Household Gods

have been a killer in the latest in short, tight, and Spandex, was too skinny by local standards. “You can’t win,” she said to herself.

Aurelia was tugging at her tunic again. “Mother! Mother, can I play?”

“No,” Nicole said absently. Then, with more focus: “No, there’s no one else your age playing. Come on inside.”

Aurelia didn’t protest too loudly. She was too excited by the whole adventure to quibble every detail of it. Nicole didn’t need to do anything clever to get her to lead the way. She aimed unerringly toward one of several doorways on the far side of the colonnade, into a room whose function was unmistakable. Two of the walls were bristling with pegs, some draped with items of clothing, others empty. While she stood just inside the doorway, letting her eyes adapt again from sunlight to indoor dimness, a woman slipped out of her tunic and drawers and hung them with her sandals on a peg. A clothed attendant sat on a stool nearby. She was probably supposed to be keeping an eye on things, but she looked half asleep.

Nicole hadn’t been nude in public since she’d escaped her last high-school p.e. class, for which she was heartily glad. No choice now — and the woman who’d just stripped off wasn’t anything special, either. Defiantly, she pulled her tunic off over her head and yanked down her loincloth. The roof didn’t fall in. The walls didn’t shake with laughter and jeers and cries of Skinny Minnie! and Hey, Horseface! No one took any notice of her at all.

Aurelia got out of her clothes in one fluid motion. She took it altogether for granted. When in Rome… Nicole thought, and grinned to herself. She wasn’t sure how amused she was, but the irony of the situation was hard to escape.

She looked down at herself. Sure enough, halfway between her belly button and the edge of her indifferently shaven bush was a nondescript brown mole. No doubt about it: Calidius Severus had seen this body naked — and paid attention to what he’d seen.

She sighed. Well, so had she, now. And isn’t it about time? Now everybody’s happy.

Once her eyes adapted, she saw the room was larger than she’d thought at first, and more crowded. A counter stood along the wall at the far end. A second attendant sat there, looking as bored as the first. When Nicole and Aurelia came up to her, she did as she’d done for the woman just ahead of them: she handed Nicole a small, cheap earthenware jar without a stopper and a bronze tool resembling a half-scale sickle.

What am I supposed to do with this? Nicole wondered. She looked around for the answer. Women sat naked on benches rubbing the stuff from the jars over themselves and then scraping it off with the sickle-like tools. She didn’t see any boys Lucius’ age, or any other age either. A soft murmur of conversation filled the room. A few women sat in pairs and threes, oiling and scraping one another, but most seemed to be there alone and comfortable with it.

While Nicole took it all in, Aurelia spotted an empty bench and dashed over to lay claim to it. “Come on, Mother!” she called. “You’re so slow today. Will you do me first, Mother, please? I want to go swim in the pool!”

Nicole picked her way past the benches full of preoccupied women. None of them looked up. Nobody stared or even seemed to notice her. She sat on the bench. Aurelia presented her narrow back and shoulders with an air of someone who knows very well what she is in for.

Nicole poured a little of the liquid from the jar into the cupped palm of her hand. It was olive oil, as she would have guessed by Julia’s odor fresh from the baths — not so good and, by the scent, not so fresh as what she used in the tavern, but unmistakably olive oil. This is going to get anybody clean?

One thing was certain: Aurelia had plenty of dirt on which to experiment. Nicole rubbed the oil over her. Aurelia was still at the age where she made a perfect figure one — all vertical lines, no curves whatever. But, though she was slim enough for her ribs to show, she wasn’t scrawny; her arms and legs had plenty of flesh on them.

“Mother!” she squeaked when Nicole began to scrape off the olive oil. “The strigil tickles!”

That gave Nicole the name of the tool she was awkwardly wielding. Amazing, how much dirt it took off with the oil. It wasn’t as good as soap would have been, but it wasn’t bad. And she only had to tell Aurelia to stop wiggling about half a dozen times.

