The Bathtub Diaries

The Bathtub Diaries

By Robert J. Williams

When I got home one weekend, I found my mother in the kitchen chopping carrots with ferocious intent. Without looking up, she told me that the shower was broken and I should take a bath if I was planning to stay overnight. She looked grumpy and exhausted.

“What happened to the shower?” I asked.

My mother shrugged and rolled her eyes, the same way she always did. “Your father tried to install a fancy contraption with a rain shower and a handheld sprayer. And now there’s water everywhere and he’s waiting for a plumber.”

“Where’s Dad now?”

“At the hardware store. Where else?”

“Mom, I need to shower.”

“And I need a good massage therapist. Go do your homework.”

“I don’t have any homework.”

“What kind of school doesn’t give out homework?”

She was picking a fight, I could tell. I just shrugged and rolled my eyes, perfecting imitating her. She went back to her carrots.

“Go find something to do.”

I didn’t want to take a bath, but I didn’t want to go to back to the dorm halls at school, either. The weekend warriors would no doubt be lugging their kegs for their binging contests. I walked into the bathroom and saw wrenches spilled everywhere on the floor. And, in the far corner, there it was: our fat, white, bulging bathtub that resembled a giant gravy boat. It was almost always empty, as if it had swallowed an unsuspecting bather from the nineteenth century. Lately it had become a coat rack and a temporary storage vat for my mother’s tomato canning project. My brother was convinced it was possessed – every time he came near it he would bang his knee on the porcelain edge. He would always swear in English, convinced that our mother wouldn’t understand him. But she always did.

Our bathtub came with the apartment, after the previous tenant had remodeled it. What it looked like before this, I had no idea. It wasn’t attached to any wall to save space, so my mother had to squeeze behind it to vacuum and scrub the walls. None of us could sit on the edge, either. The rim was too thin to perch on, and we would end up falling off or sliding in, which was like descending helplessly into a white cavern of ominous echoes. There wasn’t even a protruding lip on the tub to serve as a soap dish, and my mother’s rickety tray caddy that my brother put together for five bucks usually ended up snapping and sinking in the water like a miniature Titanic. My mother would always swear in Chinese, convinced that we wouldn’t understand her. But we always did.

“Where’s the cup holder?” my brother asked once, standing next to my father, staring at the tub as if in a daze, the same kind that boys get when they open a fridge door in the afternoon, looking for leftovers.

“Attached to your wrist,” my father answered.

The tub just seemed like a nuisance. It served no purpose other than to annoy everyone. Even the word “tub” seemed paunchy and pathetic. No wonder hotels everywhere were getting rid of them and replacing them with shiny, rectangular walk-in showers, complete with seamless bathroom floor tiles and plenty of cup holders. According to most commercial interior designers, you don’t need bathtubs installed anymore to get a five-star luxury rating. Bathtubs weren’t even sexy, anymore – apparently, it’s hotter to have sex in a steamy shower stall than to get bruised in a bony bathtub. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway.

The more I stared at it, the more I started to really hate our bathtub, wondering if there was a landfill somewhere in the world where bathtubs go to die. While my brother was in the next room – seated at his desk with his head engulfed in giant headphones, enjoying his usual slew of slasher content – I suddenly found myself enjoying bathtub demolitions on social media, influencer clips complete with fast-paced action music following sweaty contractors and butt-cracked plumbers gutting helpless, stained tubs out of their sockets and carrying them off to a dumpster off-screen. Pieces of porcelain left behind, dark stains on the floor, tarnished bronze pipes sticking out of the wall, drills and nuts and screws everywhere with scummy, soapy cocking dripping down the walls. It looked like raunchy renovation porn. After a while, I felt ashamed. I knew this was a guilty pleasure that couldn’t last. It was the same feeling you get from watching crazy Karen videos; you can’t help but looking, but you always look away when somebody mentions them.

“Your Dad’s home,” my mother called. “He’s turning off the water.” No one replied. Both pairs of headphones remained motionless.

While my father went back to his wrenches and the other weird, greasy tools I couldn’t recognize, I began to wonder about my hatred for bathtubs. Maybe it wasn’t the tub that I hated, but rather the bath. So what if we’re swimming for nine months before we’re born? Kids hate taking baths from day one. They run in terror and hide in every closet, just like that devilish comic strip kid Calvin with the spiked hair and his trusty stuffed-tiger sidekick Hobbes that my parents used to read when they were young and kept following them on their Facebook feed during their doom-scrolling breaks.

I knew that baths were scary, and Calvin hated them as much as I did. I found out that bathophobia – the intense fear of depths – was a real thing. So is ablutophobia, the extreme fear of bathing. I got curious and looked up the name of our tub’s design – it was called a “clawfoot”, made from heavy cast iron. Clawfoot, really? That sounded like the guy with the creepy black leather fishing hat from those “last summer” movies. Suddenly I was a nervous kid again, squished next to my smelly, snotty sibling, hiding between my parents’ legs on the couch with my eyes partly covered, stuck watching all those cheesy horror flicks that weren’t all that cheesy back then: The Changeling (1980), about the ghost of a boy haunting an old house where he was drowned in a tub, his little fists pounding on the porcelain; or, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), with those claws rising up out of the milky bath water; or, What Lies Beneath (2000), where Harrison Ford, the guy who plays Indiana Jones and Han Solo – two of my favorite heroes – drugs his wife and leaves her paralyzed to drown in an almost-overflowing bathtub. I could never forgive him for taking that role. After all that, I was never going to play with my rubber ducky again.

