bathroom courtesies

4 hours to surgery and counting. I'm starving. No food allowed. On the other hand, water's fair game, so I've been entertaining myself by guzzling 32oz bottles at a time and waiting to see how big my bladder can get before I absolutely can't hold it in any longer. I'm betting it'll outgrow my breast if I try hard enough.

My coworkers would be thrilled about this game, I just know. Maybe I should let them in on it.

I was never part of the bathroom packs in high school. You know the ones. Groups of giggling girls with their garbage bag purses, heading towards the girl's restroom in a stampede that flattened all before it. For one thing, I didn't -- and still don't -- wear make-up. Make-up was the sign of the Woman. On the Cover Girl scale of maturity, I was still a toddler. Much of the time the female herd spent in bathrooms was wiled away in front of mirrors, touching up stucco makeup. Then there was the fact that I never really had that much to talk about. I was a freak among teenagers: this lack of subject matter actually bothered me. It didn't necessarily stop me from talking all the time, but it occasionally made me unsociably silent . . . an improvement from the times when I was unsociably vocal.

On top of all the rest however, the real reason I was never part of the bathroom pack was because, to be completely honest, I hated letting people hear me pee.

Who knows what childhood scar inflicted by my Jim Henson mother prompted this particular inhibition. Fifteen years later I still can't even say the word. I don't go "pee." I go to the bathroom. Go To The Bathroom in capital letters, thank you very much, a procedure that has the sanctity of ritual behind it and is therefore cleansed of anything so grossly biological as "pee." Pee is a letter. It is a member of the alphabet. It is not--

--you know. That. Going To The Bathroom.

It took me years to learn how to unlock my bladder when other people were in stalls nearby. My very presence in the bathroom was a secret to be hidden by late arrivals onto the scene. Hearing the door open in an otherwise deserted bank of stalls, I'd hold my breath, clench my . . . you know, and stealthily raise my feet so nobody peering through the bottom of the stalls could tell that anybody else was present.

I know it's irrational. Shut up. And if you think that's weird, you can only imagine how I felt about conversations held in bathrooms. Public humiliation, degradation and bodily noises, all rolled up into a spiffy Nine West purse.

Which brings me to my workplace. Bathrooms are weird in my workplace. While they've stopped short of actually making the bathrooms co-ed -- and the thought of that atrocity actually makes my heart skip a beat -- they've done the next best thing to it, which is by making the outer doors almost impossible to close. Bathroom doors in other places fall automatically closed, dragged shut by some massive spring. Not here in the Island of the Purple Monkeys. At any given time you can wander past the women's bathroom and hear the sharp echoes of tinkle-inkle-inkle-tink bouncing out of the room and into the hall, and from the hall into the first rank of cubicles next to the hall.

My Caucasian coworkers usually attempt to shut the door, only to be thwarted by a doorframe that rejects all attempts at cooperation with the revulsion of the Christian Right meeting Reason.

My Chinese coworkers tend to take a less dictatorial approach towards the door. Their attitude seems to be: if it has to be wide open to let me in, it has to be wide open to let me out. Why waste energy by closing it in between? As a result, I -- a firm Closer -- have had more than one trying episode in the bathroom, emerging from the imperfect privacy of the stall to find that my occasionally enthusiastic functions have been shared with four or five IT guys just a short step away.

I was seated in a stall one day, very quietly going about my business, when the bathroom door slammed open and a heavy-footed woman came storming in. The stall door next to mine banged shut, and there was a rustling sound of obvious origins.

Then a curious ringing.

"Hello?" the unknown woman said.

I froze. Was I supposed to answer? I shifted unhappily and stopped breathing.

"Hello?" tinkle.

Maybe I was supposed to answer. Feeling caught, I opened my mouth--

"Oh. Hello, Mr. ---. How are you? We haven't heard from you in a while." tinkle tinkle tinkle.

People, she had brought a phone into the bathroom stall with her. Not only was it a phone, it was the office phone. The receptionist's phone. It was a Board Member, wanting to talk to one of the Vice Presidents.

That was pretty much it for my bodily functions. Sharing them with an anonymous neighbor in the next stall is one thing. Sharing them with the world over the medium of cellular technology is another. Even if I'd wanted to, I couldn't; the Kegel my terror had prompted could have cracked the top off a Volvo. Unthinking, desperate to make my escape from the bathroom before the receptionist finished and came out, I scrambled myself together and flushed -- an unmistakable noise, even if tinkle-tinkle-tinkle somehow failed to penetrate the Board Member's consciousness -- before making a hasty nod to the gods of sanitation and dashing out the wide-open door.

Behind me, the receptionist was still cheerfully tinkle-inkle-inkling away. "Oh, sure. I can transfer you. Hold on, I have to check the number."

FLUSH.

3 hours to surgery. Hold that thought. I think my bladder's reached an A-cup.

I have to go see a man about a dog.