In Which I Make a Dubious Purchase

They say every woman has an article of clothing she can't live without.  In my case, it's my autopsy gloves.

I've used these gloves to kill spiders, swab bathrooms and even lift rat droppings.  You might wonder why I never replaced them, but why mess with something that isn't broken?  Or so I was always taught.  I think.  I may be taking creative license with all those lectures I got from my parents.

At any rate, I didn't even realize that my gloves were autopsy gloves until recently.  This is because when I first purchased them, I was not looking for autopsy gloves.  Instead, I went on a quest, which is the quixotic and grand word I always use when I describe the process of trying to find something that I don't really know how to describe in the language I am currently speaking.  Yes, I know the English words for 'rubber gloves,' but this is not a knowledge that the kind dons of the various tiny streetside shops share.  Thankfully, they do have an almost alarming ability to read minds.

Consider the following scene:

Random girl in sweatshirt and jeans walks into a chemist's shop near closing time.  The stock boys pause to stare at her.  The man behind the counter continues stacking coins in tiny piles, by denomination.  The metallic clink fills the air.

"Excuse me, I would like latex gloves," she says, with a nasal twang.  The shopkeep lifts his eyebrows, as if to say, you aren't from around here, are you?  The stock boys draw closer, in what might be a menacing fashion.  She suddenly realizes that it is very dark, and very late.

The shopkeep ambles on into the back of the room and returns with a cardboard box.  Two ghostly white fingers flop through a slit at the top.  The girl pulls out one shimmering glove, which reminds her of the gloves nurses in movies snap on - kerak - before inserting a thermometer in a patient's rear end.  Or the gloves she once had to wear during an ill-planned out live frog dissection.  Ew, frog parts.  Palpable suffering.

"These are not the gloves I want," she says.  The shopkeep looks up again.  He has gone back to his change counting.

"What do you want?" he asks.  It could be a reasonable question, but he makes it sound so much more intense.

"You know, the other kind," she insists, unable to say more, voice worn to a thread by confusion.  For a few moments they exchange stare for stare, like two villains in a Western about to blow this town.  Then he nods and says, "Ah."

When he returns, he's carrying a pair of heavy orange rubber gloves.

"These ones," he says with a smile.

"Yes!" she says in delight.  And buys them.

--Fin--

Does it seem far-fetched?  And yet, there you have it.  Apparently "the other kind" and "rubber" are pronounced the same way in Hindi.  Or something.  I may be confusing all those lectures.

The point is that I got these orange gloves, and they opened a new world of cleaning to me.  Things I was afraid to touch, I could now touch.  It's true that rubber gloves create a false sense of distance from grossness - I'm sure that in the process of peeling them off, I got a healthy dose of whatever it was on my hands.  But that's what soap and amnesia are for.

I only noticed that the gloves might have another purpose - besides cleaning - when a friend of mine came over.

"Why do you have autopsy gloves in your shower?" he asked.

"Um?" I replied.  Because after all, there aren't many reasons for having autopsy gloves in the shower that the average houseguest would find comforting.  That's also when I realized that there was a massive black logo across the bottom of my orange gloves, which read "autopsy gloves."  I am willing to bet money that more people buy those gloves for cleaning than for autopsies, considering the statistical makeup of the population comes out slightly in favor of people who clean.  You'd think the manufacturer would consider rebranding.

It also makes me wonder what exactly the chemist thought I needed them for.  And why exactly he stocked them in the first place.