"Pesky Shower Curtain" by David Schweidel
The new shower curtain started encroaching on me, billowing in my direction, brushing against my left shoulder, my left butt cheek, my left calf, clinging in a way that felt invasive, and when I shifted further away, it pressed closer.
I’m at a place in my life where anything can seem like a metaphor, where a clingy shower curtain can represent death. If you’re not in such a place, lord love you—by which I mean count your blessings, even though I don’t believe in any lord and I’m uncomfortable with the word blessings – I prefer luck.
I don’t think of luck as a real thing, or as a quality one can possess—it’s more an acknowledgement of past good fortune. If someone says that so-and-so is lucky, I translate that to mean that so-and-so has been lucky so far. I love the joke about the guy who falls from the top of a tall building and on the way down thinks so far, so good. That’s my outlook—I try to appreciate the fall, but that doesn’t mean I’m not falling.
As the shower curtain kept brushing against me, or threatening to brush, I imagined writing a story about a character in a shower at a budget hotel. The shower curtain makes him think of death, but he’s got a job to do, a job he’s not proud of, a job that brings him no deep satisfaction, the man is a loner, he’s in the hotel alone, but maybe he could meet someone in the story, I thought.
Then it occurred to me that the man in the story was a long, long way from who I am. I may shower alone, but I am not alone. Oh, granted, each of us is alone in a certain sense, a real sense, but we are also, if we’ve been lucky so far, connected to others: in my case my wife, my daughters, my dog, my brother, my many wonderful friends, significant strangers I’m friendly with—no, strangers isn’t the right word. There are people we encounter and connect with on a level that seems both superficial and deep—superficial because we don’t know that much about each other, deep because we honor each other’s humanity, we value each other as individuals, even without knowing much of each other’s life story.
And then it occurred to me that most of what is best in my life I owe to my wife, who bought the shower curtain, who installed the shower curtain, who gave birth to our daughters, who makes granola for my brother and Fed Exes it to where he lives, who shares many of my friends and significant strangers, who sometimes even takes a shower with me, and washes my back, and lets me wash hers.
On our anniversary a few years ago, I posted on Facebook a picture of the two of us with the caption so far, so good. She questioned the sentiment. Was I expecting things to go bad? I tried to explain that for me so far, so good was the highest possible accolade. I don’t know if she bought my explanation, but she didn’t hold a grudge—because we’re connected, we’re together, and that’s quite the consolation when the shower curtain gets pesky.
David Schweidel is the author of Confidence of the Heart, winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, and co-author of What Men Call Treasure, a Western Writers Award finalist. His stories and essays have appeared in several places, including Smokelong Quarterly, Permafrost, and Stanford Magazine. He has also written three musicals, Kidnapped Heiress Blues, Ophelia, and Eve v. Adam: Who Gets the Garden?
