My husband K— and I have the same conversation almost every Sunday night.  At some point during the evening, we pass one another on the basement stairs.  He is headed to the utility room, arms piled with dirty clothing, and our usual exchange goes something like this:  I say, ”I need to do laundry, too.  How many loads do you have?”  With a completely deadpan expression on his face and a tone of utmost seriousness in his voice, he always replies, “Is it emergency laundry?”

He says it as though he’s due to blast off on a six-month space mission tomorrow and NASA is requiring him to bring along enough clean underwear for his entire tour of duty.  His implication is that my laundry need couldn’t possibly be as great as his and I should be ashamed for even asking, but the fact is, K— doesn’t even know the meaning of “emergency laundry.”  Ironically, I do.  You’ll be happy to know I wasn’t the one in need of emergency laundry services; I was just the horrified witness.  If you’re squeamish, you might want to stop reading right here.   Those of you who are still with me, don’t say I didn’t warn you:

One year in college, I had a male housemate who never did laundry.  And I do mean never.  After he’d worn a piece of clothing for a bit, he tossed it in the back of his closet, and every so often he went out to some discount store to buy a whole new wardrobe.  At the end of the school year when we had to vacate the apartment, I refused to be present for the exhumation of his clothing.  I was afraid of the health consequences.  I put a spray can of Lysol and a box of heavy-duty trash bags by his bedroom door and left the premises until it was safe to return.  To this day I don’t know what he did with the mound of soiled clothing or how, and the thought makes my skin crawl.

Now that was emergency laundry.

The fact is, when real sanitation emergencies arise, most guys (like my old housemate) are blissfully unaware of it.  Cat litter boxes way overdue for a change, a quart of milk “lost” under his passenger seat three months ago, shower curtains rippling with algal growth—none of these insult the olfactory sense of males.  What does really seem to offend their nostrils is…perfume.

I have a cousin, O—, whose wife works in a drugstore.  O— has had plenty of opportunities to watch the customers there, and he’s noticed that it’s only the women who try out the little tester bottles of perfume.  “My wife often finds a smell I hardly perceive horrible,” he writes.  “On the other hand, when we’re sitting in a concert hall and women are around me, I suffer from the different 'fragrances' the ladies have put on.  The more ‘official’ the event the more intense the stink bombs.”

He says his wife finds this noxious “gas mixture” (his words) pleasant, but he has to hold a handkerchief discreetly in front of his nose just to survive the bombardment of incompatible scents.  “Why do women amply wrap themselves in artificial smells?” he wonders, “To attract men?  In my case they definitely have the opposite effect.”

The explanation seems obvious to me.  O— doesn’t realize it, but he answered his own question when he observed that he doesn’t even notice smells his wife finds unbearable.  Let’s suppose for a second that this is true for the majority of married couples.  Then imagine this scenario repeated in hundreds of homes and thousands of communities across the globe:

A husband and wife are getting ready to attend an event together.  (Improbable, I know, but bear with me.)  In preparation, the wife bathes and grooms herself until she’s just as clean and neat as could be.  Stepping out of her bathroom, she’s feeling pretty good about herself and the upcoming evening…until she notices a pile of moldering towels that have been accumulating just outside the bathroom door for the last two weeks.  I’ll let you guess who left them there for her (or anyone, or no one) to wash.  Her mood immediately sinks as the musty odor wafts up to nostril level, and in order to bolster her failing spirits, she steps back into the bathroom and spritzes herself with some flowery-smelling concoction.  This is Application One.

Attempting to enter her bedroom in order to dress, she trips over a pair of men’s sneakers casually kicked off right in the middle of the bedroom traffic pattern.  Falling face down, she glances sideways to prevent a broken nose and is horrified to see what appears to be old food on a plate gathering dust bunnies (or maybe it’s mold) under the bed.  So that explains all the nightmares she’d been having about eating Chinese pickled eggs—the ones that get buried for a year...  Then she realizes with a shudder that she’s been sleeping a mere two feet from the mortal remains of a rotisserie chicken, her body lying prone above it for eight hours a night for God knows how long.  A concrete bunker between it and her would not be adequate, much less 24 inches of coiled springs and polyester batting, so she leaps to her feet, runs to the bathroom and…Spritz!  Application Two.

Rather than subject you to any more graphic scenes of household chaos, let’s just say that at multiple steps on the way from her bathroom to the car, she encounters one distressing sight and smell after another.  Every time some dirty, redolent thing presents itself to heighten her anxiety level, she fights back with a Spritz! even as her husband says, “What smell?”  Somewhere around Application Twelve, she’s enveloped herself in a protective “scent shield” so thick Klingon fire power couldn’t penetrate it.  By the time she and her husband get to the evening’s event, she’s like a planet: she’s got her own atmosphere.*

Now, I’m not saying that this occurs in my house (you’ll notice that K— does do laundry) or my cousin O—‘s house (O— doesn’t say that his own wife Spritzes with abandon, just that other women do).  I’m just speculating.

O— has watched the women in the drugstore where his wife works, but he hasn’t overheard their conversations.  I suspect that if he eavesdropped, what he’d find is that the customers are dabbing on the perfumes in wild-eyed desperation and interrupting the clerk’s sales pitch about essential oils and cruelty-free ingredients with the same question: “That’s all very nice, but will it mask the odor of a garbage barge?  Please help me—it’s an emergency!”


*  There’s a mail-order catalog that actually sells something called a Mini Personal Air Supply.  It’s a portable air purifier you wear around your neck.  Basically, you walk around immersed in your own little atmosphere.  They ought to package these as his-and-hers sets: one for her to chase away his unsavory odors, and the other for him to eliminate her stinky perfume.