A BAPTISM

Grandma was a stickler for clean plates, proper bedtimes, swim lessons, and car rides with quiet in the back seat. Dessert was never offered unless a vegetable had been fully consumed beforehand. You were never to leave the apartment without a sweater or sunscreen. She was a big fan of the bobby pin, and strategized its use for optimal curl control. Her own bright black hair was a perfect, Aquanetted oval; even her eye wrinkles were symmetrical. Two twin parentheses that lay horizontal under her bottom lashes, and to me, it was almost like Grandma had an extra set of eyes, a sort of superpower, the better-to-see-you-with-my-dear kind, which is how she managed to rarely let my sister or me out of her sight.

I wasn’t quite desperate to please her, but close. I let her tuck me tight under the top sheet and the heavy blanket much too hot for a Florida summer, and I always let her kiss me goodnight, her lips a perpetually deep matte shade of lipstick crimson, and the kisses themselves, little more than brief collision, an accidental tenderness that wouldn’t leave a mark. The touch of her fingertips on piano keys was just as paper-thin, her skin more like parchment than normal pliant Grandma skin, the kind other kids could grasp in fistfuls. Not my Grandma. My Grandma was specific and sharp as her own plucked eyebrows, which could arch themselves into brutal arrows of punishment without the benefit or accompaniment of words. In mere seconds, Grandma could bristle with icy derision, reminding me just how frail and vulnerable I was, how much at her mercy everyone could be, even my own mother, who carefully planned exits of her own while my sister and I were visiting.

I can’t describe my meek girl self around Grandma without mentioning the tidy, fastened compliance of my body dodging the breakables in her apartment. The whisper of my socked feet on her tiled kitchen floor. Or my nervous, delicate handling of her breakfast china. My careful consideration of the world “Please.” Perhaps it would be fairer to say I was simply an obedient child around her. That this was the only thing a skinny, freckle-faced 5-year-old could be in the face of a grandmother’s stern, German demands of seen-and-not-heard. So let’s say that, that I was obedient, playing the part of the acquiescent grandchild, letting Grandma comb the tangles from my hair without complaint, sitting absolutely still in her lap while she played the piano and singing with her only after an invitation was extended.

The bathroom was the exception to most of her well-worn rules. Even Grandma seemed to understand both the virtues of modesty and the reasonable explanations for excusing oneself from the table or when company was over. The bathroom was the only place I was allowed to be alone.

The instant I shut the door behind me, I forgot everything—the greens on my plate I was going to have to finish, the forced silence at dinner, the expected attention to the mysterious but mind-numbing banter of the evening guests. Gone were Grandma’s parsimonious deployment of sweets, the cheerless absence of my mother, and the too-early bedtime waiting just around the corner. Once inside the tiled palace of the bathroom, I shed these things like unnecessary woolen clothing. I felt regal, mythic, invincible as fog. I was like a genie funneling out of its jar in the midnight hour.

Surrounded by the golden halo of low lights, I’d turn the fan on and undo the faucets and run my hands under warm, forgiving water. I’d close my eyes and it felt like I was in one of those storybook forests, the whir of fan colliding with the stream from the tap to make the sound of lush waterfall. It made me think of Little Red Riding Hood, the delight she must have felt on that first leg of her journey, this secret pleasure of entering the woods on her own with a basket of goodies in her hand, enveloped by a sturdy swath of red cape. The electric pull of an overgrown path promising to lead her deep into the dark heart of the forest, and even the trees alive with her freedom. I was like her, like Little Red Riding Hood, entering the deep, dark heart of the forest.

There were three bathrooms in Grandma’s apartment, and all of them smelled like fairy dust. Or what I imagined fairy dust would smell like. A dreamy, delicate shimmer that made cartoon characters sneeze or fall in love. When I slinked into the carpet of them and locked the door, Grandma’s bathrooms were just like that. They smelled like that kind of hope. The delicious, shivery moment before a sneeze, something that could make you fall in love. Whatever it was, I knew it came from the large round tin of perfumy powder taking up most of the available space to the left of the water taps. One of a matching set of ornate silver heirlooms probably handed down by someone only Grandma would have known. To me, these tins of powder were illuminated bits of treasure holding court over not just the bathroom, but the entire apartment. A throne of precious, silky minerals that somehow, in my real or imagined yearnings, held the key to my happiness.

The tins came with a giant-size puff to dip into the powder, and I’d do this sometimes, wanting to delay the inevitable return to the dinner table, the invited guests, or an outing I didn’t approve of. Either way, a trip to the loo was my best tactic, the only place in that apartment for a bit of reprieve, a private respite, a chance to gather my thoughts and plan my real exit. With the bathroom door closed, I’d unclasp the top of the tin, reach in, and pinch the satin back cover of the puff, then tap it gently into the pool of powder. Then I’d squeeze my eyes shut and dab at my ears, my nose, my cheeks. After I’d finished, I’d open my eyes in wonder to see the whole room had billowed into a blankety whiteness, a million filaments of powder spreading like tiny tentacles, then coming to a gentle rest on the doorknob, the toilet paper holder, the plush seat cover.

Always, it was tempting to dust off the little white flecks from these things, because I knew Grandma came in here at least as often as I did and would notice if anything were different. She liked clean, smooth surfaces, but “liked” wasn’t the right word for the obsessive attention she paid to the any of the exposed areas of her apartment. Still, it was even more tempting to let the dust particles be, to imagine a fine, almost microscopic layer of powder somehow making its way to Grandma. A filmy trail of evidence visible only to me. And I’d look at my daintily powdered reflection in the mirror and feel clever and powerful all at once, as if I was at the source of something only I knew about, and it was hard not to want to stay in there, forever dabbing that wondrous elixir onto my changeling skin and into the enchanted air.

Still, despite her respect for what she called “the private matters” of the bathroom, Grandma seemed to know when I’d spent too long in there for whatever it was I’d excused myself from the table for. “Dinner’s getting cold!” she’d call from two rooms over or, if we were heading out the door, she’d warn, “We’re going to leave without you!” and her voice was not unlike every stepmother I’d heard onscreen, a voice of sugar etched with sea salt, cruelty masking as sweetness. With Grandma, it was less the timber and tone than it was the innuendo of her message. The way she said it, “We’re going to leave without you” was the equivalent of becoming an orphan, and it was ironic how she’d twirl that last phrase, “without you,” upwards, like a bit a music, like a chime, almost as if she were singing.

I would hear her voice and know my time was short. She was eyeing the clock, and there were but a few scant moments left in my limited queendom. I had to be quick, and as if by magnificent coincidence, the bathroom began to pulse with the verdant, almost minty scent of lavender. I dried my hands quickly on the towel and bent close to the powder tin, inhaling, my nostrils itching with glee. And then I opened it, and with three concentrating fingers I lifted the powder puff a fraction of an inch, dipped it carefully in, and touched my face against it.

How can I describe, at the age of five, how tender I was with my own skin? How to talk about those few precious moments away from Grandma and her measured affections and explain the delirious, uncomplicated love I felt for my own small body? How to explain the way I saw, in my powdered mirror image, the full span of myself, the way I could spread out of my own smallness, how I saw the whole of me, the child of me, the wonder of me. I dabbed at my face with the lavender powder like it was a blessing. Like a baptism. And then, for a tiny, perfect slice of time, I became like powder, like lavender, like waterfall, like the edge of forest. I billowed out into the whir of the room, my body like a tentacle, reaching, reaching, a shimmering plume of light, like a good story on the verge of beginning itself.