The first thing I noticed as I walked into my kitchen this morning… was the smell of vinegar.
Standing in the doorway, I inhaled deeply several times.
Yep. That’s vinegar. Unmistakable aroma. Maybe I left a container open last night?
I rubbed my sleepy eyes. As I glanced around the kitchen for open containers, I jolted wide awake…
… because the kitchen was clean.
Spotless. It definitely wasn’t like that when I had gone to bed. Frankly, it hadn’t been this clean since before my ex moved out.
A quick word about me for context: I’m not a very organized person, by any definition. And living on my own, the place has a tendency to get rather messy. It’s part of my lifelong struggle with ADHD: when I finish using something, I set it down, and then I forget about it. Out of sight: out of mind. I definitely leave stuff lying around a lot, but I wouldn’t say I’m unsanitary, or anything extreme like that: I wipe up any spills, I close up any leftover food, and I practice regular personal hygiene. My place doesn’t smell bad or anything, but there’s usually a stack of empty frozen meal boxes by the microwave, a few empty, crumpled water bottles near the recycling bin, and other things like that. Still, I never let anything become a biology project, if you know what I mean. I also have the presence of mind to admit how bad I am at washing dishes… ever… so I almost always use disposable plates and utensils. Compelling myself to actually wash real dishes is almost as impossible for me as motivating myself to cook anything more complex than a TV dinner: I have neither the patience nor the attention span for that. I have tried several times. Cooking full meals and cleaning dishes are the most draining and unendingly tedious normal-person tasks that I could be expected to complete on any given day. (Some people love to cook. I know. And yes, some people even love to clean. I have nothing but praise and positive wishes for either of these types of people: I am simply not among them… At all.) For me, it’s a chore. And that “setting something down and forgetting about it” thing I mentioned earlier? Yeah. That includes sponges, spatulas, cutting boards, whisks, vegetables, small ingredients, and stove-burners. Cooking is so much harder when you can never find whatever you were just holding a moment ago.
I thought for a moment about my ex.
Unlike me, my ex loved to cook. She would prepare these very extravagant dishes, with diverse flavor palettes. I happily ate whatever she gave me, and it was always fantastic. She’d even experiment with recipes sometimes, and I enjoyed being her test-audience. For everything else she put me through there in the end, she did make some of the best meals I’ve ever eaten in my life. I actually kinda wish I’d gotten her jambalaya recipe before things went sideways…
…I think about that jambalaya a lot. She left a couple of her cookbooks here, but I think that recipe was a family secret, so it wouldn’t be in them. (Besides, what would I actually do with it, even if I had it?)
My own, attention-span-friendly meal prep routine is pretty simple:
Simple… Straightforward… Sad?… I suppose so… Certainly a solitary lifestyle. But hey, they make all kinds of frozen meals now, so I usually mix it up for variety. They taste fine.
It’s also safer: the microwave and the toaster stop heating after the set time; so it’s far less likely that I’ll burn the place down, like I might if I forget the stove or the oven.
…But I digress.
If I’m honest with myself: I don’t remember the last time I even used vinegar. Like I said, I never cook.
The clean kitchen felt especially strange: no empty food boxes, no water bottles, no forgotten forks or paper plates, no open containers, including any vinegar. The ceramic soup bowls I’d left in the sink (yeah, to soak…two days ago… shush.) had been moved somewhere else.
Was I in the right apartment?
I opened the cabinets and found my bowls, clean, safe and sound, where they belonged…
…but they were stacked face-down. In fact, most of my (albeit few) permanent dishes were now turned face-down inside the cabinet, and each shelf had been lined with a layer of paper towels for those dishes to rest on. Neither of these things were something I would do.
Someone organized under the sink as well. And my pantry. Something is very bizarre here. Not bad, but just… strange.
As I walked around the kitchen inspecting this handiwork of persons unknown, I became aware with each step that my feet had the faintest bit of adhesion on the wood floor. Not quite sticky, but just barely tacky… As if someone had mopped the floor, but it hadn’t quite dried yet.
I knelt down close to the floor, and took a whiff.
Vinegar.
Someone has been here, and they’ve mopped my kitchen floor with vinegar.
I was annoyed. Vinegar wasn’t great for hardwood floors. I remember reading somewhere that people used to mop hardwood floors with vinegar all the time, but it gradually eroded the sealant off the surface, or something like that. The practice was more common back in the 50’s and 60’s.
Where had I read that?
I’ll circle back to that thought.
Who the hell had cleaned my kitchen?
I reasoned two possible explanations:
Checking the pantry again, I rummaged through the neat, orderly shelves. Nothing in the pantry was now where it usually was, but that didn’t matter, because I had just seen it.
