The Clean House

“If you do not clean: how do you know if you’ve made any progress in life?”

Virginia has a degree in Greek literature, a particularly esoteric topic based in the study of rhetoric. In rhetorical study, there is never a singular right answer, which is intimidating for someone who, like Virginia, is plagued with fear and self-doubt. She finds comfort in cleaning because it is a tangible achievement. Ironically, it is impossible to make continual progress in life through cleaning because dust and dirt always return. The value structure Virginia has adopted therefore asks her to constantly repeat the same activities, rather than move on to new ones.

“I know when there is dust on the mirror. Don’t misunderstand me—I’m an educated woman. But if I were to die at any moment during the day, no one would have to clean my kitchen.”

Virginia thinks that Lane doesn’t see herself or her life clearly in her (literally and metaphorically) dirty mirror. This turns out to be true, when Charles leaves Lane for Ana. Virginia, who has only made safe choices, comforts herself with the knowledge that, unlike her sister’s, her house is in order, with no dirty laundry or secrets to discover.

“If I met you at—say—a party—and you said, I am from a small village in Brazil, and my parents were comedians, I would say, that’s very interesting. You sound like a very interesting woman. But life is about context. And I have met you in the context of my house, where I have hired you to clean. And I don’t want an interesting person to clean my house. I just want my house—cleaned.”

Lane makes it clear that with her achievements as a doctor, she looks down on people like Virginia and Matilde whose work is domestic. Beyond affirming this hierarchy of types of work, however, Lane is very uncomfortable with accepting help and showing her imperfections. She is only willing to allow someone to see her without pretenses if she believes their opinion doesn’t matter. Matilde’s story makes her a person rather than a faceless domestic employee, and this revelation that another whole and complex human is in her personal space makes Lane unhappy.

“So it is, for you, a religious practice?”

After Virginia asserts that cleaning houses makes her feel cleansed, Matilde recognizes the similarities between Virginia’s feeling and how she herself feels about humor and laughing, which Matilde views as a sacred practice.

“The perfect joke makes you forget about your life. The perfect joke makes you remember about your life. The perfect joke is stupid when you write it down. The perfect joke was not made up by one person. It passed through the air and you caught it. A perfect joke is somewhere between an angel and a fart.”

Matilde attempts to explain humor as a way of introducing the memory of her parents. To Matilde, a truly funny joke is both mystical and mundane, transcendent and grounded, beautiful and crude. It’s the product of all the jokes that came before, and yet it’s fleeting and impermanent. Similarly, her parents are elevated and mythical in her memory. Their presence in her life was unfinished and too short.

“I say: what’s so funny? (I hate not understanding a joke.) My mother says: ask me again when you’re thirty. Now I’m almost thirty. And I’ll never know the joke.”

Matilde lost her parents tragically and suddenly when she was in her mid-twenties. With their deaths, she also lost the things that they’ll never teach her or pass down to her. She is plagued by her need-to-know answers that don’t exist. Ironically, though Matilde hates not understanding jokes, she only tells jokes in the play that the audience isn’t meant to hear or comprehend.

“My husband is like a well-placed couch. He takes up the right amount of space. A man should not be too beautiful. Or too good in bed. A man should be—functional. And well chosen. Otherwise you’re in trouble.”

Although Virginia and Lane are opposites in many ways, Virginia’s need to view her husband as a fixture or a piece of furniture mirrors Lane’s need to see Matilde as a household appliance. Lane believes that she is better than Matilde, and Virginia believes that she isn’t good enough, but both women dehumanize others in their minds because they’re afraid to allow them to see their flaws.

“A good joke cleans your insides out. If I don’t laugh for a week, I feel dirty. I feel dirty now, like my insides are rotting.”

When Matilde enters Lane’s house, it is stagnant and desperately in need of cleaning on both a literal and a spiritual level. Becoming a domestic cleaner in that environment has caused Matilde to stagnate as well. What Lane diagnoses as depression, a medical issue, is really Matilde’s response to a situation with no humor. Matilde needs someone who can make her laugh.

“My mother once said to me: Matilde, in order to tell a good joke, you have to believe that your problems are very small, and that the world is very big. She said: if more women knew more jokes, there would be more justice in this world.”

Throughout the play, Matilde maintains that jokes are more than words. Jokes can belittle and minimize. Depending on the subject, jokes can be used as a weapon to mock the oppressed or demean the oppressors. According to Matilde’s mother, women could use humor as an effective tool to attack the gender power imbalance by making jokes about men.

“I’ve never seen my sister’s underwear before.”

Although Virginia and Lane are sisters, they have always had a contentious relationship. When their interactions become more intimate than cordial, their sisterly rivalry rears up and nastiness emerges between them. While folding Lane’s laundry, Virginia realizes that she is seeing something more personal than her sister has ever allowed before.

“Mmm. Yes. It must make you uncomfortable to—I don’t know—read a magazine while someone cleans up after you.”

Virginia criticizes Lane for failing to take care of her own house, but she also touches on a common anxiety for women that comes with hiring someone to clean. Although Lane works long hours and can afford to pay someone to live in her house and clean full time, and even though her husband, Charles, works the same long hours in the same field, the responsibility of keeping the house still falls to Lane because she is a woman. Virginia accepts housekeeping as a duty and a privilege, a way in which she can control her home. Lane, however, must fight the guilt of passing that role to another woman.

“I don’t want my sister to clean my house. I want a stranger to clean my house.”

