a tyranny of binary oppositions: clean versus
dirty, neat versus messy, empty versus cluttered. For a while, inside versus outside
was my obsession since the peachy tint of my bathroom tile clearly indicated that
the red clay of Georgia had crept over my threshold and penetrated the inner
sanctum. The rules of cleaning are demanding yet mostly logical and can be seen
as a discipline akin to a monastic meditation or a protocol as rigid as that for disposing of nuclear waste. My mother taught me, Wrst of all, to Wnish cleaning one
room completely before moving on to the next. Move from top to bottom, just
as you would in cleaning your own body. Many corollaries spring from the initial
proposition that up is cleaner than down: a dish sponge should never be used on
the Xoor, for example, and if a sink sponge should be used to clean the toilet, it is
demoted to toilet cleaning forever. Above all, always be cognizant of what kind of
dirt you’re cleaning. Although my mother did not express the rules in these terms,
the gist is that all contaminants must be kept away from zones associated with
the head and its oriWces, such as food preparation areas, the sink where you wash
your face, your pillow. It’s funny how cleaning theory recapitulates the history of
Western philosophy in its desperate attempt to separate the head from the Wlthy,
unpredictable body. Who came Wrst, my mother or Descartes?
When I left my parents’ home and began cleaning my own places, I started
picking up tips from outside the family. From a woman in San Francisco who
joined a maid service to support herself as an artist, I learned that eYciency demands cleaning from back to front, something I knew intuitively but had never
brought to consciousness. From a friend, I learned that a splash of vinegar in the
mop bucket plus a lot of hot water makes an adequate substitute for harsh chemical cleaners. But the bedrock of my cleaning process is always the knowledge I
gained from my family, certainly not Heloise or the stylish but obsessive Martha
Stewart, the epitome of the mother who can never be pleased. From my father,
who was raised by a cadre of women, I learned that you should always wash the
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glasses Wrst before the grease from the dinner plates sullies the dishwater. And
should your glass items be dimmed by a Wlm of mineral deposits from hard water,
an accretion to which all things transparent are heir, soak them overnight in hot
water and a dollop of vinegar and they will be radiant by morning. Yes, vinegar
is the universal panacea, or at least it runs neck and neck with baking soda, but
don’t mix the two, for I think the combination creates a homemade bomb.
About Wfteen years ago, I learned from the media not to mix cleaners, and
this household chemistry lesson is serious. A number of women were killed by
toxic fumes when cleansers containing chlorine bleach crossed paths with toilet
bowl products or window cleaners containing ammonia. I think of these women
sometimes as I clean the bathroom, as I’m on my hands and knees on the porcelain squares of my black-and-white Xoor: women like me, dutiful consumers of
American cleaning products, performing a common duty while feeling virtuous
or irritated, suddenly overcome by deadly fumes. After all, chlorine gas was the
Wrst weapon in modern chemical warfare. In 1915, when the Germans released that
Wrst white cloud, which turned a sickly yellow green as it wafted along the ground
toward Allied lines, the soldiers broke ranks and ran. But the fallen women, as I
see them, lie on the Xoor until they are discovered, too late, by family or friends.
Although they do not meet the requirements of the Greeks, they make a claim
on tragedy, even as they remain nameless. And I don’t care if the circumstances
of their deaths recall Elvis collapsed on his bathroom Xoor, although of course
I wonder if Elvis’s bathroom was clean. I consider as I scrub if cleaner is always
better, if whatever lurks in the bathroom—and I don’t deny the existence or persistence of E. coli 0157:H7—can only be conquered by successive waves of chemicals, which in proper combination mimic world war. But even in war, common
household products have a role. Before gas masks were developed, the doughboys
would soak a sock in a solution of baking soda and water and tie it tightly over
nose and mouth. This was preferable to the very earliest improvised gas mask: a
sock soaked in urine.
Recently I learned that I have grown allergic to a common ingredient in soaps
and detergents, a discovery that has led me to search for alternative cleaning
methods. When the dermatologist gave me the news, I was stricken by the image
of proliferating germs, moving in for the kill: me, the helpless lamb baa-ing at the
edge of the village; they, the hungry tigers drawing out the inevitable, delicious
moment. Given my allergy, I could no longer even wash my hands in a public
restroom unless I brought along my own soap. On the other hand, there was the
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giddy hope that I would become a lady of leisure, devoted to art and scholarship
certainly, but relieved of the burden of cleaning since my loved ones would have
to wash and scrub and wipe in my stead. Of course, this scenario has played out
quite diVerently. I am Wnding substitute cleaning products and rely heavily—no
surprise—on vinegar and hot water, which, by the way, in a stronger, hotter concentration, is quite eVective at killing colonies of Wre ants.
What do we have after a lifetime of cleaning? Strong shoulders, lungs sand­
papered by corrosive chemicals, and a house still not quite up to par. I would like
to see, all in one place, piled up for my amazed assessment, the dust and grime
I have removed over the years from all my residences: the garage apartment, the
little Victorian cottage, the mock Spanish hacienda, the New Orleans-style Xat.
Perhaps then I would appreciate the accomplishment of cleaning, my ultimate
triumph in a personal battle with entropy. As it is, I have requested that I be cremated when I die and my remains scattered where no one will have to clean them
up: ashes to ashes. It’s the least I can do for the women of the world, who are far
too busy looking out for the living to follow after me with a dustpan.
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