by Jill Soloway
That’s correct, you heard me right, if I am alone in the bathroom, I pee, wipe, flush, and head back into Nordstrom. If there is someone else in the bathroom with me, I will wash my hands, but only for sound effects purposes. I have even been known to turn the water on and then off again just to allay the worries of my hidden stall-mate, but not actually wash my hands. I only do this sound scam if I am in a hurry, and yes, I do understand that it is pathological.
Now that I have a son, I teach him to wash his hands after we use a public restroom. I have been trying to break the generational cycle of grotesqueries which were handed down to me. This is where my deep searching began about how much to see, and how much to let him see. When he was a toddler, naturally, I had to be in the room with him when he went to the bathroom, just to point the manflower, or mayhaps, the manstamen, in the right direction. Now that he’s eight, it’s probably time for me to start letting him wipe his own ass, but honestly, I really am better at it.
My son has always wanted to be with me when I was in the bathroom. I used to call him my tiny terrorist, like I was a prisoner of war. I would set him up in front of a Clifford video, then sneak off to the bathroom. The second my legs hit the seat, however, sensors would go off in his brain that would let him know That Lady was missing. Apparently he couldn’t stand the thought of me taking a giant crap without him getting a chance to see it all. He’d rush to the door, and start pounding, yelling LET ME IN! LET ME IN! WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THERE?
I’d cry out in a tragic voice, I’m going to the bathroom, please let me have some privacy! His yelling and pounding would stop, but he wouldn’t leave. In the silence, I could hear his mouth-breathing panting, his hot red cheek pressed up against the door.
“I know you’re out there!” I would cry. “Please leave me alone!”
He wouldn’t answer. His little breaths would subside and I could hear tiny footsteps walking away. Ahhh. I’d relax onto the can and send signals to my anus that it, too, could relax. But soon enough I would hear his footsteps return, and a book would slide under the door, the teensy tips of his fingers budging it in.
“Can you read this to me?”
“I’M GOING TO THE BATHROOM, CAN YOU PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE?”
“Yes but can you read that to me when you get out?”
“I WILL READ YOU THE BOOK WHEN I GET OUT NOW PLEASE JUST STEP AWAY FROM THE DOOR. JUST GET AWAY FROM THE DOOR!”
But it was too late. My sphincter had gotten the message: no go. I’d toss my bunched up toilet paper into the toilet, pull up my pants, glance at the empty bowl, flush, neglect to wash my hands, and huff out. “Okay, let’s go sit down and read.”
I am trying to do everything differently for my son. As a parent, it’s my job to protect him from falling down the stairs or eating loads of pixie sticks or sitting on the bathroom floor and watching his mother take a dump every afternoon. Much like pound cake for dinner, just because he thinks he wants it doesn’t mean he should.
And now that my son is eight, manners in public restrooms are out of my jurisdiction. We were recently at a movie theater with a co-ed group of second graders when two girls reported that they had SEEN TYLER IN THE LADIES’ ROOM WITH HIS MOTHER!!!!!! Powerful peals of laughter erupted that threatened to shake the foundations of the multiplex. The children made a secret, wordless pact to exclude Tyler from all group activities, and it was obvious Tyler would not feel whole again until he got accepted at Wesleyan, a college filled with guys who spent too much time in the women’s room.
But what am I supposed to do? Let my precious eight-year-old boy walk into a men’s room without me? A room where men STAND IN A ROW AND GET THEIR PENISES OUT IN FRONT OF EACH OTHER?! This is ding dong crazy! What if women walked into the ladies room and there was a row of women sitting on the toilets for all to see? Would we greet each other? Or would we use the same code of silence I hear men use when in the bathroom: Chat at the sinks if need be, but never with penis in hand.
Which reminds me, it’s been a few chapters since my political haranguing. The fact that men pee in front of each other and women don’t seems to be more evidence of a conspiracy. The world sees male genitalia as acceptable, yet vaginas are so hideous they must always be kept behind doors, stalls, or shrink-wrapped in pantyhose.
