Read More: A Q&A with Julie Esther Fisher
Every evening, Ursula tells her friend Ruth stories in the bath. Ruth soaps Ursula’s back, and Ursula sighs and closes her eyes before she begins: “Once upon a time…”
“Once upon a time,” Ursula says, “there was a man called Reen, and he—”
“Called what?” Ruth asks. She squeezes the sponge, orange and full of soap bubbles. The bubbles run down Ursula’s back.
“Called Reen, R-e-e-n.” And Ursula twists around from her thin, just beginning to sag waist and says to Ruth: “You listen now, pay attention, y’hear?”
Ursula is thrity-eight, three years older than Ruth. The two of them met downtown twelve years ago, in a Chicago shoe store that’s still there today. J.M. Travis sells shoes to very short-footed women and very long-footed women. Ursula is a long-footed woman. She has a fan of splintery-looking bones on each foot. Ruth noticed this when she slipped the shoe horn in at the back of the navy blue buckled pump Ursula was trying on. Ruth was a salesgirl at J.M. Travis, and the long-footed Ursula sat looking down at Ruth’s plump hand fumbling with the shoe horn. Ruth knelt on the floor, the pleats of her skirt spreading out around her. Ursuyla, chisel-faced, with two tweezed snips of eyebrows, let the girl run a fleshy index finger over the fan of bones on her foot. Like chicken bones, Ruth was thinking. She touched them through the long-footed woman’s nylon stockings and a surge of joy shot through her. After that, Ursula came frequently, though she seldom bought any shoes. The two became friends.
Ruth looks down into the bath water, runs her fingers through a cluster of bubbles. She wonders how Ursula knows her eyes have strayed from the lean bony back. But she does know, Ursula sees everything. So Ruth squeezes the sponge under water, lifts it to the base of Ursula’s neck, and waits.
“Now just listen, Ruthie. You’ll like this one. Are you ready?”
“Ready, Urs. There was this man called—” Ruth can’t remember the name—it was such a strange name. She winces and wraps her fingers tighter around the sponge.
“Called Reen, and Reen was just about the happiest man you could imagine. He lived alone on top of a hill in England—no, in Wales—”
“Is he a miner like Emlyn, in the one about the Shady—”
“No, he’s not a miner,” Ursula snaps, and Ruth sees the sudden outline of muscles in her back. “Be quiet, or I’ll let the water out.”
The muscles in Ursula’s back twitch, then sink back into the wet skin that looks to Ruth like tissue paper.
“Now Reen lived alone on top of a hill in Wales, and he was the happiest man for miles around. Happier than a groom on his honeymoon, gayer than the wind that whistled and switched on the roof of his little house. Reen was happy in a way he couldn’t help.”
“Wouldn’t he get lonesome sometimes?”
“See, that was the thing of it, Ruthie. He wanted to get lonesome sometimes, like in the mornings when he’d go to his window and look down in the valley, and there’d be lots of tiny houses with chimneys smoking and curling up into the air. He’d see people in the town, walking in two’s and three’s, or standing beside their houses, leaning up against fences. It all looked tiny to him though, on account of how high up he was.”
“Must’ve been pretty high up,” Ruth ventures, staring at Ursula’s back.
The two of them sit in the water as if positioned together on the back of a horse—Ursula facing the faucets, her knees drawn to her chest, and Ruth behind, her pink legs spread out on either side. Steam rises, condenses on the blue tiles, streaks back down.
Ruth has never once been called pretty, but she has no illusions. Plump. That’s what she is. And red-headed, ruddy-cheeked. One day, while the bath water ran and Ursula hadn’t come in yet, she stripped off her clothes—the pleated plaid skirt and rose-colored blouse—and stood surveying herself in the tall mirror. She wore one of those heavily underwired bras that pushed her breasts up, squeezed them together into an impressive cleavage. Near her underarms, the stiff material pinched; her skin popped out there, pink and plump as a goose. The bath water hadn’t even filled halfway yet. Ursula wouldn’t come in until Ruth stuck her head out the bathroom door and said: “It’s time, Urs, I ran it real hot tonight!” Ruth turned to the mirror again. There I am, she thought, plump as a goose. That’s what Urs says. Soon Ursula would come and help Ruth undress the rest of the way. She’d rub her hands together so her long fingers wouldn’t sting Ruth’s skin with cold. Then she’d unfasten the hooks of Ruth’s underwire bra, reach around her shoulders, draw the thick elastic straps down over Ruth’s arms.
“Reen must’ve been pretty high up for everything to look so small,” Ruth says.
Sometimes Ursula lets her interrupt. There’s always a pause before Ursula replies, and Ruth can tell by Ursula’s back whether she’s angry or not. Not this time, the muscles stay down. Nothing rises suddenly out of Ursula’s back; she just shifts a little, and the bones move beneath her skin.
