Rethinking Showers

Good grooming, advises Amy Vanderbilt in the 1967 edition of her book of etiquette, which I received as a wedding present, means “a daily, and often twice daily, shower or bath, [and] fresh underwear and stockings daily or twice daily….” Even in my most perfectionistic moments I was not insane enough to follow her advice to the letter, but since my arrival in the land of endless hot water nine years earlier, I had taken to heart the American custom of daily showering and frequent shampooing. “You’ve washed your hair again?” my mother would exclaim as I struggled to fit the dryer hood over my twenty-seven rollers. She was also amazed that, along with my schoolmates, I felt obliged to wear a different outfit every day, which meant tossing everything I had worn the day before into the washing machine. 

Back then, America’s bathroom shelves mostly featured a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo. But in the ensuing decades bath products proliferated to include soaps for different kinds of skin, shampoos for different kinds of hair, conditioners (both rinse-out and leave-in), and body scrubs, butters, and gels. Showers grew longer as we applied the right product to the right body part and then made sure that whatever we had slathered on was sluiced down the drain. 

Now, trillions of gallons of water and mountains of plastic bottles later, things may be changing. According to the  New York Times, during the pandemic many Americans stopped showering every day, and were amazed when their body did not exude pestilential smells, their skin did not erupt in gruesome infections, and their scalp did not drip grease onto their shoulders. 

On the contrary, many people who had been bedeviled with dry, flaky, itchy skin noticed that the condition improved when they stopped scrubbing every square inch of their bodies every single day. And, when given a break from too-frequent shampoos and blow drying, formerly lank, straw-like hair showed its gratitude by growing glossier and more manageable.

With an eight-minute shower using up to 17 gallons of water, not to mention the electricity to heat that water, plus the products being washed down the drain, the trend towards less-frequent showering is good news for the environment. But why stop there? As long as we’re moderating our cleaning compulsions, we should think about laundry. 

If we had to wash clothes by hand we would think twice before tossing a shirt we’ve only worn once into the dirty clothes basket. But since washing machines are here to do the work, that carefree flick of the wrist at the end of the day requires less time and energy than looking at the shirt, deciding if it can be worn again, and hanging it carefully on a hanger. 

The Swedish designer Gudrun Sjoden believes that we should reevaluate our laundry habits: “Generally we all wash far too often! Wear your clothes until they are dirty, before which you can air your clothes and remove individual stains.” I know how to air a grievance, but I’m not sure how you air a shirt (by hanging it out the window?) but lately I have taken to hanging outfits I’ve worn once or twice in the bathroom overnight to get rid of whatever noxious odors may be clinging to them. As for removing individual stains by hand and then wearing the item again, I haven’t reached that level of ecological virtue yet. 

This is a world away from Amy Vanderbilt, who advised us to “wear a simple, starched [my italics] house dress, a clean one daily, if you must do housework…” Once the house was sparkling, the dress went into the hamper, since changing for dinner was one of the hallmarks of gracious living: “Fresh clothes and make-up, even if you are to be alone with the children for a simple meal, are psychologically sound and bring a needed change in the day’s pace.” 

Her writing bursts with the exuberance of an era when belief in progress and the endless availability of resources was at its peak. It is also a celebration of indoor plumbing, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and other mod cons that made possible this manic changing of dresses and stockings, showering and grooming, even in the absence of domestic staff.

No wonder so many housewives in mid-century America became addicted to Valium. Today our stress comes from a different source: the knowledge of the havoc that our way of life has wreaked on the planet, and our obligation to do something about it right now, by whatever means are available to each of us, even if it requires giving up habits that would make Amy turn in her grave.

Reply All

Is there an electronic-age version of Amy Vanderbilt out there? I'm in urgent need of coaching in email manners, specifically Reply All.

Say I want to send a bread-and-butter email to someone who had me over for wine- and-cheese. Should I share my message with others who also attended? My instinct is to only write to the hostess, to avoid clogging up my friends’ mailboxes with my gushings, but then I worry that they, whose exquisitely worded thank-yous have been ricocheting through the Cloud, will think that I am forgetful and/or ungrateful.

In fact, the dilemma begins before the w-and-c event, with the original invitation. Even if this is in the form of a group email, my reflex again is to reply to the hostess exclusively, she being the one who needs to know how many mouths to feed. But it occurs to me that perhaps she would like each of us to share our responses in hopes that this will generate esprit de corps and ensure a decent turnout. So just in case, I hit Reply All.

Then there is the Get Well Soon email. A group of women gets together for dinner once a month, but this time one of us has come down with a cold, and emails to say that she won’t be able to join us. I prepare to send condolences, and to urge her to take care of herself, drink plenty of fluids, etc., ending with assurances that she will be sadly missed by everyone. As I sit down to compose my message, I notice that there are already half a dozen emails in my inbox from other group members expressing identical sentiments.

I write the email, but when my finger is poised over the Reply All button, doubt assails me. Does anyone other than the sick woman really need to read my caring clichés, my hackneyed healing thoughts, my dull albeit heartfelt wishes for a quick recovery? On the other hand, if I don’t share my message with the entire group, will they think me lacking in compassion?