And as long as we are on the topic, I guess we should be honest. It doesn’t matter how many Women’s Studies paintings or self-help videos encourage us to glory in the beauty of our vaginas. I’m sorry, but have you ever just looked down at it and thought WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? You tilt your head this way, then that, trying to see where the whole ‘beautiful’ business comes in, but it’s elusive.
Returning to my son—which is a really hard thing to do when I’m talking about my vagina—although I’ve started to let him go to the bathroom by himself, it’s not easy. Yesterday after I picked him up from school we stopped at a restaurant in Hollywood for a pre-dinner dinner. After we ordered he said he had to go to the bathroom. I looked around. The place was deserted— there isn’t a huge pre-dinner dinner crowd in LA. “Okay,” I said, and took a breath. “Go ahead.”
I could see the men’s room door from where I was sitting and my son headed toward it. But time stopped and turned to slow motion when a man appeared, seemingly dropped from the ceiling. He was potato-shaped, Filipino, and with odd glasses. I say this to give you fun details for your reading pleasure and not to imply that any one or any combination of those three things make someone a child molester. Anyone heading to a deserted men’s room with my son—even a three hundred pound black man—would have been suspect. And now Filipino Potato was right next to him, in the middle of the restaurant, heading into the last third of the trek to the bathroom TOGETHER, as together as Karen and Richard Carpenter walking into a sunset on an album cover. I did miniscule calculations that weighed the implied insult against the possibility of a fondle, and my son won.
“One second!” I shouted.
Filitato looked at me. My boy looked at me. “I, uh— wanted to show you this—thing,” I said. I looked at the table… “in my Dayrunner!” My son came back to the table. I pointed at something in my Dayrunner just in case Potapino was still watching.
“Look, look at this.” My kid couldn’t figure out what in the world was so interesting about a Dayrunner. In the distance, the door to the men’s room closed.
“I just didn’t want you to go in the bathroom when anyone else was in there.”
He rolled his eyes. Everyone—Dink, his father, his school—had drilled him that he needs to constantly be on the lookout for someone wishing to do wrong things to his privates. When it first came up in preschool, I kept him home the day they showed the cartoony pictures of men with neatly trimmed beards kneeling down to touch the children’s crotches. My son hadn’t even found out what sex was yet, he hadn’t even found out that having a penis was mostly good news. All he really knew was that pee came out of it. I needed him to know that his sex organs were primarily there for pleasure and procreation. The idea that strangers wanted to harm him by touching his penis seemed information that needed to wait, at least a couple of years.
Turns out there’s no way to win this one. Keep your children home the day they do child molestation prevention and suddenly the rumors flow that you’re running a kiddie porn ring out of your living room, and you’re off the playdate rotation. It didn’t help matters when, after I looked at the literature they were using, I pulled the director of the preschool aside to inform her that they were incorrect in telling the girls that no one should ever touch their vaginas, as vaginas were actually internal sex organs and that the correct terminology was “vulva.” Rather than thanking me for the adjustment, she looked at me like I was a nutter.
It was all just too soon and too much, that I knew. I wanted to do it right, this parenting thing. I had to find a way to help my kid grow up without shame about his body. I wished there were a way to make sex be a regular, natural thing, not a frightening, secret thing that on
ly could be cloaked in shame. Luckily, he has made it clear he wants to know NOTHING. Nothing at all. The few times I tried to talk about what sex is, one or both of us ended up crying.
It’s not just sex and peeing and bathrooms, I’m trying to get my son’s entire childhood right. I look back at mine with such dismay that I question everything I do, all in the name of trying to set up a living environment that won’t traumatize him. My parents just went about their business, there was no violence, no cans thrown, and look at me. I’ve been complaining for 153 pages now and have 75 to go. All I can do is hope that when my kid writes his book it won’t be about me.
Early on I decided I wouldn’t do anything in front of my child that I wouldn’t do on a first date. I didn’t want to be in danger of overstimulating him. That meant I couldn’t cry, flop around the house braless, or fart, which seemed to be reasonable limits. Soon I took out the part about the bra. If you can’t walk around your own house without a bra, what’s the point of being home, anyway?
