Day 80: I Can Dish It Out, But...

He does the dishes like he's finishing a marathon, scrubbing with great gusto, breathing heavily, dropping the cutlery, polished and gleaming with a flourish on the countertop, before doing the victory lap of wiping down the counters. He's a quiet man, so there isn't a big show, but there is a distinct energy about him. And that energy says, "Yessssss."

It's a thrill to see him do the dishes and I usually can't bear to tell him that tomorrow there will be another batch and this marathon effort will need to be repeated by somebody. Probably me. I do dishes like an old arthritic farmer does his chores: daily, doggedly and complaining the whole way. But if I'm complaining, it's because this is all his fault.

When I was single, I could let them go for a week, piling in the sink like a teetering science experiment eventually requiring a Hazmat suit and an entire bottle of Palmolive. I've had an aversion to dishes for years and years. Everyone in my family remembers the six-month-old cappuccino excavated from my teenage basement bedroom in 1994.

But getting together with a man who likes things just so has altered my internal slob DNA and now I can't handle a messy kitchen past noon the following day. I've accused him of being anal, but I'm not entirely sure that's it. He's a programmer, working with pages and pages of code, forming patterns and database files, organizing data into tiny, well-labeled boxes. I believe his house is just en external manifestation of that. How else could you explain a drawer containing nothing but matching black Kitchen-Aid utensils?

Somewhere along the way, I internalized the fact that respecting him included respecting (even fearing) his kitchen. I have been reformed in the areas of dish-washing and not-dropping-stuff-on-the-hardwood-floor, which is something coming from a family where rinsing a lasagna pan and tossing it, crusted cheese and all, into the drying rack was good enough. Where shattered plates were followed with 'Opa!' for good measure.

When we first got together, he examined each dish as I washed, sending those with spots back to my side of the sink. In his mind, if you were going to clean the thing, you might as well clean it right. Never mind that we'd be eating the same meal off it two days later. Never mind that.

Eventually I caught the clean dish obsession, although I think it was more about achievement and approval than a genuine love of spotless glasses. We settled into comfortable domestic roles: me washing, him drying. But after a few months, he abandoned his post, leaving the counter full of dripping dishes to dry overnight. Leaving me to obsess over the relative grease-fighting merits of Dawn or Sunlight on my own. Our natures had switched, my dish-doing apathy absorbing into him, his obsession into me. Since then, once every week or two, I guilt him into washing like some bourgeois housewife and he does, with the kind of enthusiasm that screams, 'I am off the hook!'

But there is no off the hook when it comes to dishes, or most things in life for that matter. It's a conveyor belt overflowing with fingerprinted glasses or crumby bread boards and there's always another pile waiting.

I've considered keeping track, presenting him a with spreadsheet, the facts laid out in black and white. In little boxes, just how he likes things. But that would make me That Girl. The girl who keeps track of things like gas mileage and grocery bills, who says you owe her $3.72 for popcorn at the movies. The kind of girl who makes a chore schedule and picks fights about the petty things. Petty things like the dishes.

It's probably a good thing this is all I have to complain about. All the big concepts like Is He A Good Person? or Does He Love Me? are a-ok. My problems are pretty much narrowed down to the kitchen sink. And maybe it's human nature to let that one thing drive you halfway to Crazytown. Maybe it's a sign of perfectionism or that I'll never be truly happy. I don't know.

Yesterday, in the afternoon, we did them together and my solo act became that sweet duet. But after dinner, when the pristine counter was crowded yet again with crusted plates and greasy bowls, when I stood at the entrance to the kitchen sighing with the resigned feeling that things never seem to really change, when he rambled off to shuffle tiny bits of data into tiny, metaphorical folders he said, "Don't worry about these. I'll get them in the morning."