The temptation to click Reply All stems from its usefulness in certain situations, as when individual members of my dog-walking group write to all the others saying whether they plan to brave the sub-zero wind chill or stay home, thus avoiding the distressing spectacle of a single walker with dog, waiting in vain for the rest to show up. From there, it is a slippery slope to hitting Reply All all the time, just to play it safe.

I don’t know about you, but life often feels like an unruly horde of dilemmas, a herd of bulls determined to impale me on their horns. This morning, even before I could make coffee, I had to face a life-and-death decision about a tiny field mouse (velvety black fur on the back, silky white belly, one-and-a-half inches of mousy perfection) that the cat Telemann was tormenting. Telemann is an indoor cat, and this was the first mouse he had ever seen, let alone caught. He was batting it merrily all over the house, looking blissfully in the zone and embodying the Platonic ideal of catness as the mouse twitched in agony.

What to do? On the one hand, I wanted to end the mouse’s suffering, but on the other, who was I to stand between Telemann and the instincts with which the Universe had endowed him? I dithered sleepily for a while and, in the end, opted for the coward’s way out. I prepared Telemann’s breakfast and called him. He dropped the mouse and came running, and while he was eating I swept up the now thankfully expired little creature and threw him out into the woods for the fox to find.

My Corsetiere

When I was around twelve years old, my brain was still firmly anchored in the clear waters of childhood, but the winds of puberty were blowing my body towards the foreign shores of womanhood. I had the mind and manner of a child in the body of a woman, which means that I looked odd at best, and slightly mentally retarded at worst. Braids and breasts, acne and hairy legs—that was me on the threshold of adolescence.

My mother, not sure what to do about this phenomenon that was unfolding in her midst, decided that what I needed was a girdle. But we were living in Quito at the time, and you couldn’t simply go to a store and buy a girdle. Everything had to be made by hand.

Fortunately, there lived in the old part of town, between a gilded baroque church and the market where Indian women squatted on the sidewalk, selling meat and vegetables, a corsetière. She was a middle-aged Jewish lady from somewhere in central Europe, one of the many who had fled the Nazis to South America. She looked formidable to me, with her gray hair in a bun, her sturdy lace-up shoes and that tightly corseted, moving-from-the-hips look that you never see in older women anymore.

She had me take off my skirt and, mumbling and clucking to herself in a language I didn’t understand, took my measurements. Several weeks later, the girdle was ready. It was a pink satin construction with bands of flesh-colored, rubbery fabric. It encased me from about three inches above the waist to mid-thigh, and when I tried it on I felt that I would never breathe, let alone walk again.

 “It’s too tight,” I complained.

“You wish to be beautiful, yes?” the corsetière asked me. I nodded. “Then you must suffer,” she said, tugging the girdle in place and winking at my mother.

From time immemorial, garments intended to compress the female form were stiffened with whalebone, or baleen, the strong, pliable strips of keratin in a whale’s mouth that filter krill out of the water. My corsetière, being modern, had foregone baleen in favor of two narrow, flat, flexible metal shafts that ran the length of the girdle, on either side of my abdomen. They were concealed by a strip of closely stitched pink fabric, so I didn’t know they were there, though I noticed that when I peeled off the garment it resisted folding and would spring back at me, like something alive.

I was disappointed in the girdle. The corsetière had not attached garters, since my mother thought I was too young for stockings, and without stockings to help keep it in place, it tended to ride up as I climbed the tree in our backyard, or ran up the stairs. Absent stockings, the girdle’s value as an emblem of adulthood was zero, since nobody could tell I was wearing it.

The girdle also made me very, very hot. Years later, in preparation for marriage, my future mother in law gave me Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette, in which, along with instructions on table settings and “the art of tipping,” I read that a proper lady should change her girdle at least twice a day. By then it was the 1960s, and landfills across the land were overflowing with the discarded girdles of my generation, but remembering how much I’d sweated in that old girdle, I could see Amy V’s point.

Much to my relief, my first girdle did not last. Sitting in the backseat of our old Dodge one day, I bent to tie my shoelace and felt a sudden sharp stab into the soft flesh of my belly. I screamed.  My mother twisted around from the front seat “What? What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know. I think something bit me. Something big,” I said. Ecuador abounded in large, appalling-looking bugs, and I lived in fear of them.

My father pulled over to the side of the road and my mother got out. She unbuttoned the waistband of my skirt, pulled up my blouse, rolled down the top of my girdle and discovered the cause of the pain: one of the metal stays had broken, pierced the fabric casing, and stabbed me in the abdomen. On the way home, I had to stretch out on the back seat and lie still, because whenever I sat up the girdle would stab me all over again.

Later, my mother tried to mend the tear, but the stay kept poking through, and she finally relented and let me throw the girdle away. But in later years, whenever I underwent discomfort for the sake of looking good—burning my neck with a curling iron, say, or squeezing into too-tight jeans--I would recall the fateful words of my corsetière, “You wish to be beautiful, yes? Then you must suffer.”