Vanitas Vanitatis, Omnia Est Vanitas

I have never bought a home before; consequently, I have never before renovated a home.  In the past few weeks, I have come to know firsthand what a toddler feels like when confronted by an overwhelming plethora of unfamiliar choices, all of them available and none of them making any sense from an experiential frame of reference.

In other words, only my last shred of I am an adult and thus must pretend to act like one kicked in to prevent me from having an epic meltdown in the bathroom tile store.  At my age, I probably should know the difference between ceramic tile and porcelain tile, but I sadly confess that it is not so.  They both looked pretty good, although my husband told me one of them is better, and I've already forgotten which.  On the other hand, marble tile appealed to me because it sounded fancy and made me think of the extravagant follies of the Newport robber barons, and also because it looked so easy to clean.  My inner Alva Vanderbilt urged me towards the white marble for the master bathroom.  After all - the tub and the toilet are white.

But then my husband produced a highly-polished dark granite that he claimed was the only tile that would "work" for the floor, if the beautiful white marble that was on sale at such a truly ridiculously cheap price was what I definitely wanted for the walls.  Well, I have highly-polished dark granite in the bathroom of my rental apartment right this minute, and the stuff looks divine for about 30 seconds after you've cleaned it, and after that every speck of dust and every driblet of water that gets on it makes it look like hell. I do not want to spend my life in active resentment of everyone who has the audacity to actually use the bathroom for its intended purpose after I've finished polishing it and sat back on my heels with a proud, "There!"  I was forced to rethink the walls entirely, and pretty soon I was ready to lie down on the lovely terra cotta display floor, hiccoughing with sobs, drumming my heels, banging my head against the tiles, and seeing which would crack first - me, or the pretty tiles.

It turned out this was all a complete waste of good gastric juices, because (and do not for a moment, Gentle Reader, think that I blame my dear husband for this, although I do think that somebody should have told me) it seems that the choice of tile color and texture is going to be directly dependent on the kind of vanity we are going to install.  So after all that tsuris, we left without buying any tiles and had to go look at vanities, all of which were either too big or too small, too cheap-looking or too expensive, too starkly modern or too baroquely carved (and which latter reminded me of Bavarian cuckoo clocks).  It was like being Goldilocks in the bath fixture aisle of the Home Depot.

Now, first of all, I have trouble with the word vanity.  The fact that I am buying something called a vanity to put in the bathroom right under the mirror brings back unpleasant recollections of having spent hour upon wasted hour as a teenager leaning across a pressed-wood cabinet with dark walnut-looking veneer and getting the imprint of the cabinet edge etched into my stomach while I made lovely and/or interesting faces into the bathroom mirror.  Just in case I ever became an actress, I wanted to see what I was going to look like on the big screen as my by-then-famous face registered horror or pathos or tenderness.  Horror involved making my lips writhe back from my teeth in a sort of rictus while widening my eyes to the point where the whites showed on all sides, like a horse frightened by the sight of a rattlesnake.  For pathos, the eyes remained wide, but rolled upward as though I was trying to glimpse my own the hairline, meanwhile pursing my lips into a Cupid-bow pout.  (My model for pathos, of course, was Lillian Gish, whose Broken Blossoms was playing on PBS several times that week.)  As for tenderness, I combined the basic  pathos look with rapid eye-batting and soft exhalations of simpering sighs; the result was such a caricature of tremulous goopiness that even now I want to dive under a chair whenever I think about it.

So it is quite difficult enough to wrap my head around the idea that just because a piece of furniture is known as a vanity does not mean I have to revert to adolescent behavior and stand there in front of it being vain, once we have acquired it and bolted it to the wall.  I am also tentatively grappling with the concept that I will probably not be required to litter the vanity's surface with perfume atomizers and Venetian glass stopper-bottles, nor will I, in all likelihood, be forced to purchase a set of monogrammed silver-backed brushes or a quaint Victorian hair receiver.  Indeed, my husband has mentioned in passing that he expects to put his toothbrush and his shaving equipment somewhere in our newly-appointed bathroom as well, and I suppose I will have to accommodate his request somehow...the brute.

Now that I think of it, it might be best to go with my original idea and just put a nice big pedestal sink in the master bathroom, and put the vanity in the guest bathroom.  Nobody I've heard of ever got into trouble with a pedestal sink, and there's all that lovely room for his'n'hers toothbrush mugs on either side.