8 minute read
The Ladies' Room
My 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.
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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.
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.
I didn’t wear makeup, telling people disdainfully that I didn’t believe in it but secretly terrified that even makeup wouldn’t salvage the awkward mess I avoided looking at in mirrors. It wasn’t even so much that I believed her; I just knew she was right.
The bathroom was more of an escape in high school than it had been in middle school—because we didn’t have to ask permission to excuse ourselves, because most of us kept our phones in our plaid skirt pockets, because we had free periods that we could fill how we pleased, because we were older and better at manipulating the adults around us. The bathroom on the third floor was in the middle of all of our lockers and classrooms. I had a lot of tense, whispered conversations in there about selfharm, which most of my close friends and I struggled with.
We’ve all talked about it since then. None of us can remember how it started, although we all agree it was the most insidious form of peer pressure we’ve ever encountered. But it was more than just a copycat situation—something drew us all to it to begin with. Maybe it was a way of getting emotions out when we felt like we couldn’t actually change anything. We each thought it would help, that it would feel like release, when we started. It never did, but somehow, that wasn’t enough to stop. We were stuck in a limbo where we all wanted to talk to each other about it, but were worried that telling someone would make them feel like it was okay to do it themselves.
When we needed to talk about it at school, we called it “falling in the shower.” Every time Amanda wore her jacket all day, or Victoria avoided eye contact with me during English class, or Sam didn’t answer my texts during math, I knew. Falling in the shower became something of an epidemic sophomore year. The bathroom was the only place we could talk about it where there was no possibility of a teacher hearing us. Located in the middle of the whirlwind that was AP classes and SAT prep and auditions for musicals and fundraisers for charities and letter-writing campaigns and sports games and the tossing of tampons over each other’s heads and the wild speculation of what our math teachers did in their free time and stressful parents and incompetent college advisors and a terrible school psychologist who made everyone feel worse—the bathroom was the one private place we could go where we wouldn’t feel so alone.
Almost subconsciously, while writing a mockumentary film with my best friend about how kind drunk girls are in bathrooms, I started paying more attention to what was happening in women’s bathrooms around campus. That’s how I found myself spending a football Saturday—I specify “football Saturday” not because I care about football but because it might help paint a picture of me in a gray sweatshirt swimming through a sea of maize and blue—wandering in and out of women’s bathrooms on campus, looking at all the graffiti I could find scribbled on stall doors, etched into walls, even carved onto the toilet paper dispensers, trying to understand this lexicon so I could write about this new obsession for an essay.
Bathroom graffiti has always been an amusing distraction while otherwise engaged in a restroom, but I had never thought to look at it as its own kind of cumulative communication. The more I thought about it, the more I started to see it as a kind of language that all of us know how to read and write—a simultaneously learned and instinctive form of communication.
Some of what I saw I recognized from friends’ posts on Snapchat, Instagram, or Twitter. Some of the conversations or exchanges were surprisingly poetic. Some made me smile, others made me cringe; one made my stomach drop. In one bathroom, faintly scratched into the side of the stall underneath the toilet paper dispenser so you could barely see it, was: Campus rapists. A single name was listed in the same handwriting. There was no way to know how long that name has been there. Despite all the resources for survivors on campus, there is no other space for this kind of urgent, protective, raw warning from women to women. It wouldn’t be allowed anywhere else.
I went home after seeing that one, and immediately took a shower.
The graffiti included stick-figure doodles, messages to women in abusive relationships urging them to seek help, the validity of trans and nonbinary identities and fluid sexual orientations, the reality of a God, the climate crisis, the pain of unrequited love, arguments about the validity of anger, full paragraphs about things like the pros and cons of spending fifty thousand dollars on a university education, even full Bibles verses complete with citations. I felt like I had found an intellectual space in the least likely of places.
And so I want other people to understand what felt so clear to me. I spent so long hating myself and feeling like other women hated me; so did a lot of my friends. There’s so much cultural knowledge about girls hating each other. Everyone just keeps telling us.
Now, here I am surrounded by the truth and strength of women loving each other, and it feels like no one is talking about it. But the messages in the stalls tell me it’s all real, and it’s threatening to spill out.
So maybe I’m done with leaving notes in the bathroom ceiling tiles, and eating lunch sitting on the windowsill, and listening to people tell me I’m ugly, and hiding from boys who maybe would want to dance with me if I made eye contact with them. Thank God I’m done with holding my best friend’s hands, covered by crisp buttoned sleeves because she doesn’t want anyone to see her wrists, both of us blinking away tears because we only have five minutes to talk by the sinks before we have to go to our AP World History.
But I’m always going to drag a friend to the bathroom to tell her something—in class, both of us trying to be inconspicuous even as the GSI glares, or at a restaurant, or party, or business meeting. I’m going to keep taking ridiculous pictures of my roommate when she’s using a Neti pot over a sink. I will probably hold some freshman’s hair back as she’s puking and make sure she has a safe ride home, and excuse myself from brunch to fake an emergency call to a friend who needs to escape a bad date. I know I’m not finished dancing to ancient Avril Lavigne anthems in my pajamas with my housemates. I will still run the shower when I need to cry at home so my mom can’t hear, and give and get compliments from drunk girls at concerts and house parties, and read the graffiti that someone else has written, and maybe reply with some of my own.
Every time I’m on my way out for a fun Friday night with my friends, I still check the bathroom mirror one last time before I turn out all the lights and follow them out the door. Sometimes I just check my clothes and hair, not making real eye contact with myself; I’m busy. Sometimes I see what I feel like I’m starting to be—a woman learning to take up space. And sometimes I catch a glimpse of a short, solemn little girl with thick round glasses and mousey brown hair blinking back at me, both of us startled by what we see. We both have questions that haven’t been answered, but I think she’d like the way I’m looking for them.
By Sophia Kaufman