After she’d finished with Umma’s daughter — her daughter now — she swallowed a twinge of revulsion and rubbed oil into her own skin, all over. It had a slimy, slippery feel, like cold cream gone bad, or rancid baby oil. Aurelia begged to help. Nicole handed her the strigil. “Here, you do my legs.” Aurelia was happy to oblige. She did as good a job as one might expect, but grew bored with it and wandered off, humming to herself. Nicole finished the rest, twisting awkwardly to do her back and buttocks. It was truly astonishing how well the oil lifted dirt. Her skin was a couple of shades lighter, and it hadn’t even seen water yet.

A man’s voice sent her into a purely reflexive jump-and-curl, one arm over her breasts, the other over her privates. The owner of the voice sauntered in beside and a little behind one of the women who’d been exercising in the courtyard, the one who looked astonishingly like Elizabeth Taylor and seemed to have about the same fondness for gold and outsized stones. No diamonds, Nicole was rather disappointed to note. The jewels were huge, but looked rough and barely polished; they ran heavily to garnets and amber.

The woman skinned her tunic over her rigidly curled and plaited head and strolled, unconcernedly naked, to a vacant bench. She lay on her belly and rested her head on her folded arms, sighing and wriggling her ample buttocks as if to get comfortable on the well-worn wood.

Her escort was a type Nicole would have recognized in L.A. He’d have been showing off his buff pecs on the beach and trying out for roles on Baywatch, back where Nicole came from. Here he seemed to have settled into the life of a kept studmuffin. He bent over his — mistress? that could be taken several different ways — and began to rub her back. She purred with pleasure. Nobody could miss the sound: it echoed through the room.

Was he a slave? Was he her slave? Did the baths provide a masseur if you paid extra? Nicole didn’t know the answers to any of those questions. Another one occurred to the lawyerly side of her, one that made her laugh to herself: how many masseurs figured in divorce actions in Carnuntum?

Aurelia was hopping up and down with impatience. “Mother! Are you asleep? I asked you. Shall we go on the hot plunge now, or the cool one?”

Nicole shook herself back into line. “The hot one,” she answered promptly. The man’s muscles hadn’t roused her a bit, but her insides went all soft and quivery at the thought of hot water.

She’d chosen right for Aurelia, too: the child clapped her hands and danced. She skipped ahead through one of two doorways at the far side of the stripping-off room. More women had been going through that doorway than through the other. So it wasn’t just Nicole’s twentieth-century sensibility. In a world in which hot water wasn’t simply to be had at the turning of a tap, people valued it all the more.

The hot plunge was a small swimming pool, although Nicole had never before gone into a pool with a mosaic of voluptuously naked women on the bottom. Their hair was green — sea nymphs? She sighed as she lowered herself into the water: the temperature was just what she would have wanted in her own tub.

Some of her pleasure died abruptly. This water hadn’t come from a nice safe heater in a corner of the laundry room. Slaves had hauled wood to feed the fires that heated the pool. There was human sweat in it, and human blood, too.

She couldn’t wallow in liberal guilt every time she made a new move.

This whole world looked to be a liberal’s nightmare. Too much of it would have been her nightmare if she’d known what it was really like.

Well, she hadn’t. And she was here, and she was staying here, and that was that. She shut off the corner of her mind that niggled her with guilt, and went back to reveling in the feel of hot water on her skin.

Aurelia had slid into the plunge a little way down. Now she came paddling up to Nicole, sleek as a fish. “Come here,” Nicole said. “We’re going to do your hair.”

Aurelia didn’t like getting ducked, not even slightly. She spluttered and squawked and wiggled, none of which did her any good. Nicole was all for empowering children, but not when they had heads full of lice and nits. She did the best job she could with hot water and no shampoo, and had to hope it would be enough.

When she’d finished tormenting Aurelia, she worked at her own hair and scalp with fingers and nails till she could feel the sting of water in scrapes and scratches. Maybe she’d managed to unload the current cargo of vermin.