The Rectangular Stains
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The drowning basin was installed in 1903, according to the ledgers, though no one in the family will confirm they ever used it for washing. My grandmother called it "the other sink" and refused to look at it directly. The water stains on the ceiling below form a pattern. I have measured them. They are rectangular.
From the time I was a child, right up to the day we all met at my grandmother's house to go through the boxes, I never saw a bathroom in all my life. The downstairs half bathroom, that I put in personally when I moved into the house many years later, must have existed before that; I read it in the papers that mention the house back in 1940, but my grandmother went to considerable trouble to hide it from me and my sisters. There were, of course, toilets on the land; there was a well out back from the time my maternal grandfather homesteaded the property. It was forbidden to us kids to play outside, even in the front yard, because apparently that was where the toilets were, but those toilets were removed from the land and replaced in the early '60s by septic tanks in the ground, as far as I can tell. Once I found myself in the hallway bathroom with a crying fiftysomething man, an historian I believe, badly needing a spot of respite.
Where were we to use the bathroom? On the front porch, in a cup of water, in the laundry room where my grandmother disbursed her sanitary arrays - reusable cotton, bought by the bolt from Sears and Roebuck - that I used as a child, her incontinence pads, the washcloths, the peach-fuzz trimmings we kept out of her shaven chest and forehead, the patches of swollen, red weft-study upon her breasts and neck, the horse-medicine - and whether she bathed the rest of her (enormous) self in that resounding crumbling tub, or not, as became more and more pronounced to us as the years passed, I never know. There was no hot water in the house outside that same bathroom tub until my mother installed a heater for my grandmother about five years before she died. When they turned on the hot water, a great whooshing, warming, wind rushed up from that hall around the first turn, where it was out of sight of the narrow porch, where the wooden steps met the mudroom and the screened-in room where the clawfoot tub, its fixtures blackened and studded with venturi, cluttered into its corner at the end of the house-opened. When the laundry room heat rose I could hear the flap in the back come up, where even in the spring someone turned off the steam, although the thermometers on the back porch put out bursts of earth-colored ice. I could hear the humming sweep of the gears preparing the mower.
She loved the laundry room, my grandmother. We spent endless evening hours in its swelter, the breeze only tangible on the edge of the screen. She had a chair there, an ugly vinyl affair, and it was there, sitting, but not really chatting, that she laid aside her bitter, fluorescent-lit household complaints and the quick-lipped tale of marital tension between she and my grandfather, and swallowed her pills. The room smelled of lemon pledge. And there it was. There is the deep yellow of the linoleum, the same as used in the kitchen, right where my daughter steps as she comes into the house from school. The century-old quarry tile of the downstairs half bath, all faded now and turning white on the edges - I lingered alone there more and more. The shower curtain there has half-heart decals from the 1950s. I found it in among several globes of the same vintage.
I guess I could have gone back in time at nine years old and done it that way. Used the front porch, the cup. But it was my grandmother who told me that if I did not go in the house to use the bathroom, and instead went outside to pee, the birds would come and drink out of that cup.
When my grandmother called my mother on the phone to shame her into doing her bidding my mother, recently separated, would take the phone into the bathroom, shut the door. My grandmother was a seamstress, and among the tape-measure and thimble collection and little plastic sheets with all the different sizes of each was a row of buttons dating to the forties. A whole cupboard lined with off-white cups, that matched my grandmother's bedroom, the dining room and the living room. Even the rags, and the quarter spools of thread, and the dusty black basket knitting needles, the pinking shears for scrapbooking were that same off-white color.
When my uncle died my mother and I went through the house looking for things to take as keepsakes, and for decades before that we had been taking and taking, we would each put around our necks a bunch of tinfoil-wrapped crescent rolls, the bottoms of the dishes he used for drinking and eating pinned all around our necks in blue, green and gold foil, whatever we were lucky enough to peel from his ancient glass cabinets. And there in the galley kitchen, on a wall against the washroom of perpetually melted snow piled up all the year along, there were shelves and shelves of swathed tissue paper plastic-tubed linens, beef fat creamers, as many dishes as could possibly be found on my uncle's canalside kitchen table or from the basement, the double shelves that covered the scallywagths and threatening weevils of the grandchildren.
My house, the one I never saw, the one I lived in, is more and more cluttered now. It is the picture of my grandmother. The new neighbors have caught me in their beautiful, pink tulip-bedeviled yard, and emerging from my side-return leant-under window. My grandparents last living words, and least made sense◆ About the ending
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