by Jim Whitehouse
I was moving into our new home, bit by bit, as my beloved wife Marsha was closing out our old house, 45 miles away.
So far, my furniture consisted of an inflatable mattress, a lawn chair, a dorm-sized refrigerator, a popcorn popper and an electric frying pan. My friend Mr. Ed stopped by to see how I was getting along as I pondered heating a can of soup in the frying pan.
The next day, he delivered his spare microwave.
“Where’s the instruction manual?” I asked, looking at all the buttons.
“Where all manuals end up,” said Ed, shrugging.
“So how do I use it?” I asked.
“Put the food in. Push that button that says One Minute. If the food is still too cold, push it again.”
It worked.
Since getting married, I’ve always tried to do my share of the housework. Cleaning the kitchen after meals—my job. Yard work—my job. Emptying trash, fixing broken stuff, doing some of the cooking and shopping—my job. Doing laundry? Not so much.
In more recent years, I’ve done more laundry.
When alone, I put in some soap, put in the clothes, and push START, which is the equivalent of Mr. Ed’s One Minute microwave button.
When the wash is done, I put the stuff in the dryer and push START. Thank you, Mr. Ed.
When Marsha is around to supervise, the START buttons fall at the opposite end of the Quick As A Bunny spectrum.
“The neck on this shirt needs to be pre-treated,” she says, eyeing the cabinet full of pressurized cans with labels of pseudoscientific sounding names and lists of scents only found in the marketplaces of Marrakesh. Instructions are also included, all printed in font sizes smaller than the eyes of needles and the bottom lines of eye charts at ophthalmologists’ offices.
“Or I could just put it in the washer and see if the stain comes out,” I say. “Maybe after 7 or 8 washings it’ll be…”
“Pretreat it,” she says, handing me a can.
“Now this load has to be done on the delicate cycle, and with cold water,” she says, splitting the pile in half.
“I was going to do them all together. You know, one load to save our planet from global warming, and to let me get outside to do a little yard work,” I say, perhaps in a whiny voice.
“Delicate cycle,” she says. “That other load can be done with warm water but be sure you push that one special button on the washer. And by the way, the ground is frozen solid, there’s snow on the ground and you don’t have any yard work to do.”
I sigh, perhaps petulantly, and say, “About that one special button—which one is it?”
She is so patient. She never raises her voice, but occasionally her eyebrow.
“The same special button you have asked me about the last 43 times you’ve done the laundry,” she says, but not out loud.
Instead, she just points to the button. “That one,” she says sweetly, eyebrow arched.
“One more thing,” she continues. “When this load is ready for the dryer, don’t put this garment in there. You need to spread it out carefully on a drying rack.”
“Why?” I say.
“Because I said so,” she does not say.
“Read the label,” she does say.
“I can’t see it. I can’t even find it,” I say as I turn the shirt inside out, upside down, searching for the faded, wrinkled label with font smaller yet.
“I’ll just put it on the drying rack,” I say, watching the eyebrow come down.
