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Chapter Two

LORD OF THE MANOR

Men Doing Housework—Not as Rare as a Solar Eclipse, but About as Useful

When I was a little boy, I had it made. My parents organized family chores to emulate what they saw on black-and-white television: men swaggered around doing manly things, like building barns and digging wells, and the women handled the housework, waltzing through the living room with the vacuum cleaner as if dancing with Fred Astaire. Since our water poured freely from the city water system and building a barn would have violated local zoning laws, my father and I were Lords of the Manor, and my mom and two younger sisters were Cinderellas.

I thought it was a really good system.

Did I notice that it was patently unfair and that my sisters were putting in far more hours doing so-called women's work than I was devoting to men's work? You betcha. I could hardly not notice it, as my sisters complained about it every night. I was learning one of life's great lessons for males: women may work harder than men, but men should never acknowledge this fact.

It's no accident surveys show men claim to do their fair share of housework, even if the only real housework they've done in the past week is to fill out the survey. I was able to ignore my sisters' complaints because I was convinced that men's work is just, well, harder. Not that I was actually doing any. I suppose I saw myself on standby, like those pilots who were ready to race out to their planes whenever a Soviet blip threatened American airspace.

This is why a man can watch TV with a woman and not make a move to help her fold laundry during the show: In a man's world, everyone has an assigned task. His task is to shovel the snow out of the driveway. Your task is to fold laundry. See how well the system works? Shoveling snow is a hard job! Would it be fair for him to fold laundry and shovel snow? No way! Does the fact that it's July have any bearing on the matter? Why should it? What counts is when it snows, he'll be out there in the thick of it, working like a man! Unless he strains his back, and then he might need you to do it.

So I was more than a little outraged when my mother announced one evening that from that point forward, I would be part of the kitchen duty roster, rotating in as if I were one of the girls. Where was the justice in this edict, handed down after a secret trial in which I had no testimony? I turned a disbelieving glance at my key ally, my father, but his cowardly eyes wouldn't meet mine. The system that had kept his own hands free from dish soap was under assault, and he was maintaining a low profile to avoid being caught in the dragnet of the new regime.

After dinner, my sisters bolted. I watched them from the window as they played in the backyard, seething at their selfishness. Weren't we a family? Weren't we supposed to all help each other?

Well, okay. I turned my attention back to the dishes. They were a mess, a disaster. It was hopeless.

"I can't do it," I told my mother, who was working at her desk. "There are all these dirty pans."

"It will be easy once you get started," she answered in a voice that sounded kind but in fact was pure evil. "Scrub the pans. Put the leftovers in the refrigerator."

“Scrub the pans?”

"You can do it, Bruce," she encouraged me. Her faith in me was so absolute I could only conclude that I had the worst mother in the world.

I jammed my hands into my pockets and sullenly returned to the kitchen. My sisters were pulling ice cream sandwiches from the freezer. "Hey!" I shouted. I went to find my mom. "It's no fair, my sisters are making even more of a mess, and I was almost done!"

"Don't forget to wipe down the counters," she replied in a mind-boggling change of subject.

Wipe the counters? Since when were the counters part of cleaning the kitchen? Was life even worth living anymore?

I stood and gazed with pain-filled eyes at the table, still laden with the remains of the night's dinner. Why did people even bother to make meals if it was going to cause such a problem afterward? Why couldn't we just eat ice cream bars from the freezer?

"I think I've got a fever," I told my mom.

"As soon as you're done with the dishes, you should go lie down," she replied.

I went back and picked up a pan, sniffing at the dried-out spaghetti sauce.

"The stuff's all stuck to the pans," I announced, back in my mother's den. "I'll have to throw them away."

"Soak the pans first, then scrub them."

Well, I'd been doing dishes for nearly half an hour, with no appreciable progress. I listlessly went to the freezer for an ice cream bar.

"I don't hear any work going on in there!" my mother called with psychotic cheerfulness.

Well, maybe that's because my head was chopped off by the Russian army! I seethed back silently. Maybe because I'm doing dishes, which is not my job, the Russians were able to sneak in here and kill me and eat all our ice cream bars and you don't even know because you are a Terrible Mother.

"Bruce?"

Fine, you want noise? I turned on the garbage disposal, filling the house with a hungry roar as it sucked down the water in the sink in a violent swirl. There, happy, Mom? I'm doing the dishes while America loses the Cold War!

The disposal kept churning. It was the mouth of Glork, I decided, who came from the planet Quork and lived under the sink. His ravenous appetite must be sated or he would pull down the entire house in his vortex. I began scraping plates into his black maw.

I must have more, Glork roared.

No time to put the leftovers into the refrigerator, I poured them straight down Glork's throat. For a moment, he seemed satisfied, and then he bellowed in rage. We'd had fish the night before. I found some wrapped in foil and into Glork's mouth it went. Eggs were vaporized in seconds, though a head of lettuce kept Glork grinding happily for more than a minute. Carrots and cheese and pickles, but still Glork screamed, and I could feel the gravitational forces shifting, spinning me helplessly through the kitchen. I clutched a chair, but it served as no impediment as Glork dragged me toward the center of the maelstrom. Frantic, I gathered a handful of silverware and tossed it into Glork's terrible teeth.

This drew the attention of my father. He arrived just in time for Glork's clanking, thrashing death, and in the sudden stillness that followed, asked me what I was doing.

"Cleaning the kitchen," I responded obviously. I thought my father, a man himself, would be impressed by how ably I had demonstrated what dire consequences might follow when males were entrusted with this sort of work, but he seemed fixated on why I had jammed a bunch of forks into Glork's mouth, which I thought sort of missed the larger point.

What I was really doing was working a scam that men try all the time: attempting to prove they shouldn't be involved in housework by deliberately failing at the assigned task. (If my father had been a good parent, he would have chided me for such an obvious scam and would have taught me that men need to be much more subtle. Instead, he just made me do the dishes. With this kind of upbringing, it is a wonder I didn't wind up as some kind of criminal!)

Here's an example: You send a man into a grocery store with a list of items. An hour later he returns to the car with only half the things you asked for, plus a vat of barbecue flavored cheese balls because a pretty woman was handing out samples on aisle six. Even worse, he couldn't find the tofu, so he bought what he figured was a reasonable substitute--vanilla pudding--handing it to you without a trace of guile on his face.

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