Jess Lakritz

“One of my managers at work takes a photo of herself doing a handstand in every new city she visits. Jess takes a bath.”

I think it was when I lived in Spokane, Washington that my obsession with taking baths began. It was a quiet beginning because I didn’t recognize it as an obsession. Baths became a regular part of my life. Maybe it was because I had my own apartment for the first time and wasn’t sharing the bathroom with anyone that I began a sort of unabashed bathing: untimed, unmonitored, no one waiting or even knowing that I could be in the bath for hours. I hung a huge periodic table in the bathroom where I could see it from the bathtub because I thought something about it could inspire me.

I lived in Spokane for two years while getting my master’s in poetry. I was 23 when I moved there. A couple of months in, I fell in love with another writer in my program, Brandon, and if you know me, you already know this story well. If you don’t, I’ll just say the relationship was a true emotional roller coaster. Baths became a place to wrap myself in a warm blanket of water while I cried and smoked pot out of a swirly glass pipe. Baths soothed me when Brandon regularly broke my heart. They were my self-care before the term “self-care” became a thing.

Bathing was so prominent in both my life and poetry during that time that Brandon’s recent writing even includes it. In one of the stories in his upcoming collection, he wrote:

“Above the towel rack she hangs a poster of the periodic table of elements. Her lighter flares over the neon-striped glass pipe in her fingers. She sinks into the warm water, suds bubbling around her breasts and shoulders. She stares at the elements, trying to imagine a new metal, a new noble gas. The bowl grows black and cold. She sets it next to the shrunken bar of soap. As she washes her hair, she touches the ridges of her skull with her fingertips. She feels someone watching her, from the inside. Watching a movie of the soap dish and her knees.”

The character in the story isn’t me, and not everything said there is based on reality. It’s just this little piece of my life there. My bathing reputation precedes me.

Once during grad school, Brandon and I had the luxury of staying in a ridiculously fancy hotel room in Las Vegas. After stuffing ourselves at the hotel’s gourmet buffet, my stomach was not in great shape. Back in the room, I spent at least 30 minutes in the bathroom, emptying my bloated, steak-and-shrimp-and-cheese-filled stomach.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a story to tell, but there was this bathtub in the room like no bathtub I had ever had access to. It was gigantic and beautiful. I somehow convinced Brandon, despite the smell of the bathroom after my diarrhea, that we should take a bath together in that huge tub. When else would this kind of opportunity arise, a bathtub big enough for both of us? So, I lit a candle and that was the first bath I ever took with another adult in my life. It wasn’t sexual (remember, I wasn’t really feeling well), but it was profoundly intimate. I can’t remember what we talked about. Actually, I can’t remember much about the bath other than laughing about the lingering stench and feeling so close to Brandon.

Years later when I lived in Portland, Oregon, bathing was still a regular activity for me. Sometimes, my boyfriend at the time would bring in a chair and sit there with me. We’d drink red wine. Sometimes he’d put his feet in. We’d talk just like any other kind of hangout. I didn’t realize I was beginning to normalize this behavior in my life, changing the way my brain thought about baths, transforming it into something it hadn’t been before. Bathing was no longer just about unwinding or relaxing or escaping. It had become social, in the presence of close company.

My bathing life was boosted even further by a place called Kennedy School in Portland. It was an old grade school converted into a series of bars and restaurants, and an outdoor soaking pool, complete with jacuzzi temperatures. You had to wear a swimsuit, but it was a way to bathe socially with drinks and friends. My best friend and I made a habit of going.

After my grandma’s funeral, some of the family gathered at my aunt’s house. I had never been there before, so my aunt gave me a tour, which included her giant oval jacuzzi bathtub. I had been living the last six months in a tropical beach town in southern Mexico, where bathing isn’t part of life because it’s always hot (I also only had a shower—no tub). It was summer in Milwaukee, and midwestern summer nights can get chilly. Eventually, while everyone else was hanging out in the yard, I went to take a bubble bath in that big tub. About 90 minutes later, when I returned to the party, it became clear to me that my bath reputation was now set in stone. People associated me with baths.
 

My first time in a bathhouse, I was alone in Tokyo. I met up with a Couchsurfing group, where a guy took a couple of us out to show us the real Tokyo so we wouldn’t get caught in tourist traps. One part of the evening included a bathhouse. In Japan, bathhouses are not co-ed, so he and the other guy who was with us went their way, and I went mine. This was a relatively small bathhouse for locals, so what I entered into was a fair amount of older Japanese women’s gossip hours. Little groups of them hung out around these sitting showers that were lined up in a row. They had soaps and buckets of water and loofas and were chatting away naked while bathing themselves. They even washed each other’s backs.

