Bathroom Strangers I

Jesus Moses anyhow, the thing’s been stuffed up for well over a month and it’s half-inch coating of toothpaste and saliva proved it. I hate to resort to these details, but it was pretty terrible. Five minutes for a sink to drain is just not right.

My roommate and I (but mostly just my roommate) had put in repeated work orders, and gone to the main desk to reiterate our pleas about the bathroom sink with an identity crisis. They didn’t seem to care that we were clogged. It wasn’t their hair corking up our pipes. “Bathroom sink clogged. It’s really gross!!!!” my roommate wrote on the most recent work order she’d submitted. Well true, it was really gross—but mostly because we’d made it REALLY gross.

So I spit out my toothpaste and reached for the 409, then sprayed the living porcelain out of our sink. I was satisfied when I saw my reflection, and even more so when not 20 minutes later, I heard a knock at the door.

There he was. Mr. Maintenance in his work hat, a young fellow with his tool kit n’ all. 

“You’ve…got a clogged sink that’s…REALLY GROSS?” he questioned, hoping that he was in the right place, and not—God forbid—at the apartment with the clogged sink that wasn’t REALLY GROSS. That would just be too easy.

“Sure do. Come in!”

I directed him to the freshly-sparkling indisposed waterhole. Before he de-gunged our sink, I was sure to tell him how lucky he was that I’d just cleaned it, listing off the illnesses he could possibly have contracted during the job.

“Syphilis, AIDS, scurvy, West Nile, mad cow, polio…”

The man was friendly enough, but you can never be to sure what strangers are doing in your home. So I went to the kitchen and started making an epic pita for lunch, listening to every tinker and hiss coming from the bathroom.

Suddenly I heard the toilet flush.

The toilet?! What’s he doing messing with the toilet?! I said SINK! Come on man, I didn’t get around to cleaning that! My mind shifted to the last time it’d been cleaned. Oh…NO.

I continued to frantically build my pita, I continued to listen, confused.

The shower turned on.

OH NOT THE SHOWER. NOT the SHOWER. He is not seeing inside my shower right now. I remembered seeing a hairball nestled in a corner earlier that morning. DAMMIT! He is going to KNOW!

If this said “Mr. Maintenance” had, in fact been a female, none of this would have mattered. But I am a woman, and I know that we occasionally take pride in being “civilized,” living up to our stereotype as divine creatures that possess skin of ivory, breathe ideality and smell like roses. And we make certain that men know this, or at least know that we are good at faking it. 

The last thing I wanted was the plumber to know what my bathroom fixtures looked like—and I lost.

When he emerged from the bathroom, I had just begun stuffing a handful of alfalfa sprouts onto my pita. And all I could see in his head was one giant math equation, something like (food) + (digestion) = your disgusting bathroom.

This man knew that women do not smell like roses, and I did not like that. I felt that I’d broken the unsung code of womankind, the female alliance that states no male shall know of our faults. Ladies, I’m sorry—I’ve let us down.

“Your sink had a lot of hair in it. Oh, and I fixed your toilet and shower, too,” he said with a smile, and I responded with an apology.

“No!” he quickly countered, “It’s my job, you keep me busy. Keep…shedding!” He wished me a good day before wandering out the door.

And I knew he wouldn’t tell a soul.