Saturday 12 September 2015

Tall Man, Small Tub, No Shower

The last time I took a bath, I played with my little green army guys. The tub, in our suburban split level in Hillsdale, was a pinky beige, as I remember it. Somewhere along the line of fifty years since, I gave up baths for showers. For good. Until now at the Doris McCarthy house, where on my third day here after four days on the road, I gave up my array of wipe-downs, lake dips, hose frolics and sinkwashes and turned on the left hand spigot—hot!—of DM’s tiny tub to sit down in there.
Haven’t I seen movies in which characters lie full out under a blanket of suds? Here I couldn’t even straighten my legs. 75% of my legmass extruded from the water like some crude and ancient outcropping along lake Superior. And I heard a Jerry Seinfeld voice say, Why would anyone want to sit in a tepid pool of his own filth?
I’d already pegged DM as a short woman who needn’t have ducked through doorways as I have to do. (I’m going to insert a callback here to my note about the Picts, from ’10.) She built her kitchen cupboards so low that I stash my Bran Flakes on top of them.
But I’m clean and, on a rainy morning like this, still warm. 
Here's the tub, actual size.

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