Chapter Eleven
Sometimes I wondered what Daddy would’ve thought of Henry. More than anything, Mama cared most about the security Henry could provide. But I think Daddy would’ve cared more about how he loved me.
I thought I’d found both security and love in Henry. I suppose I had, I kept telling myself. But with each year that went by, love seemed to change. I remember those early days, that first date, the moments in the back of his car, the scare that came before the engagement. Now we rarely talked, we hardly even looked at each other, and he barely touched me.
Is he touching someone else?
I told myself not to think this, but the question lingered after Alice phoned on behalf of Henry to say he’d be home late again. Her voice was younger than I had expected, and I assumed her skirt was shorter than I would have liked.
I typically bathed later in the night, but I couldn’t wait. Too many thoughts raced through my mind, coursed through my body, sprinted from my head to my fingertips and toes, sending jolts of electricity through me, my mind and body buzzing.
Baths were where I went to not think. I liked to keep the water running, flowing from the faucet and into the tub, drowning out the sounds from all around, the ones that liked to carry through the walls. But they can’t when the water is flowing.
That evening, I needed a bath. I wanted one desperately. I told this to
Henry as he finished his dinner, which I had left warming in the oven all evening. Well, in so many words, I said I was going to take a bath. I didn’t say “need.” He didn’t like that sort of insistence. It wouldn’t make sense to him. I simply told him that I was taking a bath and that I would clean the kitchen when I was done.
Esther and Wesley seemed settled for the night, or so I thought, and I knew that soon enough Henry would be locked in his office, putting in a few more hours before bedtime despite having stayed late at the office. Had Alice also been there? The question plagued me, adding to the list of things that soured my stomach. Alice and Bitsy; this mysterious sick aunt they didn’t want to discuss; my husband’s closed office door; Gary’s hands on his wife, pulling, yanking, dismissing her back home.
I walked into our bathroom, the one that just belonged to the two of us.
Mama couldn’t get over a house that had a bathroom for one bedroom, not shared with others. Such an extravagance, she said. The woman who lived on a hundred-acre farm thought it was too much for us to have our own bathroom.
That farmhouse had one tub. And we couldn’t linger. The water took so much effort to heat, and it cooled so quickly. One time Mama came in to find my fingers pruned, my toes shriveled, and my lips blue.
“Are you trying to kill yourself?” she’d asked.
But the cold didn’t bother me. In some ways, it’s where I felt most at home, most comfortable, most at peace. I suppose that’s why the hot summers, the humidity so thick it felt like walking through a Jell-O salad, never felt like home to me. It’s never when I felt the most comfortable. That’s why I went to the watering hole every afternoon as a child, counting down until I could run along and dive into the pond, which never fully warmed despite the summer temperatures. I didn’t care if others were there. I often preferred they not be. And when Georgie got to be old enough to join me, I
felt I’d lost some of my own time. He was a fine brother. We got along as far as siblings were concerned, but I still wanted that time, that place, that cold to myself.
I spent whole hours floating on my back, my face to the sun, my eyes watching the squirrels that ran at the tops of the trees that branched out all around us. I wondered what it would be like to run along those branches, so high, so far out of reach. I’d watch them jump from one limb to another with a fearlessness I envied.
One day, I watched one fall. He and another had run a spiral up the tree, the other chasing him so closely it looked as though the other would nip his tail. Before he could, the first one jumped from one tree and attempted to land in the neighboring one. But he missed.
He began to fall, to plummet. It happened so quickly, so silently. No one else saw it happen. I was the only one witnessing what could be the final moments of that squirrel’s life. I watched him turn his body in the air. I waited for him to grab on to a passing branch. Instead, he landed on the ground, last fall’s leaves crunching beneath him. He stood stone still for a minute.
I wasn’t sure if he had survived. I’m not sure he knew either, at least not for a minute. Then he shook his head and ran off. How he had survived a fall that high, taller than our house, I didn’t know. I wondered what went through his mind in those seconds when he went from the top to the bottom. Had he feared what was happening?
I turned off the faucet and stretched my body as much as I could in the tub, though it didn’t give me the full space I wished it would. I couldn’t lie out flat and float like I wanted to. I pushed my toes against one end, bent my knees, and slid my head down into the water.
All sounds dampened other than the crackle of the bubbles that floated beside my ears. The water swayed, swishing from my movements,
submersing my cheeks, splashing up to my lips, even settling between them and into my mouth. I swallowed it, drinking in the soapy taste, longing for the purity it could bring me, partaking of it as if a Communion. These are the bubbles popped for you. Do this in remembrance of cleanliness.
“What’re you doing?” Henry’s voice broke through the bubbles and bathwater.
I startled, sloshing the water so that it spilled over the edge and onto the carpet below. Why did we ever think carpet belonged in the bathroom, the wettest room of the house? It merely acted as a sponge, trapping the dampness to grow mold as if a giant petri dish.
Water splashed into my eyes. I reached for my towel to dry them, but it slipped from the side of the tub. My hand fumbled along the floor, attempting to find it, causing more water to cascade over the sides.
“Lulu! Watch what you’re doing.”
“Well, if you can’t tell, I can’t watch anything right now.”
He held the towel to me, placing it in my hands so I could dry my face and finally look at him. He stood across the bathroom, leaning against the vanity.
He had removed his work shirt, but remained in his tweed pants and undershirt. I looked at his arms, his stomach. Both used to be more defined, more rippled than they were now. He used to play basketball with the guys at school, help out on our farm on weekends sometimes, even row some Saturday mornings as the fog swirled along the river. He hadn’t done any of that since we had gotten married and moved to Greenwood.
