Christina Holbrook

The Shower Room 

The thick, spongy loaner bathing suit. It felt like it had been worn by at least a hundred women before her. And today, showing up for class in this lumpy relic had filled Marie with anxiety that she somehow stuck out as hopelessly dorky and pathetic. She couldn’t wait to take a shower and get her clothes on again. Who in the world would arrive to a swim class without her own bathing suit? What had she been thinking?        

When Marie had stumbled out of her freshman dorm room at the college, half asleep at 7:45 a.m., heading to Beginning French, she’d actually not been thinking about swim class at all.          

Earlier that morning, the sound of groaning had awakened her as she lay in the dark, in the tiny unfamiliar room. She’d tried to orient herself to the tight space jammed with two beds, dressers, desks, and bookshelves. In the opposite bed, a mound of covers had heaved as somewhere beneath it a creature—her roommate, Fiona—tossed and turned. 

Perilously close to sliding into the pit of homesickness, Marie had thrown off her quilt, pulled on sweat pants and a t-shirt, and gone down to breakfast. She’d secretly feared whatever unhappiness Fiona’s mournful sighs expressed might suck her in, too. When she’d gone back up to get ready for class, both the lump in the opposite bed, and her roommate, were gone.

All morning Marie had been thinking about taking a nap. She’d forgotten about Introductory Lap Swim, so she had ended up being unprepared and looking foolish. Now, class over, she heaved herself up out of the frigid water and onto the pool edge, her baggy, one-piece suit catching and pulling against the concrete. The suit had been borrowed at the gym check-in.  She needed a bathing suit of her own! But that would require walking into town to buy one.

She shuffled across the pool area towards the lockers, a thin white towel partially hiding the ill-fitting garment. Her eyes were stinging from the chlorine and her mass of dark, curly hair felt as stiff as hay. She really needed that shower.

A steamy warmth enveloped her in the shower room, a space that was pleasingly simple and unadorned. This was a women’s college, so there was only one shower room—for women. Marie’s shoulders relaxed after being hunched up around her neck. She and the eight other students had just spent the past hour swimming laps and then standing around in the freezing-cold pool, listening to their instructor.

The stalls near the shower room entrance were missing shower curtains. Marie scanned the entire room for a stall she could use and realized that no curtains hung in front of any of the stalls. How had she not noticed this on her way to the pool at the beginning of class?

Another girl, a freshman like her but wearing her own sleek, black bathing suit, followed her in. Marie recognized the girl—Cecilia—from her dorm. Then three more girls joined them. They all looked at the open stalls and then at one another.

Cecilia muttered out loud what they all were asking themselves: “How do they think we’re supposed to take showers?”       

Uncertain—and therefore annoyed—the girls filed through to the dressing room and the individual lockers where each had stored her clothes. No one showered. Each girl found a corner of the dressing room and turned her back to the others.    

Marie peeled off the bathing suit, her body hunched, then shoved her legs and arms into her baggy green army pants, sweatshirt, jean jacket. She buckled on her flat-heeled ankle boots.

Intentionally, if somewhat self-consciously, she had started dressing to show the world who she wanted to be: An artist. Or at least, some kind of rebellious person who rejected tight-fitting clothes women were supposed to wear specifically to appeal to men. But with her dark hair wild and straw-like, she was pretty sure she looked more like a witch.

Alone, she returned her wet suit and exited the gym.

Three days later, Marie was back at the pool and mentally prepared this time for the dowdy loaner bathing suit. Classes, homework, freshman meetings, and getting lost while following the meandering campus pathways had left her no extra time to purchase a suit of her own. On top of all those excuses, the prospect of viewing her reflection in a dressing-room mirror—pale flesh jammed into a thin, revealing nylon swimsuit—had not exactly put her in the mood to shop.

It had never occurred to her to pack a suit in her college trunk. But then, during the week of orientation before classes began, she’d scanned the options for mandatory freshman Phys-Ed. Introductory Lap Swim seemed the only choice that didn’t involve hitting things or smashing into anyone. Team sports were out. Marie’s high school exposure to the win-or-lose ferocity of contact sports had convinced her for all time that she was not a team player.

