MY LIFE - Shower curtains

6/23/2015

By RHEA BOUCHARD POWERS

This may sound a little silly, but I have this thing about shower curtains. The shower curtain on my bathtub needs to be pulled to the right. All the way to the right. Not normally a problem since it's just me and the cat and the cat doesn't shower. Neither do I, for that matter, being a devotee of the tub bath method of personal hygiene, but I digress. The point is, if the shower curtain has been pulled completely closed after use by a houseguest, or pulled open to the left, or pulled to but not all the way to the right it triggers a little flutter of unease in my otherwise calm psyche.

I think of it as the "Psycho Effect," as in the movie "Psycho" and not as in a personal mental health issue. I saw the movie at the drive-in a very long time ago during its initial release and inadvertently tucked the shower scene away in the recesses of my ragbag mind where it remained dormant for many years.

Since I was still unmarried and living at home when I initially saw the movie, being accosted in the shower by a homicidal maniac was a moot point. We didn't have a shower at home. Heck, like many other tenements in town back then, there wasn't even a tub. When I got married and stepped up in class, our first apartment had a tub but no shower, ergo, no shower curtain. My first run-in with a shower...and a shower curtain... occurred when I was 14 years old and a houseguest at my Aunt Edna's in New York and was traumatic in an entirely different way.

Never having experienced, or even seen a shower curtain in my life, I didn't want to get it too wet, so I carefully draped it outside the tub. I didn't see the error of my ways until, shower completed, I pulled back the curtain and stepped into what looked like at least an inch of water across the bathroom floor. Holy crap! You never saw anyone move so fast, grabbing towels and mopping up the mess as fast as I could before it all leaked down into the kitchen directly below. I never mentioned it to my aunt, and if she knew about the mishap she was too polite to say anything either. It remained my little secret until I spilled the beans many, many years later. Traumatizing, but not of the knife-wielding psycho kind.

The new home my husband and I purchased in Blackstone and where I lived for the next 20 years had a tub with shower, but no curtain. We had glass shower doors of the kind that look like a wonderful idea until one is faced with the task of having to clean the slimy crud out of the tracks. For 20 years I cleaned that crud, so when I bought what I hope will be my final house here in Cumberland I was pleased to note the absence of glass shower doors. I never gave the shower curtains a second thought other than coordinating their color to the surrounding bathroom scheme.

To be perfectly honest, I am not sure when the placement of the shower curtain even occurred to me. I don't shower, and while my son Rick was alive we didn't have many overnight guests, and he probably pulled the curtain way over to the right anyway, so it wasn't an issue. Not that it's really "an issue" now either, but rather a minor thing that I have only in recent years been aware of...really. It has been more of a nagging feeling of unease not set to right until the curtain was pulled back to where I thought it belonged.

I figured it was just that I didn't like surprises, like walking into the bathroom and having some maniac bent on mayhem jumping out at me from behind the partially closed shower curtain. So, if the curtain is pulled all the way back and I have a clear view of the tub area when I walk into the room I can use the facility with an easy mind.

The whole "Psycho" connection didn't even enter my mind until recently when it all suddenly fell into place and began to make sense. Tucked away in the fertile recesses of my brain, the whole horrific scene in that movie had lain dormant for years until I actually had a shower curtain of my own.

Kind of makes me glad that I never cared for scary movies as a kid or who knows what kind of other phobias I might have developed.

- Rhea Bouchard Powers is a writer from Cumberland.