BATH TIMES AS A CHILD.

Bath times as a child were a mixture of joy and fear, Lulu remembers, rubbing her neck dry after her bath, holding her long hair out of the way with her spare hand. You must wash under the arms and your neck and between your legs, her mother said to her as a child, leaning over her, pouring hot water over her head, feeling she was drowning, she remembers, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, almost seeing her mother standing there with her usual critique and that wet hand slapping her legs or hand if she missed an area of skin. Lulu rubs under her arms, raises her hand upward as if reaching for the moon or stars. As she leans forward to rub her feet, pushing the towel between toes, she recalls her putting her feet into her mothers lap as she dried them with harsh rubs, pushed the towel between toes roughly, causing wittingly or unwittingly the long after remembered pain. Her mother, hard as granite, with reddened hands and stern stare, cursed in the bed of her final

days, glared at Lulu as she blanket washed her mother in the last weeks before death came for her and carried her off with her foul words filling the air. Lulu lays the towel over her lap, sitting still she leans her elbows on her legs and hides her face in her palms, wishing her mother could have gone out not with curses or swear words, but psalms.