Jul 20, 2007 10:10 am
Day 23. Be careful what you wish for.
She crossed her legs and gave me the look one gives when trying to seem very reasonable, complete with pursed lips, innocently raised eyebrows, and a slight shrug of the shoulders. “Of course, I don’t want to be the new one making up all the rules, you know? But I definitely don’t want to be always cleaning up this room. It’s just that, one puts away one’s things after a meal, you see what I mean? It’s not nice to see other people’s stuff in front of you all the time.”
I see. That cup on the dining room table was the problem. Shouldn’t have had that orange juice.
We’ve been found out. Ever since the two German Swiss moved out of the room, Sameer, Germán, and I have been secretly competing with each other to see who could demonstrate the most un-Swiss-like housekeeping habits. Germán’s specialty is a little game called “stacking unwashed dishes in the sink,” and he plays it with a vengeance. My forte happens to be “putting old food on other people’s refrigerator shelves.” In fact, I am so good at this that nobody, not even bacteria, has dared to challenge that dangerous-looking piece of goat cheese I put on the vegetable rack — until I got hungry enough to not see the expiration date and ate it with some stale bread. Sameer, the lightweight among us three, can only manage to “forget a cup on the dining table” once in a while. How ironic that this feeble, half-hearted attempt at uncleanliness would be the first thing noticed by the newest member of our suite. Of course, it wasn’t the only thing.
“Is that a dishrag?” She pointed at the yellow cloth on the table that I sometimes use to wipe my face when I’m too lazy to get a napkin. “That really should go in the kitchen.”
“Oh I don’t use it, ” I shrugged. “You can talk to the other boys about it. They might just not have seen it, since it blends in so well with the color of the wood.”
She paused for a moment and stared at the rag, and then at the table. I don’t think she believed my explanation, but she clearly couldn’t figure out a polite way to challenge me. Who knows? I might actually be colorblind, or just very stupid. I might be using some American turn of phrase to say “I don’t know.” The possibilities are endless. I could tell, though, that she wasn’t about to let the matter slide due to petty cultural differences.
“You know, I taught my children from a very early age how to clean up after themselves. Your parents must have taught you all the same, no?”
I remembered how excited I was a month ago when I learned that my summer flat would be co-ed. That excitement abated only slightly when I met my four male suitemates, and then turned to hope when two of them moved out after finishing the school year. The two Swiss guys, Manuel and Daniel, were very helpful and decent, but were so shy that it would have taken all my time here just to work up to a proper conversation with them. Sameer, from Delhi, was much more sociable, and Germán, from Granada in Spain, was so gregarious and outgoing that I hadn’t even gotten to know him yet. The only traces of his existence in our flat were the sounds coming from the kitchen when he got home from hanging out with friends (never before midnight on weekdays) and the various dishes and mugs that sometimes were left forgotten on the dining room table in the morning.
Maybe it wasn’t so bad, struggling to have conversation with the Swiss guys, or sitting around with Sameer, speculating on how much Germán actually studied back in Spain. After all, they never interrogated me about my upbringing or personal hygiene. And now, it seems that fate has made a mockery of my hope of meeting a young, lively, and interesting girl right in my own flat. Martina was certainly lively, and hearing her talking about her family and their German standards of cleanliness wasn’t exactly uninteresting either. And I’m sure that she had plenty of youth at one point — it’s just too bad she had to go have two children, send them off to college, and turn 50 before gracing us with her presence.
Oh, and update. Since starting this post our last room has been filled. Our newest flatmate: Zoltan, from Hungary. And no, he’s not young, nor female, and his liveliness has yet to be demonstrated.
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