Household Gods

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.