He arrives home a few minutes after six and drops his bag by the door. He takes off his shoes and hesitates over his socks, but leaves them on. He can hear Shelly in the kitchen, but he says nothing—she will have heard his key in the lock. He climbs the stairs without touching the banister and walks into the bathroom, locking the door behind himself by leaning the full weight of his torso against the knob.
He begins the process by turning the water to hot, using only the tip of his pinky. He does not wait for the water to warm but sticks his arms into the stream while it is still icy cold. The first shock of this seems cleansing too, and he’s found he can withstand higher temperatures if he allows himself this gradual adjustment—like the frog in that long-ago science class that had sat, serene as a monk, allowing itself to be gradually boiled to death. A sizzling, steaming absurdity of poorly calibrated nerves and inadequate evolution. At the time, he’d thought it a stupid animal—he’d been so innocent once.
He thinks about it sometimes still. The pimply skin growing perversely warm, beading out moisture. The stench all the more putrid for the unintended evocation of lunchtime—the salivation. What had they done with the frogs? Had they simply left them there on their desks, slowly cooling until Mr. Jacobison could clear them away before his third period? Had he worn gloves? Mike Rowe cannot remember Mr. Jacobison ever wearing gloves. And then what? Had Harold Redbloom, the custodian, really walked the halls that day from Room 382 to the dumpster out back carrying a trash bag full of dead, boiled frogs? Mr. Jacobison taught science at Overlea High for more than thirty-six years. How often had Harold Redbloom cleaned up after that science class? What must he have thought of it—what science had done to him? How did he ever get the stink out of his hands?
The water is getting hot now, and Mike’s hands have turned a glistening, valentines-heart pink. And so the scrubbing begins. A hard pumice stone sits in the soap dish, and he starts with this, moving in tight, spiraling rows that stretch from elbow to fingertip and back. To get the size just right he imagines the curls in Shelly’s hair back when they first met. He used to love to pull the strands straight between his fingertips and watch as they twirled back into place upon release. Lately though, he’s noticed that she’s getting greasy near the roots.
After the pumice comes the lava soap. With this, he focuses in on his nails. He keeps them cut extremely short so that nothing can get under them—but something always gets under them, and for that he keeps a Swiss army knife in the medicine cabinet. He hates how the skin of his fingertips now bulges over the stubs of his nails, but he hasn’t found another way.
Shelly is at the door, as always, knocking.
“Hey Lady Macbeth,” she says, “dinner’s almost ready.”
He laughs at the joke, ignoring the hint of anxiety in her voice. He wishes he could open the door and hold her, his hands kneading into the muscles of her back, fingers tracing the soft indentation at the nape of her neck. But he knows that if he touches her now he will later remember the path his hands took, and he will think of it every time he looks at her body—the invisible, ineradicable snail-trails he’s drawn onto her cleanliness. He’s been thinking lately of patenting a new skin care product called Lady Macbeth’s Out Damn Spot Super-Scrubber. It will be, essentially, a modified steel-wool pad that dispensed a mild bleaching solution— and possibly some sort of lotion. He thinks he might get Mark Summers onboard as an investor.
“Okay, babe,” he says, “I’ll be down.”
“We’re having ribs,” she says, and he hears her footsteps on the stairs.
Ribs. Finger-food. She does this to hurt him.
He picks up the Irish Springs to start in on the detail work, and then it’s on to the second round.
Emily Kiernan is currently pursing an MFA in creative writing at CalArts. She is interning for the literary journal Black Clock. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pank, The Collagist, and The Artizen.
ISSUE:
S P R I N G
2011
THE NEW
RULES OF
W R I T I N G
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