The Tub

"The Tub"
by Phillip Hamrick

My friend, Virginia O’Neill, is from the deeper south, from the backwater, my ma says, her family moved to Virginia cause the call of money, my ma says—Virginia says it’s 'cause her name, she reckons.

Her hand’s banged up real pretty like red crystals with trails coming from them. When she talks about the sky, I can taste blue. When she talks about the grass, I can taste green. She laughs and I go all wide-eyed and feeling like I’m full of juice. When she laughs—ha ha ha—her teeth show like moths.

You wanna wash up with me, Sandy? she asks.

Yes.

She unfolds long arms and holds out a pink hand that looks like a thousand carnations melted on her palm, and I can smell that skin, her skin, like lard and soap, and she's dressed in her mama’s old bed sheets with the orange and green flower pattern she got from the Salvation Army.

Let's go then, she says.

I think how my skin will fold and buckle in the water—so it shrivels like Virginia’s puckered toes. Her whole family uses the same tub, she says, so sometime, if she's the last one to go, she says it looks like the river with little bits of things floating and bobbing. Virginia and her brothers and sisters all use the same bath water, she says: Billy, James, Mary, Kate, John, and Mama. Her papa ain’t around much and when he is I suppose he gets his own.

We go in through the back door, which is half blue and half purple. From the last of two different cans, Virginia says. We walk into the living room and she points out the couch, making me notice it like she always does with things. It has fluff all coming out of it. She pulls out a tuft of it and shows me and then shoves it back into one of the holes. She asks her mama if I can wash up with the family and her mama says, yeah, if she go in at the same time and don’t take too long and don’t let the boys see us. Her mama got it worked out so that everyone gets a wash-day per week so everyone gets a turn in the clean water, and she got it written all out on a calendar in the kitchen.

Today is Virginia’s day.

When we go in Virginia starts giggling real funny, she says the clean bath water smells like the metal of a gun, cause she always noticing things like that. Doesn’t it? she asks. I say I never smelled no gun, so she puts her clothes back on and runs to get her Pa’s. She comes back with it and tells me to put my nose down in the tub and smell. I say okay and do it and feel it steam up into my nose, like I’m breathing outside after a storm. Then she says okay and turns the gun sideways and has me smell it.

I can’t smell nothing, but I tell her they do seem the same.

She puts the gun away and we get in the tub quick and I’m sitting uneasy against the side cause the water’s too hot cause it has to stay hot for everyone. It’s so hot it makes me sleepy and I think how it'd be just as hot sleeping beside Virginia. Her arms could rub up on mine, and I could smell her sheets and see her teeth in the moonlight, and she’d giggle and shake the bed doing it, and in the summer time I could feel her feet sweat on mine.

I like Virginia's feet. She tells me how once Bill dared her to put her foot under the old house, and then John dared her to see how far she could stick it in and then a possum bit off the tip of the big toe of the foot she stuck in. Since then her toes are all scrunched up and that’s why they all puckered, she says, cause she can’t unclench them.

She sloshes the water on her shoulders and asks me if I want to cut up worms tomorrow or take turns singing with her mama’s hairbrush. I say it don’t matter, whatever she want is fine with me.

And then she says sometimes I look at her like I got gummy fruit for eyes and a tongue like a red Popsicle. She points to a scab on my shin and picks it off real quick but real gentle. But it feels like she just reached right into my mosquito bite, right into my leg and put a rush of hot water right through me. And she ask if it hurt and I say no it didn’t, but just felt hot for a second. And then her mama knocks at the door and say we kids got to get out cause its Mary's turn.

And Virginia stands up real quick and the water sheets off her skin and she say, Sandy, you want to wash up with me again sometime?

And I say, yes, I say to her. Yes.

Copyright (c) 2007 Phillip Hamrick