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THE Bathroom

- Jenny Coolidge

The Bathroom.  A stage, a crowded bus stop, a mosquito breeding haven, my salvation.  Not just any bathroom, The Bathroom. Five other volunteers and I went to The Bathroom to change clothes and do bathroom-ish things before rafting on our firstt vacation, during our first month in China.  We knew what to expect, ammonia saturated air filling a room that clorox had forgotten for at least a decade. We thought we were ready. We marched in, arms filled with swimsuits, sunscreen, apprehension, and tissues and met amazement in the form of forty sweaty desperate women lined up like stacked pancakes in front of each stall. Pancakes with arms and hands that slapped at the thick poison air filled with mosquitos. Eighty pairs of eyes trained on the exposed women crouching over a trough in front of them, no doors to protect them and only half-high walls to separate the women onstage. Silently and menacingly the women in line pressured the perfomers to hurry but they took their time as unaffected as could be, unflinchingly going about their business as if they were not half naked, onstage, and doing bathroom-ish things. We stood, pressed against the filthy wall, arms and bladders full, wondering dumbly what we should do next.  Change.  Right there in a crowd of strangers, we stripped, grateful to the martyrs onstage over troughs, distracting attention from our pale ridiculous bodies.  Everyone but a good friend and I had changed clothes, assessed the onstage excretion performance for a split second and willed their bladders to persevere.  We didn't have that kind of strength.  We got in line.  Waiting in line and not wishing to stare at the performance of bathroom-ish things, we averted our eyes to the floor and wished we hadn't.   The floor was covered in at least an inch of water? and mosquito larve. Gingerly we moved our feet up in line.  The sweat and water? Condensed walls offered little more comfort than did taking in the irritated, strained faces of the women waiting in line all around us.  We moved up in line and looked at each other.  The eyes replaced the words.  Our turn, I on the outer stall, she in the second one in. Trying not notice the stares. Impossible.  The voices got quiet in the line for my stall, and the line next to me.  "Do foreigners do bathroom-ish things the way Chinese people do?"  "Almost, but they seem to turn a bit red in the faces. Foreigner flush, induced by urination." I heard them say with their faces as they noticed my discomfort and agitation squatting in front of twenty people who were assessing my every move.  Then, the stage fright.  I  couldn't do it. There was no way.  I started to get up and squatted right back down at the thought of punishing my bladder for the next four hours. Giggles.  There's no way this was going to happen.  I'd forgotten how.  The mechanics of it were absurdly complex in this setting.  With the aid of time and a berating inner voice, a lifetime later, it was over. Triumphantly, I whipped out my tissues when a pair of flailing airborne legs flew upward in my peripheral vision.  Black flip flops.  I felt so bad for that woman, whoever she was, especially considering the present environment.  I thought of the water on the floor and cringed. I stood up and walked offstage and straight into the biggest, most shocked and appalled pair of eyes I had ever recognized.  My friend, who had been in the next stall, showed me the left side of her body which was saturated with water from her unfortunate meeting with the bathroom floor. Near tears, she kept asking if it was all over her, is it in her hair, did I think is was just water, what should she do?  I was sure that it was water and I told her so, but that wasn't what she asked.  You can't always hear question marks. I led her outside, feeling so bad for her and her new found diseases that I could be nothing but cheerful and laugh at the whole situation. Chortling and hooting at the absurdity of the entire situation, the stage, she turning out to be the woman that I felt so bad for, and the awards that she would recieve for her absurd calamity and all of the jokes that were sure to come out of this, we walked out and past the row of vendors selling weapons of water assault. There was no changing out of her clothes and no standing the water being on her skin.  A bucket full of large water guns held the answer. I grabbed one as if I were testing it out before buying it and sprayed her until she was soaking wet.  The definition of friendly fire.  We formed a bond to last the whole trip as the absurdity of the experience came to its denouement and an undying story was born.