A few years later, when Dink moved in, it was time to incorporate his ways into our family ethos. Dink is one generation older, from The Generation Without Irony. Self-awareness simply is not funny to him. Maybe it’s people who remember Kennedy. Maybe it’s people who believed in something. All I know is that a lot of people born before 1955 don’t like to talk about what they’re doing while they’re doing it. They don’t start sentences with “How weird is it that right now I’m…”
This appealed to me in Dink’s personality. He would simply go to the bathroom, shut the door, take a shit, and light incense if necessary. Me, I’m not that way. Not so much. I would head toward the bathroom, proud that I wasn’t announcing that I was going to the bathroom, pick up a magazine, make a joke on my way in that “just because I have a magazine and I’m heading toward the bathroom doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything unladylike in there,” then shut the door, take a shit, realize I didn’t have matches, run back to the kitchen, yell to everyone to stay away from the bathroom, get the matches, wave them in the air and say, “Please ignore the lady with the matches,” run back to the bathroom, light the incense, run back out and try to act like nothing happened, and then comment on the relative success of the entire comedy bit I just did.
Then, as you can see now, it would all get written in a book. But I’m not just writing about what happens in my house when I shit, which would in itself be enough of a problem, but rather, writing about how my examination of shitting continues into writing about shitting, which turns this entire paragraph into the most meta-exhibitionist sense-around logorrheic shitstorm imaginable. In other words, if you aren’t running to the bathroom right now to vomit, I commend you.
No, I can’t let go of anything, even when it gets ugly, a lot like my mom when she’s on a chicken bone. I am first generation Not Jewish Ghetto, but I was raised Jewish Ghetto, which means I witnessed, as part of a daily and regular dinner table show, people smacking and snarking on chicken bones, getting so deeply into the marrow that what’s left is a stick of holes through which the wind whistles, people sucking their teeth clean with their tongue and a sharp inhalation, people reaching into their mouth to pick at pieces of beef in a molar. I learned how to crack the cartilage knob off the end of a chicken bone and chomp on it like gum until no more pops are heard, and how to use saliva, even if it reeks of yesterday’s red onion, to get stains out of shirts and off of children’s faces. I learned that lettuce should be cut by putting an entire leaf into your mouth, using your teeth as a chopper, letting the remainder fall onto your plate. Yes, I saw a lot of things. Bad things.
But now that Dink and I are trying to cobble together our own traditions, I am attempting to weave a tapestry of my overly-self-conscious style with his natural, rootsy ways. Dink instituted the tradition that we close the door when we pee, lock it for anything more. He averted his eyes enough times during meals that he taught me to cut the food with a knife before it goes in my mouth, rather than with my teeth, after. He taught me it may not be necessary to get off the phone by saying, “Okay, I have to go take a shit now,” and that to leave it at “I’ll be going now” is not a sin of omission.
He also taught me that not everything has to be hidden, and that it’s not just Jews who give bodily functions names. Where he comes from, they call farts “fluffies,” which is one of the most disgusting things I have ever heard. Making it sound pink and cute is even worse than referring to it directly. Indeed, he had relatives that used phrases like “wee-wee and dookie,” “puddles and bundles,” and “sissy and bunches,” which made me grateful for something so straightforward as “pee and BM.”
To be fair, we do burp in front of each other. Burps are not only tolerated, but welcomed. A particularly resonant one even gets a shout-out, a “nice push” or “lovely” in the call-and-response bird sounds of day-today family life. And, if I’m really being honest, my son does just freely send farts (I WILL NEVER, EVER SAY FLUFFY) around the house, as loud and horrid-smelling as anyone could ever wish for, and they are always duly noted.
A milestone in our lives occurred when Dink’s teenage daughter visited us and farted loudly in the living room. At first she giggled, embarrassed, and Dink said, “Amy!” But I was trained in the mother-daughter overbonding ways: “Leave her alone,” I said, “that’s how we know we’re family.” It truly was a lovely, foul-smelling moment. And hopefully, it’s a moment you will find sweet enough to end this chapter. I wanted to craft something delightful, meaningful yet snarky, but if you want me to be honest, and I know you do—right now, like right right right now, my little booty is a’ callin’ me to run to the can and deliver unto it a big ol’ heaping pile of….
