Bath Time

Change is in the air. Mr. Smith is back home, and he is singing his number one song, Amazing Grace. His warble falls flat in some places, and he mangles some words, but it’s recognizable by all.

Mrs. Smith is sick of Amazing Grace. So sick of it. She hopes tonight they do not have the personal support worker named Grace, a plump young woman who wears too much jewelry, who is always snapping bracelets on and off. Although surely Grace is sick of that song by now, too. Isn’t she? Sometimes Mr. Smith sings Amazing Race instead. The first time he did it, Mrs. Smith and Grace looked at each other in surprise and laughed.

Mrs. Smith has gone to fill the tub. She can’t hear his singing above the thunder of water. Deep in thought, she trails her fingers in the rushing current. She did not shut down her computer, even though bath time takes an hour these days, possibly more. The computer 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 and she didn’t even know it. Although in some ways she is lucky now. Lucky that she is big enough and still strong enough to lift Mr. Smith out of his wheelchair into the tub. Lucky that she has matured into an apple-cheeked grandmotherly type with wispy white hair. Practically angelic in expression.

Always a small man, Mr. Smith has shrunk with each hospitalization. Now he’s back at home and she is prepared with pads, pills, gloves, and a list of numbers to call. Just in case.

Those numbers.

She despises them. The pamphlet they handed her chirps, “Do you have questions about how to care for your loved one?” It lists different numbers to call for support: physical, nutritional, medical, and emotional.

The sheer presumption. “Loved one.”

Mrs. Smith’s hand churns the water.

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

She knows she should wait for the PSW so they can do bath time together. Just in case.

But Mr. Smith smells bad, putrid. It’s the new medication he has come back with. She wants to be rid of that revolting smell. 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 smell of indignity. She had time to herself. Time to sit in the old house, amid the flaking paint, crumbling plaster, and doors falling off hinges.

Time away. She ought to have called the painters, the drywallers, and the handyman. But her finger paused over the landline’s keypad as she remembered there was a recipe for zucchini bread she wanted to look up on the computer. Come to think of it, there would be phone numbers and a rating system for all kinds of repairmen there, too.

Hours later, she staggered to bed. Without recipes, without recommendations but quite dazzled by online friends.

While Mr. Smith was away, she had time to indulge in online chatting and making new friends. Like Roger.

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

She should be well rested; he has been in the hospital for the past two weeks, but she was staying up far too late with the online world and the mind teasing puzzles and the two chatty hosts of YouTube channels for things she never needed to know. It had been overstimulating. She had fallen into bed later each night but still woke up to the alarm she set to make sure Mr. Smith was up early each morning, before the personal support would arrive, up and toileted and washed and brushed. Before the PSW measured pulse and blood pressure and sugar levels.

Mrs. Smith tests the water with her elbow. Too cold. 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 Tony 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 in the water. And then there was plain, old drowning. The water didn’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 screen shows palm trees on a sunny beach. If you lived in a beach house in the tropics, what would your screen saver show? A winter storm and three-foot-high snowbanks?

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 pallid, red-haired Irish girl who died under the wheels of a speeding train. Was it a horrible accident or a regrettable suicidal impulse? No one could say for certain.

Or was she pushed? Mrs. Smith has felt the urge to push someone off the train platform. Once some 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 never even lost his balance.

She would do it differently this time, she thinks, as her arm curls and relaxes.

There are many things she would do differently. Age has given her a ruthless quality, and an impatience. Stop being so kind. She can’t keep waiting for her real life, her exciting, wonderful life, to begin.

Last week she found a broken bird’s nest under the cornice 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 get so deeply in love with someone 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 carapace over his heart. She was convinced she was lucky, getting the final, most eligible bachelor.

And now, when they could be murmuring sweet nothings in their golden years, 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 he does not know opera—that repertoire could carry the full range of what a fully rounded person might wish to say, everything from the hilarious Barber of Seville to the heart-wrenching La Bohème.

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

Mrs. Smith pushes his wheelchair to the threshold of the bathroom and, with a tangle of limbs, maneuvers him into the bathtub. The sunlight coming through the window dapples the surface. 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. His mottled flesh looks worse than it is; his skin is so baggy, so delicate it might tear. Like shrink wrap that has been taken on and off twenty times.

As she squirts the soap for his hair, the same baby soap she used for Tony, she wonders what their son is doing right now. He barely reacted to his dad’s most recent hospitalization. Tony 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 Tony, “I can’t work the TV.” This brought a reluctant phone call.

Mrs. Smith had unwisely confided she’d found a warm and welcoming online community and Tony had interrogated her. “Who is Roger?”

Mrs. Smith led Tony to assume it was all over.

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 Tony’s cross examination. Followed by a condescending lecture about seniors being targeted by fraudsters.

So what if she wants to have a little fun.

Mr. Smith is all lathered up and lethally slippery. He has forgotten the bath time ritual, how he used to lean back so she could pour a pitcher of warm water over his head. The angle of leaning meant his face did not get unduly wet. Today he is uncooperative and refuses to lean. He whimpers and frets when she pours water, and it runs all over his face and hair.

She speaks in a high girlish voice, saying this won’t take but a minute, this will be over soon, you will feel so clean and refreshed, but the rising tone of her voice is edged with annoyance.

Mr. Smith never used to complain. On a happy day he would sing This Land Is Your Land and on a bad day he would pull his arm away from her. The whimper is new. The whimper is annoying.

While he was in the hospital this last time, she felt untethered. Like a balloon that left a stodgy retirement party and went up up up to check out the birds and the clouds and maybe the contrails slashed across the sky by jets going somewhere. She gazes out the window at the clouds of gun-metal gray. The biggest cloud is shaped like a pistol.

Roger told her he plans to visit her. Would she like to meet him? It was a natural point to inject reality. To say she was married, and her husband would be leaving the hospital any day now. But instead, she asked where on earth Roger would stay. He had messaged back the coordinates immediately and she had looked up the boutique hotel where he would stay. Had checked it out on Googleview and had become dizzy trying to turn around in front of the hotel. Like she was 18 and arriving in Hollywood all over again.

Mr. Smith is calmer now in the bathtub although he is looking chilled. His fingers are pale pink raisins, and his nose is dripping into the bathwater. Mrs. Smith is delaying the inevitable.

Or she could just go on autopilot.

Getting him out, getting him toweled off seems like an insuperable duty now: the square miles of skin that have to be dried, the dozens of buttons that need to be done up. The nose that is dripping gallons. The hundreds of teeth that need brushing. 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 always knew it would come to this.

Mrs. Smith runs more water.

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 begins to seep into his mouth.

“Hello,” a voice calls from the hallway. “I see I am just in time for the bath.” Grace steps into the bathroom. With one smooth motion she unsnaps her bracelets and pockets them. She reaches into the cooling water for Mr. Smith’s shoulders.

The End