BATH TIME | Fiction by V.J. Hamilton

Change is in the air, a secret, indefinable scent. Mr. Smith is back home, and he is singing away, his number one song, Oh! Susanna. His warble falls flat in some places, and he mangles some words, but the song is recognizable by all.

Mrs. Smith is sick of Oh! Susanna, so very sick of it. She hopes that tonight the personal support worker who comes is not the one named Susanna, a round-shouldered young woman who wears too much jewelry, and is always snapping bracelets on and off. Although surely Susanna is sick of that song by now, too. Sometimes Mr. Smith sings Oh! Banana instead. The first time he did it, Mrs. Smith and Susanna looked at each other and burst out laughing. “Well, I declare!”

Mrs. Smith is fixing to give him a bath. The weather’s unsettled; it’s blowing up a storm, and she should close the bathroom window. She can’t hear his singing above the rumble of water filling the tub. Deep in thought, she trails her fingers in the rushing current. Her computer, in a nearby room, is still open to the chat session where she’s been reminiscing with Pat, a former neighbor, about the good old days, the magic years after their kids had all left home and before their spouses became ill. Before Mr. Smith started showing symptoms of distractibility, irrationality. Tremor. Back when the biggest quandary was when to schedule the kitchen renovation.

She was so lucky then, living in high cotton, as the old-timers say. Although in some ways she is still lucky. Lucky that she is big enough and strong enough to lift Mr. Smith out of his wheelchair and into the tub. Lucky that she has matured into an apple-cheeked grandma-type with wispy white hair. So angelic she could sit atop a Christmas tree.

Medium-sized to begin with, Mr. Smith has shrunk with each visit to the hospital. Their savings, too, have shrunk, and might not be enough to cover the next time. Now he’s back at home and she is prepared with pads, pills, gloves, and a list of numbers to call. The pamphlet the nurse handed her says, “Do you have questions about how to care for your loved one? Give us a call.”

God bless ‘em. The sheer presumption. “Loved one.”

What, is she supposed to call that number and say, “I’m worn slap out. I didn’t sign up for this”? Who will answer when she shrieks, “I can’t take it anymore”?

Mrs. Smith’s hand churns the water, and she watches the light glint like a crystal, breaking and re-forming. She knows she should wait for the PSW, Susanna or not-Susanna, whoever, so they can do bath time together. Just in case.

But Mr. Smith smells stinky as all get out. It’s the new meds. She wants to be rid of that revolting odor. It chokes her at the back of her mouth.

Or maybe she just notices it more. He was away for two weeks, in the intensive care unit, racked with his latest infection, and Mrs. Smith had time away from the constant reek of urine and stench of leaky buttocks. The odor of indignity.

She had time to herself. Time to sit in the wretched old house, amid the flaking paint, crumbling plaster, and doors falling off hinges.

Time away. She ought to have called a handyman. But her finger paused over the landline’s keypad as she remembered there was a new recipe for jambalaya she wanted to look up on the computer.

Hours later, she staggered to bed. Without recipes, without recommendations for a handyman, but feeling but quite comforted. She’d reconnected with Pat and others from her heyday.

But now it’s back to the old routine. The crushing routine.

She should be well rested, but she continued staying up far too late. The online world was like using a hammer to calm choppy waters. She fell into bed later each night but woke at the same time each day. The alarm was set to make sure Mr. Smith was up early each morning, up and toileted and washed and brushed. Before the PSW came and measured pulse and blood pressure and sugar levels.

Mrs. Smith tests the water with her elbow. Cold as a frosted frog. She runs some hot.

The bathroom is the most dangerous room in the house. Not the kitchen, with its knives and burners. Not the stairwells with slippery steps.

When their boy Virgil was little, she used to worry constantly about accidental scalding. Slip-sliding on the hard porcelain. Concussion against an unforgiving faucet. Electrocution due to a curling iron that fell by chance into the water. And then there was plain old drowning. Water doesn’t have to be deep, just enough to cover the nose.

She goes down the hall to fetch Mr. Smith, walking past the home office where the screensaver shows penguins in Antarctica. If you lived on a glacier, what would your screensaver show? The bumblebees among the bergamot in the Smiths’ balmy backyard?

She hears his song. Now it is Good Night Irene.

She grits her teeth. He sings “Eileen” not “Irene” because that was the name of his first love, a red-haired Irish girl who died under the wheels of a speeding train. Was it a horrible accident or a regrettable suicide? No one could say for certain.

Or was she pushed? Mrs. Smith has felt the urge to push someone off the train platform. Once a man shoved her against the wall and groped her just as the express train came rushing into the station, a cataclysm on wheels, and she placed her hands against the groper’s chest and gave a push, hoping to see him fall into the train’s path, under steel wheels slicing his head like twin machetes on an overripe melon. But it was a ladylike push, not a mighty heave, and he didn’t even lose his balance.

She would do it differently this time, she thinks. Her arm curls and relaxes as she swooshes the water.