I mean, um, I’ll be going now.
12
Diamonds
Being a TV writer and producer is really, really fun. As I mentioned earlier, it’s like being paid to play a long game of Barbies. There are tons of real-world perks as well: The costume department can get you a Juicy sweat suit wholesale, the set painters will come over and faux wood your fireplace mantle, and the prop girl will let you wear a gigantic diamond ring for a week.
Our prop girl’s name was Monica. Any time we had a character who was supposed to be married, she would come to the set carrying a black velvet tray of giant, sparkly wedding rings. In season three, I wrote an episode of Six Feet Under that had three suburban wifey types in it. They were waiting in line to see a Dr. Phil–like character we called Dr. Dave. It was the first time I did a superspecial trick in my TV writing: I opened the episode on a billboard of the title of the talk show—Making Love Work—which was also the title of the episode—“Making Love Work.” I feel the phrase “making love work” is nigh on highlarious because of its double meaning—yes, making love turn out okay, but also making love into a horrendous job, tedious work, which it truly is.
Monica came to me with the tray. All three of these women were supposed to be housewives on their big day out to a TV taping, and so they needed rings, even though there’s no chance in hell anyone would see said rings in the final airing. Clearly, the actresses had to have them for their character development. If a character is written as married, they wear rings, even if we never see their hands close up. Now that there’s HDTV and Tivo, we do even more detail patrol just to appease the freak who freeze-frames and blows up the picture to catch a mistake and write an angry letter to HBO, demanding a refund from their local cable provider.
All of the rings on Monica’s tray were cubic zirconia, but they were the high-end kind that had bands that weren’t split on the underside. I chose three for the TV wives, then pulled out one more.
“Monica, could I wear one for a week?” I asked. “I promise I’ll give it back to you.” She looked around to make sure no one more important than me was watching, then let me take one.
I chose a big huge square cut rock on a white gold band, deciding that it cost around $45,000, and slid it on my ring finger. That day, I marveled at how heavy my left
hand felt. Normally I never wear any jewelry at all, neither a ring nor a bracelet nor a watch, so it felt quite strange. I constantly gazed at my $45,000 finger, ashamed at how bad my unmanicured nails looked in such close proximity. One thing was clear—the diamond and manicure industries are clearly interdependent, creating a secret sister-city bond between Cape Town and Phnom Penh that needs to be explored in a documentary one day.
But another thing was even more clear: I was suddenly a member of a club I’d had no idea existed. The scream would start a few feet away and I would tense up, wondering who had fallen off some scaffolding. But there was no fall. The scream was my fault, as Kira from post-production or Gail from makeup was coming toward me. “OOOHHH MY GOOOOOODDDDDDD! YOU FINALLY GOT ONE! AND SUCH A BIIIIG ONE!!!!”
Then they would invariably grasp my hand and wave it about, like the vultures waving Charlie’s hand as he held the Golden Ticket, a siren call to all within screeching distance. Women walked toward us, encircling me, each and every one of them needing to see it and hold it up to the light and speculate on its cost, doing miniscule calculations in their miniscule heads about our comparable values.
“OH MY GOD YOU GUYS! JILL GOT ONE! SHE GOT ONE!!!!”
Me, I’m not that way. I see a big diamond on someone’s finger and I say in the really high-pitched, legislated, fake way: “Wow! It’s really pretty!” But inside, I’m actually thinking BLARGURGH or FLUGHVOMIT or some other sound that I don’t know how to spell but it means I want to choke on my own soul.
It’s the same sound I make when I see those ads in the New York Times Magazine section, the ones that equate diamonds with proof that the woman has been good and deserves something to show for it. There’s one running right now that has two diamond rings. Next to the smaller ring, it said “Thank You Honey.” Next to the bigger ring it says: “Thank You, God.”
