Home Alone

THE LAST MAN to get away with being funny about his incompetence as a housekeeper was probably the American comedian Milton Berle, who faded from the television screen fifty years ago. Berle once claimed that when his wife, temporarily confined to bed with flu, asked him to get her a glass of water, he had to ask, “Where do we keep the water in this house, honey?”

This stumblebum fish-out-of-water comic persona has long since been put to death, and justly. The characterisation was never more than faux self-deprecatory, the real object of ridicule being the profession of household management and its practitioners.

My household duties over the years have been light but I am by no means hapless. Not everybody accepts me as fully hap, however.

The madness of crowds engulfed my daughters when they learned recently that their mother would be away from home for a month, undergoing a bilateral knee transplant, and road testing her new knees under professional supervision. One daughter insisted that I come and live with her and her family. Another insisted (from Tokyo) that she come and live with me, carefree about deserting her husband, who, she claimed, was an ace with a vacuum cleaner and preferred eating in sushi bars anyway. Another daughter, already cooking daily for six, began planning a subsidiary boutique meals-onwheels service for me.

I was able to end this intrusive welfarism only by telling them that, if they didn’t cut the crap, I would check in for a month at the El Dorado Hotel in fashionable Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I once had several margaritas and always fancied as a setting for prolonged relaxation, more or less in James Bond style.

Although it did not ruffle my insouciance, the insensitive overreaction of daughters to my being home alone did sound a warning about the probably significant difference between chipping in with an occasional helping hand and being domestic CEO. Clearly I would need to draw heavily on my powers of concentration. This proved to be the case. The following paper presents a selection of findings from my field research. The interrelation of king-size bedsheets and the Hills Hoist is a subject for a separate monograph. I believe the full record of my experiments has potential for development into a manual.

The shortening day. It has been my morning practice to spend twenty minutes or so at the computer catching up with world news and the latest intellectual fashions, then go to the breakfast table to eat my toast and drink my tea while reading the Australian and Sydney Morning Herald. Finished with the world on my first morning at home alone, I was marginally taken aback to realise, as I logged off, that no tea or toast awaited me and that the newspapers were still on the front porch, or embedded in the hedge, if the delivery man’s aim had been off.

This was a useful early reminder that the strictly linear approach doesn’t work in household management. You don’t wait in peaceful meditation for the toaster to pop; you start emptying the dishwasher while the bread browns. Steaming asparagus doesn’t require second-by-second oversight. You can water the pot plants while your lunch is cooking. In the morning, with bread, Vegemite, marmalade, tea and tea mug kept at all times near the toaster, you break temporarily from the computer just before getting to nytimes.com, and switch on the hot water jug. You’ve already prised the newspapers from the hedge before logging on.

Unless you separate yourself from one-thing-afteranother rigidity and habitually wade in on parallel projects, you will need a thirty-three-hour day devoted entirely to keeping house. It is a mistake, however, to have too many parallel projects. This can lead to rugby watching being interrupted by the smell of your soup bones boiling dry.

The indelible footprint. Everything you do in a house leaves a trace. I became aware of this when a daughter strode uninvited into my kitchen, ostentatiously picked up the dish cloth and sniffed it. “Not too bad,” she announced. When I asked what the hell she meant by that, she claimed that a smelly dish cloth is the core indication of bachelor neglect and grottiness.

With gentlemanly reticence, I will venture only briefly into the bathroom. If you don’t want to see your face disappear suddenly from the shaving mirror as you skid from fracture height onto wet tiles, regularly wringing out and replacing the towel on the floor outside the shower is imperative. With sole responsibility for cleaning up, you are not actually tempted to sit down to pee but, conceptually, the cultural chasm narrows.

Beyond the bathroom, all flat surfaces become greasy by a process not dissimilar to pathogenesis. If you drop or spill anything soft or liquid on the floor it pays to clean it up immediately. Even water seems to turn rancid after a day or two. Stove tops come apart and the pieces fit into the sink. They should do so at least once a week, with a strong detergent, unless you feel you can make a case for splatter chic and have an impaired sense of smell.

Generally speaking, to cook is best. When you can’t bring yourself to do it, pies are a discreet choice. Discarded pizza boxes and fish-and-chip paper tell a squalid tale. Legs of lamb are rewarding. They are easy to cook, surgically inserting the garlic cloves being the most demanding part. You get at least two meals from a leg, plus an almost endless supply of superb sandwiches (with supermarket chutney). Corned beef is easier than uncorned beef and also makes great sandwiches.

Though bed-making is hell, an unmade bed lasts only two days without giving offence. Nobody else may see it but, as the guy in charge, you feel put off. Hurried bed-making on the morning the cleaners are due produces unsightly bulge and crumple and is evidence of weak character.

The machines are out to get you. I asserted and maintained authority over the washing machine and drier, the dishwasher and, up to a point, the refrigerator. Through lack of judgment, my fridge came to resemble a woman’s handbag. This is sexist, I know, but rummaging cannot continue into infinity and a spare set of car keys has saved many marriages. Unfortunately there’s no quick fix for refrigerator clutter.

The toaster proved the most intractable of my machines, a sinister little swine, in fact. Not only was it slow in its work but often reluctant to release its product. One of its tricks was to hold the toast half a centimetre below the exit level, a clear attempt to lure me into prising it loose with a knife and suffering death by electrocution. When I outwitted it by using chopsticks, the toaster lowered its level of retention by a few millimetres, making extraction without excessive crumbling a challenge even for someone capable, at his peak, of picking up and holding aloft in his chopsticks a single grain of rice.