I sat in the tub, uncertain of what to do. I wanted to remain there, but I didn’t know how long he would take, what he wanted to say, how much of an imposition he would be. I crossed my arms on the rim and rested my chin upon them, allowing the tub to shield my exposed breasts, as if I needed to be modest in front of the only man who had ever seen me naked.
“We need to talk,” he said.
One night. One night I dared to take a bath before cleaning up the kitchen, and here he was talking to me as if I were a child who didn’t complete her chores.
“I’ll get to the dishes as soon as I’m done here.” I reached for the drain plug, realizing that my bath time had come to an end for that evening. Maybe I would take one in the night, when I couldn’t sleep. I had never done that before, always too afraid the running water would wake Henry. Maybe I should take one in the hall bathroom. Surely he wouldn’t hear the faucet filling and draining, gurgling on its way down when I was done.
“Wait,” he said as my fingers came in contact with the chain. I stopped before I could open the drain. “I think I know what’s going on.” He looked away from me, dropping his gaze to the pink carpet. Why was it pink? I hadn’t chosen it. He pulled his fingers through his hair. He was looking more tired these days. I didn’t know why. He seemed to sleep soundly at night, through everything else that went on in the house. “Lately you’ve seemed… I don’t know how to say it. Moody. Distant. More than usual.”
He continued to lean on the vanity. I hadn’t realized until then what a mess it was. So cluttered with all those perfume bottles, the decorative one Wesley had gotten me last Christmas, the one shaped like a cat. He had been so excited to give it to me Christmas morning. I dabbed some on my wrists and neck, and spent the rest of the day with itchy eyes and a tickle in the back of my throat.
“I know—” I began, ready to be chastised for being rude to the Betsers, but Henry held up his hand and I stopped.
“I think I know what’s going on. I should’ve realized it sooner, but there’s been a lot.” He kept looking at the floor, and I wondered if he also thought that carpet was ugly. I assumed he did, but we never talked about it. But that’s not what he meant. Standing with a river of pink carpeting between us, a bath mat that looked like an empty raft floating down the center with no
passengers. How I wished I could be on that raft and float away from this conversation, this room, this house, and all of Greenwood.
“But, Lulu…” I stopped looking at the carpet and met his eyes—those brown eyes. I could get lost in them. Even after years of being together, they still pulled me in. “I made a call, and we’re going to have a dishwasher delivered in a few days.”
“A what?”
“A dishwasher. I should’ve seen it sooner. I mean, we debated installing one when we moved in. We should have. It’ll make things easier for you.”
Henry crossed the carpeted river and knelt in front of me, placing his hand beneath the edge of my chin, encouraging it upward so our eyes met. As much as they pulled me in, I still couldn’t make sense of what he had just said.
“A dishwasher?”
“Yes. I mean, at first I thought you just needed some time and then you’d come around, but it has been a few weeks now, and we’ve had those dinners each night, and the more I started thinking about, the more I realized. You don’t want to have to clean all those dishes, so if we get a dishwasher, it’ll make your job easier. Right?”
A dishwasher would solve it all; that’s what he thought. He looked at me.
He looked through me. He wanted the solution to be so simple, a modern convenience that could snap me back to normal. I put my hand atop his and smiled, but what I wanted most was to fall down into that water, let it engulf me, let my skin and bones, hair and nails, soul and spirit swirl down that drain, let it gurgle me up and flush me out to sea, to be absorbed into a mass of water so much bigger than myself.
“That’s so thoughtful of you,” I said with a smile like Bitsy’s plastered across my face. Henry kissed me on the forehead and stood up.
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
It was our word. The one I’d said to him when he asked me out on our first date. The one he’d repeated when he first said he loved me and I asked him if he meant it. The way I’d told him that I would marry him. I must have believed in absolutes then.
That evening in the tub, as my husband looked at me and his eyes pleaded for me to let a dishwasher make everything okay, I thought about grace.
Mama talked a lot about it. God’s grace was why we were there. Why the crops survived each year and harvest happened at all. Why the war ended.
Why Georgie survived. Why I got the scholarship and a husband.
But for me, I think the greatest gift of grace was that we couldn’t read each other’s minds.
“Listen.” He looked at that ugly pink carpet instead of at his own wife.
“Thursday night, we have a dinner, for work. I know it’s a lot for you right now, but I’ve already spoken to Hatti. She’ll come over that evening. And I know it’s been a while, but it would be a good reason for you to pamper yourself. Get your hair done.”
While grace saved me from him knowing my thoughts, I wasn’t sure I could hide the look on my face, the astonishment that he expected me to get dressed up, to mingle, when I needed to be home instead.
“I can’t. I don’t have anything to wear.”
“Go shopping.”
“It has been ages since I’ve been to the salon.”
“I’m sure they’d love to see you again.”
And then, with the most honesty I could muster, I said, “It’s too soon.”
He looked me square in the eyes. I didn’t want to look at him then. I didn’t want to see the pity. What must he have thought of me? I sat in that cold water, the bubbles having long since popped so that an iridescent sheen
swirled on the water’s surface.
“It’s time—and, Lulu, I need this.” He looked away from me, and for the first time in months, I saw him. The promotion wasn’t coming as easily as he had expected, assumed, hoped. He had put in so many hours. Worked so hard. He wanted this, and he needed his adoring wife by his side. She had been absent, but he was calling her back.
“Okay,” I said, trying to get myself to believe what I had just told him.
“You’re sure?”
I held his gaze, unblinking. He couldn’t read my mind—thank God—so I looked at him with as much earnestness and compliance as I could, and I uttered one word. Our word. “Absolutely.”