The confusion on my face upon entering must have been rich to witness from their side of things. I had never witnessed anything like that before and it was unclear to me what I was supposed to do. One of the old ladies kindly helped me out with some makeshift charades (the language barrier was no joke) showing me how to enjoy the bathhouse experience. There were several pools of water in various temperatures from very hot to hot to warm to cold to ice cold, as well as standing showers and sitting showers. I made my rounds to try out everything, and when I was finally finished, the boys were in the lobby patiently waiting for me.

Since then, I’ve also been to bathhouses in Korea. It’s so interesting to me that Korean (and Japanese) culture is notably modest publicly, but in the privacy of a single-gender bathhouse, people are willing to hang out with their friends and relatives naked. In the US, where the culture is not nearly as modest, we don’t have bathhouses. In gym locker rooms, most people try to keep their nudity in front of others to a minimum.

Those experiences piled on top of my own bath culture have helped me complete the realization of how liberating it is to be naked in front of people (including people you know) without it being a big deal. In the Korean bathhouse, where I went with my friends, we were just a couple more naked bodies in the room and that was that. There were skinny bodies, hairy bodies, hairless bodies, chubby bodies, toned bodies, soft bodies, but all clean bodies.

I was already primed for that realization, though. A close friend used to come into the bathroom while I was taking a bath in Portland (we lived together) to bring me beverages. In Barcelona, we lived together again, and bathing rituals full of essential oils, salts, and other bath luxuries became common in our household of six girls. One memory of a bath in that tub has particular significance to me.

For the first few months after my transatlantic move to Barcelona, I was casually dating a guy who I had already fallen in love with before I moved. I moved because I had never met anyone like him and I wanted to give our relationship a real chance by living in the same city. From the start, his fear of commitment was clear, but it seemed like the more we hung out, the idea of being in a relationship became more comfortable to him.

Then one day, I wanted to talk to him about something serious, and I told him so beforehand. His response was to ghost me, and I was devastated. How could he treat me this way? We were “casually dating,” but we were really close and had been for a long time at this point.

My friend told me that maybe it was time to move on if he was willing to so blatantly ignore my feelings. When I started to cry, she hugged me and suggested I take a bath. She prepared it for me with candles, soothing oils, and wine. It was one of my most melancholy baths to date, grappling with the possibility that it might be over with this guy. Still, the comfort of the hot water, aromatherapy, wine, and dim candle lighting, the comfort of the fact that my best friend had built this beautiful scene for me to weep, to think, to prepare to grieve, was special. I will never forget it.

I have one more bathing story I want to share, though it isn’t quite like the others. It’s a story about skinnydipping, which I would argue is a genre of bathing, and it’s a part of my coming-of-age mythology that stands out as an influence on the person I have become.

A group of us went camping in the wilderness of Manitoba, Canada the summer after my senior year of high school. One of the attendees was my boyfriend at the time. It was a hot night, and the forest was loud with crickets. After some beers, we all decided to go skinny dipping in the lake. Well, not all of us, but many of us. My boyfriend was not in the group of skinny dippers, and for certain reasons related to that, I decided to keep my (white) bra and underwear on instead of all-out skinny dipping. The rest of them got completely naked and went in.

I don’t recall looking at/seeing any of my naked friends directly. It was night; we had been drinking, When we got out of the water, my white bra and underwear had become a bit translucent, and my boyfriend brought me a towel immediately and started berating me for allowing everyone to look at me in my see-through undergarments. He was patronizing me as if I were a child who didn’t understand that for the good people of this world, nudity is saved for your romantic partners, not to be flaunted about like you’re “some hoe.” Today, this is called slut-shaming, but that term didn’t exist in 2003.

I don’t remember the conversation exactly, but I very clearly remember how it made me feel. I cried, my 18-year-old brain questioning everything he said as well as what I did. Was he right? Were our friends looking at me sexually, even though all of us were skinny dipping as a group? Was it my responsibility to not skinny dip with friends when I had a boyfriend?

Eventually (years later), I realized he was a lot more socially conservative than I was (am), and that was the basis for many of his critiques of my behavior, including that one. This skinnydipping memory has stuck with me because I now see the scolding he gave me on that midsummer night in the Manitoba wilderness left me questioning who I was and who I wanted to be. And that played a role in shaping me into who I would become: a person unshy about nudity, a person who bathes in the company of others, a person who is much more free.

And now here I am. Bathing has become a part of my identity.  In my world, bath culture is a relevant term, a way of life.

p.s. Here is my favorite TV bath scene of all time.