Doing the Dishes
Apr. 12th, 2007 02:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dichroicYou know what kind of writer I am? Reactive, that's what kind. I don't write until something klunks me over the head, or someone asks a question I need to answer. However, I have now proved to my own satsfaction (though probably not Geoff Ryman's) that it is, in fact, possible to write a science fiction story that focuses specifically on "child rearing, washing the dishes, building everyday relationships, and earning a living" and moreover, one about running to domesticity instead of away from it. Whether it's possible to write a Hugo-caliber story on those things I don't know; ask someone who can write one. There's an old saying that you can write a song about anything: according to the stories I've heard, that saying is directly responsible for both the old hit "Splish-Splash, I Was Taking a Bath" and the beautiful "Follow That Road." I don't see why it wouldn't apply to SF stories too: if Connie Willis can write an iconic story about menstruation, why not any other topic? But yes, it is definitely, provably possible :
She always did the dishes by hand. Part of it was simple logic - they still hadn't been able to design a dishwashing machine that didn't require pre-washing the plates, and that took very nearly as long as just washing the silly things yourself. The bigger reason, though, was that washing dishes required no decisions to be made. After a day of mediating arguments over whether the Zilph traders had authority to sell on Iskander 5, or whether the Lumorians could tax imports from their planet's moon after it gained independence, or the even thornier issues of juggling her assistants' vacations so that someone was always on call, it was a welcome relief to stand, wrist-deep in hot soapy water with no decisions to make, no messages waiting, no demands for her attention. The dishes began dirty and ended clean; for this one moment, in this one tiny fight, chaos was defeated.
She'd always lived alone; sometimes she thought that one quiet moment after dinner was the whole reason she'd never wanted a partner. She wasn't sure whether she could have borne interruption in that quiet moment. She'd seen how it went in other homes: the dishes were rinsed and loaded into the cleaner in a hurry, with constant calls from the children for Mama's attention, or from the partner with questions about the next day's plans or the location of some widget that always turned out to be lying in plain sight. Household chores, supposedly automated, still needed to be supervised and there always seemed to be one member of the house who got stuck with that task no matter how many other jobs she had, keeping one eye on the household appliances, one on the children, and one on the newsfeed.
She mulled over work issues while cooking, and ate with the newsfeeder on, but she'd always been succesful at putting work concerns out of her mind as she cleaned up from her meal, luxuriating in cleaning her mind as she scrubbed her dishes clean. Today was different, though; this evening her thoughts swirled in a maelstrom that refused to settle down. Today she was faced with a decision she'd never seriously considered before.
Xie was a businessman, but since xie dealt exclusively with on-planet business, there was no potential for a conflict of interest with her decisions. That was crucial, because her decisions only had weight as long as she remained above even the appearance of personal interest. Xie was successful enough to be able to afford a houseful of the latest work-savers, or even live-in help. Xie had first piqued her interest when they'd met at an otherwise-tedious banquet, of the sort she generally tried to avoid, with the livelines of xir mind and the breadth of xir conversation. It was rare to meet anyone at these functions who would talk about anything but the specific business at hand, or the work they did all day - that was exactly why she avoided them. In contrast, xie ranged from books to ideas to the minutiae of daily life, in dazzling figurative leaps that kept her scrambling, breathless with laughter, to keep up. She was immediately smitten, but it wasn't until today that she'd begun to consider whether this might become something more than a casual pairing.
They'd met for lunch, as they did whenever their schedules permitted. They were well known and liked at their favorite cafe, and today they'd been given a very quiet table in a private corner. The conversation moved to the chaos in their busy lives, and xie leaned toward her with the self-conscious air of one about to impart a great secret. "Remember that article we were laughing about last week? The one with the picture of us and the caption, 'Has the person with everything finally been caught?' They must have been talking about you, because I don't actually have everything. There's one thing I don't have. You'll probably think I'm crazy, but..."
She felt her breath quicken, for not reason she could identify; later, she wondered if she'd had some inkling of what xie was about to say. Xie continued, "I may be the only person left on the planet who doesn't have a self-guided suction cleaner. I like vaccuming my own floors. Well, you know what my job is like. Yours is the same way. There's something about the noise and the mindless work. It's the one time I can shut my brain off and just do something totally mindless without thinking about anything."
She looked at xem for a long moment, caught between reactions. She'd said nothing then except, "Oh, I do understand, believe me." Now, though, as she rinsed the last glass, she found herself wondering one more thing. They'd known each other so well, almost from the first instant. She knew what xie was like across a dinner table, in a crowd, alone watching a moonset, naked and tender with admiration for her in xir eyes. Now she contemplated one last threshold of intimacy, one she'd never considered crossing before: what was xie like with a dish towel?
Note, for those who get this far: anything fictional I write is a learning exercise these days, so commentary is welcome, as long as it's more informative than "this sucks!" At least tell me what and why.
