CLEAN
by LORI HALL STEELE
When my mother leaves, it’s
as if Tinkerbell has sprinkled fairy dust here and there through my house.
The toaster sparkles, dog hair has disappeared, and glass shines.
Cleaning is in her blood. As we sip coffee in the kitchen, she’s running
water, putting plates away, offhandedly wiping the enamel-top table, as she
chats about the day — your aunt called and we should take a yoga class and,
what did the baby say today? — and it all meshes together, one fluent
action. Cleaning is unpremeditated, an instinct like turning your head
toward laughter.
It also is an answer: When she arrives and sees a flu or frustration,
the droop of routine weariness, she says, “Let’s clean.” Or she just does
it. It’s not a dramatic act, it is something that logically follows.
The broom begins its Zen motions, dishwater runs into porcelain,
tangles of laundry turn into neat, comprehensible shapes, and we talk as we
move through the pure motions of housework. And we talk and we talk, and
none of it seems like work, only movement toward something more ordered,
more sensible, something more genuine under all the inevitable
accumulations, the dusts and footsteps of everyday life.
When she leaves, a little part of the world is in order, if only for a
moment.
This is a gift I have not always fully comprehended. As a teenager, I
actually was aghast at my mother’s love of housekeeping, and this phase
wasn’t merely an adolescent rebellion. This happened during those
transformative years between Betty Crocker and Martha Stewart, when my
little-girl ears heard volumes about gender roles, and the voices said:
Housework? You must be joking.
Meanwhile, my mother sang Carly Simon songs as she ironed linen
tablecloths, watered Boston ferns and dusted picture frames, and the world
felt warm and kept, but the voices continued. They said: Housework?
Definitely Not Sexy. Rather, housework was a string of long, gloomy words
with hard souls, like “dehumanizing.” It was a time when the metaphors of
order became metaphors of control, when a mop meant subjugation, not
purification.
I could see my mother there, scrubbing a floor, and though she
sometimes looked hurried, she never looked repressed. Maybe she hadn’t
heard? But I had, and to this day am conflicted by beach sand on the floor,
gummy handprints on the refrigerator and toothpaste in the sink.
Now, when I see my mother’s ease with cleaning, I envy her. I really
do. She has not questioned the instinct to dust her world. Wheareas I— when
I find myself longing to put on Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” and spend an
afternoon polishing silver and shaking rugs and using bleach — hear some
very tiny, awfully vocal part of myself clear its throat and ask: “Um, what
are you doing?” Like I’ve betrayed the sisterhood.
But a dirty home is not a sexy home. A messy room isn’t empowering. So
I do it anyway, and I thank god for feng shui. Also, Martha Stewart.
Together, they’ve dressed up homemaking as something alternately exotic and
mystical, upscale and imbued with the stellar lineage of All Our
Grandmothers. It has helped return honor to the simple, beautiful act of
nurturing our homes. Hallelujah.
Because I love my silver, and polishing it is a joy. It was my
grandmother’s, and as I rub each tine, it summons a genie, a childhood
memory of running down a sun-bright hallway toward a holiday table, a
grownup memory of a winter night and candlelight and a joke told with a
French accent.
And I love my house, even with all its broken parts, and somehow, when
it is clean, when the things are in their places and the surfaces touched
and tended, I sometimes feel like dancing, there on the scrubbed floors. My
voice says: This is liberation.
There is something a little holy in taking care of the places we
inhabit, in summoning sheen. And there is a power in watching over our
spaces, the rooms we move within, the sets where our life’s stories unfold.
My mother knows this, and that is why, when a baby is born, or one of
her children’s hearts is breaking, or a someone’s blue simply because the
sky is as flat and gray as a tarp, she comes over. She comes over and she
turns on a vacuum, wipes handprints off a door, or sprinkles Comet in a
sink, all the while chatting — your uncle called and how do you make apple
crisp and, I can’t believe how much I love that baby — until it all melds
together into one fluid movement, and the world is just a little more in
order, if only for a moment.