A caveat: this post is even more of a navel-gazer than usual, so if you dislike introspective personal essays and find them self-indulgent, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Nobody’s holding a gun to your head.
That said, I’ll proceed. Join me at your peril.
So I was cleaning my bathroom the other day, wiping accumulated dust and fuzz from the base of the toilet, when I suddenly remembered another such throne I’d cleaned many years ago in the Maryland town where I went to college. What was memorable about said pot was not the object itself, but the particular circumstances under which I cleaned it. I’m sure that more than a few people would have deemed my reasons quietly pathological. To an outside observer, they probably were.
It was summertime, and a number of us had sublet apartments in town during the break. Among those hanging around were two guys I’ll call Dave and Jacob, who were sharing a two-bedroom with another young man I’ll call Alexey. I didn’t know the latter very well, but Dave was like a younger brother to me. We had very similar religious backgrounds, and could talk about almost anything with the comfortable ease you might feel with a childhood pal.
And then there was Jacob.
My memory of Jacob looks like a shot in a Merchant-Ivory production, where our hero is backlit by sunshine in a meadow, his shiny hair making a sort of lambent halo. And this is really how he appeared to me then. He was a lovely, lonely, tragic sort of boy, a bereft orphan (his parents had died within months of each other), shy around women, whose first and only love had abruptly dumped him and moved on to other things and other men. During the course of my junior year he managed to capture both my imagination and my impressionable heart, even though he didn’t ask for either. Red-faced and stammering (how I embarrassed his excruciating modesty!), he had already made that much clear. He was a one-woman man, regardless of where the woman was.
But Dave and I were still the best of buddies, and talked on the phone regularly. As I recall, on one of my days off from work, we spoke and he told me he was at home sick. Jacob and Alexey were at work, so I decided on the spur of the moment to come over and attend to Dave. I brought food, intending to cook up something restorative for him, but when I saw the decimated condition of the bathroom (remember, there were three college-age guys sharing an apartment!) I announced “I’m cleaning your bathroom,” and attacked it like a Clorox-wielding kamikaze despite his protests. I scoured the toilet until it gleamed, and scrubbed the shower free of the grime that had built up from the residue of Alexey’s boat-detailing job. When I was finished, it looked like a different room.
I realize that to another progressively-minded woman (not to mention a “Rules Girl” — see “Fascinating Womanhood”), this may seem thoroughly objectionable, but I really didn’t feel like some domestic drudge. I remember feeling incredibly energized, even excited. Under different circumstances I might have felt differently. Make no mistake, I’m no June Cleaver. I hate cleaning my own apartment. I don’t put on an apron and run around serving men all the time. But I saw this as an opportunity to give something to Jacob as well as to Dave. I couldn’t do it any other way, or at least in any more direct way (after he turned me down, I respected his feelings and left him alone). Besides, to me, Jacob’s dirt wasn’t nasty dirt; to clean it up felt oddly intimate. And now he would come home not only to leftovers of the hearty stew I made Dave, but to a bathroom that could no longer incubate bubonic plague.
There is still a part of me, though, to which this seemed excessive when I thought of it after so many years. Jacob, after all, never returned my affections. What the hell did you do that for? this part will demand, after I perform some beau geste for which I know I won’t receive thanks or reciprocity. It will vociferously remind me of my maternal grandmother, who moaned and groaned over the daily chores she elected to do to assist my mother, and then complained to my brother and me that we didn’t appreciate her selflessness. Martyrdom runs in my family, so I’m aware that I’m a high risk.
Moreover, I recently admitted to a friend, “Somehow I arrived at the conviction that it’s pointless for me to expect recognition, because I know I’ll ultimately be disappointed.” I’m pretty sure I picked this attitude up during high school, when so many of my peers started to surpass me academically, athletically, romantically, and even in terms of their supposed “walk with Christ.” Jesus, Christ wouldn’t even walk with me across the street! It didn’t matter how “good” I was. It didn’t matter how smart I was. It didn’t matter how much effort I put into trying to be attractive. In this world of weights and measures, someone else always got the A. I told myself it really didn’t matter to me, even when it did.
But I also know that at some point life stopped being about getting A’s. I remember the bracing wave of relief and gratitude I felt reading James Baldwin’s words: “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.” The same could be said of any concept, including our notions of “success” or “justice.” (I always thought one of the the coolest things about Jesus was that he declared an-eye-for-an-eye obsolete.)
Cleaning Jacob’s toilet really wasn’t a ploy to score points or to buy his undying love through indentured servitude. I chose to do it, and it actually gave me tremendous joy while I was performing the task. The most essential part of me felt I was contributing to the well-being of those I cared about. Few things in life feel that good.
Of course I’m not Mother Teresa. Like most people I have this wounded inner adolescent that clamors for attention and hates feeling overlooked or undervalued. She’s the strategizer, the one who (as Ben Zander put it) got me out of childhood alive. Sometimes she resents doing something from the gut for no glory, remembering how she ceased to be a player in high school, warning me not to be anyone’s bitch. (She can also be obstinate, petty, vain, insecure, full of blinding, bitter jealousy and envy, impossible to please…did I mention jealous?) Hers is the realm of doing and having, of winning and losing, rather than that of simply being. She measures my actions against the yardstick of accepted external standards and frets that I’m doing it all wrong, that I’m not getting mine, that I’m being left behind.
So let me recognize me, for her, right now. Let me give myself a shout out on behalf of anyone who wouldn’t or couldn’t do so. I know we’re not encouraged to blow our own horns except on our resumes; well, then, let this be my resume, the resume of a toilet scrubber, because it’s more real and more meaningful than some lame chronology of my various bullshit jobs.
Strengths and skills: if I care for you, if I love you, if you matter to me, I will do windows. I will give you more than you didn’t ask for. I will leave you be if that’s what you need. I will look for subversive and original ways to help you. I will sneak over while you’re at work and clean your toilet.
Education and experience: lots.
References: who needs em?
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