She could, on the other hand, imagine herself swimming, face down in the long blue lap lane, in water as cold and quiet as outer space. Weightlessly cutting through the liquid silence, she could mull over her own thoughts, uninterrupted by someone in cleats trying to run her down and kill her with a field hockey stick or knock her over the head with a volleyball.  

Now as she walked through the shower room towards the pool, she averted her gaze from the girl who stood in one of the curtainless stalls, naked under a hot shower. The girl was just standing there, showering. Completely exposed! Though she’d barely glanced at her, Marie was almost certain the girl was Cecilia.

Tall, and with the erect posture of a dancer, or a police sergeant, Cecilia came across as very sure of herself. With envy, Marie had observed her dashing off assignments during lunch for the Philosophy course they shared—literally a minute before class. The professor had returned Cecilia’s first assignment with a big A+ scrawled across the top in red, while Marie, who had labored over hers, had earned only a B. Cecilia also had her own car, a sign to Marie of her greater, adult-like independence.

And now, Cecilia nonchalantly showered with no curtain around her for privacy.

Marie walked out to the pool, sat down on the edge, and tested the cold water with her feet. The instructor had outlined her expectations during their first class as she’d strode around the pool with long, tanned legs that suggested days filled with nothing but swimming laps, in an outdoor pool, say, in sunny Florida. Not one inside a chilly gym in Massachusetts. Seventy-two laps—more than a mile!—three times a week, she’d announced, with a goal of completing the laps in under forty-five minutes.

Marie had scowled and her teeth had chattered. She had to be kidding, right? 

Weekly laps could be accomplished under the “Honor Code,” the instructor had continued, meaning that students could swim on their own, any time during the week, and keep track of their own results. But she did not, apparently, trust her students’ “honor” entirely: They would have to clock in and out at the front desk of the gym, and the instructor would be checking the timesheets.

The instructor had not been kidding.

How was she going to do this?

Today, Marie had to admit she liked it here, in the big, open, blue-gray-white space. The enormity of it, the absence of people talking, the feeling that she could think her own thoughts without interruption. It reminded her of a museum or a church—which was weird because the pool was obviously not at all like the Catholic church her family attended.

Even the smell of chlorine in the warm, humid air soothed her. Strange. The view of trees outside caught her eye, too. Fall leaves changing to gold and scarlet fluttered outside the bank of picture-windows set high above the churning blue water, and they drifted in the air carried by a breeze. It was so … unhurried. Gentle. She eased off the rough ledge and began swimming, back and forth, across the twenty-five meter pool.

One, two. Three, four.

How was it, Marie brooded, that this other girl—Cecilia—could just stand there, stark naked, in the open shower room? She felt defensive and critical—it was not something she would ever do. From her brief, embarrassed glance, she had observed that Cecilia was neither thin nor fat. It wasn’t like she had some amazing body to show off, like she was a model or anything. She was just...herself. Naked. Taking a shower.

The word DANGER in big neon-red capital letters lit up inside Marie’s brain. Didn’t Cecilia feel awfully… vulnerable?

Marie was too fat. “Thunder Thighs,” a group of unkind girls in high school had nicknamed her. No way had their family doctor been right when he’d informed Marie that, to the contrary, her weight fell in the “average” range for her age and height. Despite her haphazard attempts to get into a routine of sit-ups, her belly felt soft. She hated how embarrassing her nipples looked to her—too big. And her breasts didn’t stand up the way she assumed they were supposed to, but hung softly on her chest. Her body looked and felt all wrong.

Lap thirteen, fourteen.

She would never even consider saying out loud that she didn’t like her body. That would sound prudish and anti-feminist. But now, in the safe embrace of the pool, swimming back and forth, something inside Marie relaxed. She breathed deeply, evenly, one stroke after the next stroke after the next. It felt okay to admit to herself that her body made her uncertain. Scared.

Sometimes her own body seemed like a thing apart, a thing she had a hard time owning. Her eyes stung with underwater tears. If she were honest, sometimes her body felt like an alien being she was at war with.

Twenty-five, twenty-six.

She kicked off from the pool’s edge, and propelled herself into her next lap with an unexpected surge of anger. Too many other people seemed to think they had some claim to her body! 

