Shower

In her illness Elizabeth believes we do this deliberately, the washing of her body. She blames me, her Japanese daughter-in-law for having made keeping her clean a fetish. Angry, she says we do this to torment her soul, the shower a hot spray of needles we subject on her moon-colored skin. She hates it even more if I’m there to wash her. She wants her son, the person she thinks of these days as her lover, or husband, or father. Memory and privacy, she cries at their loss as I soap her down like an old car. What protestations! And as I listen to her, I think of these bodies we have given so freely to men, yet feel ashamed of when in the eyes of another woman. How she fawns when she thinks a man’s around. Today, she bangs the walls. “I hate you! The water’s too wet!” Hanging onto the safety bars, she pitches back and forth like a child, wanting to be let out at the gate. I wash her back. She spins around in my soap-lathered hands, and loosening her face in mine, she glares. She sticks out her tongue, and biting down on it, she squeals, jowls swinging, arms jiggling. Then, in a dive of both hands between her legs, she drops to a semi-squat, simian posture and thrusts her pelvis bones forward like mountains in an antediluvian upheaval. In a gesture of obscenity, she unfolds her petals and displays her withered sex to me— the same way boys moon, flip the bird or grab their crotch and waggle their tongues— the profane she feels but can’t articulate.