Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of women and nonbinary writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find in this column, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.
My fiancée loses her phone at least twice a day. She often lodges socks so far beneath the couch that they require a Saint Bernard to rescue them. And recently, when we were watching TV in bed, she opened a packet of Starkist tuna and laid the lip of the dripping wet package between us, as if this were a perfectly normal thing to do.
“Bridget!” I shrieked.
“What?”
Despite her affinity for messes, she reminds me of the Dustbuster. There is nothing more satisfying to me than the Dustbuster. It’s only about the size of a loaf of bread, but oh, the satisfaction it brings. The little pockets of beauty it creates where there once was a ball of hair or a crumbled cookie or a dead stink bug. The Dustbuster is humble, despite its power to say, “Ta-da!” It provides instant comfort, reminding me that things aren’t so bad, that the house isn’t all that dirty, and that my life, however disordered, is but one good whoosh away from relief.
I once lived in a house that I could never get clean. The toilet rusted up immediately after scrubbing. The corners of the rooms were like flypaper, collecting cough-drop wrappers and spiderwebs. Earrings were forever falling into the cracks between the floorboards, which heaved gusts of dust with every step like they were exasperated with me. It did not help that the woman I was dating told me I cleaned things wrong. She was a perfectionist. She liked the dishwasher loaded a certain way and the food cooked exactly as written in the recipe book.
“Are these dishes dirty or clean?” I asked her once.
The plates gleamed in their racks, but I could just make out the coffee faintly staining the cups. The spoons contained no trace of peanut butter, but the knives held hints of breakfast in their tiny teeth.
“They’re dirty,” she said, like it was obvious.
“But why do they look so clean?”
“That’s how they should always look when they go in the dishwasher,” she said. “That’s how they look when you rinse them first.”
I got the Dustbuster a few months ago because the regular-size vacuum was starting to make me feel like the old girlfriend did — like I couldn’t do anything right. Bulky and blue, it sat in the hall closet, practically crossing its arms every time I opened the door and didn’t choose to pull it out. What can I say? It was heavy. The rest of the closet teemed with precariously stacked boxes, a shovel, a metal detector and a bin of jewelry-making supplies. It was a shrine to activities I could be doing but wasn’t. To open this closet wasn’t just to see the unused vacuum, but to behold the unrealized dream of starting a garden or soldering a necklace.
The Dustbuster, on the other hand, brightens when I enter the room. We demolish dust bunnies and revel in the crackle of another popcorn kernel expertly busted. Putzing around the house, from corner to corner and from excavated sock to excavated sock, I feel a lightness of being. The house is far from spotless — it is all but impossible to vacuum an entire house with the Dustbuster — but that’s kind of the point. I will never be the sort of person who dutifully rinses dishes before placing them into the dishwasher, but when I met Bridget, I finally realized I didn’t have to be.
When our bed isn’t drenched in tuna juice, it’s actually pretty cute. In the morning, after she kisses me goodbye but before I start writing, I take my time making it. Fold, tuck, arrange. This is no small task, what with the 13 pillows, three blankets and the gaggle of plush avocados and stuffed cats who gather there. A few weeks ago I forgot to make it. It might have been a doctor’s appointment or a meeting or, quite possibly, my creativity dragging me directly to the desk. Either way, the avocados remained on the floor.
“Sorry for not making the bed,” I told Bridget when she came home that night.
“It’s OK,” she said simply, “I didn’t make it either.”
We brushed our teeth and slipped into our pajamas, deciding on a show to watch. Something about British people throwing pottery or couples deciding which house to renovate. Downstairs, in the slightly swept kitchen, with the good-enough microwave and the seldom-wiped counter, the dishes lay perfectly stained in the sink.