Her mother had regularly worked herself into near hysterics ever since Marie had gotten her first period, at twelve. Before that, Marie had moved about her child’s world freely, like a wild animal. Girls and boys had all run around together playing in the neighborhood. Then suddenly, Marie’s body had turned into a ticking time bomb! Those same boys, or so her mother insisted, “just wanted one thing.” They were intent on detonating her like an explosive!

Marie had resented that she had to be on guard, now, in a way her brothers did not. By ten o’clock at night her parents expected her to be home, while her brothers had no curfew. The boys lived as they always had, while she had become a prisoner-of-war under her parents’ constant surveillance, threatened with getting thrown out of the house should she allow her body to misbehave in some reckless and careless way.

Marie gasped for breath. Why couldn’t her parents see that their fear and lack of trust in her had just made her angry and confused—and uncertain if she could trust herself?

Forty-seven, forty-eight.

That was it. Forty-eight laps were all Marie could swim today.

She grasped the side of the pool, puffing, trying to catch her breath. Her instructor with the long, Florida legs strolled into the pool area and straight over to Marie. She leaned down to talk.

“It’s Marie, right? You’ve got a good, strong kick, Marie!”

Marie had not expected the praise. She smiled like a goofy little kid.

“When you take a stroke, try not to lift your head up out of the water. Think about making a rotating motion with your chest, from left to right, and just allow your head to turn naturally for a breath with each stroke. And don’t forget: Raise each arm up from the elbow.”

Marie nearly swaggered into the shower room. She stood up taller. She hadn’t thought that anything about the way she lumbered through the water was right, but her instructor’s comment that she had “a good, strong kick” had given her a burst of self-confidence. Her thighs weren’t “big” or “fat”; they were strong.

She stood for a moment enjoying the thick steam cocooning her. She ran her fingers up one of the smooth, light-brown tiled walls. She pressed her feet down and spread her toes against the warm tile floor. The warmth felt like acceptance. Should she take a shower?

But … like hypervigilant parents, her feet began moving her past the showers to the secluded safety of the furthest corner of the locker room.

Friday afternoon, she set off from the campus and walked into town. In a sporting goods store, a Speedo suit with a purple tie-dye design fit perfectly. On Saturday, clutching her new suit, swim cap, and goggles—and with the instructor’s suggestions in mind—she returned to the pool.

She’d approach the class like a real swimmer. She dove in.

Lap one, two.

Churning through the vast, silent blue of the pool, her mind slipped back to her junior year in high school. Her boyfriend, Jordan, then a senior, had been obsessed with having sex. He’d badgered her endlessly with “When are we going to do it?” and they’d spent hours making out in his car. Jordan would try to get his hands between her legs, while Marie, aroused and horny, the crotch of her jeans wet, would burn with frustration at her body’s unruly desires—and at her boyfriend for pushing and trying to direct everything. He never gave her a chance to figure out what she wanted.

They’d end up exhausted, disappointed, and angry at each other. She’d be relieved to get away from him and back to the safety of her house. Why was it that her body, too, seemed to have its own agenda, and was at war with her mind?

Nineteen, twenty.

Marie realized she felt more at ease in the water now, like she had a right to be here, swimming. Rolling from side to side, turning her head from right to left, lifting from the elbows as her instructor had suggested worked! With her improved form Marie’s speed increased, her strokes pulling her through the water as fast as the girl in the adjacent lane. Faster, even.

Thirty-three, thirty-four.

It pissed her off that she was supposed to listen to, and take into account, everyone else’s opinions about how her body looked, and what she should and shouldn’t do with it. In the end, the only strategy Marie had been able to come up with to fend off her parents’ oppressive fear and control—as well as the unfair and untrue accusation by Jordan that she was a “cock tease”—had been to separate herself from the object of everyone’s relentless fixation. To make an enemy of her own body.

Fifty-five, fifty-six.

She wished she wasn’t divided into so many pieces. There was her brain that seemed to be on constant high alert, especially in this new place. And then there was her unpredictable body, driven by its own impulses.

Sixty-seven, sixty-eight.

