I HAVE INTERNET!!!!!

France Telecom is finally working properly. After nearly a month, I now have internet in my room. Soon Katie shall be hooked up as well, and lo, there shall be chatting and video.

To celebrate, here's the edited version of "A Bathtub Story." Comments, please!!

When Helen came home that afternoon, I had already been staring at it for a good two hours. It was indeed a remarkable fixture: smooth white ceramic with a bronze inlay that resembled some grotesquely stiff scene off a Grecian urn. Four clawed legs held the monolithic structure a good six inches off the floor. There was something oddly frightening about its presence in my living room. It didn’t match the red leather or the spindly wood furniture motif at all.

“Gawd, Howard, it’s freezing in here!” Helen called from the kitchen. “D’you leave the door open again?”

I did not answer immediately. Despite two hours’ bewildered pondering, I was still far from intelligent speech. I finally managed to squeak out a very confused, “H…el…en?”

She did not seem to hear my plea for attention, so I pulled myself together and called out, “Helen!”

“What is it, deah?” Helen entered, stood beside me, and barely glanced at it.

I tried to take a sip of my coffee, but it had long since gone cold and I had never reached the sugar bowl in the breakfront by the window. The room-temperature bitterness did nothing to help my mood. “Helen, why is this bathtub in the living room?”

For a moment, she shifted her weight to her left foot, seeming a tad nervous. “Motha sent it. Parta my inheritance from Grandpa Smith.”

Now, why Helen’s mother would send an enormous, tacky washroom fixture from her New Jersey home to our Vermont ski cottage in the middle of January was very much a mystery to me. Other questions that popped into my head included, “How did my wife inherit a bathtub?”, “What’s going to happen to next week’s party?” and “Why did I marry this woman again?” However, the question of its placement in the center of my living space was still foremost in my mind.

Helen answered my unasked query with great haste. “The d’liv’ry guys wouldn’t carry it upstayes, and there isn’t room anywhaya else on this flowa.” She put an arm around my tense shoulders and said, “It ain’t so bad, Howard. I think it’s…homey.”

I wanted so much to tell her that she was horribly mistaken, that the mass of porcelain in front of me was about as far from “homey” as I could imagine. Instead, I forced a smile and said, “Maybe you’re right, honey. And if you like it, well, I’ll get used to it.”

“We’ll try to move it tamahrow.” Giving me a quick peck on the cheek, she went back to the kitchen and started a fresh pot of coffee. I heaved a great sigh and edged around Helen’s inheritance to my armchair, where I remained inanimate for the next forty minutes.


I tried not to let the bathtub bother me. I went on with my life. The next week, we hosted our little get-together as planned, even though it was still in the same place on my authentic Persian rug. Helen filled the bottom with ice and used it to hold the drinks, which I thought was completely tacky. The guests, up from Newport for a little skiing, found it “avant-garde.”

I had been staring at the disgustingly ornate bronze taps for some time when one of the guests, a potential client of Helen’s, approached me. He had slicked-back blond hair and an annoyingly high-and-mighty attitude. “Look at the exquisite tahnish on the bronzework,” he said to me, as though he thought it was put there on purpose. “Simply mahvelous. So authentic. And it plays so well against that old rug of yours. Harold, where-ever did you get this masterpiece?” His familiar tone broke me out of my unwilling reverie. He spoke the way I used to speak in modern art museums, before I realized that modern art had no purpose.

“Helen’s…mother sent it,” I replied, letting him make what he would of my comment.

“Well, your mother-in-law has fine taste,” the man said, taking a bottle of champagne from the tub. He poured it into a red wine glass. I felt like pointing out the flagrant error, but decided against it. It was best to avoid offending clients.

Helen came into the living room with a fresh tray of hors d’oeuvres. As she rounded the corner, she bumped into the bathtub and moved it just a hair further into the center of the room. I heard a tiny ripping sound and suppressed a scream. “Ain’t this a great pahty?” she said as she threw an arm around my waist.

My eyes settled on the tiny hole that our “avant-garde” decoration had torn in the beautiful rug.

“Sure is.”


After three months of banging my knees on the bathtub, I had had just about enough of its presence in my home. Helen, however, continued to get compliments on her creative decoration techniques. When her family came up from New Jersey, they simply raved about how well it “tied the room togetha, just like it did at Grampa Smith’s place” (although it had then been located in the proper chamber).

One night, we were sitting on the pristine leather couch by the electric fire when Helen made me snap.

“So I was tawkin’ to the Joneses about theya livin’ room and they kept sayin’ they wanted to put a sink in it. A sink, Harold! So I asked them why, and they said it was because of our pahty. Like I said, it really makes a house a home.” My eye twitched slightly, but I kept my silence as her grating Jersey voice continued to expound the virtues of putting things where they simply shouldn’t be. While she spoke, I glanced at the bathtub. Its mere presence mocked me. The artificial firelight glistened on the bronze inlay in a purely offensive manner. I found myself staring at it, captivated by the ugly wrongness of the thing.

“…And then they said something about a showah head as a coat rack. And it all stahted with our homey little bathtub, Howard. Ain’t that just priceless?”

I broke my gaze away from the monstrosity of a basin and stared at her in what I hoped was blatant and convincing disbelief. “Helen, for the love of God, it’s a bathtub!” I practically shouted. “There’s nothing homey about an antique bathtub in a living room! It doesn’t go anywhere!”

A silence heavier than the inheritance hung in the air between us.

“Howard…”

I decided not to answer.


The next morning, Helen sold the bathtub to the Joneses, who were all too happy to take it off our hands and out of my space.

When the delivery men arrived to take it away, I could have leapt for joy. They lifted the porcelain behemoth with great effort and carried it out of the living room toward the front walk as I poured myself a cup of coffee. I whistled a happy little tune as I treated myself to two teaspoons of sugar. It was leaving. It was going to go away and stay somewhere where I would never have to see it again.

Suddenly I heard a loud thud, followed immediately by another. “No,” I whispered as the burly men walked into the kitchen.

“Mister,” one of them said, “it won’t fit out the door.”

“It has to,” I said, my eyes wide with agony as I ran for the doorway. “It came in, didn’t it?” Sure enough, they had set it down in front of the door, scratching the hardwood floors beyond repair. I pushed at it feebly for a few seconds, but it wouldn’t budge. Finally, with tears in my eyes, I collapsed inside the bathtub, admitting defeat to my inanimate enemy.