The thing about having friends house sit is that no matter how careful you are, you never know what they'll turn up, or what conclusions they'll draw. When my wife and I returned from a long weekend away and were having lunch with our friend Genie, who'd been taking care of the dog, we couldn't help but notice something odd about her, as if she were struggling to keep from bursting out in laughter. Which, in fact, she was. Oh my God, I thought, what did she find? Those pictures of me in my Jesus phase? The afikomen no one could produce at last year's seder? Things I dare not write even here? Out with it, I demanded. What got Genie, she finally admitted, not nearly as contrite as I thought she ought to have been, was my sock drawer, in which every item had its proper mate, and they all were lined up perfectly and arranged by color. As God meant them to be. I can't live any other way.
I thought of Genie this morning as I read Lisa Belkin's gigantic lead story in Sunday Styles about the state of affairs between married couples regarding housework. Now don't go skipping ahead to Nora Ephron just because this topic strikes you as soooo lame; I have a point to make. OK, couples still argue about housework, some couples find interesting ways to divide the chores, others revert to what their parents, to use my current most-hated buzzword, modeled. I agree, this is not news, even if you stick in a Dyson vacuum cleaner and the obligatory reference to the sorry state of feminism.
What's wrong with this picture? I kept thinking as I read about the couples' traumatic experiences with laundry, dishes, and sex-after-cleaning. Four pictures, actually, illustrate the story. One is of a couple haggling over an ironing board. One is of a woman and the bottom half of her husband pushing that vacuum cleaner (a new twist on old porn, I thought); one is of a man doing laundry; one is of a woman doing something-or-other in the yard.
I suppose it goes without saying that all of these people are white, upper middle-class, and heterosexual. And I suppose it's too much to ask the New York Times in 2006 -- a paper desperate to show younger readers that it's hip to the larger world out there -- that it recognize the existence of actual human beings who, even though they don't fit the above description, lead lives worth investigating and which might even enrich such a story.
Wouldn't it be just mind-blowing if someone at the Times thought to include in this story an anecdote about how, say, gay and lesbian couples negotiate gender stereotypes not about sex, but about scrubbing the toilets? About how couples of other races, mixed-race couples, couples in something other than their starter marriages, deal with these challenges? Couples like the ones on the Times's front page the other day who struggle to care for aging parents?
Because I keep thinking that even though I fit the demographic Lisa Belkin writes about, I came away from this story thinking not about chore equality but about but about something else I learned from my parents: The evil of exclusion.