![\"Clorox](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/09_0715_100b_Butch397.jpg\")
<\/a><\/strong>No good will be served<\/strong> if I demonize my mother and claim that she was responsible for who I am, dirtwise. But almost everything I know about cleaning clothes and floors and toilets I learned from her. Since I was 6, I measured laundry powder, ironed shirts, polished mirrors and even memorized cleaning-supply jingles on TV because they were sung in a code that it was up to me to break. Mom told her friends that she was training me because she thought boys should be self-reliant, but it was actually because she wanted help in the house, and company.<\/p>\nShe and my dad lived together before they married, which was a big deal and frowned upon, but once he acquiesced and — what\u2019s the term? — made it legal, they employed a housekeeper, a \u201cmaid\u201d named Mamie, who did the regular cleaning and gathered the loose ends my infant brother and I tossed everywhere.<\/p>\n
You know what\u2019s coming: one morning, wonderful Mamie was gone. I had liked her a lot because she sang in a rich, beautiful voice and opened my world just a bit to the outside.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere\u2019s Mamie?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe wasn\u2019t honest,\u201d either Dad or Mom said.<\/p>\n
\u201cDid she steal things?\u201d<\/p>\n
They shrugged. A short while later my mother led me to the liquor cabinet, just a shelf in a credenza, and pulled out a half-empty bottle.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe amount kept dropping,\u201d she whispered. \u201cThat\u2019s why.\u201d<\/p>\n
No one replaced Mamie, and Mom began to wash the bathroom fixtures and floor once or twice daily with a potent mixture of Spic and Span and Clorox. Spic and Span powder leaves a chalky residue if you don\u2019t rinse it thoroughly, and residue was unacceptable, so her work seemed endless. Also, Dad had told his boys never to use the word spic<\/i>, it wasn\u2019t respectful, so of course we chanted \u201cSpic and Span\u201d over and over, tempting his belt.<\/p>\n
From the moment they arrived, Ellis Island immigrants like my parents were exhorted to humanize themselves by keeping their bodies and private surroundings ardently free of dirt, and in this punishing atmosphere Clorox thrived. Though the product was long advertised by \u201cButch,\u201d a male-figured glass bottle, it\u2019s also true that more than a few New World housewives, way before Robert Graves, referred to Clorox as \u201cthe white goddess,\u201d an early gender confusion. They were dead serious, no doubt.<\/p>\n
One afternoon after school, I saw my mother lying on the wet but clean bathroom floor, next to her brush and pail, crying. I can\u2019t be certain, and have no one now to ask, but it\u2019s likely that she and not Mamie was the reason the level in the bottle had been going down.<\/p>\n
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“Dirt Always Wins” is a story in six parts, two posted each week, about the narrator’s intimate relationship with dirt. Here’s the third.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1360,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[402,401,390,388,385,386,400,403,398,399],"class_list":{"0":"post-1358","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-main","8":"tag-african-american","9":"tag-black","10":"tag-cleaning","11":"tag-clorox","12":"tag-dirt","13":"tag-fiction","14":"tag-maids","15":"tag-robert-graves","16":"tag-short-story","17":"tag-spic-and-span","18":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}