Apologetics, Secret Faucet, & Ablutions

Apologetics

My stepmother, Bess, didn’t “cuss,” so when she picked me up at the college gates to take me to dinner, she acknowledged that she’d been a “b” during my last year of high school and asked if I’d been to the fried chicken place downtown. I hadn’t—not because I didn’t want to go, but because I didn’t want to suggest it to my new friends.

Bess’s car looked a little banged up. When I mentioned this, she said some local kids had stolen it right from the Kingdom Hall parking lot.

“But they knew they were wrong,” she said, slowing at a yellow light. “They knew, and that’s why they brought it back.”

“Is that what Dad thinks?”

“Let’s not talk about Dad.” She stuck out her lower lip and exhaled sharply, but her bangs stayed in place, touching her upper lashes. “He didn’t think I should come.”

“I figured that,” I said.

While she stood in line for our fried chicken boxes—dark meat, white rolls, extra pickles—I searched the car, certain she’d brought me some “literature,” as she called it. I was right. The brochures targeted people who’d strayed from the Truth, though none mentioned the reason I’d strayed.

When Bess returned, I noticed magenta welts on her skin as she unfolded our napkins.

“What happened to your arm?”

“Dog bite. There was a beware sign and everything, but I took my chances.”

I pictured her in the purple dress she wore out on service. My father had severe leg pain and was exempt from going door-to-door. Bess did it with enough fervor for both of them, towing me along every Saturday until I left for college.

“Lydia,” she said. “You really don’t believe in the Bible no more?”

My whole face felt greasy. I shook my head.

On the way to my “surprise”—acrylic nails at a strip mall salon—Bess cried a little. I asked her to choose my color for me. “Royal blue for the princess here,” she said, as if I weren’t standing next to her.

In my first weeks of college, trying to keep the malt liquor down, learning how to straighten my hair, using words like “discourse” and “problematic” when I spoke in class, I’d made a mistake: I discovered that imitations of Bess were a good party trick. Bess, talking to me: “Well, look at you, Miss Seven Sisters, up on your high horse!” Bess going door-to-door: “May I share my favorite Psalm with you?” I chased a frighteningly beautiful girl up and down the dorm hallway with a hairbrush, threatening to beat the living daylights out of her in Bess’s raspy voice. Everyone laughed. There was no use for the rest of Bess: Bess mixing up a can of frozen orange juice on a hundred-degree day and trying not to cry over local news—riots, riots—and how I would fall asleep to the thop of her cutting butter into flour to freeze dough overnight and serve biscuits to me, warm in a paper towel, on our ride to Sunday meeting at the Kingdom Hall. On Sundays, the three of us had cocktail hour on the screened porch; she made me Shirley Temples in cordial glasses she’d found in the attic, and the sweetness always carried, also, a taste of dust.

I sat through the nail process with a discomfort that recalled the single time, so far, I’d been to the gynecologist. The lights were just as harsh, the air just as cold; a gloved woman wielded gels and instruments.

Bess, in the chair next to mine, tipped her head back and sighed with pleasure. “Best part of my week,” she said, her hands transformed. She had chosen watermelon pink with rhinestones.

On campus, it was impossible to hide the nails, and I had to turn the whole thing into a bit: crazy Bess and her bad taste. I lasted twenty-four hours before I begged some hallmates to help me remove them. We sat around watching the same movie on a loop while I soaked my hands. Around 2 a.m. the blue ovals began to loosen, then come off in painful snaps. We messaged the all-night cookie delivery and ordered oatmeal chocolate chip and passed a pint of milk as if it were a joint. What I don’t understand, said the friend trying to ease my fake thumbnail off of my body, is why you let her do this in the first place?

Give me my brush so I can beat the tar out of you, I said in my Bess voice. Everyone laughed, moved on from the question, complained that the milk was gone and that it was late, and the pressure broke off and floated away. I couldn’t figure out how to tell them there was no such thing as let. 

Secret Faucet

Matthew forgave me for being a terrible peer editor, and for being perpetually hungover during our trysts, which were, shamefully, in my parents’ house—we could walk from campus right into the soft backyard, leave our shoes in the vestibule with my mother’s clogs and my stepfather’s running shoes, pacify their rescue dog by slathering peanut butter on a bone, and leave with a bottle of gin, occasionally, from their healthy supply. Matthew’s hands—long-fingered, good for gripping two wrists at once—were all over the house: on the banister when we went upstairs, turning every cut-crystal knob. He liked the dining room’s view of the shuttered mills on the river, two of which had just been sold to a tech startup.

