KS Culbreth

Bath Towels

I was single again. In a one-bedroom apartment on Capitol Hill. I was a young manager at a Fortune 100 and rolling in it. I’d been a stepping stone for her and now she’d moved on and was rolling in it much deeper than I ever would.

Wasn’t much, but it had just been refurbished. Everything new. I took good care of it, kept it clean and orderly. Built and stained bookshelves and filled them with my best friends.

The Cascades were less than an hour away for hiking and camping. There was swing dancing a couple of times a week just down the street. I’d go and dance and come home, stay up to all hours writing ten thousand a day for days on end. Sometimes I’d walk downtown and have a few drinks at the nineteenth century saloons much as they had been a hundred years before on Pioneer Square and walk back. Seems everything closed by about ten back then, except those old saloons.

I was free to come and go and do as I pleased, just had to be at work on time the next day and do what I was paid to do. Easy enough.

There were always two bath towels on the rack. I switched between them so they’d dry and stay fresh and didn’t have to wash them quite so often. Even when I did wash them, they never seemed to need it.

Some force pushed me out of that apartment to the other side of the city, into another one-bedroom, a bit bigger, facing the morning sun and always bright. The bookshelves were piled two-deep and most of my best friends hidden away. The closets were overfilled with her clothes. Still not entirely sure how I came to find myself thus, evenings and nights now spoken for, having to go to bed at someone else’s hour, even the clicking of the keyboard sometimes too noisy for her to sleep and having to stop.

There were still two bath towels on the rack, but only one was mine. The rest of the rack hung with folded shower caps, loofah sponges, robes, drying bras and pantyhose.

In no time, we had the first of our sweetest blessings. How I loved that little guy, making him laugh, playing the toy xylophone for him as he lay on a quilted blanket in the middle of the floor, looking up at the mobile arched over him.

The young man in the apartment below caught me outside one day and said how he loved to hear the baby laugh, that he’d never wanted children before but just hearing that little guy laugh changed his heart and he couldn’t wait to have a child with his bride.

The bathroom became overrun with specialty items for the little guy, a tub insert, special shampoo, soap, floating toys. I installed his own rack on the back of the door for his extra-soft towels.

We outgrew that well lit apartment. We were going to move so figured why not make the big move back to the east coast. I hated the east coast and hated leaving the Pacific Northwest and had no desire to move other than to let the little guy be raised around family. But we did.

It’s all part of it.

Got a little place that was a hundred years old, lots of character, in the middle of the crowded suburbs. Fenced yard. Detached garage needing some studs to be sistered. Fixed it up as best as I could and called it home.

A year or so later I considered building it into a studio, but the thought of sitting out there in isolation working while the family was inside living broke my heart.

Fifteen years later, the house was crowded, not enough closet space, basement and attic were storage units. All the plans of so much time together and making good memories replaced by each going his and her own way, pursuing our own interests, each isolated from the others. How hard it had been to think clearly, to craft lines amid indifferent shrugs and an electric guitar screaming a tantrum at the side of my head.

But that’s all part of it, too.

I tried to keep the bathroom clean and organized but was like an aged southern gentleman trying to keep the Spanish moss off his cypress and live oak. Lotions, cleansers, exfoliants, used razors, the sink forever covered in water and hair and globs of toothpaste, the tub sills lined with shampoos, conditioners, body washes, pumice stones.

After cleaning and organizing it for hours, overnight it seemed there’d be six or eight towels crammed on the racks, the kids getting a new towel every day or two. They were so crammed together that they never dried and hung with that stale mildewed odor. We each had an assigned spot on the rack, but no one wanted theirs near the sink where everyone would use it to dry their hands. So they used mine. It was perpetually wet and darkened where the hands would churn against one another.

At some point, I moved my towel from the bathroom altogether, hung it on the glass doorknob of my chestnut-stained closet door, behind which hid two decades of very important items of the ‘may need it someday’ variety, only five percent of which I used anymore. There it dried completely between showers, stayed fresh smelling.

But it hung alone.

Though I found it depressing for some reason, I got so used to seeing it on that glass doorknob that when there was no towel hanging there, the closet looked naked, almost undignified, so I continued to hang my towel on the glass doorknob.

Then they’d gone, spread out over the country, successful, having fun and happy. We hadn’t even gotten through the empty nest phase when she left. Went to live with someone living the lifestyle of the rich and famous and who was looking for a gal with old-fashioned values. You know, like leaving your husband and family to go live the lifestyle of the rich and famous.

As a sort of apology, she gave me what she said was a good deal on buying out her half of the house. I stayed in that house I never particularly wanted, purchased and set up mainly for her and the family we were raising. Stayed on a couple of years wondering if my children would ever return with their families and we’d spend holidays there together. But we didn’t talk much after they found their own places and separate lives and they didn’t suffer the sentimentality and nostalgia that plagued me.

The bathroom was finally clean and orderly. The towel racks were empty except for a hand towel near the sink. I still kept my bath towel on the glass doorknob of my closet door, mainly out of habit but also somehow feeling sorry for the door seeming to live such a singular existence without it.

I’d finally gotten around to selling everything I didn’t want or need and was packing up to move out to the most rural area I could find, a packing that would take several months working alone, when I heard.

Her family was happy to cut me off after the split and I hadn’t spoken with them for a couple of years, so I heard through friends of the family and confirmed by several social posts. She’d had a stroke and was comatose for a few days before passing.

The house was empty now. I left home-care instructions and owner’s manuals for the appliances on the kitchen counter for the new owners.

And I left a clean towel on the glass doorknob.

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance or similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental. The author bears no responsibility for any damages that may occur to actual persons based upon this writing.]