Bathing

In 45 years, since I was a young child bathed by my mother, I have taken, I think, exactly five baths. Most have been this past year, in a claw-foot tub my husband and I hauled up Rainbow Pass to this cabin in the shadow of Nipple Mountain, where longhorns still linger at the brink of old prospecting glory holes. It’s not that I don’t understand the need to purify the body: the dark stain of consciousness still flowering out of the old garden, out of the old wounds—Eve the rib fleshed and wanting. I have stood at the mouth of ancient baths in underground ruins, know of the ritual mikvah baths of my husband’s Judaic heritage: lover, bride, menstruating wife, all the grieving who have placed their hands on the newly dead—equally impure and so immersed in the living waters of springs and deep groundwater wells. It’s simply that I did not bathe.

In Ohio, when I was 13, we lived on a farm behind a cemetery where the metal hulls of parked cars glinted beneath the moon, where high school lovers swam into each other above the soft and dented graves, mornings the damp grass I wept over littered with their beer bottles and spent balloons. Here, the Catholic milk farmers raised their sons and daughters in long barrack rooms, ate meals on heavy wood tables longer than caskets, swam naked to cleanse themselves in summer cow ponds. I remember the daughters of the cemetery caretaker who bathed in metal horse troughs with the well water they heated on the kitchen stove, carried steaming into loafing sheds sagging beneath the weight of their long winters. In our house of brick and stone behind farm fences and locked gates, half built in the years of the Civil War above vanished pig yards, and filled with ghosts my mother sometimes heard—voices of those dead farmers passing idly beneath our bay windows—I took my daily showers like a confessional in bathrooms of tile and indoor plumbing.

I sit now in water pumped from an aquifer some 465 feet below me, where I imagine the calcified bones of thirsty dinosaurs must rest. Outside the window, jets cruise over me, weave the sky with their white contrails above this mountain plain where once miners washed in the phantom springs I’ve named. Before the well, before this cabin, we had no real water, bringing the little we could in small coolers when we camped out dirty and ashy, the wild din of coyotes crowding us from the far valley, the summer stars above our small fires blurred.

I will tell you I did not bathe because I am almost 5′10″, because I don’t have the body for it—my knees awkwardly splayed above the water since I was an adolescent. I will tell you I did not bathe because I’ve never had the predilection for it—the words of my mother, a “shower” pragmatist, filling me with disdain for the lingering dirt of my own body. I will tell you I did not bathe because I grew up guilty as this “landed gentry”—my father, a successful doctor in a wealthy suburb of Cincinnati, moving us to those cow ponds and horse troughs, to those dirt roads named for the grog once brewed in Prohibition stills rusting now in fields and creek beds and bounded by such resentful poverty. What I won’t tell you is that I never loved my body enough.

Once I read that young victims of rape will sometimes go through a stage of promiscuity. I think of the lonely, vulnerable, adolescent girl I was, listening beneath the kitchen window to her parents discussing their concern that she wasn’t “over it yet,” this girl the one ghost my mother could not hear. In Ohio, I sometimes swam naked with the Catholic girls. They didn’t like me, but they came anyway to swim in our spring-fed pond, to shed their suits at our sand shores, half hidden by the weeping willows. I remember covering myself with shamed hands...