“So Reen was happy. He was ecstatic! But it was a curse to him, it wasn’t natural, he thought, and longed to feel sad or angry or full of despair. And the more he longed to be sad, the more wretched be became—wretchedly happy, Ruthie. It was a curse on him, and poor Reen was a miserably happy man.”
Ursula looks down into the water, cups her hands between her legs, lets the water flow in. She lifts the cup of her hands, and Ruth hears the water dripping down, breaking the surface of bubbles in the bath. Before it all runs out between her fingers, Ursula tilts her head back, drenches her face.
She was named Jean Ursula McGinnis, because her mother was German and her father, Irish. Her mother’s gone now, no more cleaning houses for her. People liked her mother. They used to say, Why not take a rest for a bit, Mrs. McGinnis, come and sit and have a cup of something hot. Sometimes her mother would bring Ursula to work, telling her daughter she must be very respectful and play quietly, and for God’s sake, don’t touch this crystal vase or that china dog. Ursula used to sit on her feet in a corner or under a piano until Mrs. Griffith or Mrs. Saile—(she remembers Mrs. Saile with her two front teeth, like a beaver when she smiled)— until one of those ladies said, Why not take a rest, Mrs. McGinnis, and your pretty daughter too. That was in Chicago. They lived on Bleet Street. But when her mother died a few years ago, Ursula’s father couldn’t cope. He couldn’t manage the house by himself: there were dishes piled high in the sink and coffee cups on the floor and he was overwhelmed in a chair with the television on. This Ursula found when she returned to Bleet Street to bury her mother. Mr. McGinnis lives in a Home now.
“So what did Reen do?” Ruth asks. Imagine, she thinks, a man too happy! She loves Ursula’s stories.
“So what he did,” Ursula says, “was this…”
Ursula is pleased with Ruth tonight. Often Ruth ruins the rhythm of a story by asking too many questions. But tonight she gets it right, plays according to the riles. It’s a game, and Ruthie’s playing well. They’ve been playing this game for eleven years, ever since Ursula’s twenty-seventh birthday. It was December twenty-fourth, the furnace was broken, and Ruth baked a cake with icing the color of peaches. Through dinner, Ursula tried not to look unhappy, but Ruth laughed because she saw Ursula shivering beneath her layers of sweaters. “It doesn’t matter what the temperature is,” Ruth laughed, “you’re always cold! Maybe you have ice water in your veins instead of blood!” Ruth cleared the dishes from the dining room table, stuck her arm out of the kitchen door to switch off the light. And when she carried the cake into the darkness, twenty-seven flames flickered near her face. “Hurry, Urs,” she said, “make a wish before the candles melt.” Ursula warmed her palm above the flames. Then she closed her eyes and blew, and Ruth helped because some of the candles wouldn’t go out. “What’d you wish?” Ruth asked when they finished their cake. And when Ursula whispered to her what it was, Ruth said, “That’s a funny wish,” and seemed disappointed. Later, she let the bath water run, and called to Ursula, “It’s ready, Urs, one nice hot wish coming up!” Then Ursula came in. Ruth turned to leave, but Ursula took her arm and said: “Don’t go, Ruthie, it’d be warmer if we both got in. And if you soap my back, I’ll tell you a story.” That was how it all began.
“Reen woke up one morning and the sun was shining, and he felt the curse of happiness on him. He looked out his window, through the sunlight. He blinked until his eyes adjusted way down into the valley, and he saw… You’ll never guess what Reen saw down there.”
“What? What’d he see?”
At the base of Ursula’s neck, Ruth squeezes the orange sponge. As it springs back, Ursula hears the little popping sounds it makes through its holes, like breathing. Ruth loosens her grip, and the sponge slides down Ursula’s back, floats into the water, and disappears. Ursula shivers.
“He saw, parading slowly through the streets, a tiny coffin. The coffin was gliding slowly along, and it was only when the coffin came to a corner and turned the corner that Reen saw six tiny figures bearing it.”
Ruth’s hands are in the water, feeling through the bubbles around her thighs which press against the sides of the tub. Every evening at the end of the story, Ursula helps to lift Ruth out. Water beads down from Ruth’s hips, creeping across the patches of red where her thighs have squeezed against the smooth blue tub. […]
Subscribers can read the full version by logging in. |
___________________________________
Julie Esther Fisher’s stories and poetry appear or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, New World Writing, Prime Number Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, Bridge Eight, On the Seawall, Sky Island Journal, Radar Poetry, The Citron Review, Litmosphere, Leon Literary Review, Waxwing and elsewhere. Winner of several awards, including Grand Prize Recipient of the Stories That Need to be Told Anthology, and Sunspot Lit’s Rigel Award, she has received multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations. Her collection of linked stories, Love is a Crooked Stick, is about to go out on submission. Raised in London, she holds degrees in fiction writing and counseling psychology. Today, she lives on conserved land in Massachusetts. Visit her website at julieestherfisher.com
“That Long Body of Hers” originally appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Read More: A Q&A with Julie Esther Fisher