The Ladies’ Room By Sophia Kaufman
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“I am not afraid of storms for I am learning to sail my ship.” ~ Louisa May Alcott, Angell Hall bathroom stall “I’ll be your guide on stormy waters until your bravery takes the rudder, Little Poseidon, the sea is only yours.” ~ Anonymous response to Louisa May Alcott, Angell Hall bathroom stall
M
y memories of the girls’ bathroom transcending its literal use started with Marshmallow. My best friend in second grade, Amy, was a redheaded pipsqueak with innocent blue eyes and an impish grin that could melt the hearts of the toughest nuns at Saint Ignatius Loyola School. I called her Marshmallow, for no reason other than that she called me Cookie. I can’t remember how that started. Amy moved from Manhattan to Staten Island the summer after third grade without a warning, leaving me with a bendable six-inch ruler from McDonald’s, a secret, and probably abandonment issues I haven’t fully worked through, but I digress. Amy and I became inseparable the day she knocked out my front tooth. We were lined up on the staircase, and she was on the step below me. Straightening up from retrieving a dropped pencil case, her head collided with my chin. She escorted me to the girls’ bathroom by the cafeteria, me bloody and she teary-eyed but both of us enjoying the attention of other kids, and the kind of hard and fast friendship that can only come out of such an experience was born. We became infamous for passing notes in class, but soon decided it was too risky under the jealous noses of other kids or the hawkish eyes of teachers who would make us read our words aloud. We convened one day in December in our spot, freezing our butts off on the ledge by the open window inside the girls’ bathroom. Amy stood up on the windowsill and began pushing on the ceiling tiles above us, which she had realized could be loosened enough to slip a folded piece of paper under them. There was no way to tell the note was there unless you knew to look. We were thrilled. Amy was a genius, and I had my first shared secret.
I’m sure there were other places Amy and I could’ve hidden notes, but we never questioned our choice—that bathroom made sense. Whenever a girl wanted to tell a friend a secret during lunch, the only time of communion we had out of class, she’d stage whisper, “come to the bathroom with me,” and they’d get up and walk to the bathroom, giggling the whole way. Throughout the thirty minutes of lunchtime, there would be a steady stream of groups of girls walking self-importantly up the five stairs to the little hallway with the bathroom doors. The following conversations were often about drama: Anna liked Dennis, who danced with Caity at the social last Friday, who still had a crush on Steven, who was ignoring Sharon, who wasn’t speaking to me but that’s beside the point, which is that Patricia wasn’t talking to Anna because she liked Dennis too. You’re beautiful and you don’t need a man to complete you I’ll take a woman, though ^ Same ~Mason Hall bathroom That girls’ bathroom in Saint Ignatius saw a lot of shit go down, no pun intended. While memories of those dramatic bathroom conversations are perfectly preserved in my mind, sometimes they meant more than that, especially when they were one-on-one. In seventh grade at a school social, while I was hiding in the bathroom during a slow song, pretending I needed cool air from the window but really just avoiding the awkwardness of no one wanting to dance with me, my friend Clara joined me for the same reason. Clara and I weren’t close; we sang in the church choir together, but ran in different social circles. She was the nerd who everyone knew would be valedictorian and who kept to herself; I was the nerd on the lowest rung of the cool girl ladder. She made a joke about how boys never liked us because we were ugly. I was twelve and I believed her. I was short and wore glasses and had too-long brown hair and bad skin and unplucked eyebrows and a bit of an overbite.
