But not in mine.
Mine was just over the size of the small downstairs bathroom and at the very front of the house. Probably at one time it had been used for storage or as a maid’s quarters.
In that year’s foggy West Coast winter, the Modern Language Association was holding its sprawling annual academic meeting in the Bay Area. One Professor Thomas Clareson had invited me to address the Continuing Symposium on Science Fiction that year — the second oldest of the two continuing symposia in the organization. (Once I’d asked Professor Clareson what the oldest continuing symposium in the MLA was. He’d said, “Oh, it’s something like Shifts in the Umlaut through Two Hundred Fifty Years of Upper High German…or some such.” I assumed he was joking.) The night before I had been out drinking with a handful of science-fiction scholars, including Clareson, who was to moderate the next day’s panel on which I was to give my talk. It was my second MLA appearance in three years, though at the time I was neither a teacher nor a member. (You could do that then, but you haven’t been able to for the last decade or so.) Apparently he had been keeping track of what I was drinking — I hadn’t — and he had driven me home afterwards. He’d figured, correctly, that I might need some…support getting to my event by one o’clock the next day.
At ten I had opened an eye, squinted at the sun coming through the curtain, and thought, “Oh, Christ…no, I’m going to blow this off. Can’t do, can’t do, can’t do…” and I’d rolled over and gone back to sleep. Stuck in my notebook, on the desk wedged beside the head of my army-style cot, was the typescript of my talk.{6}
In about an hour, though, the doorbell rasped. Loud knocks, now. The bell rasped again. Someone else in the house answered and, soon, called through my closed door: “Chip! Someone’s here to see you…!”
I had no idea who it might be. But in that haze where you are too wiped not to respond, I sat up, pulled on some jeans, stepped to my room door and opened it.
Looking fresh in a gray suit, a pale blue tie, and a paler blue shirt, Professor Clareson — far more experienced in such matters than I — said, “Morning, Chip. Into the shower with you. Come on, get your clothes on. We’ll pour some coffee into you. You’ll feel a whole lot better!”
I said, “Unnnnnnn…” and then, “Tom, hey…thanks. But I don’t think I can do this, today — ”
“Yes, you can,” he said from behind silver-rimmed granny glasses. “It’s eleven. You don’t have to talk till one. Hot shower, then cold, then warm again…” White hair receded from the front of his skull. (I thought of Death…) “Come on,” he repeated.
I took a breath, looked around, and grasped a fistful of clothing. Tom walked with me along the hall’s gray runner while, on the walls, oversized shepherdesses loped among blue and pink sheep and, with halos neon bright around their naked bodies, male angels did not look down at me. Clouds and eagles — and one angel who was also a skeleton, refugee from some Dia de Los Muertos celebration — drifted over the ceiling. Tom pulled a wicker-backed chair in front of some large shepherd’s knee and settled on it, slowly, glancing down at both sides. I think he was wondering if it would hold. “I’ll wait….” It did. “If you really feel sick, give a yell. I’ll help, if you need me.” He smiled up at me. “You’ll be okay.”
“Okay…?” I repeated, queasy, between questioning, confirmation, and the entire conceptual impossibility. I went inside — white tile to the waist, a few pieces cracked or missing, dark blue walls for the rest — and pulled the door closed. A cat box sat under the sink. Kitty litter scattered the linoleum, and a blue plastic toy lay on the shower’s zinc floor.
There five weeks, it belonged to the kid who belonged to the stroller in the alley. But the people whose kid it was weren’t there that month.
I dropped my jeans, tried to kick them off — one pants leg wouldn’t come away from my foot till I sat on the loose commode ring (it had no cover), leaned forward and pulled my cuff down over my heel. Standing again, I stepped into the stall, moved the plastic curtain forward along its rod (it had torn free from two of the odd-shaped metal wires), and — stepping toward the back — reached forward and turned the knobs that looked more as if they were for two outside garden hoses than for an inside shower stall. Between my forearms, water fell.
When it reached reasonable warmth, I moved forward and, for a minute or so, turned one way and another, under the heated flush. A soap bar lay in a metal dish edged with rust and bolted to the blue. I slid the bar free — soft at one side — and soaped chest, underarms, groin, and butt, while warm water beat away the foam. Then, a knob in each hand, with a quick twist I made the water cold —
“Oh, Christ…!” shouted a committed atheist. (In foxholes and in cold showers…)
Outside, Tom chuckled.
Taking a breath, I held it and made myself stand there for a count of three, four, five — then sharply turned up the hot and turned down the cold. It took three long seconds for the warm water to creep up the pipe and spew from the showerhead.
Again I began to breathe.
Out in the bathroom once more, I turned for my towel, among four others filling the rack. My glance crossed the mirror, and, remembering I had a beard, I was glad again I didn’t have to shave. But I wondered — for the first time in years — if I’d look foolish speaking in public with bushy black whiskers.
When I was again sitting on the commode and my legs were dry, I pulled on my dress slacks. Outside the closed door, Professor Clareson went on, “You know, Chip, I was thinking this morning. My favorite book of yours has always been The Ballad of Beta-2. I must have read it four, even five times since it came out — but I keep returning to it. The reason, it occurs to me, is because it’s about learning.”
Inside, I thought: I hope I’ve learned not to do this again….
I stood once more, stepped over and got the blue toy from the stall, turned, and put it on the bathroom shelf where I noticed my aerosol deodorant. I’d thought I’d left it in my room and would have to go back for it —
“You’ve told me about your dyslexia. I wonder if that has anything to do with it. Though there’s nothing about that in the book. Still, it’s about learning — yes. But I mean a particular kind of learning, one I have so much trouble as a teacher getting my students to do: getting them to understand texts that don’t make a lot of sense unless they also acquire some historical knowledge that clarifies what was really going on, why it was important, even to the point of what actual phrases mean — in Charles Reade, in Spenser, in Milton, and in Melville. Your book deals with a problem very close to me. And it deals with it interestingly — at least each time I reread it, I find it so. And each time in a new way.”
While I finished drying, I told myself I’d take the toy to the kitchen and put it in the parents’ mail cubby next time I went in, then started for the door to get my deodorant from my room — with my hand on the knob, I remembered it was on the bathroom shelf, turned back, got it.
And knocked the toy — it was a blue airplane — onto the floor. I sighed, left it, took the aerosol can and sprayed under one arm and the other. (The antiaerosol campaign to help preserve the ozone layer and retard the greenhouse effect was a few years off.) It was cool — cold even, but not as cold as the cold water. I put the deodorant can back on the shelf. At least that stayed there.