Maybe, I thought, bathtubs were never meant to be private or used alone. Bathing began as a communal activity in bath houses, going back thousands of years. One of the oldest known bathtubs in human history was found in what is now the Indus River Valley in South Asia. Archaeologists found evidence of early plumbing in the form of bronze pipes, used to bring water to groups of bathers. Hot baths came along later in Greece and Rome, where water was heated on rocks or coals before being poured. In Morocco, a hammam – a very hot and humid Turkish steam bath intended for public bathing – typically lasts over an hour and includes steaming, scrubbing, a foam massage, and rinsing. Women are encouraged to remove their bras so that they can experience a total cleanse. In Japan, to enter a bath is considered a form of relaxation, to find peace and mindfulness, not merely to receive a royal scrub down. In recent years, natural pools have become more and more popular in Chile, Iceland, and in Radium Hot Springs, British Columbia. I wondered: was our bold, bulky bathtub trying to make us realize something?

I walked back to the bathroom, watching my father tinker with his tools while he stared at his tablet, watching top ten tips on shower head replacement. I was praying for him to pull some magic trick, like he used to when my brother and I were little, and fix the shower so that I wouldn’t have to take a bath. But he wasn’t getting anywhere. He was good with numbers, not with his hands. The tub, meanwhile, just kept staring at me from the corner with its pouty, porcelain complexion.

“Can I help, Dad?” I asked.

“Go do your homework, honey,” he said, not looking up.

“I don’t have any homework.”

“Then go help your mother.”

“She’s in one of her moods, Dad.”

“Nothing a kind daughter’s heart cannot fix.”

Dad was in one of his wise-man-on-the-mountaintop moods again, so there was no more talking to him.

I sighed and walked toward the kitchen and heard my mother humming a tune. I stopped. It was faint but melodic, triggering something. An old song in Chinese I had heard before, but I had forgotten the meaning of the words. And then it came to me.

My mother used to sing to me in the bathtub. It was the only way she could lure me into it. She sat next to it on an old wooden bench while the faucet gurgled and choked out the water. She hummed to herself, softly stroking the rising pool and spreading the soapy bubbles, knowing full well that I was watching from the doorway. Eventually she curled her index finger toward me, so I undressed and climbed in. She was patient with me back then, not like now. While I played in the suds, she stroked my wet hair to straighten the tangles, combing them gently.

The bathtub had bonded us. It made us forget the hour, the day, the tantrum I had thrown, the argument she had had with my father, the juice I had spilled, and the pate chinois she had left to burn in the oven. The bathtub had healed us. She was smiling while I played with her shiny, dangling necklace beads, and I was laughing while she splashed water in my face with her delicate, nurturing fingers. The bathtub had cleaned us. It warded off the moody spirits that had been chasing us wherever we went, and it silenced the noise that had been filling our ears. The bathtub was simply trying to fulfill its own destiny, its sole vocation in life: to answer our yao – our wants and needs. To take care of our skin, our bodies, our “linghun” – our souls. To impart its “zhi” – its wisdom – onto anyone willing to touch it and surrender to it. The bathtub was not a monster or a menace or a meddlesome pest – only a melancholic companion that wanted you to hide from the world and imagine a better one.

I smiled and remembered. And I was wrong about Calvin. He was fine once he got into the tub and forgot about all the dirt that had defined his day. The soapy water became his own little tsunami, his amphibious battleground, his soggy ground zero for his unstoppable imaginations of mayhem. His childhood was saved yet again. That’s what my mother had wanted for me. She kept me young in that tub, perhaps so that she could keep herself young for just a little longer, so that I would learn to smile and laugh and sing, so that I would cherish the touch of a loving hand. I looked now into the kitchen and saw my mother rubbing her fingers. The knife had become too heavy. The rice cooker was shaking, and something was sizzling in the oven.

“Mother, can I help?” I asked as I entered the kitchen.

“Tell your father to get out of the bathroom. He’s been there long enough.”

“Okay.”

“And go wash up. Dinner is ready.”

I stood there until she turned her head and looked at me. And we exchanged a smile as if each knew what the other was thinking, a mysterious force that only mothers and daughter can share, that fathers and sons can only wonder about. And for the first time in many countless weekends, I found the tact and tenacity to treat the tub with a tone of Zen and comfort. The handles bristled and glistened as I turned them. The faucet hissed at first, then cascaded out its churning, chortling life blood. The water splashed and began to make bubbles as I sprinkled in the soap. A faint puff of steam billowed, and a scent of lavender rose, and with it a faraway hint of the song I remembered, the song that only a tub can echo from the past, the song that only a mother and daughter can truly cherish.

I knew that I would sleep well that night.

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