The June I Took My Sister Instead

I sat with the phone in my lap after she hung up. Out on the hills the rain was lifting and settling again, like breath.

Wednesday was the bathhouse. I had saved it for the middle of the week on purpose. Robin did not know exactly what a traditional bath was. Neither did I, if I am honest. I had only read about it.

The oldest bathhouse still running on the Row has done it close to the same way for more than a hundred years. The women’s side is white tile and marble and old brass.

An attendant named Pat, about sixty and built like she could carry both of us, took our clothes and handed each of us a sheet.

“Wrap up, ladies,” Pat said. “Nobody here is looking at you. I’ve seen it all and none of it surprises me.” Robin looked at me over her sheet with her eyes very wide.

First came the tub, deep and old and full of hot spring water, so hot I had to ease in a little at a time.

Pat came by with a scrubbing mitt and went over our backs and arms like we were six years old in a farm kitchen on a Saturday night.

Then a sitz tub, which I will not describe except to say Robin and I made the same face. Then hot towels on our backs and our knees. And then the part that undid us both, the vapor cabinet.

It is a little steel box you sit inside, and they close the door, and only your head sticks out the top.

Pat put Robin in one and me in the one beside her, and then she went to check on somebody else.

I turned my head and looked at my sister.

There she was, fifty years old, short gray-blonde hair plastered to her forehead, red as a beet, with her head sticking out of a steel box like a jack-in-the-box somebody forgot to close.

She turned her head and looked at me. I do not know which one of us went first. I think it was Robin. I think she snorted. And then we were both gone, laughing so hard the steam shook.

We laughed like we did when we were nine and fourteen, sharing the double bed at Grandma’s farmhouse outside Seymour, when Grandma would bang on the wall and tell us to hush.

Pat came back, looked at us both, and shook her head. “Every week,” she said. “Every week, there’s two of you.”

That set us off again. Robin laughed until she was crying, and then she was just crying, with the tears running down into the steam, and I could not reach her, because my arms were inside my own box. “Robin,” I said. “Honey. What is it?”

“I’m happy, Dawn. I’m just happy. I forgot what it felt like. I thought I’d done something wrong and it was gone for good.” I told her she had not done one thing wrong.

“Twenty-six years,” she said. “I asked him one time to take me to see the ocean. One time. He said it’s just water. And I believed him, Dawn. I believed him that what I wanted was silly. I’m sitting in a box in Arkansas, and I finally know it wasn’t.”

Pat came back with cold towels for our foreheads. She laid Robin’s on very gently, and she did not say one word about the crying, which I will love that woman for until I die.