The mania began in the pantry and only ended because I was exhausted. Down but not out, I vowed that I wouldn’t rest until I had rooted out and excavated every black hole in our house.
A black hole in a house is an enclosed space where entropy and chaos are allowed to flourish behind closed doors. A closet is an excellent spot for a black hole, as is a chest, armoire or kitchen cabinet. Our house is riddled with black holes which have festered into shameful cesspools of forgotten crap. Today, I went after the lower kitchen cabinets, where I found cats living with dogs in an unholy landscape reminiscent of Mordor.
This intense feeling of wanting to introduce order in the home comes to me when it is our turn to host Thanksgiving. Now that I am practically able-bodied again, I am on a cleaning bender, desperately trying to conquer the squalor that I let build up over the last year and a half when I was laid up.
I love hosting Thanksgiving and could not be blessed with a friendlier or more fun loving and nonjudgemental bunch of in-laws, yet each year I am overwhelmed by a powerful and irrational urge to pass myself off as a credible “fabric softener person.” It’s not just Thanksgiving that awakens my inner fabric softener person—it’s the prospect of being cooped up all winter that sends me off the deep end.
A fabric softener person is someone who buys and uses fabric softener and probably uses dryer sheets as well. She might even use Glade Plugins, and probably cleans the toilet with that industrial looking blue stuff that squirts under the rim and badly frightens the bacteria that cruises the toilet bowl in tiny rowboats. She sorts laundry by color and always has a stain stick. She has scented candles.
A fabric softener person is everything that I am not.
A fabric softener person does not use a coffee can as a container for the toilet brush. She does not have a kitchen ceiling so water stained that it looks like it was tea-bagged by the Jolly Green Giant. She is not dealing with the rust problem on the refrigerator door by plastering it with bumper stickers. Her world is clean, orderly and fresh smelling, whereas mine is clean enough and smells like weed, lentils and Nag Champa.
I love to cook for friends and family, and I make everything from scratch. Instead of following recipes, I review recipes and then attempt to build upon their “spirit.” I spontaneously invite friends over for dinner and make something that is not only edible, but often inspired, using only the ingredients I have on hand.
Today, as I unearthed one disgusting, ancient and rusted baking sheet and cake pan after another, it occurred to me that for someone who spends as much time in the kitchen as I do, I have the world’s nastiest tools. While nothing could get me to forsake my beautiful collection of cast iron skillets or my pressure cooker, I realized that I could and should throw away and replace some of my more “vintage” items.
I could buy a meat thermometer that can be read, I mused. And a pizza pan that is not rusted and black with grease, or a basting brush with bristles! Why, I could even purchase a chef’s knife with an actual blade that is sharper than a spoon! I could store my leftovers in those nice glass containers with snap-on lids, instead of bowls covered over with twice recycled bread bags! I could own a can opener that opens cans! And, I am worthy of a real lemon squeezer!
These extravagant thoughts piled up in my head like snowdrifts until I had to stop what I was doing and go straight to Marshalls. I can do this, I thought, mentally cursing my mother for burdening me with my depression-era sense of home economy. Where else could I have acquired my profound sense of unworthiness? At this point the damage is already done and I have infected my own children with the same sense of extreme stinginess.
When My Royal Consort and I used to paint the seaside pleasure domes of the 1 percent, I would get very bitter about the elaborate kitchen that the lady of the house invariably claimed to have “designed” herself.
Sometimes I’d catch myself being all heated and think “whoa girl, have a sarsparilla and calm down already! So what if the skanky ho has an awesome freaking playground of a kitchen, and you only have a broken stove with just two burners and an oven that won’t shut off?”
My irritation wasn’t so much about me being resentful of what I had or didn’t have. It was more about my Oppressor not knowing or appreciating what she had. It seemed like such a huge waste. Ditto for the broads who called themselves artists and had studios built for them. I wanted to smite them all.
These ridiculous kitchens would typically have huge expanses of exotic marble counter tops, bar sinks, regular sinks, several ovens and two refrigerators—basically enough fire power to cook a four course dinner for Mitt Romney and all his relatives, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and both Bushes, 1 and 2.
Until today, I had never gave the kitchen section of Marshalls much attention because I saw did not see the need for any of those newfangled kitchen tools, but as I admired the goods, I was amazed by the heft of a modern cake pan, the user-friendliness of the basting brush (which has evolved since World War ll into a cheerily colorful neoprene affair that can actually be washed). Amazing, I thought as I marveled at a turkey baster, Fleet Enema, Inc. finally got out of the kitchen supply business!
In the end, I allowed myself to splurge on two cake pans, a can opener, a set of three basting brushes, an apron, a set of tongs, and a long, sharp fork with a handle that stays on. It was a mad, wanton spree that set me back about $70.
I could not quite pull the trigger on purchasing a decent chef’s knife because my meat cleaver still works and I am not worthy.