Elegy for a Dishwasher
A writer in the pits.
My days fixing cars and gardening and pitching hay are over, and for now I am tasked with the essential and unglamorous work of dishwashing.
Step into my office: “the Dish Pit.” Come to chat, drop your dish and stay a while! Seek life advice through the kitchen window and distract me from the buckets ringed with fetid milk. Is this the dinner that launched a thousand pots and burnt the bottoms of every pan in Christendom? Oh Marlowe, the Illiadic proportions of the postprandial destruction! Oh Melville, it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, poor devil of a sub-sub dishwasher.
The dishwasher never knows what treasures lie at the bottom of the dirty dish bin. A mouse impaled on a fork desiccating in a mug is just your average Tuesday night. (True story.) One has to ask what the rationale is: you see a mouse in a mug and you think…fork? Someone at this college thought, fork! The dishwasher learns a lot about the people she lives with when she washes their dishes…
Sisyphean is the word that comes to mind when describing this labor assignment, the dishes unwashing themselves within minutes of putting them back on the shelves. An especially inventive punishment is when all the muddy-booted students come clomping through the kitchen as I am trying to mop. Hell is mopping around other people. They do not see me or they grimace and murmur a quick “sorry.” I cannot be angry at them; I once was one of them.
Dish washing is a fine time for transcendental meditation. (Not that I ever take the opportunity to do any.) I really should be trying to become some Stoic master, ‘letting the thoughts float by on the river of my frustration’ or whatever. A job for a better woman than me.
While engaged in such menial labor I had aspirations to think up the Great American Novel (or at least the Great American Undergraduate Paper). No such luck. Though my mind is largely my own when scrubbing and rinsing and drying, my thoughts never come out of the Dish Pit as fresh and sparkling as the mugs.
Every time someone has a new dish for me to wash, they hand it to me and look me in the eye. How I long for the anonymity of the dishwashing system at any other college—the beautiful, obscene, faceless dumb waiter that whisks away the upsetting dirty cutlery and plates! But I know that when I have that life I will long for the strange intimacy of the Deep Springs “Dish Pit.”
I write this for my dad, our family’s dishwasher, for whom washing dishes is “a monastic practice you do for the glory of God, with no other reward.” He has done enough dishes in his time to remain equanimous “in a kitchen that eternally alternates between chaos and control.” To all the dishwashers out there, Happy Thanksgiving. The person making dinner will use all the pie tins and clog all the sieves and get turkey drippings everywhere. There’s nothing you can do about it. You might be feeling stabby, but try not to think, fork!