How to Steal a Bath

“You’re wrong as usual,” Mazen said. “You’ve seen me angry many times. I’m insulted that you don’t remember.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I assume I must have, but nothing comes to mind.”

“What about the bath?”

“What bath?”

“When I tried to get you to steal the bath,” Mazen said with an exaggerated huff, “and you failed miserably.”

My laughter burst out suddenly, accompanied by a fricative snort. My fingers tightened around the steering wheel. I’d almost forgotten.

I was ten, since Mazen and I still shared a bed. As I was walking back to our bedroom, I noticed the door to the bathroom open. The tub was filled with the most enticing water, limpid and blue—a beckoning, hot spring lake in a snowy white room. The late-afternoon light forced the steam to dance along the water’s surface. I must have sighed when I walked into our room, because Mazen, lying on the bed, wondered what was going on. I told him I’d never wanted to soak in a bathtub as much I did now. He jumped off the bed to see for himself. We heard our sister talking to our mother in the kitchen. He led me by the hand toward them, but we stopped right outside the door. In the most nonchalant tone he could muster, Mazen asked Aida if she’d set up the bath. When she said yes, he told me to go jump into the bath while he went into the kitchen and distracted her. I undressed down to my underpants in my bedroom, as usual when taking a bath, then went into the bathroom with my comics because that’s what one did, soak in a tub with a comic book. I peed before stepping into the tub. I’d taken too much time. Only one foot was in the water when Aida rushed into the bathroom, grabbed me under my armpits, and hauled me out of the tub. She was sixteen then and much larger than I was. She dragged my limp naked form across the bathroom and pushed me out the door. Humiliated, my buttocks pressed onto cool stone tiles, my legs splayed before me, I saw the streak of kanji my wet foot had traced on the floor. My white briefs landed on my face. Mazen cracked up. Aida made sure to tell us that we, her sons-of-bitches brothers, were not as smart as we thought we were, not smart at all, as she slammed the bathroom door and locked it.

“No,” I said. “You’re the one who’s wrong as usual. You weren’t angry. You were laughing and mocking me.”

“I yelled at you,” he said. Pink bubbled up to his cheeks, and his impish eyes reminded me of the boy he was. “I couldn’t believe you didn’t lock the door. Who doesn’t lock a bathroom door?”

“No yelling,” I said. “You were on the floor laughing.”

“Yelling, I tell you,” he said. “I was angry at you for not locking the door, for screwing up my genius plan.”

“Laughing.”

“Yelling.”