Editorial Assistant Kenna Corey: Gwen E. Kirby’s “How to Retile Your Bathroom in 6 Easy Steps!” (excerpt here) utilizes the conventions of an instructional manual to uniquely represent the interiority of a woman experiencing disruption and loss. Kirby expertly crafts distinct sections, each labeled with basic instructions for the home renovation project that the focal character, Miranda, is undertaking, like: “1. Plan ahead. Remember, your bathroom will be out of commission for a few days.”
Each instruction is paired with Miranda’s personal instructions for coping with her husband’s infidelity and betrayal, such as: “Do not remember the many times the orthodontist had her hands in your sons’ mouths, stretched their lips as wide as hungry baby birds’. Do not imagine those hands on your husband’s body.” The impartiality of the how-to, paired with the powerful emotionality of Miranda’s processing, provides tension between the said and unsaid.
The act of tiling over the bathroom is an expression of Miranda’s need to find a physical way to compensate for the things she cannot say and emotions she cannot explain, an attempt to find agency in her destabilized world. This tension is further explored in descriptions of her relationships with her children, one of whom she sends to obtain supplies for her project.
Her boys, though impacted by the same loss, are at a distance from her, and Miranda struggles with finding ways to communicate with them. For example, near the end of the story, Kirby writes, “Open your eyes to see your oldest son in the doorway. He is worried about you. His hands are shoved into his pockets. He wants and does not want you to speak to him like the grown man he almost is. And maybe that would be best.”
Kirby expertly weaves together the contradictions, like “wants and does not want,” or the care Miranda takes to retile the floor and the fact that “water will always find a way to sneak between the grout and the tile, between the tile and the floor.” No matter how much Miranda attempts to salvage the floor, it is not safe, in the same way her bond with her husband was not.
The piece’s consistent second-person address makes the distance tangible, and the reader experiences the pain of a suffering family with Miranda. Kirby’s utilization of the instructional genre invokes such empathy in the reader; you wish you could perfectly tile the floor for Miranda, following the instructions perfectly, but instead must accept that “it is not any better than the previous bathroom floor. In fact, it is worse. Your tiles are crooked and do not lie flat. They dip and jut as if riding the last of the wake from a now-distant ship.”
Kenna Corey is a first-year masters student in the literary and cultural studies program at the University of Cincinnati and a Cincinnati native.
