Still Life with Plums: Short Stories

Grooming

32 Grooming You are a meticulous groomer. Every morning you crouch under the showerhead for eighteen minutes, spray of hot water baptizing you as you untangle the Old Spice soap-on-a-rope from the hot water faucet handle, your father’s scent. A nostalgic indulgence that is getting harder and harder for your wife to procure and wrap up every Christmas, or so she claims. You wonder if she has stockpiled. Found a rich supply the year you married and has been doling them out ever since. She is a faithful woman. You stroke a plush washcloth against the Old Spice, like rubbing a magic lamp that conjures your father’s presence, though he was never really present, always out saving someone else’s life. Pulling mothers and babies from burning houses. Dousing flames, windows shattering , embers flying, smoke seeping into his hair, his skin. Such a noble profession. Which explains the Old Spice, the only balm that eradicated the smell. You close your eyes and pretend he is shaving at your sink, performing his own morning ablution while in the kitchen your mother makes oatmeal and slices oranges and stirs extra milk and sugar into your father’s hot tea. You can hear her yelling at you: “Hurry up in there, Cal!” 33 grooming You scuff the washcloth down your arms and legs, leaner now without the muscle of youth, a much flatter behind, ankles as skinny as a girl’s. Shampoo twice with Head & Shoulders, groaning at the tangle of hairs slipping toward the drain, so few left now and you imagine that the abundance of foam whipping up in your fingers is your original coif, your locks once so full and lush barbers sighed when you plunked into their chairs. You rinse, massage the soap from your underarms and crotch, more hairs sloughing off along with dead skin and your vigor. The faucets turn off easily, no straining today since you replaced the rubber washers yesterday. Your faithful wife’s complaint. She can’t sleep with the unrelenting splat though you never hear it. You doze like a child. Innocent as a lamb. She, however, grunts and grinds molars and tangles sheets with her frigid feet because she brings her work home. All her clients’ emotional baggage rammed into her skull along with recipes and the grandkids’ birthdays and the hiding place for those medallions of Old Spice. You wonder what secrets your wife has tucked away along with the soap, what wounds her clients reveal, what tragic pasts that she cannot divulge, though you have wheedled and pried because it doesn’t feel right that she keeps things from you, even if those things do not belong to her. The bath rug is plush, the heartbreaking tickle of silky fibers on the soles of your feet as you dry off with an oversized towel. Another insistence. No thin, rough terrycloth for you. You pack your own towels on vacations because hotel towels are like sandpaper against your delicate skin. The family joke. You’re so thin-skinned you never could wear starched collars or wool slacks. Sweet Pea, your father called you. Ought to send you to the army and see what military cots feel like. You know something about army cots though you never enlisted. You wrap the towel around your waist and squeegee steam from the mirror with the side of your hand, glass squealing as you then 34 grooming swipe the slick surface with the end of a towel so you can examine your torso, count the moles on your chest, create constellations with freckles and skin tags. Stalking lion. Howling wolf. A universe expanding year by year on your pasty skin. You suck in your belly and turn sideways to gauge girth, only slightly thicker than when you played high school football. A swift running back with nimble fingers and the grace of a panther, Coach Simpson said. You are a perfect specimen, Coach said. To him you were neither soft nor delicate. You were lithe and virile and the most promising athlete he’d seen in years. Decades, he said, and you believed him. How you ached to believe him. So did the other players who resented you for it, the special attention, particularly when you got the girl: the perfect unplucked high school sweetheart who could barely look you in the eyes. Your alliterative wife, Connie. Cal and Connie Corbin. You used to attend high school reunions: tenth, twentieth...