In Dishwashers We Trust, I Guess?

In which I learn the ways of the world.

By Zach Hively

Did you ever hear the tragedy of Kaspar Hauser?Pull up a chair and I’ll tell you that Kaspar Hauser, the story goes, once wandered onto some Bavarian street as a teenager. This wasn’t in itself notable. Nor were the two letters he carried—one purportedly written by his birth mother in 1812, and the other purportedly written by the old man who had housed Hauser since infancy.

“Housed” is too fitting a term. Kaspar had existed lo these many years, so the second letter said, without once leaving the house. Lucky him? Not really. Kaspar never saw the sky. He ate only rye bread and drank only water. He had experienced only enough human contact to learn only the words needed to tell the outside world that he had never experienced human contact.

Kaspar Hauser fascinated the world, or at least some nineteenth-century Bavarians, with the murky riddle: What is a human being who never learned how to be human? But like, at all?

Kaspar Hauser, image ca. 1828 and thus certainly in the public domain by now, right?

Now. Let us set aside all the extraneous details of Kaspar’s story. These include the suspicions that he was a habitual liar, that he made it all up, and that he—being a man of the male gender before his brain finished developing one way or another—accidentally killed himself while staging an assassination attempt to re-up his public attention. Not important.

What is important is that I, two hundred years later, can answer exactly what happens when a man has been isolated from human society since his youth:

He cannot properly load the dishwasher.

More to the point: I cannot load the dishwasher.

This is not me rehashing the old trope that one person in every relationship loads the dishwasher like a Zen monk on assignment, while the other person loads it like a chipmunk whose parents just got home a day early. The beloved and I both load the dishwasher with great care and obsessive tendencies, thank you very much.

But I? I do so with a complete and uncompromised lack of knowledge of how to do so properly.

I may disagree with this assessment. But my disagreement does not matter. I am, after all, the Kaspar Hauser of dishwasher-loaders. I have had only enough dishwasher exposure to understand that dishwashers exist—but nowhere near enough to function as half of a successful dishwashing power couple.

Just like Kaspar Hauser (if we believe him), I came by it honestly.

See, I grew up in two households with dishwashers. But I also grew up in two households that did not trust dishwashers. One of the chores I was accused of evading on a regular basis was to wash the dishes—by hand!—before loading them into the dishwasher. This process thus negated the need to ever clean food debris out of the dishwasher’s food debris filtration system.

I’m pretty certain the only functional purpose of our dishwasher was to get our money’s worth out of having a dishwasher in the first place.

This entire setup also meant that we could load that puppy to the brim with clean dishes, so as not to waste any more water or energy or money than we were already wasting. And this went on, and on, and on, dinner after dinner, week after week, until I reached legal voting age in the United States of America and legal drinking age everywhere else.

And then? As an alleged adult? I never had a chance to learn any differently. I stumbled into the world as if it were a Bavarian street. I took up residence in an ongoing string of dorms, apartments, back rooms, basements, garages, and full-on houses without dishwashers. And if they had dishwashers, I used them as storage compartments.

Other people relive their issues in relationship after relationship; I took mine out on kitchen after kitchen.

But I was also being, to the best of my male brain’s understanding, smart about it. I was hacking the system: I washed my dishes by hand, then stopped there.

How was I ever supposed to know that, sometime in the last few decades, we started trusting our dishwashers to wash dishes? How was I to know that, according to certain beloveds, we trust our dishwashers but only to wash the appropriate number of dishes? What even is the appropriate number of dishes?

​I can now tell you the appropriate number of dishes is “fewer than that.” We wash approximately four items at a time so that additional items “don’t break” because I “stuffed the dishwasher so full that the water cannot actually reach the dirty surfaces anyway.”

A dishwasher, at capacity.

These are not complaints on my part. They are not part of that other trope of making fun of domestic disagreements. I call this trope “Everyone is an equal partner and everyone’s perspective is valid, especially hers.” And this trope is not fair. She is actually very right, a very great deal of the time. Sometimes, enchantedly so.

As proof, a recent text exchange between us went this way:

Me: I’m cracking. I think I threw out my pill bottle yesterday.

Beloved: Check the dog Rx pile?

Me [to myself]: That’s dumb.

Me [ten seconds later, also to myself]: … God dammit.

​So I trust her, and her worldly experiences, on how best to load a dishwasher. I’m invested in doing it right, because it matters to her far more than it should matter to any human being. Then again, what do I know about being human? Only this: that I bet I can fit in a fifth dish without her noticing.