My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Soap Opera

It was our first date together. The man who was to become my husband, the man I call Ed, got up from the table within minutes of his arrival and excused himself to go wash his hands. I found this adorable. He was like a little raccoon, leaning over the stream to tidy himself before eating. At the same time I found it odd, as it typically would not occur to me to wash my own hands before a meal, unless I’d spent the afternoon coal mining, say, or running an offset printing press.

It was at this same dinner that I made the unfortunate decision to share my philosophy of bath towels, which holds that you needn’t wash them very often because you’re clean when you use them.

We both sensed something of a hygiene gap, and, not wanting to alarm one another, spent our first six months trying to hide our true selves. Ed didn’t tell me how he’d replace the toilet seat whenever he moved into a new place, on the grounds that he “didn’t know who’d been sitting on it.” He said nothing when I used the Designated Countertop Sponge to wash the dishes and the Designated Dishwashing Sponge to clean the bathtub, an act I now know to be tantamount to a bioterror attack. For my part, when I dropped food on the floor I’d throw it away instead of picking it up and eating it, and I’d clean the spot where it landed, albeit with the wrong sponge.

As time went by, we reverted to our true selves and the Hygiene War commenced. More than anything else, it was a war of perception. Ed has crud vision, and I don’t. I don’t notice filth. Ed sees it everywhere. I am reasonably convinced that Ed can actually see bacteria. Like any normal couple, we refused to accept each other’s differences and did whatever we could to annoy the other person. I flossed my teeth in bed and drank from the OJ container. Ed insisted on moving our vitamins out of the bathroom and into the kitchen, where the germs are apparently less savage. He confessed he didn’t like me using his bathrobe because I’d wear it while sitting on the toilet.

“It’s not like it goes in the water,” I protested, though if you counted the sash as part of the robe, this wasn’t strictly true.

“Doesn’t matter,” Ed said. Ed has a theory that anything that touches the toilet, even the top of the closed lid—which I pretty much use as a dressing table in the mornings—is unclean and subject to the sanitary laws of Leviticus.

Things came to a head one evening at a local eatery. When Ed returned to the table after washing his hands, I told him there was no rational reason to do that unless he was planning to handle his food and then leave it sitting out at room temperature for three or four hours before eating it. This reminded me of something I had recently learned in the course of my work, which was not even raccoons wash up before eating. Yes, according to wildlife expert David McCullough, of Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, raccoons are not washing, but merely handling their food. They do it even when there’s no water around. “It’s a tactile thing,” he told me. “They have extremely sensitive hands, and one idea is that they are just fulfilling a need to feel food moving around in their paws.”

I told this to Ed. He looked like he wanted to strangle me, and Professor McCullough too. I followed his gaze to the true source of his emotion: the restaurant’s cook. The man had his right hand tucked in his left armpit and was absently massaging the flesh as he read our dinner order and prepared to contaminate Ed’s halibut.

“Big deal,” I said. “He’s wearing a shirt. Maybe he has extremely sensitive hands and it fulfills a need.”

Ed called me insane. I called him abnormal. He was right, I was right. We decided we canceled each other out and that together we made one sane, normal entity, at least compared to, I don’t know, raccoons. Then Ed did something very touching. He reached over and kissed my hand, which we both knew hadn’t been washed since the night before.