The grout was the paste between the tiles. A thin line of cement that held the tiles together and kept the water out. The grout was the most ignored part of the bathroom. Nobody looked at the grout until the grout turned black. Then everybody looked at the grout. The grout was the relationship between the tiles. The tile was the individual. The grout was the community.

The grout was white when it was new. White and clean and invisible. You saw the tiles and the grout disappeared between them the way the mortar disappears between the bricks. Good grout was invisible grout. But grout absorbed everything. Soap and water and mildew and time. The grout turned gray and then brown and then black and the black was a map of everywhere the water had been. The grout was the bathroom's memory.

You scraped the grout. That was the maintenance. You took a flathead screwdriver or a grout saw and you scraped the old grout out line by line and packed new grout in with your finger. Regrouting the bathroom took a Saturday and a sore back and the bathroom looked new for six months. The grout asked you for a Saturday twice a decade. The bathroom gave you a decade of not thinking about the grout. That was the deal. The new caulk lasts two years and peels like a sunburn. The old grout lasted ten and went down fighting.

The subway tile had grout. Every subway station in New York had white tiles with white grout and the grout was the grid that held the underground together. The grout in the subway was the same grout in the bathroom was the same grout in the barbershop. The city ran on grout. A hundred million tiles held together by a paste you mixed in a bucket. The tile gets the credit. The grout does the work.

They make grout-free tile now. Large format tiles with razor-thin joints that you fill with silicone. The silicone is flexible and waterproof and it does not stain. The silicone is better than grout the way a text is better than a letter. Faster, cleaner, less work. But the grout line was the human hand. You could see where the finger pressed and where the finger stopped. The silicone line is a machine's line. Grout was imperfect because it was applied by a person. The imperfection was the proof.

See also: Threshold, Washtub