The classic Ivory soap bar contained sodium tallowate, sodium cocoate, or sodium palm kernelate, water, sodium chloride, sodium silicate, magnesium sulfate, and fragrance.
The way soap bends like sponge, a new formula.
What it means when we bend soap.
It is well with my soul.
Mercy thinks about the way the soap disappears every day. The way it creates a static ring, rings in rings, until the crust is thick, the crust is thick. Mercy loves the way her father's cheek is still warm when she hugs it, it feels round and fleshy as if his whole body was that way.
The Ivory soap of today is made of acids, coconut acid, palm kernel acid, tallow acid, palm acid.
We put acid on our skin, how it dries our hands, how the skin flakes when we wring them.
Mercy doesn't use soap, or at least she didn't until she came back to her father's house to take care of him. There is no body wash in the house, no liquid soap, bars of white stacked one on top of another,
one on top of another.
It is will with my soul.
Mercy uses the soap because there is nothing else there.
Ivory soap has a laundry detergent called Ivory Snow. Ivory Snow, Mercy loves that name.
Mercy names her children all the time, while she is driving, while she is doing the dishes, while she's on dates, espeically then. Mercy changes names all the time. When she was young she wanted to name her daughter Duranna, and then Kennedy, and then Cohen, what about Ivory Snow. Patrick #1 wanted to name his daughter Constance, after his mother, he said when he lied and tried to say that she was dead. Patrick #2 wanted to name his son Tex and didn't care about having any girls. Mercy doesn't know if she could ever be a parent. She was almost a parent once with Patrick #1 but she lost the baby and never told him. If he knew, if he only knew. If she would have had a baby with Patrick #1 her life would be ruined. No turning back. Thank God it didn't happen.
It is well with my soul.
The soap starts to give her rashes, give her burns, give her dry spots on the insides of her elbows and the sides of her breasts. She doesn't ever have the heart to tell her father. She never has the heart to throw the bars of soap away. She doesn't have the heart to stop using it on her father and on herself.
Her father's frail skin doesn't react the same way to it. She got this sensitive skin from her mother.
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