My Wife Hand-Washed Our Socks Until Her Hands Bled. I Was Too Busy Being Right to Notice.

She fished the socks out of the washing machine with two fingers, holding them as if they were a dead mouse.

“You’re insane,” she said.

I wasn’t insane. I had put my underwear and socks into the washing machine together. Sixty degrees. Disinfectant. Detergent. The standard cycle. I had read the studies and looked at the experiments. Machine washing was cleaner than hand washing. But I had said this too many times. She had never listened once.

“The socks have fungus,” she said.

“Trichophyton rubrum. Athlete’s foot fungus. Sixty degrees. Ten minutes. Dead.”

“How do you know?”

“Experiments. Samples. Petri dishes.”

“Petri dishes are petri dishes. This is underwear.”

“Underwear is fabric.”

“Fabric is not fabric.”

She could not say where the difference was. But she still threw the socks into the basin and turned on the tap. Hot water came down. The back of her hand turned red at once. She did not use warm water. She used scalding water. She believed scalding water was clean.

I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched her scrub. Soap foam slid down the rim of the basin and dripped onto the floor tiles. She scrubbed hard. Her knuckles went white. The socks were mine, gray, the heels worn thin. She scrubbed for five minutes, rinsed three times, wrung them out, and hung them on the balcony. Then she came back and scalded the basin with boiling water.

“You should hand-wash your underwear too,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s dirty.”

“Where is it dirty? What bacteria? Why can’t the machine kill it? Why can your hands kill it?”

She did not answer. She started washing my underwear. The same scalding water. The same soap. The same scrubbing until her knuckles went white.

I watched her. I remembered when we first got together. She washed my clothes the same way then. Back then I thought she was diligent, good. Now I thought she was stubborn, impossible. She probably thought I had changed too. Before, I would say, “Thank you for your hard work.” Now I would say, “There’s no need.”

Under all of it, she believed only hand washing was safe. She believed the world was full of invisible dirt, and only after she had scrubbed it with her own hands, scalded it, rinsed it, could she relax. When she was a child, her mother washed the whole family’s clothes this way. Her mother said washing machines did not get things clean, that washing machines were full of bacteria. She had believed it for thirty years.

I believed science could solve the problem. I believed data, experiments, high-temperature disinfection. I thought if she did not believe in science, she was ignorant. I was wrong. She did not distrust science. She distrusted me. She did not trust that I could take care of her, that I could make her world safe. She put her sense of control in that basin of scalding water, and I kept trying to take it away.

That night, she washed until eleven. I sat in the living room, listening to the water. I wanted to go in and say, “Let me wash them.” But I knew she would refuse. I wanted to go in and say, “I’m sorry.” But I knew that was not what she wanted. She wanted me to admit hand washing was cleaner. I could not admit that. It was not true.

The water stopped. She came out. Her hands were red, wrinkled, like paper soaked for a long time. She looked at me, said nothing, and went into the bedroom.

I sat on the sofa and looked at the socks on the balcony. They swayed in the wind. I thought of the data: machine-washed socks, zero colonies. Hand-washed socks, one hundred and eight. But I did not dare tell her. Telling her would mean another war.

Later, we separated. She could not stand the way I “knew everything,” and I could not stand the way she “listened to nothing.” The day she moved out, she took her basin. The red plastic basin, its rim worn white. I threw it away. Then I bought a new washing machine, with high-temperature boil wash, with drying. I put my underwear and socks in together. They came out clean and sterile. I sat on the sofa, listening to the machine hum. The apartment was quiet.

I thought of her scrubbing socks. Her white fingers, the hot water on the back of her hand. I thought, if I had kept my mouth shut, if I had hand-washed with her, if I had not tried to prove who was right and who was wrong, would we have been different?

But I knew we would not. She wanted me to admit her fear was reasonable. I could not admit that. Her fear was me.

Now my socks are machine-washed. Clean and sterile. But sometimes I think of that basin of scalding water, of her red hands. I know some things cannot be washed clean by a machine.