Humor writer David Sedaris once wrote a story about his attempts to solve a persistent household mystery when he was a teenager. It seems that someone in his house had developed the obnoxious habit of using the bathroom towels as toilet paper. The hardest part, he said, was that everyone was a suspect, up to and including his 90-year-old grandmother. In fact, the only person who wasn’t on his list was his brother—not because his brother was beyond such a diabolical act, but rather because all of the soiled towels had been neatly folded and placed back on the towel rack, and he knew that his brother was incapable of such a thing.
The first time I read that story my daughter Clementine was still an infant, and so I laughed. The next time I read it I only chuckled, because by then I had two kids, and the thought of someone using a bath towel as a bidet aid wasn’t that far-fetched. This last time I read it, however, I didn’t laugh at all, because by then I had realized that the true horror of that story doesn’t lie in the fact that the towels were used for nefarious purposes, but rather in the resigned way Mr. Sedaris accepted the fact that his brother was never going to be able to hang up a bath towel. I didn’t laugh that time because I realized with a sinking feeling that he could have been describing either one of my own children, and in his resigned acceptance, he could have been describing me.
It’s true: I’ve managed to bring two people into this world who think that towel racks are some kind of freaky modern bathroom art, and that it is their job to show the world the beauty of these art pieces by methodically removing the layers of terrycloth that some Philistine has so callously covered them over with.
Or maybe they’re just slobs. Either way, the outcome is the same: I end up washing more towels than the Holiday Inn. The washing is necessary because the two of them are never content to just throw the towel on the floor and leave it there—they must also trample it, as if the towel, having come into contact with water, is now the Wicked Witch of the West, and must have the bejesus stomped out of it.
It’s true that I could just go in after them and hang up the towels myself, thereby saving myself all of the extra washing. Here’s the thing, though: while in some bathrooms, being trampled on the floor isn’t necessarily a death sentence (or rather, a wash sentence), this is definitely not the case with my mine. For one thing, my bathroom is so small that the toilet is right next to the shower; for another, it contains a boy who frequently loses both aim and focus while standing in front of said toilet. Factor those two things into the equation and you’ll understand why I don’t want to reuse a towel that has been whipped about on the floor. In fact, if anybody were to hang one of those towels back up, neatly, you’d probably have a situation similar to the one that took place in the Sedaris household.
Come to think about it, maybe that was the answer to the Sedaris house mystery: maybe it wasn’t one person who was committing the crime knowingly, but rather two working unwittingly together. Maybe the brother (who Sedaris claims would have been the best suspect if not for the neat condition of the towels) was soiling the linen, and it was the grandmother, the passive aggressive neat freak, who came along after him and hung the offending towels back up.
It could have happened that way. Or maybe, like my house, the mother just had it in for all of them.