Lane is uncomfortable with admitting that she needs help. If her sister cleans Lane’s house, her sister is taking care of her, doing her a favor, and picking up what Lane is unable to do herself. With a stranger, on the other hand, cleaning is simply a transaction. Lane can expect the job to be done without feeling judged for her inability to do it herself.

“People imagine that people who are in love are happy.”

When Lane imagines Ana and Charles together, their expressions of love for each other are saccharine and unselfconsciously ecstatic. Matilde, though she remembers her parents with similar idealism, reminds Lane that love is not the same as happiness. People yearn for love and even commit suicide for lack of it because they believe that love would make them deliriously happy, but love is often also difficult and painful.

“We fell in love when we were twenty-two. We had plans. There was justice in the world. There was justice in love. If a person was good enough, an equally good person would fall in love with that person. And then I met—Ana. Justice had nothing to do with it.”

Charles acknowledges that his leaving Lane is unfair to her, but throughout the conversation, he tries different tactics to absolve himself from guilt and responsibility. Charles suggests that he can be with Ana remorselessly because love is inherently unfair, and declares that he is just as surprised as Lane to have discovered this.

“There once was a very great American surgeon named Halsted. He was married to a nurse. He loved her—immeasurably. One day Halsted noticed that his wife’s hands were chapped and red when she came back from surgery. And so he invented rubber gloves. For her. It is one of the great love stories in medicine. The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love. When I met Ana, I knew: I loved her to the point of invention.”

Charles romanticizes the story of the surgeon William Stewart Halsted, who invented rubber gloves after seeing that one of the hospital’s best scrub nurses (who was not yet his wife) was developing skin rashes from the surgical soap. Halsted’s innovation was one of many contributions to medicine and was also a part of his interest in germ theory and recent discoveries in antiseptics used to battle infection. Charles’s comparison of himself to Halsted is lofty, elevating himself as if Ana has the capability to bring out levels of genius in him that Lane could not. By this fanciful reasoning, his infidelity was a service to humanity.

“In Jewish law you are legally obligated to break off relations with your wife or husband if you find what is called your bashert.”

Ana is Jewish, but Charles is not. Having only heard about the concept of bashert on public radio, Charles demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of Judaism. “Bashert” is Yiddish for “destiny” and is used in Jewish culture to mean “soulmate.” But while Jewish law allows for divorce, it certainly doesn’t require it. In fact, Judaism is a scholarly religion, and its religious texts are constantly open to interpretation. Instead of expressing remorse to Lane for hurting her, he uses the reference to bashert in an attempt to claim that his choice to break up with her is beyond his control.

“Matilde is like a sister to me. […] We clean together. We talk, and fold laundry, as women used to do. They would gather at the public fountains and wash their clothes and tell stories. Now we are alone in our separate houses and it is terrible.”

Virginia defines her identity as a woman through cleaning and housekeeping, but she is lonely and isolated, and longs for the days before technology made it easy to keep domestic work and laundry in the home. By saying that Matilde has been like a sister to her, she reveals that her criticism of her sister’s hatred of cleaning is founded in a desire for kinship and company.

“Excuse me. But I think that people who are in love—really in love—would like to clean up after each other. If I were in love with Charles I would enjoy folding his laundry.”

Virginia tries to take her sister’s side by criticizing Ana’s unwillingness to do laundry for Charles. But she inadvertently criticizes Lane as well, since Lane also avoids cleaning and laundry.

“I made up eighty-four new jokes since I started working for you. I only made up one at the other house. It was a good one though. Sometimes you have to suffer for the really good ones.”

Matilde’s joke-writing flows more easily while she’s in Ana’s household, but Lane’s house, as stifling as it is, pushed her to write an even better joke. Here Matilde suggests that adversity can breed creativity.

“The perfect joke happens by accident. Like a boil on your backside that you pop. The perfect joke is the perfect music. You want to hear it only once in your life, and then, never again.”

Matilde is constantly creating new jokes, but although she is well-versed in the anatomy of humor, she suggests that there is also something mystical about the way the perfect joke emerges. It isn’t a matter of working harder, but of harnessing magic, and jokes are ephemeral because they are only funny once.

“But I love you more than Houdini loved his wife. He was distracted—as by his magic. I’m not distracted. Ana. Let’s go to the hospital.”

Charles is in denial about the fact that Ana is dying and that he will lose her. He pushes Ana to practice techniques for communicating from beyond the grave, asserting that their love can withstand death, even though he knows his effort is futile. Her only hope for survival is to go to the hospital, which she will not consider.

“No you’re not. If you were really sorry, you wouldn’t have done it. We do as we please, and then we say we’re sorry. But we’re not sorry. We’re just—uncomfortable—watching other people in pain.”

When Lane visits Ana to give her a medical exam, Ana apologizes for helping to end her marriage. Before this point, Charles and Ana have only justified and rationalized their choice. Now, Lane recognizes that Ana doesn’t regret her action; she just feels guilty that her happiness caused Lane to suffer.

“People talk about cancer like it’s this special thing you have a relationship with. And it becomes blood count, biopsy, chemotherapy, radiation, bone marrow, blah blah blah blah blah. As long as I live I want to retain my own language. Mientras tengo vida, quiero procurar mantener mi proprio idioma. No extra hospital words. I don’t want a relationship with a disease. I want to have a relationship with death. That’s important. But to have a relationship with a disease—that’s some kind of bourgeois invention. And I hate it.”

Like Matilde, Ana connects her identity to her nationality and native language. Ana explains that becoming a cancer patient has a way of infiltrating one’s identity and becoming central to every conversation. Ana prefers to see herself as dying rather than seeing herself as constantly negotiating and living with a disease.