Unless by Carol Shields

look after the dishes.”
    A house requires care. Until recently the Merry Maids came and cleaned our house twice a month, but now I call on them less and less frequently. Their van rolling into our driveway, the women’s muscles and buoyancy and booming equipment wear me out. I mostly look after the house myself. I deal with the dust and the dog hairs, wearing my oldest jeans and a cotton sweater coming unknit at the cuffs. Cleaning gives me pleasure, which I’m reluctant to admit and hardly ever do, but here, in my thoughts, I will register the fact: dusting, waxing, and polishing offer rewards. Quite a lot of people would agree with this if pressed, though vacuuming is too loud and cumbersome to enjoy. I especially love the manoeuvring of my dust mop over the old oak floors. (It is illegal to shake a dust mop out of a window in New York, and probably even in Toronto; I read that somewhere.) Those Buddhist monks I saw not long ago on a TV documentary devote two hours to morning meditation, followed by one hour of seriouscleaning. Saffron-robed and their shaved heads gleaming, they actually go out into the world each day with buckets and rags, and they clean things, anything that needs cleaning, a wall or an old fence, whatever presents threat or disorder. I’m beginning to understand where this might take them.
    With my dampened dust cloth in hand I’m keeping myself going. I reach under the sink and polish that hard-to-get-to piece of elbow pipe. Tomorrow I’m planning to dust the basement stairs, swiftly, but getting into the corners.
    I’m pot so thick that I can’t put the pieces of my odd obsession together, wood and bone, plumbing and blood. To paraphrase Danielle Westerman, we don’t make metaphors in order to distract ourselves. Metaphors hold their own power over us, even without their fugitive gestures. They’re as real as the peony bushes we observe when we’re children, lying flat on the grass and looking straight up to the undersides of leaves and petals and marvelling: Oh, this is secret territory, we think, an inverted world grown-ups can’t see, its beetles, its worms, its ant colonies, its sweet-sour smell of putrefaction. But, in fact, everyone knows about this palpable world; it stands for nothing but the world itself.
    I dust and polish this house of mine so that I’ll be able to seal it from damage. If I commit myself to its meticulous care, I will claim back my daughter Norah, gone to goodness. The soiling sickness that started with one wayward idea and then the spreading filaments of infection, the absurdnotion—Tao?—that silence is wiser than words, inaction better than action—this is what I work against. And probably, especially lately, I clean for the shadow of Mrs. McGinn, too, wanting to drop a curtsey in her direction. Yes, it was worth it, I long to tell her, all that anxiety and confusion. I’m young enough that I still sigh out: what is the point? but old enough not to expect an answer.
    I hurry with this work. I hurry through each hour. Every day I glance at the oak banister. Hands have run up and down its smoothed curves, giving it the look of a living organism. This banister has provided steady support, all the while looking graceful and giving off reflected light, and resisting with its continuity the immensity of ordinary human loneliness. Why would I not out of admiration stroke the silky surfaces now and then; every day, in fact? I won’t even mention the swift, transitory reward of lemon spray wax. Danielle Westerman and I have discussed the matter of housework. Not surprisingly, she, always looking a little dérisoire , believes that women have been enslaved by their possessions. Acquiring and then tending—these eat up a woman’s creativity, anyone’s creativity. But I’ve watched the way she arranges articles on a shelf, and how carefully she sets a table, even when it is just me coming into Toronto to have lunch in her sunroom.
    Her views often surprise me,