Who was she, and who did she want to become? These questions came from her heart. The most hidden and unknown of all the pieces. She didn’t want to be broken like this, cutting herself on her own sharp edges. She wanted to be one smooth, whole person.

Seventy-one … Seventy-two!

Marie stood at the shallow end of the pool, breathless, smiling. She’d done it! Seventy-two laps! Over a mile! Okay, she’d been swimming for more than an hour, but so what? She’d done it.   

In the shower room, Marie saw two girls, each in her own curtainless stall, standing naked under the hot water. Soaping up, washing her hair. Marie paused and stood still in the warm safety of the tiled space, trying not to look at them. Trying to name the feelings that rose up inside, choking her. Ultimately, she landed on: ashamed and afraid. How did those girls feel comfortable enough to expose themselves like that?

Were they that different from her?

Earlier that day, on her way across campus, Marie had heard an unbelievably awful noise that turned out to be her roommate Fiona playing bagpipes on the Green. Fiona had turned bright red when Marie walked up to her. “It’s pretty loud, right?” she’d admitted, abashed and apologetic.       

“No! I mean, well yes, it’s pretty loud,” Marie had said, “but … it’s so different, too. I think it’s cool that you play bagpipes.”

Later, in the cafeteria, she’d found herself at the same lunch table as Cecilia. As they’d talked, she learned how hard Cecilia worked to live up to the expectations of her famous parents, both actors on TV. “You’re so confident, Marie,” Cecilia had sighed. “Like, how you dress—just the way you please. You never act as if you’re trying to impress anyone.”

Marie had not considered that her baggy wardrobe—partly a statement, but also, she had to admit, partly a disguise—might come across to anyone as a sign of self-confidence. To say the least.

Maybe they all felt nervous and insecure, each in her own way.

Now in the shower room, despite the triumph of her seventy-two laps, she hesitated. Then, she walked with determination into a curtainless stall. Still wearing her bathing suit, she turned on the hot water and felt the muscles of her body relax under the pounding heat. But this was stupid, showering with clothes on. Was anyone really looking at her? Passing judgment on her? And if they were, did it matter to her now, the way it might have when Marie was younger and surrounded by the cliques and popularity contests of high school? 

Last spring, right before the end of high school, that younger version of Marie told her parents she was staying with a girlfriend but instead took a bus to visit Jordan for a long weekend at his college.

A smiling young woman named Debbie popped into the common room Jordan shared with his two college roommates, offering a plate of freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies. As she assessed Debbie’s tight t-shirt and short shorts, Marie tried to hide her jealousy and instantaneous dislike. Debbie even asked if the young men had any laundry they wanted to add to the load she was just about to do!

Debbie was so pretty, and yet Marie could see her straining for their approval. Did trying to win guys’ affection, she wondered, automatically make girls feel like they had to act like their mothers—or their maids?

That weekend, however, Marie had more important things on her mind than Debbie and her cookies: Whether or not she and Jordan were finally going to have sex. Nearing graduation, Marie was determined to lose her virginity. A Catholic school virgin! What a childish cliché. There was no way she was arriving at college without having had sex at least once.

Saturday night, she and Jordan found themselves alone in the dorm suite while his roommates were out partying.

“Do you have condoms? Because I snuck a few, from my brother. In case.” In her nervousness, Marie tried to sound assertive. Prepared.

“I know what I’m doing, Marie,” he rebuffed her. He pulled a foil square from his wallet, then fumbled with the slippery, rubber tubing. He climbed on top of her and then … she gasped from the sharp jab. A few struggling thrusts later, it was all over. Was that it? Was that what all the threats and arguments and drama had been about?  

“For future reference? Being so pushy… it’s kind of a turn off,” Jordan grumbled before turning his back on her. “I don’t care what all the ‘feminists’ say.” He fell asleep, leaving Marie to feel irredeemably unattractive—and sad. So, this is what it was like, then, between grown-up women and men.

Sunday morning, she overheard Jordan laughing with other guys in the common room: “Oh Jesus! That’s so sick!” one of them snorted. Something about their tone—like the high-pitched, squeamish laughter of little boys torturing some small animal—summoned a sense of dread inside Marie.

