Free High Tide in Tucson by Barbara Kingsolver Page A

be more valued for inward individuality than outward conformity. That a world plagued by poverty can ill afford the planned obsolescence of haute couture .
    But a small corner of my heart still harbors the Bride of Frankenstein, eleven years of age, haunting me in her brogues and petticoats. Always and forever, the ghosts of past anguish compel us to live through our children. If my daughter ever asks for the nineties equivalent of go-go boots, I’ll cave in.
    Maybe I’ll also buy her some of those clear plastic galoshes to button over them on inclement days.

THE HOUSEHOLD ZEN
    In Barbara Pym’s novel Excellent Women , published in 1952, there’s a moment when our heroine pays a call on her new downstairs neighbor, a dubious kind of woman who wears trousers and is always dashing off to meetings of the Anthropological Society. When this woman answers the door, she shrugs without remorse at her unkempt apartment and declares, “I’m such a slut.”
    Wonderful word. Like so many others—gay, pill, roommate—it’s acquired a sexual edge since the fifties, and it’s too bad about slut , because the language needs a word to describe this particular relationship to housework. Something to tell the UPS man.
    A select group of friends and I have formed a secret slut society. We wear trousers, we have fascinating work, and it’s possible that the dust bunnies under our beds could be breeding dustbison. It’s pretty shocking. In our lives we’ve seen revolutions in birth control and microchips and air bags, and all these are nothing compared to what’s happened to housework. Interestingly, technology has nothing to do with it.
    â€œWe had a dishwasher, but my mother insisted you had to scrub and rinse every dish before you loaded it in,” one of my colleagues in sluthood recalled as we sat around drinking something instant. The rest of us knew the story. The Kitchen Mystique. Dad gives Mom a microwave—a putative labor-saving device—and she reorganizes the whole kitchen as if the family had gone kosher, creating a supernatural order of kitchenware, some of which can go in the microwave and some of which will, she is sure, blow up in there. Melmac bombs.
    My friend Jane dates a turning point in her life to the day in childhood when she drew a diagram of the vacuum cleaner before taking it out of the closet. When she finished vacuuming she put it away, every loop and coil scientifically in place, then silently watched her mother take it out and do it over again, claiming as always that it wasn’t properly put away.
    Cleaning houses in 1960 took ninety hours a week and the mind of a rocket scientist. Cleaning my house, in the nineties, takes a lick and a promise. Maybe fifteen adult-hours per week, for everything: laundry, dishes, a semiannual dust-bison roundup. The vacuum cleaner can stand on its head in the closet for all I care. I’ve discovered that almost any two things can be laundered together, and that the dishwasher will actually wash dishes if left to its own devices. Once in a blue moon my daughter’s ballet tights will shrink and the forks won’t entirely come clean; I donate them to the hand-me-down bag and run them through again, respectively. In these matters, it seems to me, an ounce of cure is worth a lifetime of prevention.
    How did housework get to be so easy? I spent years wondering, until it dawned on me I was asking the wrong question. Why was it ever hard? I don’t mean in the days of slogging clothes against rocks in the river, I mean in the days between our fore-mothers’ competent Maytag and mine. Why did Donna Reed’s house demand a full-time wife whereas mine asks for an occasional date? Because of historical necessity, pure and simple. In the fifties and sixties the economy boomed. One breadwinner could feed a family, and the social order demanded that Rosie the Riveter get out of the factory and into the