THE DISHWASHER
I groaned inwardly. It was a cold Tuesday morning in May and my parents were arguing about the dishwasher again.
“Honestly, Liz,” Dad said, “you don’t need to rinse the plates before putting them in. That’s the whole point of a dishwasher.”
“If you rinse the plates,” Mum said patiently, “then the dishwasher is more effective. Otherwise, you get potato starch streaking the glasses.”
“Look,” Dad said, “why don’t you go and sit down and let me do this?”
“Oh no,” Mum said. “I’m not falling for that. You’ll start putting wooden spoons in.”
“You CAN put wooden spoons in,” Dad said. “That’s why we bought the German one.”
“If you two don’t stop arguing about the dishwasher,” I butted in, “I will throw it into a quarry.”
“We’re not arguing, darling,” Mum said brightly. “We’re just discussing.”
Other unimportant things my parents argue about just discuss include:
• Whether to butter both pieces of bread in a sandwich, or leave one side for condiments only.
• Whether to put your coat on a few minutes before leaving in order to “get toasty” or just as you leave so you “feel the benefit.”
• Whether jam or cream goes first on a scone.
• Whether Jaffa Cakes are cookies or cakes. (“There’s a clue in the name, Liz!”)
• Whether you’re allowed to fold the corners of book pages over to keep your place.
None of these issues will ever be resolved. Ever.
I love my parents dearly, but they drive me crazy sometimes. Aside from her dishwasher obsession, my mother is possibly the most terrified person on the planet. She panics over the tiniest things and she won’t let me do anything that she considers even remotely dangerous. She made me wear a neon vest on my walk to school right up to eighth grade before I rebelled and threw it into a duck pond. Even now she insists I wear a blinking light on my backpack. Last month I asked her if I could go to London with my friend Blossom to attend a Knitters Against War protest march and she immediately had palpitations and got a migraine.
“A march? There might be terrorists!”
“Mum, they’re knitters.”
“There’ll be an extremist wing. Don’t you know how dangerous London is? A man knocked me over on a tube platform once.”
“By accident,” I reminded her. I’d heard the story before.
“I could have fallen in front of a TRAIN,” she said dramatically. “My life would have been snuffed out in a moment.”
“Dad would have found someone else,” I said. “He’s resilient.”
My father drives me mad, too. He’s one of life’s fence-sitters. To Dad, there are always two ways of looking at things. “Faults on both sides,” he says about the conflict in Israel and Palestine. “Both candidates make good points,” he says whenever two lunatic politicians argue with each other on the radio. “There are two schools of thought,” he explains when I ask him what he thinks about the death penalty. Apparently there are two schools of thought about the death penalty, but only one about rinsing plates before loading the dishwasher.
I watched the two of them edging around each other in the narrow kitchen. One would put something in the machine, only for the other to reposition it, or take it out altogether.
“You CERTAINLY can’t put that knife in,” Mum said.
“Why not?” Dad asked.
“That’s a paring knife. It’s vital that it remains sharp. The water will blunt it.”
“So how would you suggest I wash it?”
“In the sink!”
“Using what? Sand?”
They drove my sister, Verity, batty, too, which is why she moved to New Zealand a year ago, along with Rafe, my two-year-old nephew. I missed Verity and Rafe dreadfully, but I didn’t miss the arguments. Mum and Verity fought like stoats in a sock.
“Fleur? Fleur?” I realized my father was trying to get my attention.
“Yes?”
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think you are both insane,” I replied.
“Yes, but what do you think about putting paring knives in the dishwasher?”
“I think,” I said, getting up from the table and grabbing my schoolbag, “that there are two schools of thought on the issue.”
Copyright © 2018 by T. S. Easton
