Cleaning with the Enemy

I grew up with a father who labeled his dresser drawers with an automatic label-maker, as a "guide" for my mom to put away his clothes in the proper place. My mother ran surveillance on the clutter in our bedroom like a Patriot Act agent, scooping up any idle toys and selling them in the next yard sale. Yes, she sold our idle things. Hmmm....I wonder why I have such a hard time relaxing? Needless to say, I grew up in a clean house. Now, I am an adult who abhors clutter. I don't buy knick knacks because I still feel slightly guilty when I lay on the couch at 4:00 watching Oprah; I certainly don't need some bisque figurine staring at me from the bookshelf, judging me with frozen eyes.

Turns out, I don't need a judgmental tchotchke to make me feel like my bathroom will never be clean enough. I have a fiance for that. I really thought (and my sisters would agree) that my dad was the most meticulous person I'd ever met. And then I met Kyle. I remember going to his apartment for the first time when we started dating. I was impressed with how clean and put-together it was for a bachelor's house. He had art on the walls, hand soap in the bathrooms, and matching towels hanging in the guest bath. And, just as with every other encounter in my life, I failed to see the red flag in all of this. The alarms didn't sound because I was so wrapped up in the "nice, clean guy" idea. If I had only looked closer I might have noticed that the toilet paper rolls were always hung the same way. Or, that the matching towels were never used. Because, as he explained, they are the "pretty towels." Again, not noticing that my new love interest was freakishly clean and ignoring the fact that a 6'4" man used the term 'pretty towels' to describe his bathroom decor, I looked up at him and said, "Wanna play house together?"

I soon learned that my sweet Rain Man craves routine and order. He arranges his toiletries in order of use, from top to bottom, in his shower caddy to "save time." The logic behind the aforementioned toilet paper placement is because "that's how they do it in the hotels and it just looks nicer." He cleans both ears at the same time, a Q-tip in each hand, because it's "more efficient." And the pretty towels, well, let's just say that they are never, under no circumstances, to be used to wipe Great Lash off of one's eyes. Not even in a pinch. That was a long night. Mostly these little quirks and preferences are endearing. Who doesn't want to just pinch the cheeks of a guy that sits frozen on a toilet, unable to wipe his bum, if the toilet paper is upside down? But sometimes, as is the case with housecleaning, it is just plain annoying.

According to Kyle, my version of cleaning is "putting crap away." Kyle approaches cleaning with the ferocity of a meth-addict with a toothbrush. Surface cleaning is for amateurs. We also have very different understandings of what "let's clean the house" means. Just last week we were "cleaning" and I went upstairs to run the vacuum, dust, strip the bed sheets, and turn my nose up at the bathrooms. I came downstairs and found Kyle with his head up the gas fireplace insert in our living room in some sort of weird Sylvia Plath interpretation. I watched as he stood up, replaced the faux wood and screen, turned to me and said, "There! Much better!" Uh...much better than mopping the floor? Apparently, whomever installed the fireplace had placed the faux wood incorrectly and the vents were in sore need of cleaning. Being the ever-encouraging fiance that I am, I said, "wow, what a difference that makes!" He sat on the couch opposite the fireplace, turned the switch and beamed as he saw the gas flames flickering in perfect symmetry, unobstructed by a crooked log. Talk about an inability to relax! I was more than a little concerned.

I left him to warm his neurosis by the fire and started sweeping the floor. He watched me and my half-baked attempt to corral our scum for a few moments before he just couldn't stand it anymore and said, "you're doing it wrong." Uh, what? Last time I checked sweeping consisted of pushing a stick around a room. My first instinct was to unleash a diatribe about what an obsessive-compulsive, chauvinistic jerk he was But in a moment of genius, I looked up at him with a furrowed brow and said, "I know, I just can't do it the way you do," and handed over the broom. I felt like Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy, when she outwits her psychotic husband by jumping off the boat when she supposedly "didn't know how" to swim. I escaped upstairs, reading magazines, until I heard, "Honey, come look at my shiny clean floor!"