Baths by Gillian

There’s a city in England called Bath, and it has baths.
Does it ever!
It’s had them since the Romans settled there around the time of Christ, though there was a Celtic shrine there dating from about 800 B.C. 
By the 2nd century A.D. the baths were enclosed in a wooden building and included a caldarium bath, a tepidarium, and a frigidarium – no translations required, I think!

After the Romans left Britain in the 5th century the baths fell into disrepair but were later revived in several stages and the original hot spring is now housed in an 18th century building which contains the baths themselves and the Grand Pump Room where one could, and can, drink the waters.

Anyone who has ever read any Jane Austen has heard of Bath, and those watching the movies of her books have seen it on screen, as Austen’s heroine’s are inevitably off to Bath to “take the waters.”
In the early 1960’s you could still bathe and/or drink the waters flowing through the original Roman lead pipes, though for health reasons the waters have now been rerouted since the 1970’s. Just one more reason my brain is addled, I guess, as I was there lounging in the steaming water in 1963.

I was at a loose end, having recently graduated from the University of Sheffield with a degree in Geography – and what is God’s name was I supposed to do with that? In a shattered still-post-war Britain jobs were hard to come by and anything remotely to do with geography - cartography, geology, exploration in general - was male-dominated. I had a temporary job in Bristol, a city close to Bath, transferring eons of data onto Hollerith punch card – do not bend, fold, staple or mutilate - somewhat ironic as I spent most of my later life working for IBM where in the later 1960’s everything was taken off punch cards and put onto magnetic tape!

I met Lucie at a lecture. I have no memory of that talk, not even of the subject, nor how I got to talk to Lucie, but it was one of those immediate bonding moments. I might rather have thought of it as simply lust, or at best infatuation, on my part that is, but I had not come anywhere close to acknowledging such feelings for women in myself back then. We became friends, hiking at weekends, “doing lunch,” going off for picnics in her rattletrap old Austin 7 – something of an equivalent in Britain to the Model T in this country.
I was deliriously happy.

Lucie was extremely attractive and sexy. I’m sure I was not the only woman whose body parts twitched simply at the thought of her, and an endless line of men constantly offered to lay their lives at her feet. She went from one torrid affair to another, or sometimes indulged in them simultaneously, but every man fell short in one way or another.

So one day Lucie and I rattled off to Bath, not to take the waters - we had packed bottles of cheap chianti - but at least to lounge in them. For this purpose Lucie wore a very sexy very skimpy bikini that drove my heart rate up to what I’m sure was a dangerous level, especially while coming slowly to a boil in the “caldarium!”
She talked of her latest inamoratas, mainly grieving for one who had recently left to do a post-grad year at Rice in Houston. I had noticed with before that Lucie’s men were frequently viewed more favorably in absentia.

After a few minutes’ silence, bobbing about it the hot water, I was practically asleep despite my elevated blood pressure. Suddenly I heard Lucie’s voice, as if in a dream.
“Let’s go to America.”
I started and gulped and did in fact take the waters, if unintentionally.
‘Yeah. OK.”
And that was that.

Just as well for me that she wasn’t hankering after some guy in Baghdad or Darfur. My answer would probably have been the same.
Doesn’t it seem that the pivotal moment that changes the course of your life forever should be marked with something more dramatic, more insightful, than,
“Yeah. OK.”

©  10/22/2012

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.