When Jordan returned to the bedroom where she was getting dressed, Marie asked, “What? What were you all laughing about out there?”

Jordan looked embarrassed. Like he didn’t want to say.

“WHAT?”

“About Debbie, if it’s so important for you to know. There was a party at Sigma Chi. People are saying she drank too much, got wasted …” Jordan turned all serious and distant. “Then … I guess she disappeared into one of the frat bedrooms. Let a bunch of guys have sex with her.”

“‘Disappeared into a bedroom? Let a bunch of guys have sex with her?’ That sounds like rape, Jordan. Like your friends raped the cookie girl, who does your laundry for you!” Stiff with shock, Marie sat down on the rumpled quilt, on the verge of being sick.

She couldn’t help imagining pretty Debbie’s injured, used body. A body that was, after all, like hers. Maybe Debbie had believed she and the guys at the party were all buddies. But in the end, she’d been nothing more to them than that empty plate of cookies: ‘Here,’ they might have just said. ‘You can take this now. We’re finished.’

“Where’s Debbie now?” Marie asked. “Did anyone check to see if she’s okay?”

“How should I know? I doubt she’ll ever want to show her face in class again, after this.”

“Are you serious, Jordan? It’s your friends who should be ashamed. They should be kicked out of school! She should report those guys to the campus police.”

“Keep it down, okay, Marie? Jesus Christ ... it was a party.”

As she began to throw things into her suitcase her ears were ringing. She wanted to block Jordan out, as he made more excuses for his friends’ behavior. On what planet was it okay for Jordan to pretend it was perfectly normal for multiple guys to have sex with one drunk girl because it was a party?

Jordan rolled his eyes, and spoke to her with his new, worldly college voice. The voice that came from a person she no longer knew. “Don’t be so naive, Marie.”

She stared at him, until he looked down at his feet.

“Should I walk you to the bus stop?” he asked, like he already knew the answer.

“Don’t bother.”

Lugging her suitcase, Marie marched past his surprised roommates and out the door as messy tears streamed down her face.

In the shower room, Marie peeled off her bathing suit and hung it over the tile dividing wall. The sense of vulnerability she felt was excruciating, her embarrassment dreadful.

DANGER!

She glanced across the room. One of the girls had gone and the other one was paying no attention to her. She took a deep breath, felt the warm water pounding on her, thrumming all over her body and calming her down. Smoothing her sharp edges.

In her real life, the one that started now, she could wash her parents’ fears and demands and the immature pettiness of high school, right off of herself, watch all of it slip through her fingers, swirl between her toes, disappear down the drain.

In her new, real life, she would not allow her ex-boyfriend Jordan’s callous view of the world to stifle or intimidate her. Down the drain with that, too! Let him try to feel better about himself by calling her naïve. That just made him a coward.

The truth was, she’d decided to expect something more—something better—between herself and men, even if she couldn’t yet imagine what that might be.

She lifted her hair and let the water rinse through it. She ran her hands down her body and felt a sense of tenderness for her soft breasts, her strong thighs. Silently, she apologized to her body for considering it too fat, or somehow wrong. Or dangerous or untrustworthy. Her body was her ally, not her enemy.

Marie was strong, after all. She had a body that could swim seventy-two laps! A body that held her heart and mind and belonged to her.

More girls came in. More taps turned on. Steam billowed all around them. Then one by one, the young women finished washing up, swiveled their taps to “off,” wrapped their hair in towels. They walked around the shower room as if they were strolling across campus, at once unguarded and unassailable.                                                                     

In this place—here, now—no one was obsessed with nakedness or frightened by their own vulnerability. Standing among the other women as she toweled her body dry, Marie understood that they were all the masters of their own legs and arms, faces, hands, and feet. As if here, in the shower room, they’d found the way home to their bodies and to themselves.

Originally from New York City, Christina Holbrook now lives in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue Lake Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, City.River.Tree, Bombfire, and others. When not writing, she is probably out hiking with her dog Luke and trying to avoid surprise moose encounters. She has just completed her debut novel.

The dowdy loaner bathing suits from Christina’s freshman year at Wellesley College have long since gone out of circulation, much to students’ relief.