Specifics, because I am learning, and because if you're an engineer after you put something together, you take it apart again: The hardest decision on this was the pronouns. I made one character "xie" because I didn't want to limit it: not only to hetero partners, but also not specifically to humans. (That's also why there's a reference to someone having three eyes; if you want it to be human, the third one is figurative. But it could be literal.) My only worry is whether it's too unintuitive to figure out that that is a pronoun, not a name, especially for people who haven't encountered the deliberate neutral pronouns "zie" and "zir" I sometimes see on LJ.
She always did the dishes by hand. Part of it was simple logic - they still hadn't been able to design a dishwashing machine that didn't require pre-washing the plates, and that took very nearly as long as just washing the silly things yourself. The bigger reason, though, was that washing dishes required no decisions to be made. After a day of mediating arguments over whether the Zilph traders had authority to sell on Iskander 5, or whether the Lumorians could tax imports from their planet's moon after it gained independence, or the even thornier issues of juggling her assistants' vacations so that someone was always on call, it was a welcome relief to stand, wrist-deep in hot soapy water with no decisions to make, no messages waiting, no demands for her attention. The dishes began dirty and ended clean; for this one moment, in this one tiny fight, chaos was defeated.
She'd always lived alone; sometimes she thought that one quiet moment after dinner was the whole reason she'd never wanted a partner. She wasn't sure whether she could have borne interruption in that quiet moment. She'd seen how it went in other homes: the dishes were rinsed and loaded into the cleaner in a hurry, with constant calls from the children for Mama's attention, or from the partner with questions about the next day's plans or the location of some widget that always turned out to be lying in plain sight. Household chores, supposedly automated, still needed to be supervised and there always seemed to be one member of the house who got stuck with that task no matter how many other jobs she had, keeping one eye on the household appliances, one on the children, and one on the newsfeed.
She mulled over work issues while cooking, and ate with the newsfeeder on, but she'd always been succesful at putting work concerns out of her mind as she cleaned up from her meal, luxuriating in cleaning her mind as she scrubbed her dishes clean. Today was different, though; this evening her thoughts swirled in a maelstrom that refused to settle down. Today she was faced with a decision she'd never seriously considered before.
Xie was a businessman, but since xie dealt exclusively with on-planet business, there was no potential for a conflict of interest with her decisions. That was crucial, because her decisions only had weight as long as she remained above even the appearance of personal interest. Xie was successful enough to be able to afford a houseful of the latest work-savers, or even live-in help. Xie had first piqued her interest when they'd met at an otherwise-tedious banquet, of the sort she generally tried to avoid, with the livelines of xir mind and the breadth of xir conversation. It was rare to meet anyone at these functions who would talk about anything but the specific business at hand, or the work they did all day - that was exactly why she avoided them. In contrast, xie ranged from books to ideas to the minutiae of daily life, in dazzling figurative leaps that kept her scrambling, breathless with laughter, to keep up. She was immediately smitten, but it wasn't until today that she'd begun to consider whether this might become something more than a casual pairing.
They'd met for lunch, as they did whenever their schedules permitted. They were well known and liked at their favorite cafe, and today they'd been given a very quiet table in a private corner. The conversation moved to the chaos in their busy lives, and xie leaned toward her with the self-conscious air of one about to impart a great secret. "Remember that article we were laughing about last week? The one with the picture of us and the caption, 'Has the person with everything finally been caught?' They must have been talking about you, because I don't actually have everything. There's one thing I don't have. You'll probably think I'm crazy, but..."
She felt her breath quicken, for not reason she could identify; later, she wondered if she'd had some inkling of what xie was about to say. Xie continued, "I may be the only person left on the planet who doesn't have a self-guided suction cleaner. I like vaccuming my own floors. Well, you know what my job is like. Yours is the same way. There's something about the noise and the mindless work. It's the one time I can shut my brain off and just do something totally mindless without thinking about anything."
She looked at xem for a long moment, caught between reactions. She'd said nothing then except, "Oh, I do understand, believe me." Now, though, as she rinsed the last glass, she found herself wondering one more thing. They'd known each other so well, almost from the first instant. She knew what xie was like across a dinner table, in a crowd, alone watching a moonset, naked and tender with admiration for her in xir eyes. Now she contemplated one last threshold of intimacy, one she'd never considered crossing before: what was xie like with a dish towel?
Note, for those who get this far: anything fictional I write is a learning exercise these days, so commentary is welcome, as long as it's more informative than "this sucks!" At least tell me what and why.
Specifics, because I am learning, and because if you're an engineer after you put something together, you take it apart again: The hardest decision on this was the pronouns. I made one character "xie" because I didn't want to limit it: not only to hetero partners, but also not specifically to humans. (That's also why there's a reference to someone having three eyes; if you want it to be human, the third one is figurative. But it could be literal.) My only worry is whether it's too unintuitive to figure out that that is a pronoun, not a name, especially for people who haven't encountered the deliberate neutral pronouns "zie" and "zir" I sometimes see on LJ.
