Associated Pressure
By C. M. Dougherty

The People vs. Pigs

Four decades ago my girlfriend’s seventeen year old Southern Italian grandmother moved to Milan after a shotgun wedding. In addition to being branded harlot she was also chastised by the Northerners for being dirty, malodorous and uncultured. She spent the next half-century among the Milanese developing an obsessive-compulsive disorder trying to prove to her pious neighbors that she kept a clean home, raised proper children and bathed every day. My girlfriend’s grandmother passed this obsession for cleanliness onto her daughter, who passed it to my girlfriend. Three generations later, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I am directly suffering from it all.
"How many glasses of water do you have to drink before you drown?" I asked my girlfriend, not without a large dose of condescension and suppressed anger.
"What!" she hastily replied in anticipation of a good old fashion brawl.
"You’re in the middle of the desert and you’re dying of thirst, literally."
"Shut up!"
"If you don’t have water in the next thirty seconds you’re finished. Suddenly you come across a strange man with water, not just little restaurant size glasses of water with onion cubes, but clear, cool, not too cold, water, served in pint glasses. How many pints in a row can you drink before you drown?"
"Fucking professor!" was not the answer I was looking for. She stepped on the power button and the vacuum cleaner roared to life. I watched her blaze a swath across the spotless faux Chinese carpet and I left for the local pub. It was a beautiful Sunday morning.
The first and second pints of water would be undeniably life-saving. A quick third and fourth pint would be both therapeutic and enjoyable. The fifth pint would probably bring forth indifference. The sixth would be annoying. You would become bloated. After the seventh pint, water may start to enter your lungs. You may begin to dribble and cough. The eighth in a row would have to be forced down your throat by the stranger with the pint glasses. You would begin to choke and possibly lose control of your bladder. The ninth, also forced, might go directly into your lungs. You may pass out. The tenth fills your lungs as you lie unconscious on your back. You are no longer breathing. You would finally drown. Dead. Ten pints, five minutes. That’s my guess, give or take a few pints, depending on size and weight.
My girlfriend cleans well beyond ten pints of water. She cleans until beautiful sun-filled Sunday mornings pass into darkness under the repression of a roaring vacuum cleaner and raw smell of harsh abrasives. She doesn’t just clean, she erases. She erases our existence.
Waste paper baskets are emptied as soon as something small, dry and harmless floats toward the bottom. She throws out newspapers before they are read. Both sides of the carpet are vacuumed because, and I quote, "the dirt goes through the rug and makes the floor dirty". Then she mops the floor under the carpet. She changes the bed sheets every week. She organizes her closet every few days and even irons her socks and underwear.
By the time she’s finished our apartment resembles a tourist site of some dead forgotten president without the velvet ropes. Her obsession for The Art of Clean, and orderliness in general, merits psychiatric attention, even if she lived in Nazi Germany or Amish America.
Last week when the exterminator came by for the bi-monthly debugging he noted in broken English as he left "This cleanest apartment in city." He smiled an incomplete smile and I said "I know, I know."
This contentious cleaning issue has often delivered us well past the hurdles of anger and into physical violence. She once threw a TV remote control at me, which fortunately hit me in the back of the head because behind the back of my head, not only was the front of my head, also known as my face, but a rather large, weather-beaten window facing a First Avenue. That argument, inconspicuously enough, began over a some poor innocent sock drying on the back of a kitchen chair and ended in exotic phrases like "Sei un porco!" and "I don’t want to live in a God damn museum!" and "Idioto. Torna da tua madre!" and "Oww!"
I have secretly thought about divorce. She openly spoke of it and I pretended offense.

It has turned into a war of attrition and retreat. She wins a skirmish. I take a front. She seizes a hill. I build a bridge. She razes the bridge. I become a marginally neater, cleaner, more respectful person. She becomes more tolerant. I promise to put my shoes away. She stops throwing them out onto First Avenue. We’ll meet somewhere in the middle, some day in Paris or Switzerland, an armistice will be signed, if I were to guess the year, 2030.
Henry Miller wrote a beautiful paragraph in The Tropic of Capricorn. I apologize for taking the liberty of converting his prose into a poem:
The newspapers are folded
The dishes are dried
Shirts are pressed
And thirsty plants watered
For tomorrow morning’s sun
Everything is for tomorrow
But tomorrow never comes
I like to live on two pints of water, three pints if I’m hungover. It’s never a bad thing to be a little thirsty, the water tastes so much better.