It wasn’t in the pantry.
I swear, I had just seen it, though.
It was under the sink. That’s where I found my bottle of vinegar: turns out, that’s where I had seen it earlier. Our mystery cleaner had moved it there. I examined the vinegar bottle, now only a quarter full.
“I’ll throw it away,” I thought, “and them take the garbage out.”
They can’t put more vinegar on my floors if I don’t have any, right?
I opened the trash bin to through the bottle away.
…Looks like my phantom cleaner had already emptied the bin and replaced the liner bag. The only thing in the new liner bag was a single dryer sheet.
The bin itself had been scrubbed clean, too. No crumbs or food stains.
I doubt I could be this diligently thorough, even if I’d been sleepwalking. Something else must be going on.
I slipped into a pair of sandals, walked outside, and tossed the vinegar bottle directly into the dumpster. Problem solved. As I returned to my apartment, I rolled through the list of details so far:
“For the smell,” I said aloud to myself, as the realization dawned on me:
These are all tricks! Old-school, homemaker-housewife tricks from the 1950’s; stereotype suburban-Americana stuff from the days of hardcore racism and codified, sexist gender roles!
I marched back into the kitchen with this new theory, and headed straight for the oven. I pulled open the metal drawer at the base of the oven, where I normally kept my frying pan and my baking sheet.
Sure enough, the drawer was completely empty, and scrubbed clean.
For those of you who don’t already know, the drawer below most ovens serves an actual purpose, beyond storing pots and pans. It’s called a warming drawer, and it’s meant to keep food warm while the rest of the meal prep is still going on. It’s also handy for breadmaking, I think? Warming drawers don’t get used very much for that purpose anymore, though. As a result, that little nugget of knowledge is far less widespread, ever since the advent of microwaves; it was far more common in eras passed.
…So it stands to reason that this entity, whatever it was, with a trademark 1950’s mindset, would not perceive the warming drawer as a suitable place for me to store my cooking utensils.
I was right. I found my skillet and my baking sheet neatly placed inside a different cabinet.
Now, you might be wondering, “How does someone who never cooks happen to know anything about a warming drawer?”
Well, I collect and read books…
Unusual books. Used books. Random books. Usually books with obsolete information, or about incredibly niche topics. If I see an antique shop, I’ll wander inside just to look for interesting old books. I have a large one called “The Lore of Ships;” written in 1975, it’s essentially an encyclopedic maritime equipment guide: knots, lanterns, signals, anchors, etc… I found it under a roll of butcher paper in the back of my high school’s ceramics drying room, and my art teacher let me keep it. I once found a bird encyclopedia from 1941, propping up the workbench in a muffler shop. I also have an old guidebook that’s all about post-death funerary processes, like body preparation stuff: embalming, cremation, autopsy, etc. It really gets into all the nitty gritty details that most people don’t want to think about.
I actually found one just the other day that I haven’t even opened yet. It’s about the size of a bible (but I doubt it’s really a bible): black, canvas-bound (faded to grey), but it has no title or author anywhere on the outside cover. Its pages are quite yellow from age, and the binding along either side of its spine has heavily deteriorated. Despite this, it has proven impossible for me to open so far. My current guess is that it’s an old-fashioned book-safe: like a hollowed-out book used to stash valuables or hide other small objects. It’s normal for book-safes to have most of their pages glued together, which would explain why I can’t open it easily. It might also mean that something interesting is still tucked away inside it, and I’m admittedly quite curious. I asked my friend Lenny if I could borrow his pry-bar next week. Between that and some careful acetone application, I’ll get the mystery book open soon enough. For now though, it’s tucked on the top shelf of my bookcase, right next to—
Wait just a minute.
I dashed over to my bookshelf and pulled down the mystery-book’s nearest neighbor:
“Happy Husband, Happy Home: The Essential Homemaker’s Guide for the Modern Woman.”
I acquired this book ages ago, and kept it mostly for my own amusement: “haha; antiquated gender roles,” “haha; stupid backward cultural norms.” I approached this book with that sort of playful irreverence that only comes with hindsight.
Now though, I flipped through it again.
This is where I’d first read all of those cleaning tips: the vinegar on the floor, the upturned dishes, the dryer sheet in the garbage, even the stuff about the warming drawer.
It was all in here. In this housewife’s guide.
Seems an odd coincidence.
Unsure of what else to do, I simply slid the housekeeping book back into its place on the shelf, right between the old black book, and a cookbook my ex had left behind.
Out of sheer curiosity, I’ve purposefully left the kitchen messy again tonight, and now I’m going to bed. I’ll let you know if it happens again tomorrow.