This was war. After some experimentation, I discovered that if I seized the lever at the side of the toaster that you use to lower the bread into its innards, and gave it a fierce upward jerk, the toast would leap free, to be collected in mid-air. After a little practice, I was snapping up the slices like Mark Waugh at first slip. The drawback was that, needing one hand to work the lever, I could eject and catch only one slice at a time. I was losing valuable minutes that could have been spent replacing the paper bag lining in the bio-degradable garbage bucket.

My killer toaster had to go. For all my determination to be frank, I take the next narrative step diffidently, because it feels like a plunge into Milton Berle stereotype: but where do you buy toasters? I felt I couldn’t call my wife to ask, interrupting her physio. Besides, I had no mandate for plant replacement. It would probably take weeks to get a new toaster over from Japan. So, with misgivings, I telephoned my bossiest daughter on her mobile.

She was in her car and immediately gave me instructions on how to get to an appliance store somewhere over the curvature of the earth. Pride prevented me from whingeing about how much I hated and feared shopping. Suddenly my daughter exclaimed: “I’ve just passed the good guys [later I realised she had actually said the Good Guys, a Sydney appliance chain]. I’ll chuck a u-ey and be with you in twenty minutes.”

Her laser eyes explored in a few seconds every crevice of kitchen, dining and sitting room when she arrived with the new toaster. I had then been home alone for two weeks or so. I detected a faint flicker of incredulity in her expression but she made no comment. She did not even sniff the dish cloth. It was an accolade.

A fate worse than bed-making. Making a king-size bed on your own is as draining as a 10,000-metre Olympic run, maybe even a marathon. There is no short cut across the hypotenuse. When a delicate adjusting tug on one side causes the meticulously trimmed other side to erupt, there’s no alternative to the long trek around the vast perimeter. Back and forth. Back and forth. Nor does any man have the stretch, strength and balance to reach across to the middle and pull up sheet, bedspread and doona simultaneously. Each layer is a separate challenge. When your bed is American king-size and thus just a little bit larger than Australian sheets, bed-making is uniquely testing. Changing the fitted, bottom sheet requires you to lift each corner of the mattress—which is the equivalent of tucking a dead sheep in the crook of the arm—and fiddle the corner of the sheet around and under it. By the time you get to the fourth corner of an American bed with an Australian fitted sheet, you’ve expended effort that would bring sweat to the armpits of Superman. Furthermore, when you let the final mattress corner drop, the sheet snaps so taut that if you don’t keep your hands out of the way, you will lose most of your fingers.

But bed-making is only the second-worst job in the household management profession. My lips tremble and there is a prickling in my eyes as I turn to the subject of shopping.

The stress begins before the beginning. To shop for a household you need to know what you are shopping for. Impulse is cumulatively unbeneficial. Taking inventory of what you have in stock is manageable but how in God’s name are you supposed to inventory what you haven’t got? Yet, if you don’t, after half a day of parking, searching, queuing and lugging, your feet sore and your wrists possibly dislocated from hours of shopping cart navigation, you find that somehow you are out of Anzac biscuits. (The following week it was soap!)

Moreover, I believe Woolworths’ security cameras focus on me, so that as soon as I am spotted walking confidently to a location, staff rush to transfer the commodities there to a different aisle. Having calculated by experiment the unlikelihood of all items in pre-packaged fresh fruit and vegetable bargains living up to billing, I advanced to the conclusion that rock-hard fruit (and avocados) had not had enough life-giving sun and were doomed to wither rather than ripen in my bowl. Rather than easing my concerns, these discoveries led to my being haunted by speculation about all the other secrets real shoppers were on to, and I wasn’t. Also, my thinking was being monopolised by stressful analysis of the right times to hit supermarket parking lots. Before 10 a.m. is best. The old shoppers haven’t arrived in numbers yet. After 12 noon is also good because they’ve gone home for lunch. Forget 3 p.m., when school gets out, and 5 p.m., when the worker locusts descend. Paradoxically, Saturday morning isn’t too bad because the timorous are scared to venture into the maelstrom and parking spaces turn over quickly. I hate having my mind filled with this information.

A single serendipitous discovery somewhat compensated for my shopping ordeals: the best supermarkets stock ready-made posh sauces like bearnaise and hollandaise in plastic sachets. They heat in forty seconds in the microwave and add swashbuckle to anybody’s cooking.

The presence of poltergeists. Few things irritated me more when I was working as a casual, and intermittently, in the housekeeping game than being upbraided for not putting things back “where they belong”. Giving native title to a jar of Vegemite or oven mittens struck me as control freakishness at its craziest. On my own I realised that the “where they belong” ritual was, in fact, an essential defence against evil spirits.

One morning I sought to pour hot water into the teapot, only to discover that the pot was devoid of tea. Yet, only seconds before, I remembered clearly, I had taken three spoonfuls from the tea jar. Something had snatched the tea out of the air on its way to the pot. My blood chilled. Would it affront the demon if I dug out three replacement spoonfuls? Maybe it would make me disappear. Then I noticed that my tea mug was near brimming with dry tea. Later I lost a bag of cherries. Only when I was lowering a replacement purchase into the fruit and vegetable bin at the bottom of the refrigerator did I notice at eye-level on an upper shelf the original cherries, now rather diminished in daintiness. For several days I suffered irritation over an inexplicable shortage of shirts and chinos. Then I stumbled upon a cornucopia of pants and shirts in a downstairs closet, where I had, to save my stair-weary legs, deposited them after bringing them home from the laundry.

One morning I woke up retaining fragments of a nightmare about living in a house where not a single object was where it belonged.

ALTHOUGH MY WIFE is home now, I continue to handle, for the time being, the heavy lifting of household management. However, her availability for counsel, and even peremptory command, eases my burden. Also I have rediscovered the pleasure of cooking as a performance art. What a difference an audience makes! “A touch more bearnaise, madame? Pas de tout. Ce n’est rien.