“Our bathtub attacked me earlier,” I told Crankenstein this evening, after she’d recounted the highlights of her day. Before I could add “While I was naked and vulnerable,” which would’ve alerted her to my amusement, her brow shot toward the ceiling and her eyes widened in concern.
Disconcerted by her reaction — it was as if she’d been waiting to hear I can no longer shower without assistance — I abandoned the jokes and explained what happened. Midway through my shower, while lost in thought and soaping or rinsing who knows what, a noise startled me. The water seemed to cut out at the same time, even though I still could hear it.
It’s not often that I shriek. I recall doing it once as a kid, when startled by a mouse in my parents’ garage, and twice in my twenties when up late at night watching thrillers — Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and David Fincher’s Zodiac — alone in the dark. But I may have emitted a short, strangled shriek this evening when I turned and saw an exposed pipe where the tub’s diverter spout should’ve been. It spewed water as visions of The Money Pit danced through my head.
After hurriedly shutting off the water, I noticed the spout was at my feet. It was only last year that we’d updated the bathroom’s fixtures and shutoff valves, knowing that eventually the floor would have to be removed so older plumbing could be replaced. We planned to renovate the guest bathroom first, so we could use it while ours was out of commission, but that’s since moved down the list of our priorities.
The shriek, if it happened, was premature. Another glance at the pipe and spout told me the first thing I needed to do — after toweling off and putting on slippers so I didn’t fall down the stairs — was grab the hex keys from the Stanley toolkit that’s been stashed in the hall closet of every home I’ve lived in since getting my first apartment. Once the spout was reconnected and tightened, I was able to finish my shower in peace while musing that I’d jinxed myself with last night’s post.
It always seems to happen that way: I speculate that my siblings seem happy in their relationships and then everyone splits up. Or I write about one sister making a series of questionable decisions, only for the other to turn around and do something crazier. A decade ago, almost immediately after insisting to Almost Girlfriend that I’d never date again, I met Crankenstein. Not long after yapping about ghosts and joking about relatives who are certain they exist, I learned of Best Friend’s death and started thinking more about them.
Mostly these thoughts were silly.* “I wish I’d known,” I imagined telling him if he appeared in ghost form. “Not just so I could’ve intervened, which you wanted to avoid. I could’ve at least prepared — done some crunches, hopped on an elliptical — so my nudity was less anticlimactic for you.” (He wouldn’t have refuted the peeping charge. You don’t spend the better part of 25 years making lascivious jokes about someone and not take a gander once you’re invisible.) But then something strange happened.
Two nights in a row, shortly after I found his obituary, I got ready for bed late, after Crankenstein was already asleep. Our room was dark and I was ‘off’ while waiting for my extended release levodopa to kick in. Standing before my dresser as I changed into pajamas, I wobbled a bit and then felt a band of tightness around my right bicep, as if someone had taken it to steady me. I knew there was nothing to it; I was tired and my muscles do all kinds of weird things after midnight. How nice it would’ve been, though, to believe that he was there.
* I can’t think of ghosts without remembering Naked Gun 2 1/2′s classic spoof of the pottery scene from Ghost. Felix and I watched those movies far too many times as kids.