There are many things she would do differently. Age has given her ruthlessness and impatience. She’d stop being so obliging. Stop waiting for her real life, her exciting, wonderful life, to begin.

And besides, kindness takes many forms. Last week, Mrs. Smith found a broken swallow’s nest under the corner of the old barn where it used to hang. She placed a board over the nest and stomped on it. It was kinder that way, she told herself. Kinder than leaving featherless squabs to die of cold or dehydration—or cat-induced heart attacks.

Eileen’s death on the rails cast a shadow over Mr. Smith’s entire adult life. A shadow of caution. Of reticence. Of emotional distance, because he never wanted to love someone so deeply again lest the grief overwhelm him.

Way back when they’d first met, Mrs. Smith hadn’t known this about him, hadn’t realized he had grown a callus over his heart. She was convinced she would be living in high cotton, getting the final, most eligible bachelor.

And now, when they could be murmuring sweet nothings in their golden years, instead she hears Good Night Eileen. Again and again.

Apart from singing, Mr. Smith cannot speak in the regular way. He depends on songs to carry everything he wishes to say now. Too bad his repertoire is shrinking. He used to sing Nobody Knows the Trouble I Seen. I’ll Fly Away. Feelin’ Alright.

But now Mr. Smith is stuck with ditties and childish jingles.

Mrs. Smith pushes his wheelchair to the threshold of the bathroom and, by hook or by crook, maneuvers him into the bathtub. He sloshes about, singing the final verse of Good Night Eileen, the verse about jumping in the river to drown. He sings it with a wistful smile on his face.

“Do you mean it?” she says teasingly, splashing him with water as she lowers him, lowers him more. “Well, bless your heart.” His mottled flesh looks worse than it is; his skin is so baggy, it nearly hides the worm curled between his thighs. She stirs up bubbles so the water covers all flaws.

She can still pretend.

As she squirts the soap for his hair, the same baby soap she used for Virgil, she wonders what their son is doing right now. He barely reacted to his dad’s most recent hospitalization. Virgil texted, “Do you need me there mom?” two days after the ambulance brought him in. A week later he texted, “Back from high tech detox weekend sorry to miss your call.”

“Help,” she texted Virgil, “I can’t work the TV.” This brought a reluctant phone call.

Mrs. Smith had unwisely confessed she’d found a warm and welcoming online community and Virgil had interrogated her. “Who is this Pat?”

“Just an old neighbor.”

Everything was lies. Mrs. Smith still doesn’t know why she was lying, it just felt more fun to do than giving the straight-up truth which would be punctured by Virgil’s cross-examination. Followed by some big opinions. He pays for the PSW, so she must listen. That boy acts like the sun comes up just to hear him crow.

So what if she wants to have a little fun?

Mr. Smith is all lathered up and as slippery as a swamp eel. He’s forgotten the bath time ritual, how he ought to lean back so she can pour a pitcher of warm water over his head, like gravy over dumplings. The angle of leaning means his face won’t get too much gravy. Today he’s uncooperative and completely refuses to lean. When she pours water, it runs all over his face and hair.

She speaks in a high, girlish voice, saying, “This won’t take but a minute, bless your heart,” but the rising tone of her voice is edged with annoyance.

Mr. Smith never used to throw hissy fits. On a happy day he would sing Walk on the Sunny Side and on a bad day he would pull his arm away from her. The whimper is new. The whimper is downright annoying. Today he won’t quit being ugly.

While he was in the hospital, she felt untethered. Like a balloon that left a church picnic and flew up-up-up to check out the gulls and the clouds and maybe the contrails slashed across the sky by jets going somewhere. She gazes out the window at the darkening clouds.

Then she looks back at Mr. Smith.

Mr. Smith is calmer now in the bathtub although he’s looking chilled. His fingers are pink raisins, and his nose drips into the bathwater. Mrs. Smith delays the inevitable. Accidents sometimes happen, don’t they? She’s only ever had one memorable accident—and that was when her jalopy rear-ended his. How they first met. He was so obliging.

Always obliging… how will she do this? She grits her teeth. Suck it up, buttercup.

Getting him out, getting him toweled off seems like gargantuan chore: the square miles of skin to be dried, the dozens of buttons to be done up. The hundreds of teeth to be brushed. She pushes his shoulder, gently but firmly, and he leans back against the tub. A knowing look comes across his face. A small smile. If he could speak, he might say, “I’ll stay here till the cows come home, sugar.”

Mrs. Smith runs more water. “If the creek don’t rise,” she whispers.

She joins him singing Row Row Row Your Boat. He sings gently down the stream. Her eyes well up. He sings Good Night Eileen I will jump in the river and drown.

She marvels at his serenity as the water creeps up his neck and touches his jaw and goes over his chin and up to his lips and touches the corners of his mouth.

“Well, I declare,” a voice calls from the hallway. “I see I’m just in time for evening bath.” Susanna steps into the bathroom. With one smooth motion she unsnaps her bracelets and pockets them. She reaches into the cooling water for the arms of Mr. Smith.

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