Curtains

When C.J. was small, he was afraid of the bathroom—but not for any of the usual reasons. No monsters lurked in the plumbing, no hockey-masked man waited behind the shower curtain. It was the curtain itself that scared him.

His mother, who, when she was younger, had aspired to become an interior designer, chose the shower curtain for “it’s whimsical organic lines.” It had a pattern of abstract flora—flowers or ferns—in smoky earth tones against a cream colored background. “The signature colors of the new Spring lines,” his mother said. His mother loved every object in their small house, from the salt shakers to the mattress covers. She researched each item before selecting it, followed the care instructions to the letter. She had never been able to choose things herself before.

If the shower curtain design had resembled herbage a bit more closely it might have been more tolerable, but the pattern looked like nothing so much as a roiling mass of twisting, sinister creatures, the gaps in the foliage where the white showed through, their wide, malevolent eyes, blank as corpses’.

They were not, to C.J.'s child-mind, simply unfortunate representations, but real creatures, frozen and trapped in the cloth, like the snake-monster in Greek Myths for Children, which he’d chosen from the library because of the horse on the cover. Actually, there were hardly any horses in the book at all. Instead, it was full of bulls and spiders and one-eyed giants; an earth with a face and breasts; a maze without end. Greek Myths for Children, together with Hans Christian Anderson and Grimm’s Tales, gave him the disquieting impression that anything might happen. One day, he thought, those monsters might wake, shake themselves free of the shower curtain and step out into the solid world, fast and light, and armed with claws. There was no telling what might cause their release: a saturation of steam from the shower, a certain word spoken aloud three times on a certain day of the year, the aura of a particular person, doomed to take their place in the weave. He dreaded entering the bathroom to find a plain white curtain, or (worse?), a slightly different shape, maybe just a little more like the profile of a person than that of a sapling.

Bath time was not so bad. C.J. took his bath with the door open, his mother peeking in every couple of minutes to check on him as he played, kneeling on the mat to help him rinse the shampoo from his hair, bundling him into a towel at the end. But he did not like to go in alone.

He took to clandestinely urinating out of doors, perched on the far corner of the deck aiming into the neighbors’ hydrangeas, which turned from almost white to brilliant new-denim blue. Then their leaves began to droop and scatter, soft and yellowed like old lettuce. He felt bad about this, since his friend Denny lived next door, but not bad enough to stop. He overheard his mother and Denny’s discussing the slow death of the flowers one weekend afternoon over their watering cans. “Too much acid,” his mother said. “Try a little lime.”

His mother grew white roses and ferns and strange kinds of grass—black mondo, pink champaign, Japanese silver. They had a fairytale garden, she said, not like before. C.J. couldn’t remember where they had lived before, except it was what his mother called “a good distance away,” a whole day in the car. The fairytale garden only reminded him of the beasts on the curtain.

The rest of his bathroom activities, C.J. reserved as much as possible for school. The weekends were bad this way. He’d beg to go to Denny’s house to play, as much for the bathroom as for the friendship. Over Memorial Day Denny’s family went to his grandparents’ house. C.J.'s stomach ached so much by Sunday that he couldn’t eat. By Monday he’d developed a fever. His mother, suspecting a digestive disorder, cut out first dairy, then gluten. She had him tested for allergies but he had none.

Then, one day, the monstrous shower curtain simply disappeared. It was as close as C.J. could imagine to a perfectly happy day. His mother sent him over to Denny’s Saturday morning as soon as breakfast was over, without C.J. even having to ask. The friends played with Legos all morning. After lunch, Denny’s dad walked with them to get ice cream. He didn’t know C.J. wasn’t allowed to eat dairy, or gluten and bought cones for all three of them. On the walk, they looked at all the cars parked on the street and chose their favorite: a big black pickup outside the ice cream place for Denny, an orange beetle in a driveway for C.J., and a tiny shiny black car parked at the corner for Denny’s dad. All afternoon the boys took turns jumping Denny’s skateboard off the back porch and running through the sprinkler. For dinner Denny’s mom made cheeseburgers and grilled potatoes with ketchup and green salad with any kind of dressing you want. Afterward they watched a movie about robots.

It was dark when C.J.’s mother came to get him, so late she sent him straight to bed without a bath, without even brushing his teeth. The next morning when he woke, slightly sticky, his mouthy gummy from sleep, he found a new shower curtain in the bathroom, one with fat stripes: orange, green, brown, and bronze.

“For Fall,” his mother told him. The formality of the heavy pattern, imitative of 18th century French brocades, cleverly counterbalanced the modern color pallet. “And look, new hand towels to match.”

C.J. thought about that day sometimes as the hydrangeas in Denny's yard slowly recovered. Their foliage was thick and green again by the time the police came. C.J. was in the living room playing with his Gameboy, new on his last birthday. From his spot on the sofa, he could hear the conversation, even though the police stayed on the porch. They asked about a car abandoned in the neighborhood. He knew the car they meant. The little black one Denny’s dad had admired on their walk, still parked at the corner, now decked with sodden parking tickets of varying ages.

The police wanted to know whether his mother had seen a man called Cody (she had), and if so when (a while, a couple of months, she thought), and if she’d noticed his car was still parked in the neighborhood.

“I've seen the one you mean,” his mother said, “but I didn't realize who it belonged to. It doesn't look like him.”

“Well,” the policeman said, “as a matter of fact, it’s not his car.” The car belonged to a woman with a name that sounded like a flower. She let Cody use the car at first, but when he never brought it back she reported it stolen.

“Really,” his mother said, in that way grownups sometimes say it, to prove they are listening. The police went away. The next time C.J. looked, the tiny black car was gone too.

C.J. had dreams about the figures on the curtain even after it was taken down. He dreamed of the twisted leaf creatures creeping through the house at night, moving like cats, step, step, pause, their white eyes bright and alive. He dreamed of them in a place that was somehow both his backyard and the play yard at school, hunting in packs like wolves, fighting over the bodies of small animals. In his dreams there was blood, but not ordinary blood—it glowed like invisible blood under a black light, like in the shows his mother sometimes watched on TV at night, only in his dreams it was still red. Animate flora in trendy olive, brown, sea foam and spring green, splattered in phosphorescent red. Those dreams kept him awake at night when he was small, but as he grew older, they only left him confused on waking, with that annoying sense of a word lost on the tip of the tongue.