CHAPTER 7

Showering

The prospect of a hot shower was sometimes the only reason to walk, to move, to let the day pass by like a reflection. There was so much misery and boredom in day-to-day life but showering was a momentary respite from it all, the steam, the warmth, the limitless possibility that filtered through the sound of the water pounding her back. Anything is possible, and I am naked, she would think, insulated by the shelter of the shower curtain.

On a rare occasion she would take a bath instead. Taking a bath was a promise that she’d make, usually in simultaneous acceptance of misery. I missed the train and will be late, and they will be mad at me, but later I will take a bath so I can float on their anger.

During her final exams she made such a promise to herself when she had accepted the reality that the next three weeks she would be stuck in her apartment studying. The tub filled as she undressed. Standing in front of the mirror, she ran her hand over the curve of her rib cage, then her waist. She thought she looked very linear and that her breasts looked lovely also. The mirror fogged, softening her poses. She leaned over the bath, the water so clear it was almost not clear at all. She dropped her hand in and let it sink into the stark heat and thought to add bubbles. Deftly she pulled her arm out of the water and held it, letting the water drip as she reached for the bottle at the corner of the tub. It was empty. She placed it back in its spot to continue its reign as the-empty-bottle-in-the-corner-of-the-tub. The bottle sat there for two more months until a Saturday at four o’clock when she was arrested by a whim to do an intensive cleaning of the apartment. The sun was going down as she scrubbed away an ingrained Cheerio on the kitchen floor and thought of what her future children would look like. She threw out everything that had been inexplicably saved in a fluttered moment of grasping the transient nature of life. Reorganizing the bookshelf, she put the Noam Chomsky on a higher shelf between Willa Cather and Proust. The Willa Cather she had read, the Proust she had read half of. She stopped cleaning when she realized she couldn’t wash the window by her bed. It was muddied from the outside, and given the building height there’d be virtually no way to clean it by herself. She thought of ladders and spent the rest of the evening watching TV. Her intentions of organizing her closet went unfulfilled.

She put her hair up to avoid getting it wet and to admire herself in the mirror as she pulled it into a bun. I look best with my arms raised, she thought, but there are so few situations in which to raise them. She sunk into the bath. The sound of the water enveloping her parted the silence of the room. There was her, and her body in the water, and stillness, and her neck against the back of the tub. She looked up at the skylight above the shower. It was remarkably clear despite the steam. The sky looked like early afternoon sky, but she figured it must be around three by now. She lifted her hands out of the water. They looked small and childlike. In so many years they’d hardly changed. She remembered herself at ten in a vain attempt at taking violin lessons. Her fingertips would get raw as she pressed down the strings to make F, F-sharp, and G, or something like that. The instructor told her she had soft hands and said that if she practiced more she would build up calluses on her fingers and the strings wouldn’t hurt her as much. That night she lay in bed, her bird lantern spinning inverse silhouettes of robins and blue jays over her bureau, then closet, then toy chest. She thought of her fingers growing raw as she vigorously mastered “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” She pinched her hands to her palms and fell asleep. Two months later she quit violin.

Soon after, her violin made its way casually from the corner of her bedroom, to the closet, to the attic. She didn’t think of it much, but her mother mentioned it from time to time during conversations about “things Leda had been great at.”

Her first year of college she decided to move from the dorms to a studio apartment that was “so cute” and “so full of light.” The place needed bookshelves, so she made the decision to sell her violin. She did not hesitate on the decision, not even as she climbed the small, ill-proportioned stairs leading to the attic in her childhood home, not even as she moved her old dollhouse it sat behind, not even as she carried it to the pawnshop.

The pawnshop smelled like eggs and the man who worked there spoke with a burly voice and didn’t have soft hands. Her violin was in his hard hands that already had calluses but not from violin.

Walking back from the shop, she imagined her little violin, the relic of her fourth-grade musical ambitions, displayed beside other relics of past lives. Her arms felt unburdened as she walked caselessly to the train station. Violin cases are heavy and they knock your knees, she thought. She had gloves on so she didn’t think of how soft her hands were, but she may have thought it if she didn’t have gloves on. She wouldn’t have had gloves if it hadn’t been so cold and hadn’t been winter. She may have thought many things if it had been spring. As she reached the train station, she motioned the few notes she could remember on her wrist. She was deliberate in her spacing, mimicking the ambitious fingering she categorized in her mind as professional violin playing F-sharp C-flat, F-sharp C-flat, F-sharp C-flat. As she boarded the train she thought, This is the last time of this in my life and this is never going to be this way again because this is over. The bookshelves she bought were auburn.

Leda lifted her knees out of the bath. She held them as still as possible until they looked like they were floating. My violin is out somewhere with someone, and it is not mine, she thought. She imagined it sitting there with the pawnshop man, getting dusty as he spoke in his burly voice and wrote receipts with his calluses. She got out of the bath. Her hands were pruned and she was clean. It felt good even though she was dizzy from the steam.