the habit of being

We were in the Metro waiting for the Orange Line train, and there was a group of four college students paired off boy-girl, boy-girl. The closer pair were sitting on the platform in front of us with huge hiking packs - the sort of packs we used when we were traveling.

It was so strange because the packs were so clean, and they had those little airline tags on them, and these kids were so well-groomed and college-y.

It just didn’t seem right. They sat with their clean hiking packs and they talked about how dirty Mexico City was. This girl had been to some scuzzy South American cities, but had heard they were nothing compared to Mexico City, so she tried to avoid it. He concurred, pretentiously, having been there himself. She had glasses and a tank top and was from New Jersey, and he had a goatee and nose ring and a necklace with wooden beads that he fiddled with in a way that James found annoying.

“He was just doing it to get attention.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I can tell.”
(We discussed it in bed last night.)

It’s like, you can’t take a pack like that on a plane. It’s ridiculous. It’s cheating. It made me literally uncomfortable.

. . .

He wants to do it again. Traveling, I mean. Adventure. He wants a touring bicycle with paniers. He wants to travel like we traveled before, except in Europe. Except without me. Or maybe even with me, just without all that sickness and pain.

When he thinks of traveling he still thinks of adventure and excitement. I just think of the sickness and pain, the loss. I can’t imagine doing it again. I want Italy but I want a place to live too. I don’t like not having a home. I don’t like it at all. I don’t like not knowing where I’m going to sleep at night. I especially don’t like not knowing where I’m going to sleep at night when I do know that it won’t be anywhere comfortable, that I’ll wake up anxious and guilty.

. . .

On the train, there were these other people with a screaming baby. It wouldn’t shut up and it was really loud. They were a young couple with stroller, a few seats back. The father took the baby out of the stroller and it stopped crying for a minute, but then it bumped its head on the seat and started up again.

James pointed out that College Boy #2, who was wearing an Abercrombie tee-shirt, was currently engaged in the Unequivoclal Crotch Display, slouched in his seat with legs spread way out, for the benefit of College Girl #2, a blonde. Meanwhile, College Boy #1 was still playing with his beads.

. . .

When we got to our next stop, and sat down again to wait for the Red Line, James said he wished he were traveling.
“You couldn’t want to haul all that stuff around again,” I said.
“It’s a lot better than hauling one of those around,” he said, motioning toward the couple with the baby, who were waiting there too.

It was like someone slapped me. Again.

At truck stops, you can buy a shower for about $5. Or, if you’re a driver, you can usually get one free if you buy a certain amount of fuel. Most drivers buy so much fuel that they easily develop a small collection of these free shower coupons, which usually expire within a week or two. If you’re a hitch-hiker, and you get picked up by a truck driver, and he’s going to be taking you somewhere overnight, and during that time he’s going to be stopping to get a shower, there’s a good chance you can get a shower too.

To redeem your shower, you usually have to take the coupon, which is generally on the fuel receipt, to the fuel desk in the truck stop, which is separate from the rest of the registers. If you have a driver with you, it’s good to have them do this for you, just in case someone asks to see your CDL. There are all sorts of cool things to do in truck stops that you’re not really supposed to get to do unless you’re a licensed truck driver. Movies, TV, washers and dryers, free showers, free coffee. (I don’t look like a truck driver at all.)

At the fuel desk, you trade in the receipt for a key with a big plastic rectange on it with a number. You sit around the in-house fast food restaurant eating area until the intercom calls your number. “Driver Number 8, your Shower is Ready.”

The shower room is big and completely tiled, floors and walls. There is a sink with a mirror over it and a little ledge to sit your toiletries. Exactly one towel and one wash cloth are folded on the top of the toilet tank. At some truck stops, you can request extra towels, as there are drivers who take their wives around with them, but some places frown on this.

The shower is separated from the rest of the bathroom by a wall that goes partway across the middle of the room. There is never a shower curtain or a shower door, just a little mini-wall along the floor of the doorway to keep the shower water from going out into the rest of the room. The shower area is quite large. Much larger than a regular home shower. The drain is in the middle of the shower floor, not under the showerhead near the wall.

There is never, under any circumstances, shampoo. If you don’t have some with you and can’t afford to pay five bucks for the Suave they sell in the store, you’re out of luck. There is a hand-soap dispenser mounted on the wall in the shower.

More than likely, you will not make it out of the shower before having sex on the shower floor, covering up the drain, and making the water spill out over the little guard-wall into the rest of the bathroom, making a huge mess. Hopefully you put your clothes on top of the toilet.

I do not know why truck stop showers are so sexy.

