I Won't Launder My Dish Towels

By Sarah Vowell

I consider myself a feminist, which means that I support increased funding for breast-cancer research, cheer at Allison Janney's breakthrough performance on TV's The West Wing and don't mind mentioning that I periodically trounce every male of my acquaintance with the temerity to think he can beat me at the basketball game Pop-a-Shot. So what if I have not one but two scars on my right hand from baking corn bread, or if since I bought that yellow paint, I preside over the most cheerful dang kitchen in the tri-state area? I don't find it particularly contradictory to sweep my floors while singing along with Riot-Grrrl records. I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan and crumble it over potatoes sauteed in anise as a delightful side dish for brunch.

So in the great Cheryl Mendelson debate, I'll gladly take Ms. Mendelson's side; dust mites of the world, beware. Mendelson's 884-page reference book Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, published by Scribner last November, is in its eighth printing. There are 180,000 copies of it loose in the world, and readers, mostly women, are torn. Many find it a handy, even revolutionary guide to household tasks our mothers never taught us, while others see it as antifeminist, barefoot-in-the-kitchen propaganda, gleefully pointing out that Mendelson recommends cleaning the kitchen floor on one's hands and knees. (Yet among the reader reviews on Amazon.com one male fan of the book commented, "Since I am the more organized partner of my marriage I have found it to be a wonderful tool in helping my wife mend her sometimes messy ways." Alas, the great ones really are taken.) Alluding to, among other chapters, Mendelson's take on "Peaceful Coexistence with Microbes," Katha Pollitt complained in the Nation that "this is domesticity as paranoia--Oh, no, a germ!"

Granted, Mendelson's overwhelming attention to dust mites, food pathogens and spores can be so constant and so alarming that a better title for her book might have been Life: The Silent Killer. Not only are the things necessary for survival--food, clothing, water--impending Petri dishes of doom, the products used to clean these things may very well be contaminated. Mendelson describes sponges the way Alan Keyes talks about the "radical homosexual agenda"--breeders of bacteria threatening our very way of life. Since there's no way I'm together enough to constantly launder a pile of rags and dish towels, I'll keep using sponges, reassuring myself that if I have to choose between microscopic organisms from the sponge and, say, a rapidly molding glop of spaghetti sauce mucking up the counter, I'm going to go with the unseen horror. Being a firm believer in knowing the rules before one breaks them, I like Mendelson's standards. She aims high so I don't have to.

The author's utopianism is balanced by her pangs of practicality. Mendelson, whose credentials include a husband and a son as well as a Ph.D. in philosophy and a J.D. from Harvard Law, is the most unimpeachable source this side of Janet Reno for such a girly-girl endeavor. Most of the book works on a sliding scale, giving tips for compulsives and slackers alike, such as the following memo to would-be floor cleaners: "Vacuuming every day is best for your floors. I feel obliged to say this even though most people, myself included, are unable to do this."

Home Comforts has a lot of answers--answers to questions I've had (no, don't keep bread in the refrigerator), questions I never thought to ask (wash your hands for the length of Yankee Doodle) and answers to questions that have been asked of me. Once on a bus through San Francisco's Chinatown, a recent immigrant took some pants out of a Gap bag, pointed to the label and asked me, "What is twill?" If only back then I'd had page 198 under my belt.

I suspect one reason Mendelson's book is so popular is that more people are spending more time at home, thanks to the digital revolution and its accompanying explosion of at-home workers. I know my own living quarters improved drastically once my living room became my office. I'm thinking of giving Home Comforts to my friend Nancy, who recently became a freelancer.

The day after she quit her job, she called me up exclaiming, "Now I know why your house looks so nice!" She had lasted only two hours as a shut-in freelancer before making haste to Bed Bath & Beyond.

Sarah Vowell's book Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World will appear in April