I see a white bathroom

I see a white bathroom
Posted by: eschorama.

The couple who belong to this bathroom are very very white. They pad around in white terry bathrobes. He reads from a folded newspaper, most likely the Washington Post. She sips white tea from a cup and whispers soft prayers to herself that only the mockingbirds can hear. That which is not white is wooden and brown. Dark brown. These partners in romanticonomic bliss have individual sinks and mirrors identical in look. Symmetry has the value of whiteness for them. Always an even number of flowers in the vase. Their soap and gels are kept in unlabeled white containers. Towels, curtains, and thoughts: all white. Politics moderate. Fiercely so. The antique clawfoot bathtub bespeaks the rich tradition of their race, the amplitude of their whiteness, their incredibly superior purity. In this picture of perfect cleanliness, there can be no suggestion of a toilet, until we realize that the photograph itself may in fact be a toilet's eye view, and when he or she sits on this toilet, their stools complenting the browns of the antique wood shelves and towel rack, he or she is overcome by lilywhite thoughts, or spiritual vaccum as it were, that accompanies the disillusionment of ten o'clock, the oppressiveness of snowmen on winter afternoons. Nothing will be permitted to smell in a room such as this. There is a peaceful kind of whiteness, and they have tried to engender a kind of peace or respite from reality in this place, yet there is the whiteness of the blind too. The blindness and futility of trying to bring it together and keep life clean. They have been through five cleaning ladies, this couple. Call them Jeff and Linda. Five women of color who were unable to keep the dirt away from this room. Now, a retarded girl of sixteen comes in twice a week with rubber gloves and gallons of ammonia bleach. It is better now. Much better. They feel cleaner, even whiter than before. It must be documented in a photo as proof of their consistency, their moderate evenhandedness, their pure taste. Whoever it was that took this shot, he or she, one of them has however documented a perfection that cannot last, for the whites, despite the bleach and sheer drapes the consistency of angelwings, the whites will accrue dirt, grime, mold, the reverberating klunk of a hollow shell. This insanity of whiteness is a temporary forgetting, a dream from what these people need the most, confrontation with the waking world. A world of dirt, dust, blood, color.