Zenitopia

People say I’m too picky about public restrooms. I suppose they must be right because even as a small child going to lunch at the Officer’s Club with my grandparents, I would have to inspect every stall, and find the cleanest one, and once I did, my grandmother would remind me, “Don’t forget to put paper on the seat.” This was before the tissue seat-liners were in common use.

My husband finds my bathroom squeamishness both endearing and annoying. At home, I have walked out of restaurants with my face turning green if the restrooms weren’t clean enough, skipping postprandial shopping trips in exchange for the comfort of my gleaming porcelain throne at home. We are not at home, however, but in Baja California Sur, Mexico. When you’re in a foreign country, you put up with restroom conditions you would run away from, screaming in terror, at home.

It is my grandmother’s reminder about tissue that is ringing in my head as I approach the toothless old man guarding the cash-box in the parking lot where we’ve left my parents’ old Jeep. His smile turns into a leer when he notices what I’m wearing. It is December, and though the thermometer in the car read 76 when we parked, the breeze off the water is cool enough to make me shiver in my touristy sundress. All the natives are in sweaters and jeans.

“Do you have a restroom?” I ask, in Spanish half-remembered from a high school class decades before, in which I spent more time flirting than actually paying attention. The department store restroom had one working stall, thirty women in line, and no toilet paper. The cafe where we had dessert didn’t have working restrooms at all. I’ve had two mochas and a bottle of water and I am desperate.

He bobs his head and points toward a weathered door attached to the mud-splattered cement building. I open the door, and find myself in a dark cement closet with a dirt floor. Something scurries away from the light cast by the open door. To my left, there is a black nothingness, from which chittering sounds emanate; to my right is another weathered door, this one louvered. I think it must be the missing shutter from the bar down the street because it’s painted the same green. Or it was once, anyway.

The toilet sits with the lid and seat both raised and a plunger in the back corner of the closet (it’s too small to be a room). There is no light switch, but a bulb and cord dangle above my head. I return to the first doorway, and poke my head out to Sr. Toothless, for help with the light. A thought crosses my head and I ask for toilet paper as well.

He comes running over, moving faster than his bony frame would seem to allow, his scuffed work boots kicking dust into the rolled up cuffs of his chinos. He hands me the toilet paper roll and then reaches up to plug in the light. I almost wish he hadn’t, because now I can see that the water in the toilet is brown. He leaves me there in the flickering light of the swaying bulb.

I use my foot to lower the seat, and skip the bit about wrapping it in tissue because I don’t want to touch it. Instead, I squat over it, and do my business as quickly as possible, while trying not to look at the floor or the walls (Especially not the walls.) I tuck the toilet paper roll beneath my chin as I rearrange my underwear and skirt, flush, and escape into the fresh air and slanted afternoon sunshine.

My husband is waiting outside with my purse. “Are you okay, Love?” he asks, responding to the mixed signs of relief and disgust on my face.

I nod. “I’m alive,” I say.

We leave the parking lot and return to the streets, walking through the alley to the waterfront. I know that on the ride home I will embellish the tale of the cement bathroom, make the creatures visible and dangerous. By the time I’m back in the States, the toothless parking attendant will be a muscular young man who flirts with me when my husband isn’t looking.

People say I’m too picky about public restrooms.
Sometimes I’m not picky enough.

Originally published at The Novelette, as part of their first-quarter writing contest. Please visit their site.

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Image credit: http://velma-dacron.livejournal.com/.

The sun was warm, enticing, shining through her office window and warming her back through the glass. It made a bit of a glare on the computer screen, and she turned around with the intent to close the blinds and finish work, when a butterfly alighted on the tree branch just outside her window.

She watched it for a long moment, saw its wings slowly opening and closing. It wasn’t particularly pretty, not a monarch or anything, but it compelled her to watch, nevertheless. She realized she was timing her breathing to the fragile creature’s movements.

In the space of a moment, she decided to shut down her work for the day, and go outside.

The grass had never seemed greener, the air never cleaner, the world never brighter. She sat cross-legged on one of the lawn chairs.

And a butterfly landed on her head.

Their first date had been to dinner and a movie, and they’d ended up in bed.

Their second date was an all-day trip to San Francisco. She didn’t live there any more, but she believed everyone should see it. She was wearing flowered stretchpants, a baggy sweater, walking boots. He was wearing jeans, a t-shirt and a trench-coat. They held hands, and bumped their hips against each other as they walked.

They stopped in a comic book store, for him.
A stationery store, for her.
A sword store, because they both wanted to see the shiny metal weaponry.

Later that night, on a pier overlooking the ocean, they held hands and kissed, and the salt air stung their faces but they didn’t care.

Ten years later, they would separately remember the first days of their life together. Life wasn’t so bad now, but there were stressful jobs, mortgages, car payments - so many things they hadn’t had to deal with a decade earlier.

She keeps a box of his old letters to her, opens it from time to time. The one about just sitting and holding her hand makes her cry, and the tears taste like salt, but they don’t sting.

He wants to know what’s wrong.

“Nothing,” she says. “I just love you.”

January 2007. I’m sitting in Aveda, and talking with my stylist/colorist Natalie. Natalie rocks. Natalie understands that I have no problem trying stuff. As I always tell her, “It’s hair. It grows back.”

She asks me if we’re doing the same chocolate brown we’ve been doing. I say, “You know, I’ve been having fantasies of dying my hair pink.”

She says, “Really? All of it or just highlights. You should do highlights, see if you like it.” She scurries off to the supply closet and returns with a tube of something called Fire Rocket Red or Rockstar Red. Something like that. It’s not pink. But it’s very cool. And so we bleach a few strands, color a few strands, and I have streaks of vibrant punk-rock red in my hair for the next few weeks. She tells me, “Aveda doesn’t make these colors any more, so if you like it, there’s stuff called Special Effects. Bring it in and we’ll discount the color.” She writes down three shades.

I order them all.

Meanwhile, I enjoy having my red streaks.

I was sitting at Center Stage having spiral curls twisted into my Celtic-red colored hair, and watching the stylist across the room blow out the hair of a woman with hair so pink that all the pink crayons in the universe looked cheap by comparison. The style was simple, the hair, glossy and healthy. The color was pink. Unabashedly pink. It stuck in my head, in my heart. Someday, I said, I would have the same color.

I went home that night and told my husband what I’d seen, what I wanted. “Your hair is beautiful the way it is,” he said.

But that wasn’t the point.

Pink hair is a statement. Even if the statement is one you make only to yourself.