Bathing
by Richard Krause
At eighty-four, she still had it. At least, that is what the doctor told her sister, a nurse ten-years-younger who had been married three times. The eighty-four-year-old had never married and now was in the nursing home hiding under her bed every night the nuns came in to give her a bath. She screamed “bloody murder” each time she was touched, and really “put on a show,” her sister was told.
Even when Margaret lived with her sister she didn’t want to be touched. In all that time she only allowed her back to be scrubbed from behind the shower curtain.
“And I never saw her undress, come to think of it,” her sister mused.
Despite that she was engaging, a little girl almost, with thick curls even at eighty, until that is, she was placed in the nursing home with the nuns. It was about the time her sister got tired of dragging her out to view the sunsets up in Shrewsbury or forcing her to read the Wall Street Journal aloud at the kitchen table, to keep her mind alert, she said, while she cooked. She got tired too of making her walk straight, until finally her sister’s spine got so bent, she walked permanently stooped at the waist. Her sister also grew tired of the same stories she told visitors again and again about Charlie. So, she placed her in the home and sold the house and moved into an apartment by herself in town.
Margaret didn’t communicate after that, and to her sister’s surprise she picked the smallest room when she could have had a larger one. She preserved an eerie silence broken only by reports of the piercing screams when they took her out from under the bed to her bath. It took two of the strongest nuns, so large were they that you couldn’t tell if they were not men in disguise. Each had one arm, and sometimes a third went behind supporting the old woman as they virtually carried her down the hall to fulfill the regulations that had to be kept by all. Each resident had to have a bath at least once every other night. All the residents peeked timidly out of their rooms when they heard the old lady being carried by the grim-faced nuns, their jaws firmly set, their ivory crucifixes bouncing on their dark habits, their trembling beads at their waist reminding people of their order, and of an almost tribal ceremony, a ritual that had not taken place in over seventy years.
Riding a horse hadn’t done it, swimming or vigorous exercises had not done it, and a man certainly never had. Margaret saw to that. She embarrassed her younger sister who took her along on dates in the way she would all of a sudden rise up and smack the man. Almost out of the blue with her pocketbook. More than once she made such a scene at restaurants that she just got up and left the table if the man so much as tried to be openly friendly. She didn’t have the grace of her sister who took the man’s hand just like her mother had taught her and patted it gently once or twice, and said with a smile, “Now be a nice boy,” and returned the hand to him. No, Margaret stormed off. And for years, she went with Charlie who graduated from Yale and wanted to marry her. He had a law practice in New York City, but she would have nothing to do with him outside of dating. Even though she often met his family in New Haven in the summers, that too came to nothing.
And so, all the time it was building up, it must have been, sixty, seventy years, thickening in secret. The doctor who had examined her confirmed in astonishment that it hadn’t been lost. Neither in the back seat of a car, or in any marriage bed. No, that would be left to the day when the whole nursing home would witness what was never performed by horse, or man, or the bawdy reach of a salty wave. What a proper woman can close off like the most efficient suction in the world. Guarded by only a will that had the remarkable resolve to last seventy years. Perhaps it grew from her father being a Greek Orthodox priest, even though that made the younger sister elope at seventeen and get married, only for the sex, she later confided. It must have been something lasting in her. Something that endures. Something untouchable. A curtaining of mind that no random, adolescent movement could ever perforate, no accident.
But at eighty-four her resolve thinned, like the brittleness of her bones, with her abandonment to the nursing home in Vermont. Her blood, too, was probably thinned by the medications, and the religion come back to haunt her, to manhandle her under the guise of nuns just doing their duty. Women on each arm, dragging her with the thin craning necks of the residents sticking out of their rooms. Extra silent. Knowing something similar could happen to them. That regulations are regulations. Did her piercing screams do it, or the legs she threw out to stop herself, the short jerks and starts, the pulling and pushing, the humiliation, the sense of helplessness, did that make for the tiny drops of blood on the floor that barely anyone noticed, until they had to be wiped up? Proving that it was more than her pride that was lost having been forced to take a bath.
Even when Margaret lived with her sister she didn’t want to be touched. In all that time she only allowed her back to be scrubbed from behind the shower curtain.
