A clean kitchen and a tidy life are different projects
By Lorna Beckwith, Editor · · 5 min read
Everyone I know who keeps an immaculate kitchen is, by her own account, barely holding on.
This is not a criticism of the kitchens. They are lovely. The counters are bare, the dish towel is folded over the oven handle in thirds, the fruit is in a bowl and the bowl is centered, and I have sat in several of them with a cup of something and felt the particular peace of a room where nothing needs doing. But the women who keep them, when the cup is empty and the conversation has gone where conversations go after the second cup, do not describe their lives as peaceful. They describe a long list, mostly of other people, and the counter is the one item on it they can finish.
The counter as the one finishable thing
I think that is the real function of a clean kitchen for a woman who is carrying a household, and I want to be careful here, because the easy observation is that she is tidying the kitchen instead of dealing with the rest, and I do not believe that is what is happening. She is dealing with the rest. The rest does not finish. A son who will not call does not finish; a husband's test results do not finish; a church committee does not finish; a daughter's marriage does not finish, and cannot be wiped, and is not hers to wipe. The counter finishes. It is finished in four minutes and it stays finished until somebody makes toast.
What the clean kitchen provides, then, is not order in the life but the experience of completing something, which a woman in the middle of her life may go days without otherwise having. The mistake, and I have made it, is to assume that because the kitchen is done, something larger has been done, and to be surprised at nine at night to find the rest of the list exactly where it was.
The other kind of kitchen
My aunt Vera's kitchen was never clean in her life. There was a stack of mail on the table that migrated but did not shrink, a radio that was always on, a pan soaking that had been soaking, I am fairly sure, since Easter. Vera buried a husband and a son and raised the son's two children, and if you had asked her how she was she would have told you, at length, and then asked what you wanted to eat.
I am not holding Vera up as the better way. Her kitchen made me anxious as a child and I understand now that the mail on the table was unpaid bills. But I noticed, even then, that nobody in Vera's house was pretending. The kitchen told the truth about the house. In the immaculate kitchens the counter is clean and the truth is somewhere else, usually in a drawer.
What the counter costs
There is a cost, and the women who pay it are the first to name it, which is why I trust them on the rest. The four minutes at nine are four minutes not spent on the phone with the son, or on the porch with the husband who has been trying to say something about the test results since dinner, and the counter, unlike either of those, does not require you to hear anything you were not ready for.
A friend who keeps the cleanest kitchen I know told me, without my asking, that she had once wiped the same counter three times in an evening while her daughter sat at the table waiting to tell her about the marriage, and that she knew, each time, what she was doing, and could not stop, and that the daughter eventually told the dish towel, more or less, because that was where her mother's face was. She does not tell that story as a confession. She tells it as a description of what the counter is for on the nights it is for something, and she has not stopped wiping it, and I would not expect her to.
What I would actually say to the woman with the folded towel
Not to stop. The four minutes are hers and they work. I would say only that she should know what they are for, which is finishing something, and that she should stop expecting the finished counter to extend its calm into the parts of the house that are not counters. It will not. It was never going to. Expecting it to is what makes the nine o'clock surprise so bitter, and it is the surprise, not the list, that I think wears people down.
There is a version of this that goes in the other direction, which is the woman who stops cleaning the kitchen because, she says, what is the point, and I would say to her that the point was never the kitchen either, and that she has just taken away the one thing in the house she could finish.
A reader wrote after an earlier piece of ours to say that she wipes her counter last thing at night and that it is the only prayer she has the energy for. I did not know what to say to that for several days. I think now that she was describing the thing exactly, and that the counter was never the point for her either, and that she knew it, and wiped it anyway, which is what most of us are doing.