Hose
Emily Hiestand

First published in Domestic Travels (Beacon Press, 1998); revised slightly 2024
Anthologized in Jo’s Girls, Tales of True Grit and Adventure (Beacon Press)
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The plumpest woman in the world, circa 1953, lived on my street, Gordon Road, in the small town where I grew up in Tennessee near the purple-gray Cumberland Mountains. She had a daughter named Alice, who was nine, three years older than me, and one day I asked Alice why her mother was so fat.

"She is not fat," Alice replied indignantly. "She's pregnant." 

I could tell from Alice's tone that this was an explanation, but it was the first time the word "pregnant" had been used in my presence and it failed to signify — a triumph that was the product of a long tradition of people, men and women, using euphemistic terms for a pregnancy such as: "She’s in a family way," or "She’s far along," or simply never mentioning it. 

Alice and her family, about whom I have no further memory, lived next door to Mrs. Bayliss, an elderly lady whose house sat on the crest of a hill and at the extreme edge of what my brothers and I considered known territory. We had the impression that Mrs. Bayliss lived on a cliff, but when I visited our neighborhood again years later, I saw that the land only sloped rather gently at Mrs. Bayliss's yard, descending into a thicket of persimmon trees. In late summer the grove exuded a clean, sweet pungency that grew stronger still in fall, after the persimmon fruits had fallen and begun to rot, matting the slope in a slick of overripe pulp and skins.  

Our house stood on flat, sunny ground, about nine houses away from Mrs. Bayliss and the cliff. One very hot August afternoon, as Kevin Hennessey and I were playing with the garden hose in my front yard, Mrs. Bayliss appeared, walking along the low privet hedge that divided our yard from the sidewalk. She was wearing a silk print dress and close-fitting hat. She wore gloves and carried a patent leather purse over a crooked arm, as the Queen of England did. This was Mrs. Bayliss's marketing outfit, which she wore whenever she walked the half-mile to the A&P grocery in Jackson Square. I had the garden hose in my hand as Mrs. Bayliss passed in front of our yard, and when the thought came into my mind to point the hose at Mrs. Bayliss and soak her, nothing intervened. 

I did know that it was considered quite wrong to squirt a jet of water at a grownup, most especially at an older woman, but something strong and ancient rose up in me to override this feeble teaching. The sensation of joy, the abandoned, transcendent joy that came to me — as the water arched toward Mrs. Bayliss and landed in a great whoosh — was unparalleled. I had willfully crossed a line and known the ecstasy of dissolving an absolute rule — in this case, human decency. By great good fortune, silk turns very dark when it is wet, and Mrs. Bayliss not only was wet, she looked wet. 

For a moment, all three of us stood frozen, staring at one another, unsure if we actually believed what had just happened. Mrs. Bayliss's dress was sopping wet and water ran down her face and plopped onto her black patent purse. She must have said something to Kevin and me at this juncture, but I cannot remember any words, only watching her come slowly to her senses, turn herself around, and go home. Kevin and I resumed playing in the yard, now in the frame of mind that bank robbers must experience have after they have pulled off the heist and are back in their compound, running their hands through piles of gold but listening anxiously to the radio for police reports. 

In about twenty minutes Mrs. Bayliss reappeared, again walking along the low trimmed hedge in front of our house. She had put on a fresh silk dress and the same hat, had dried off her purse and face. I squirted her again, same as before. The inward, guiding voice had spoken afresh, suggesting that once over the line you might as well linger there a while. I remember that Mrs. Bayliss did speak to us this time — in sharp, high, memorable sounds. Then she turned around, went home, changed her clothes, came back a third time in a different silk dress, and — Yes!  

Three times she appeared before us, trusting in our basic goodness; three times she tempted us, and three times we sprayed her with water. Times two and three, Kevin and I fought over who would do it. But it had been my brilliant idea, and when the blade came down, Kevin was the one who had been "led on" and I was the ghastly child. The fourth time that she set out for the grocery store, Mrs. Bayliss turned left at the fork in Gordon Road, rather than right towards our yard, and went the long way down Georgia Avenue to Jackson Square to shop.   

She called my mother the next day. After replacing the receiver in its cradle, my mother used my full name and told me to come into her room. Language is greatly a tonal affair, and no one could have failed to tremble at the eschatological, end-of-the-world timbre now flowing in my mother's voice. She directed me to sit down on the pastel ottoman by the window — a round thing with only a rare functionality. During the "very serious talk, young lady" that ensued, my mother’s own sunny nature was replaced by the scorches of Presbyterian Hell. Afterwards, my mother helped me into one of my fancy outfits, a dress sewn by my grandmother with dozens of dainty buttons down the front. We practiced my apology several times, and then my mother walked me up the road to Mrs. Bayliss's house on the edge of the cliff, and knocked on the door.  

Mrs. Bayliss had always been kind, in a syrupy way, to all the children in the neighborhood, including me. Now, as we waited at the door, I felt not precisely remorse (the feeling my mother had done her level best to arouse) but rather a dim sense that Nature had chosen me to redress this goo of kindness. But this was far too subtle and dangerous an idea of justice to explore in the moment. I only hung my head in Mrs. Bayliss's house, offered my whispered apology, and then sat in her living room and ate butter cookies. Mrs. Bayliss forgave me and continued being sugary and frail. The only lesson that I learned at the time, if you can call it a lesson, was that for an exquisite joy, for the ineffable feeling of being in tune with nature and the gods, there will be a price to pay, and it will be worth it.  

Recently I asked my mother, now seventy-five, about this long-ago event and what her point of view was at the time. "My point of view," she replied, the incident coming rather easily to mind, "was the point of view of a mother who wants to crawl under the foundation of the house and never show her face again." My mother also claims that Mrs. Bayliss was neither old nor frail at the time of her soaking. In fact she was not much older than my mother herself, which would have put Mrs. Bayliss in her early forties — younger than I am now. Nor was she a widow — there was a  Mr. Bayliss!  "And," my mother continues, the ripples of corrective memory sweeping her on, "the dress" — she means dresses — "could  not have been silk. In summer, dear, Mrs. Bayliss would have been wearing voile."  

About these variances: I doubt neither my mother's memory nor her greater perception of our neighbor and her circumstances. I can only say that the person she describes is simply not the person I squirted, though I grant that the dresses were very likely voile. The savage glee of that afternoon lodged firmly in my memory, where it seems to contrast completely with my present moral life. I am often these days trusted not only with garden hoses but with several hearts, civic causes, and jumper cables. Recently I traveled from my longtime home in New England to the town of my childhood, and the woman who answered the door of our family’s former home let me wander a while in a yard where the hemlock planted for my birth has grown taller than her house. I stood for a long while under the maple where Kevin and I liked to open wing-like seeds, arrange the sticky cases over our noses, and walk around like that. Mrs. Bayliss, I was sorry to learn, had died, only the year before. 

How I would like to have visited her once more, or taken a walk together down the hill to Jackson Square. I could have offered her a profound apology this time, from an older self. But could I have also found a way to thank her? It would have been a delicate undertaking, involving the risk of appearing completely unreconstructed. But I might have tried, for by her person, by her enormously dear and misplaced trust, the Lady, Mrs. Bayliss, gave me a singular experience – the memory of which is undimmed across four decades.

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