“And I never saw her undress, come to think of it,” her sister mused.
Despite that she was engaging, a little girl almost, with thick curls even at eighty, until that is, she was placed in the nursing home with the nuns. It was about the time her sister got tired of dragging her out to view the sunsets up in Shrewsbury or forcing her to read the Wall Street Journal aloud at the kitchen table, to keep her mind alert, she said, while she cooked. She got tired too of making her walk straight, until finally her sister’s spine got so bent, she walked permanently stooped at the waist. Her sister also grew tired of the same stories she told visitors again and again about Charlie. So, she placed her in the home and sold the house and moved into an apartment by herself in town.
Margaret didn’t communicate after that, and to her sister’s surprise she picked the smallest room when she could have had a larger one. She preserved an eerie silence broken only by reports of the piercing screams when they took her out from under the bed to her bath. It took two of the strongest nuns, so large were they that you couldn’t tell if they were not men in disguise. Each had one arm, and sometimes a third went behind supporting the old woman as they virtually carried her down the hall to fulfill the regulations that had to be kept by all. Each resident had to have a bath at least once every other night. All the residents peeked timidly out of their rooms when they heard the old lady being carried by the grim-faced nuns, their jaws firmly set, their ivory crucifixes bouncing on their dark habits, their trembling beads at their waist reminding people of their order, and of an almost tribal ceremony, a ritual that had not taken place in over seventy years.
Riding a horse hadn’t done it, swimming or vigorous exercises had not done it, and a man certainly never had. Margaret saw to that. She embarrassed her younger sister who took her along on dates in the way she would all of a sudden rise up and smack the man. Almost out of the blue with her pocketbook. More than once she made such a scene at restaurants that she just got up and left the table if the man so much as tried to be openly friendly. She didn’t have the grace of her sister who took the man’s hand just like her mother had taught her and patted it gently once or twice, and said with a smile, “Now be a nice boy,” and returned the hand to him. No, Margaret stormed off. And for years, she went with Charlie who graduated from Yale and wanted to marry her. He had a law practice in New York City, but she would have nothing to do with him outside of dating. Even though she often met his family in New Haven in the summers, that too came to nothing.
And so, all the time it was building up, it must have been, sixty, seventy years, thickening in secret. The doctor who had examined her confirmed in astonishment that it hadn’t been lost. Neither in the back seat of a car, or in any marriage bed. No, that would be left to the day when the whole nursing home would witness what was never performed by horse, or man, or the bawdy reach of a salty wave. What a proper woman can close off like the most efficient suction in the world. Guarded by only a will that had the remarkable resolve to last seventy years. Perhaps it grew from her father being a Greek Orthodox priest, even though that made the younger sister elope at seventeen and get married, only for the sex, she later confided. It must have been something lasting in her. Something that endures. Something untouchable. A curtaining of mind that no random, adolescent movement could ever perforate, no accident.
But at eighty-four her resolve thinned, like the brittleness of her bones, with her abandonment to the nursing home in Vermont. Her blood, too, was probably thinned by the medications, and the religion come back to haunt her, to manhandle her under the guise of nuns just doing their duty. Women on each arm, dragging her with the thin craning necks of the residents sticking out of their rooms. Extra silent. Knowing something similar could happen to them. That regulations are regulations. Did her piercing screams do it, or the legs she threw out to stop herself, the short jerks and starts, the pulling and pushing, the humiliation, the sense of helplessness, did that make for the tiny drops of blood on the floor that barely anyone noticed, until they had to be wiped up? Proving that it was more than her pride that was lost having been forced to take a bath.
Richard Krause has two published collections of fiction, Studies in Insignificance and The Horror of the Ordinary. A third collection, Crawl Space & Other Stories of Limited Maneuverability, was published by Unsolicited Press in 2021. His two collections of epigrams are Optical Biases, Eye Exams, and Blind Insights into the Writing Process. His writing has recently appeared in Club Plum Literary Journal, Mobius, Northwest Indiana Literary Journal, Blue Lake Review, and Digging through the Fat. Krause lives in Kentucky where he is retired from teaching at a community college.