“I can’t believe they pay for you to live in a dorm that’s a mile away,” Matthew said.

“I know, I’m spoiled,” I said. “Do you hate me?”

“Maybe.” When he smiled without planning to, he exposed plenty of gum.

Once, we actually brought our work to the house. He skimmed my pages with disgust.

“You misused ‘entropy,’” he said. “Like seventeen times.”

I pretended to snore. He dropped his pen and watched it roll off the table.

“Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

We had to step down into the bedroom we used; it had three shallow wooden stairs, its boards buckling in the heat. Once, Matthew said he liked the way my dark skin looked on the yellow sheets, and I turned back the covers and waited for him to notice. Instead he opened the closet door.

“What are you doing?”

He took a step deeper into the closet. I heard him knocking on the walls. I joined him, shivering in my new underwear.

“What are you even looking for?” I said.

There was a board nailed to the wall, about the size of a dinner tray; I’d never noticed because I didn’t care. It was an investment, this house. My parents hadn’t even bothered hanging their art.

“There’s a sink back here.” Matthew tugged on the plywood. “This wasn’t always a closet.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been here without you.” The board loosened. “Had you troubled yourself to ask a single question about me in the past few months, you’d know that this is my childhood home.”

“That’s not funny,” I said.

“Oh, I agree. It’s devastating.”

I put my hand on him.

“And still, you ask me nothing.” Matthew tipped his head and shook his curls, a gesture I believed he’d picked up from me.

“Is this a joke?” I said.

On his way out he kissed my scalp, perhaps because my scalp was of no real interest to him. The plywood moved easily. The sink was blue-white and cold to the touch, with tiny gold taps that spun useless circles, a dry throat of a faucet, a cobweb on the basin’s underside. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, as if he were still beside me, “and what else don’t I know?”

Ablutions

The Harlans believed that they were good neighbors to us. Each time I had a baby (four, so far), they dropped off a foil-wrapped kale-and-squash bake that I salvaged with ricotta and salt. James wouldn’t touch it either way—he didn’t want “lesbian cuisine.” He disliked how freely Heidi and Nadine crossed the property line—they brought occasional flower cuttings and misdelivered mail—but I saw chances to preach, however fruitless. They never wanted our brochures, and they declined my invitation to the Kingdom Hall. “Oh, we don’t do church,” Heidi Harlan said. James called Heidi “the girl” because she had hair to her shoulders, and her dresses were the same kind of ankle-skimming florals I wore. Nadine was fond of hats, blazers, and a pair of jeans that looked soft enough to sleep in. James called her nothing.

Last winter, when our water heater broke, I guess the Harlans must have heard me crying and carrying on when I went to the garage to tell James. He was painting the crib pink again—we’d painted it blue for our third, Caleb, and now we had Philippa—and Nadine was dragging her recycling bin to the curb. When I wheeled our trash to the end of our driveway she was still there, crushing empty seltzer cans with the square heel of her boot. The boots were black with red zippers up the ankles, as if she had stitches for two identical injuries.

“If you need a shower, you’re welcome to ours,” she said. “Just until everything gets ironed out with yours.”

The bathtub was the only place I could (usually) be alone, but of course I had to say no.

James said it would be two more paychecks before we could make repairs. We ate off paper plates. The children rejoiced at the string of bath-free days. I lost my own skin under layers of baby oil and bacon grease, under perfume I sprayed on my clothes to hide my true odor, which grew more complex by the day: Philippa’s formula, Caleb’s applesauce, Ruth’s buttered toast, and William’s jam. There was late-night-TV sweat. There was James.

I would like to say that demons carried me to the Harlans’ aqua-tiled tub after I fell asleep on the floor beside Phillippa’s crib. The demons were at work elsewhere, not lifting my body, just tempting my mind with thoughts of water and soap. And once I was in, it couldn’t be fixed, it was too late, my bare flesh lay where theirs did. I might as well have climbed into the bed between them. The wrongness of it burned as much as the water did—and what pitiful attempts I made, scoring my skin as I washed, getting filthier and filthier still.