I woke up groggy after another fitful night, another insomnia episode, the sudden and jolting wake-ups that started like clockwork about six months after I recovered from a Covid infection. I frequently feel, as someone with what is very likely a permanent change to my body due to this disease, as though I am living in an alternate reality, a completely different world from people I know who haven’t thought about the risk of Covid in perhaps years, or altered or adjusted their behavior in any meaningful way. And of course, I am. I am living in a different place than almost everyone I know. The urge to think something like You’ll get yours soon enough! while shaking an internal fist comes and goes, ebbs and wanes. Often it is said with resignation and sorrow: You WILL, as a matter of sheer statistics, get yours, soon enough, and it is likely to be awful, and I am already very sorry in advance for all of us. But then, the slow motion disabling and mass sickening of everyone for no other good reason than rich people’s yacht money is just one of many ongoing mass sorrows which I simply must learn to put away, set aside gently, if I am to exist in the day to day, try to make a “life” for myself.
What is a word for this, by the way? Yes, billions of my country’s tax dollars are being used to slaughter and make homeless millions of people, a clear case of genocide. Yes, we are melting the planet alive and cursing ourselves to a future of certain scarcity and extinction. But…for some reason, I still exist, I have to keep eating things and “going on dates” and reading books and making decisions about pants. I don’t want to put reality away, or party away the grief, but I also want to make something of being alive, although it frequently feels stupid and embarrassing.
It’s times like this that I get the urge to clean the bathroom. Sweet, sweet bathroom cleaning, you’ll always be there for me!!! After dropping my laundry off at the place on Forest (smiling at the owner, who I know well enough to smile at, as he puttered from machine to machine, alone in the room), I scrambled over the crusts of frozen snow, watching the Polish ladies in fur coats and their husbands in suits as they meandered with purpose toward church. I miss going to church, I keep remembering. I miss the ritual of it, I miss picking out an outfit, I miss the feeling of collective release, a notion I keep trying to earnestly explain to my non-religious friends as something We should try, as a community!!! while they politely smile and nod. Instead, I flipped over to the Spotify playlist I’ve made that approximates, collectively, something like the feeling of being with God, thereby sending a few more parcels of my inner world over to marketers and eventually, probably, the government, or whomever they sell it to.
Then I got home, with a latte, and went to work on the bathroom. When did this obsession start? I can’t remember. I do recall that feeling of Saturday mornings growing up, when my mom, like all Mormon women I grew up with, threw herself into frantic stacks of errands and chores, with a certain desperation that I now recognize in myself. The bathroom door across from my parents’ bedroom flung open, the lights all on, the Saturday morning radio show “Lunch with Led” blasting Robert Plant’s penitent wail through the house. She would be in a series of squatting and scrubbing motions, almost calisthenic in nature. I now associate this stance of the body with Mormonness, with femininity: the pursed lips, the slight grunting with effort, the set and resolute expression, like a first row member of Mr. Clean’s high internal training workout class. Cleaning for GOD. Errands for JESUS. Chores for HUSBAND and DECENCY. If I just WORK HARD ENOUGH, and TAKE CARE OF EVERYONE, then everything will be FINE.
The fact is, infuriatingly, there are entire sections of society who never learn how to clean, who never think about how cleaning happens. This still bewilders me, when I try to conceive of it. It is an matter of class consciousness, of course (I can now pretty easily parse out the vaguely ignorant and distant nature of roommates and friends who grew up wealthy, who regard dishes and dirty floors with bafflement — don’t those just get done, somehow?). Also, there are men, who, for a labyrinth of infuriating entrenched privileges, still overwhelmingly assume that clean surfaces are a matter of neutrality, a constant baseline state that someone or something maintains for them (and that someone or something is usually women, paid not enough or nothing at all). Mostly, they are right. When I was in the Missionary Training Center, a kind of temporary boarding school where future Mormon missionaries spend three to twelve weeks learning how to say “Plural marriage was a divine law, but we no longer practice it” in various languages, we were assigned weekly “service,” meaning chores. My companion and I, assigned together and never allowed out of each other’s sight, were tasked with cleaning the already spotless restroom of one of the guest buildings. I still remember the glistening white porcelain, the acrid scent of the cleaner, how the custodial team we worked with sneaked us in a bag of contraband Taco Bell once we became friends. The toilets weren’t the home kind, but the public ones with half-moon seats, sharp edges, with their whooshing roar of a flush. Every toilet I had ever peed in, I realized, had been cleaned by someone. The architecture of my life was built on this labor. It is still hard to comprehend.
I’ve been single for most of my adult life, never lived with a partner. I’ve moved homes at least once or twice per year every year since I was 18. Being single is financially and emotionally burdensome for a number of reasons, particularly for women, who still, on average, earn less and face more barriers to financial stability, let alone that hideously euphemistic phrase, “building wealth.” What I’m saying is that I’m sooooo brave and strong, please acknowledge me! But no, really, what I’m saying is that, after a lifetime of being socialized with the expectation of wifehood as a catch-all to justify me, stabilize me, make me a person, I’ve had no choice but to, like many others, be my own wife. There’s a kind of purity of focus and purpose that comes in doing household tasks, or most kinds of manual labor — if you are lucky. It makes me think of Levin in Anna Karenina, who fetishizes the simplicity of his peasants’ lives, spends days working alongside them and marvels at the mental clarity and joy he feels after a day of such work. He is not wrong! I do frequently feel a kind of pity for people who have never cleaned, never really cleaned, a bathroom. It’s so satisfying! It’s so delightful and so much better when it’s done! I think of myself, on Sundays going back at least ten years, chopping piles of sweet potatoes and wiping along the floorboards, cheeks flushed. The extreme joy of a toilet that has recently Seen Bleach. How the dinginess of the tiles suddenly gives away, you see how much filth you were living in, and how happy you are, sweating, knuckles red and scrubbed raw, newly restored to order.
Maybe it’s that people who are familiar with various kinds of powerlessness build smaller worlds, the better to feel enclosed in. Our jars of preserves, arranged just so, in the beautiful pattern. Our sheets, soaked and hung out to dry. Our shrinking windows of order. When I was a missionary in Stara Zagora, I felt a kind of hot and furious guilt at all times, like someone who was visibly failing God every single day. I cleaned the bathroom at church at least two times a week. The elders never noticed. Why would they?