House, Ex-Wife

    The pale, bony fingers wrap around the long cotton tendrils of the mop, wring it with a swift twist that expunges the water in a gray-brown stream. The woman who belongs to these hands watches the fluid trickle into the bucket. She is not wearing gloves, so the bleach gives her hands a deceptively supple, almost oily texture. When her hands dry they will burn and crack. The tips will feel tight and the flesh around her left thumb will bleed. But she's nearly finished; it's too late for protection, pointless to put on gloves now. Her hands have soaked so long that she could not dry them fully with a towel. They would remain damp enough to stick to the inside of the gloves, and they would chafe. With the back of her right wrist she brushes a wisp of shiny black hair from before her eyes, directs a puff of breath out the side of her mouth as she does it. Mindful of her hands all the while, she takes care not to splash herself as she dips the mop into the faded blue bucket.

    She needn't worry about splashing bleach on herself. She isn't wearing anything that could be stained. She isn't wearing anything. Once she was cleaning the kitchen in the buff when he came home. When she heard the car, she went to meet him at the door and was surprised to see he had brought a colleague with him. She giggled and walked down the hall to their room. He followed, after ushering the guest into the living room and hurriedly pouring him a tall drink. 

    The house is a long rectangle, its perimeter, plate glass. A narrow hall runs along the eastern length, ending in the square kitchen at one end. A breakfast bar separates the kitchen from a small sitting area, which opens to the living room, which occupies the center of the house. An adobe wall divides the deep living room and the long corridor. A white tile floor stretches from the kitchen to just past the bathroom, where the passage ends in a square cul-de-sac: to the left, the master bedroom, to the right, the guest room, with the study in between.

    They had fought over this floor. He insisted on white. She begged for terra cotta. She told him white was ridiculous in the middle of the desert prairie. It would never be clean after being laid. Nothing ever is, honey. He had laughed as he took a drag on his cigarette, cast his glance away. Nothing ever is. Deep in his eyes he wasn't laughing. He was impatient. Disgusted. Wrong.

    The house was his design at her expense. 

    She kneels as she backs into the bathroom, positions herself so that her waist straddles the threshold. Her knees are in the bathroom, her hands are in the hallway. If she lifted her head, she could gaze out the window wall at the line where the prairie meets the sky. The gentle rolls of earth crest a mile from the house, just enough to hide the road a hundred yards beyond, at the bottom of the opposite slope. Occasionally the top of a truck will show above the mound as a long moving shadow.

    But she does not look across the browning sage and pinion into the remains of a scorching sun. She does not notice how the mountains appear purple in this light. She looks left and sees that the kitchen floor is dry, as is the short stretch of hall that extends beyond the small wet circle that she has knelt to scrub. 

    A sudden sneeze screeches from within her chest, and once the reverberations die she notices how quiet the house is. Now she glances outside to see the sky, a cloudless white-washed blue. The grasses are motionless, and nothing flutters in the distance to indicate traffic on the road. She is her only evidence of life. 

    Her breasts hang from her chest, point to the floor, so that she resembles the ancient bronze sculpture of the she-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus. But her teats are not rock hard, they swing lightly with each swipe of the scrub brush, into which she throws the force of her entire upper body. She heaves her hips backward while shoving her hands out, pressing the brush into the floor with each forward thrust. 

    The tile is cool beneath her knees. Invisible waves of heat begin to rise off the back of her neck and perspiration condenses under her arms. She leans her weight on her left hand and makes circles with the brush using only her right. The heel of her left hand tires of holding her weight as she works on the intersection of four squares that are marked, as is the grout between them, with a dark stain. Her rhythmic scrubbing erases the mark before she can determine what it is. She hoists herself to her feet, stands with the brush in hand, her hips thrust far to the right, and scrutinizes the floor from the higher angle. She exchanges the brush for the mop that has been soaking in the bleach water, wrings it out again and slathers it over the place that was stained and across the rest of the bathroom floor. 

    When she reaches the toilet, she lifts the lid and seat at once and pours the dingy water into the bowl. Then she sets the bucket on the floor, drops the toilet seat, and sits. 