Maybe because there’s usually someone waiting outside to buy you greasy truck stop dinner. Maybe it’s the image of the hundreds of thousands of fat sleazy men who must have showered in there before. Maybe it’s just the weirdness of the whole situation.

My goal for today was to clean the bathroom. To really clean it, enough so that I could take a real bath in there and not come out of it feeling dirtier than when I got in, enough so that the sides of the tub would not be slippery with scum, and that thin opaque film would not develop on the surface of the water, enough that I might feel like staying in there long enough to read a book, to shave my legs.

But maybe that’s not the best thing I could be doing with my time. Maybe I’m not even really the kind of person who can’t be content in a filthy room. Maybe I just use that as an excuse not to be content, like how I can’t write when my boyfriend’s home.

. . .

I’d go months without bathing, wearing the same clothes every day. These weeks were spent mostly outdoors, sitting on dirt, sleeping on dirt, standing next to roads, where dirt flew out from under wheels onto my face. When I’d cry, which was often, the tears would leave streaks down my cheeks and my neck, tracks through the dirt, and it would be very ugly. The same would happen to my arms and legs when I’d sweat, which was also often, in the summer, in the Southwest. It would get so bad, sometimes, that I’d roll up my jeans leg, put my foot in a public bathroom sink and try to wash my calf, and the sink would get really nasty and I was so scared someone would walk in, and I never did that great of a job. I didn’t want anyone to see me, even though what I did for a living was stand at the busy intersection down the street and get stared at by strangers who sometimes gave me money or something to eat.

When someone would offer to take us home with them for the night, it wasn’t so much the heat, the AC, the food, or even the bed that was exciting - it was the shower. We’d head for the bathroom as soon as possible.

I’d undress, and look in the mirror, and it would be the first time I’d seen myself naked in weeks, and I’d always look different from the last time. Stronger tan lines, pointier clavicles, more muscle. After I got pregnant, I could’ve stared wide-eyed into those infrequent mirrors for hours. My breasts and stomach were completely new. Round. My edges had shifted. I never got far enough along that you could tell when I was dressed, but in the mirror, I was astounded, I was someone’s mother.

We always showered together, when we could, to save time, to save water, to feign intimacy we had lost. Mostly though, we showered together because we needed help. We were too dirty to get clean on our own. At that point, lathering up your hands and rubbing them on your body doesn’t do any good. You could go over your entire body twice that way and then scrape your fingernails down yours arm to find them full of dirt. There are layers upon layers to get through, and you need a washcloth, and you need to scrub. You must really really scrub, so that it’s painful, because if your skin is not bright reb and stinging, then there is no chance it is clean. The dirt peels off, like those little white price tag stickers that won’t ever come off unless you soak them in hot water and scrub at them until they disintegrate and you can scrap them off into little white balls. After you’d scrub your skin pink there would be little brown and black balls of dirt still on you, like fuzz on a blanket.

We took turns scrubbing each other. I’d unfold the washcloth and lay it out on the top of his back, then use both hands to press on it as I forced it all the way down to his ass. We touched one another; we giggled. It was warm wet fantasy; it was completely foreign to our day-to-day life. I loved it. I hopped on one foot, I balanced like a bird, trying to clean my ankles and feet, which were often quite black. The water pooling at my feet was invariably brown. It took two shampoos before my hair would even lather.

I wore a scarf on my head, everyday, to cover my hair. After a while, I could take the scarf off and my hair would not move. When hair reaches a certain level of oiliness, it ceases to exist in individual strands. Instead, it is a big sticky dirty mass that can be molded. Brushing it serves only to prevent dreadlocks from forming of their own accord, and often stirs up huge scary flakes of drandruff from the depth to which no fingers could ever run. I’d get huge tangle-complexes that could literally take hours to undo, often including leaves and twigs from the trees masking our campsite. The scarf helped to ward off these sorts of disasters, but it never looked good on me. It eventually got so dirty itself that after being washed twice it still doesn’t look clean.

I’d wash my hair four or five times, until the water ran clear, and condition it until I could run my fingers through with mimimum effort. I’d help James wash his hair, which was twice as long as mine, and darker, so it showed dandruff so much easier. He shampooed his beard, too.

. . .

I’ve never in my life felt as beautiful as I felt when I looked in the mirror after one of those showers. My eyes seemed so much brighter, so much clearer, more alive. My skin was tan and completely free of blemishes. It was like I was a whole new person, and awake. It was like I was myself again, finally. My hair would dry and curl, and it was so soft, and I couldn’t stop looking at myself, a person I could barely recognize anymore. I was so pretty.

I would smile, flop myself down on some stranger’s couch with such a sigh of relief, such gratitude. I was free.

Now that I think about it, those showers were probably my favorite part of the entire trip, and maybe the only time I was ever really happy.