Water Works

by Sally Sheklow

(800 words)

Every Thanksgiving I thank my poor parents, rest their souls. It's a wonder they made it as far into old age as they did, considering the toll I took on them when I was little.

I caused a lot of household damage, most of it involving water. Had my energies been directed into more scientific pursuits, I might have proven to be some kind of genius in the field of irrigation. But left to my own devices, my experiments veered more in the direction of home flooding.

By the time I was six, I'd completely saturated the entire square footage of our three-bedroom house‹twice. The first episode was inspired by a TV commercial in which a bathing beauty in a tall glass vat, smiles underwater and holds up a successfully retrieved, still-ticking Timex watch. I intended to replicate the effort to see if I could produce similar results. Having no glass vat, swimming pool, or other body of water, I improvised (a talent I received no positive reinforcement for until my late 30s).

I extracted my mother's dressy wristwatch from her jewelry box and proceeded into the lab (my parents' bathroom.) To approximate the vat effect, I closed myself inside the shower stall, plugged the drain with a rubber stopper, crammed my mom's entire collection of shower caps into the under-door crack, and turned on the water. I sat on the pink-tiled shower floor waiting for my "vat" to fill. I amused myself under the falling water until my experiment was interrupted by the screams of my mother coming home from work to a sheet of water flowing out from under her front door.

My second flooding incident involved even more water. My cousin Wendy came over to play one hot summer day. Before Mom left for work she told us to BE GOOD, a weird instruction for a couple of six-year-olds whose idea of good had, just the week before, included giving all the stuffed animals close shaves with dad's electric razor.

Wendy and I had no problem dreaming up activities. We both loved our dentist's fancy fish tank and wanted to make one of our own‹big enough for us to be the fish.

We stopped up the crack under my bedroom door and dumped some pennies onto the floor so we could dive for them once the water was deep enough. I climbed out the bedroom window onto the picnic table and into the front yard where I pulled the hose out from the oleander bed. I handed it in to Wendy and turned on the spigot. The hose sputtered a little, then started to flip around like a crazy snake. It sprayed all over my pink wallpaper and the gold-flecked overhead light fixture before I could climb back in and help Wendy wrestle it into submission. We pinned the hose down between my mattress and the dust-ruffled box spring.

Our squeals and giggles should have alerted my supposedly supervising brother, who sat in the family room glued to Spin and Marty. We were under his strict instructions not to bother him. An occasional "Shut up Girls², constituted his compliance with his babysitting duties.

Pretty soon my entire bedroom floor was soaked. It was fun to stomp around on the sploshy carpet, but the water was nowhere near deep enough for swimming. Impatient, Wendy and I climbed out the window and left the hose running while we played Candyland at the picnic table. Pretty soon our fish tank would be full and we could dive back in. I was going to be a neon tetra, Wendy would be an angel fish.

A car pulled up and tooted its horn. Wendy's mom called out the window asking did we want to go out for ice cream, which naturally we did. The six-year-old brain, scientists surely know, is incapable of retaining awareness of running water at the same time ice cream is involved. We hopped into Auntie Phyll's wood-paneled station wagon and drove off. I¹ve tried to imagine the scene my parents must have confronted when they came home, but my memory of what happened after Auntie Phyll dropped me off and drove away with Wendy is pretty much blank. I do remember the defeated look on my parents' faces, a look that has returned to me every time I¹ve considered having children of my own. I never trusted the luck of the draw to grant me an easy, sensible kid.

Thanksgiving is the holiday that reminds us to be thankful. I thank my dearly departed parents for never mentioning how much money my water experiments cost them, and especially for the self-control it must have taken for them to let me live. Above all, I'm thankful that reproduction is not mandatory.

Writer Sally Sheklow lives a thankful life with her wife and their teenager in Eugene, Oregon.

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