    The bathroom is predominantly white: the walls, the porcelain sink, tub, toilet, and bidet, the tile floor that continues into the sunken shower stall and up its walls. The shower is large, has a small bench built into the wall. The space was designed not to need a door or curtain. Even the fixtures cast the white shine of silver. The room is saved from being a modern monochromatic nightmare by bright towels stacked on stainless steel shelves beside the sink and between the shower and tub. Three ceramic torsos, each life-sized and glazed dark blue, inhabit a shelf beside the sink. They depict the stages of woman: a thin boxy shape with dangling arms is girlhood, the same limbs become long and lanky and are crossed defiantly in front of adolescent nubs, burgeoning into the bosom of the third sculpture, breasts that droop from having nourished those first incarnations and weigh on knobby but slightly slumped shoulders that imply both strength and resignation. 

    Her mind slowly returns to her body and registers that her legs are numb. She is disoriented for a moment; her eyes dart about to find a clue to her position. She sees the toilet paper roll, absent-mindedly tears off a strip, passes it between her legs, stands cautiously and plods to the shower, back hunched, arms hardly swaying. 

    The first touch of water is cool. She stands away from the flow. The water becomes warm and quickly turns hot. The needle streams are so strong that when they make contact with her chest the water bounces off in a mist that covers the fine down on her face with dew-like beads. She begins the ritual of washing her face. She squirts pearly white soap from a white plastic pump dispenser into her hand. It feels cool. She wipes her hands together to spread the soap around, then pushes her hands up and down her face. Her head does not move. Her hands do the work: they slide down to her neck, wipe underneath her chin, glide around to the back of her neck, still tired from the weight of her head as she knelt on the floor. Her fingertips slip into each fold in and around her ears and massage her lobes. After facing directly into the spray she turns around and lets the water douse her hair. She sways slowly to let the water cover her head; the rushing sound increases in volume as she moves in and out of the flow. Pink shampoo oozes from the bottle. She rubs the blob between both hands and lathers her head. The floral aroma arouses a vision of him in this shower, washing her hair. She shakes her head and ducks under the pelting stream.   

    Another liquid cleanser is squeezed into one hand, which slaps the other, making contact sooner than expected, sending a sharp clap reverberating through the open stall, drowning, for a second, the sound of the water. Another meeting of hands, they cross and slide up opposite arms to her shoulders. Left hand drops, right continues to work the foam, slowly glides across her torso, the uppermost part of her chest. The left hand reaches for another dot of soap and meets the right over her heart. Her hands make circles around her breasts. She cups their tender roundness, lifts them, holds them, pushes her hands up through them, up to her neck. She bows her head and massages her shoulders with her fingertips, flattens her left hand and covers what part of her back she can reach, repeats the motion with the right. She smoothes both hands over her buttocks and around to the front of her waist. The left fingers slip under the delta of fur and part folds of flesh, while the right hand directs water over sensitive pink skin.   

    Her legs are smooth and feel good on her raw hands, which cover the length of them, one at a time. When she reaches the foot she traces the profile of each red-tipped toe with her index finger, then carefully massages the heel, the arch, the ball, the toes. 

    She stands under the spray, wraps her arms around herself. Each hand clutches the opposite shoulder, then touches every part of her again, searching for hidden dirt and unrinsed soap, re-establishing sentience.

    With one swift crank she turns off the water. The stream patters to a halt. Rivulets run down her face and off her body. She squeezes her hair with much the same motion she used to wring out the mop. Water continues to drip off her, from the faucet, and down the walls of the shower, piddles into the drain. 

    The large cotton loops of the bath mat tickle her tired feet. She wraps herself in a sapphire-blue towel, swaths her head in a Kelly green one. She shuffles to the vanity, brushes her teeth, staring at herself, expressionless in the mirror. She bends to spit out foam. When she straightens, she feels a drip escape between her legs. The red dot looks almost black on the tile. She crouches down to look at it, removing the blue towel from her body and swiping it between her legs before she swabs the floor and tosses it into the bathtub. 

    The bedroom is cool, as is the beige bedding. The sun has just fallen behind the mountains and the sky is smeared with scarlet, orange, violet, and gold. The green towel drops to the floor, she falls into the king-size bed. In the morning only one of the now-crisp pillowcases will be wrinkled.