Housework

Rose took a day off to recover from a cold and to update her resume. She was less than thrilled with work and was plotting to apply for a new position. At the same time, she knew she was too old to find a new job easily.

Dye your hair and lie about your age, her sister advised on the phone.

Rose glumly suggested plastic surgery might be in order.

The lip thing?

Oh, sure. And a face lift and new breasts while I’m at it.

They laughed what they called the laugh of hags: the uninhibited shrieks of menopausal women.

Rose enjoyed weekday vacations. The city was quiet. The neighborhood was eerily deserted. She had that last-woman-on-earth feeling.

What does the last woman on earth do?

Housework

She hand-washed “heirloom” linens that her mother had given her . Not that they were heirlooms. Her mother had bought them at a church sale. They had belonged to some materfamilias who had long since switched to paper napkins. Thanks, Mom, she had said at the time. They looked nice folded in her linen closet. Then Rose made the error of using the linen tablecloth and napkins at the impromptu pancake supper.

Good God, so much work. Coffee stains and sticky Log Cabin syrup spills. The soaking overnight, then washing on gentle cycle stuffed into an old pillowcase. The tablecloth and half the napkins survived this process. A couple of the napkins fell apart in the wash. So much for heirlooms. She would just as soon buy Martha Stewart at K-Mart. No pressure, machine washable.

Once the linens were hung on the clothesline, she dragged an old wooden table outside and painted it pale creamy yellow. The buttercup hue would complement the Simpsons-cartoon-sky-blue of the kitchen walls.

While the paint dried she sat on the riverbank and drank coffee. Yellow leaves wafted onto the water. She imagined a different life, a life without work and office politics, the life of a ‘50s or ‘60s housewife, before Betty Friedan and the rest of the feminists revolutionized daily life for women and sent them into the work force. Not that women hadn’t been in the work force before. Quite a few had. There had been teachers, secretaries, nurses, and retail workers. Her own mother: a widow, a teacher who pretty much worked the same hours as her kids. She was home at the end of the day, baking cookies in the late afternoon. She corrected her students’ papers while Rose and her sister did their homework. They weren’t allowed to go out until their homework was done. Of course, they rebelled when they were older.

Her mother had summers off: she took trips to museums, read mysteries (a lot of Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh), and went swimming at the pool. She spent time pottering around doing housework that didn’t strictly have to be done while she listened to classical music. Rose and her sister did almost no housework. They were slobs. They weren’t ashamed at all. They cleaned hectically before their mother visited, but she always cleaned house anyway.

Sometimes Rose thought she would have preferred her mother’s life. Seven-to-three instead of eight-to-five. Summers off. A lot of housework.

Women worked nowadays, not because of a feminist ethic, but because they wanted...things. Three-car garages, enormous vehicles.

That reminded Rose. She had been meaning to sell her car. What did she need with a car? She walked to work and could take the bus to the mall.

She went inside and put an ad in the paper. Then she stared at her computer and thought about updating her resume.

Not yet. She’d done enough work for a vacation day. She picked up a copy of one of E. F. Benson’s Lucia books and went outside to read in a lawn chair.