Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
Week of March 20, 2005
Fiction published as a WIP dated November 27, 2001
© 2001 by Bud Grossmann. All Rights Reserved.
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Reflection #1, 2004
© 2004 by Bud Grossmann
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DOMESTIC DANGERS
Monday morning. Shaving in the shower today, I nicked the skin just left of my goatee. It stung pretty bad and bled pretty good—the red ran right through the lather of Ivory soap.
I was still assessing the damage, squinting into the magnifying mirror propped in the ceramic handhold of the soap dish chin-high in the tiled wall of the shower, when my wife knocked on the bathroom door and opened it to announce, “Alex, we’re leaving. Nicki has a makeup chemistry lab this morning at seven. I’m driving her to school. There’s a bagel for you in the Toast-R-Oven. And I made coffee.”
Makeup chemistry. Distracted by my injury, I struggled to decipher this message. Makeup chemistry? I pictured high school kids with Bunsen burners and beakers, brewing up cosmetics. Our Nicole is the only senior in her chemistry class. She had enough credits to cruise through fall semester (and the spring) if she had so chosen, but she signed up for a full schedule and picked up some electives she had missed. She’s more like her mother than her dad. Her sisters, older, are serious students as well. “Okay, Marcia, thanks for letting me know,” I hollered through the fog and spray of the shower.
I rinsed, turned the water off, toweled myself dry, and blotted the bleeding scrape with a tissue. Went to my closet and chose a dress shirt with some color in it—burgundy stripes—and a dark necktie. Didn’t dress, just hung them on the clothes caddie beside the bed. In my boxers I went barefoot and bare-chested down the hall. Furnace was putting out heat, this Monday morning in late November.
Radio was on in the living room. Five Americans in Afghanistan reportedly wounded by friendly fire, a misdirected smart bomb. Not quite as bright a bomb as we would wish, I would say. Though I would not say it aloud, in these times of United We Stand.
From the dining room, using the remote control, I silenced the news. The morning paper, rubber-banded, was on the table. I didn’t open it. Just sat down with my coffee, my buttered bagel, and a bowl of seedless grapes, and summoned a memory of a girl—her name was Renee—who should have kept me from “losing face” in the shower this morning.
I have an excellent safety record for shaving, first of all because I’m aware I bleed easily, and secondly because I always think of my college friend, Renee Lauterbach, who sliced her eye while shaving in the shower. Strange as it sounds, Renee slipped with her Schick on the upstroke across her armpit. (She told me this; I wasn’t there.) The razor flew from her grasp and pared a little piece off her cornea. Healed up okay, and her vision wasn’t harmed, but Renee’s account of the accident made a lasting impression on me. Not that I shave my armpits, you see, but, ever since, I’ve taken special care to keep a good grip on my throw-away twin-blade when I’m mowing through the whiskers on my face. Don’t know what went wrong today.
Must have momentarily lost sight of sweet Renee. I brought her back into view as I sipped my coffee, sugared-and-creamed, and bit into the bagel, its egg-glossed underside warm against my tongue. I thought back to a time long years ago, before I was the father of three girls.
Renee was a college friend, not a girlfriend, but as good a buddy as anyone could wish for. No, she was more than a buddy—I don’t know what label to put upon our friendship. A few weeks into our senior year—we were at a church college in Iowa—Renee dropped out and went home to Alabama. She didn’t stay there long. She traveled around for a few months, and, despite friends’ attempts to coax her back to classes, she enlisted in the Navy. The Vietnam War was winding down.
I visited Renee a year or so later, on a weekend in December at Whidbey Island, Washington, where she’d been assigned. She and two other sailors had rented a house off-base, but her roommates weren’t around, and she had no duty while I was there. I recall nothing of the base or of the town. I do remember rain. A fireplace at night. The scent of cedar. I recall a quilt, and Renee upon a waterbed. I remember the shower stall, brightly lit and tiled in tan, where my friend showed me how she hurt her eye.
I finished my breakfast and washed the dishes; Marcia’s and Nicki’s were waiting in the sink. I refilled my cup and unplugged the coffee maker. Carried the cup back to the bedroom. Then I began to get dressed for one more day at the office.
As I knotted my tie, I examined again the red smudge beside my beard. It was wide as the razor, and, I sort of thought, it looked quite a lot like lipstick. But maybe that was nothing more than wishful, wistful thinking. ♦
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