2.1. MRS. PALOMAR IN THE SHOWER
2.1.1. The Dust
Mrs. Palomar's morning shower is her favorite time of the day. She enjoys exercising her mind and her thoughts in a little world untouched by Mr. Palomar, who only takes baths. When the shower is broken, Mrs. Palomar enjoys repairing it, extracting her tin box of wrenches and screwdrivers and hearing it clank on the tile floor of the bathroom. Ironically, Mrs. Palomar also likes the sound of the broken shower head, the continuous drip drip drip of the leaking water reminding her that her private world is always waiting there for her pleasure and consumption. The shower head has gathered a thin film of brown rust that collects under her fingernails when she scratches it.
Today Mrs. Palomar takes an especially long shower, since the autumn morning is cold and the hot water such a pronounced contrast to it. The air fills with steam, it hangs in a bloated, warm cloud between her head and the ceiling, which is slightly mildewed in the corners. Mrs. Palomar's bar of soap bears the outline of several large bubbles that popped and dried on its surface after her last shower, which was yesterday. After she is finished using it she rests it in a green ceramic dish and watches the bubbles rise, clean and round as pearls. Seeking her towel, she discovers that once again Mr. Palomar has removed it to some other nook of the house. The towel rack shines chrome and empty in the fluorescent light, occasional streaks of fog falling over it like shadows.
Towelless, Mrs. Palomar waits to drip dry. There is a small window that forms a horizontal axis with the shower head and light comes through it this morning, illuminating the soft folds of the shower curtain. Mrs. Palomar also notices in the morning light a thin layer of gray dust on the window sill, which has become slightly misty with steam. She touches a finger to the sill and the dust collects there on its tip, which is withered from the shower. Where she lay her fingertip there is an oval-shaped spot on the sill that is clean. Mrs. Palomar puts her finger there again and begins to draw letters in the dust layer, P-A-L- until she runs into the side of the window. She remembers a quiet, gold afternoon on a beach with Mr. Palomar, in the days of their courtship. They sat in a reverie of the monotonous breathing of the waves, her husband holding a fistful of sand close to his face and determining the properties of the grains, opaque or crystalline, fine or rough and thick. Mrs. Palomar found a stick and began to trace those letters in the sand, P-A-L- until she came to Mr. Palomar, who had moved, sweetly, to sit in the path of her pen.
Now with her fingertip she smudges over the letters, then lifts her palm to her face and examines the dirt-coated skin. The dust has gathered in such a way that her fingerprint is apparent, its swirls and curves outlined in soot and her clean white skin surrounding it. The print is like a map marked to show the elevations of a mountain from an overhead view--or perhaps an anthill, since the lines on Mrs. Palomar's fingertip are very close together and would therefore suggest an extraordinarily steep incline. Soon Mrs. Palomar realizes she is naked and cold. Towelless, she isn't sure what to do with the dirt that has accumulated on her fingertip. On her wide white belly, she begins to draw in dust the letters P-A-L-, reversing the earlier white on black lettering of the windowsill. Dusty drips of water descend her thighs and calves onto the floor of the shower.