“It’s time to come out for lunch,” I tell my four year old, Nicky. “No, sorry,” he says waving a wrinkly hand behind the glass door, “I am going to live in the bathroom now.”
Having been locked up at home for nearly eight months today, I decide to give this proposal some serious thought. And serious thought needs a proper feasibility study.
“Won’t you get hungry?” I ask.
“You can bring my food here.”
“Where will you sleep?”
“You can bring me a pillow.”
“Won’t the floor be hard?”
“Maybe I’ll get used to it.”
Where was this willingness to try when asked to eat Zucchini?
“What about cartoons?”
“Ipad.”
“What about your brother? He’s going to miss you.”
“I’ll be right here. He can visit me.”
“What about Lolo Eric?”
He gives this one some serious thought.
“Can he visit me here?”
I shake my head, though he knows the answer to this one.
“Our apartment building doesn’t allow visitors yet.”
“For how long?”
“For I don’t know how long.”
Silence and splashing. Deep thoughts submerged in bubbles.
“Maybe I can take a vacation and visit them sometime.”
“Who will keep your bathroom home safe?”
“We can lock it?”
“We can pretend to lock it.”
“Okay, mama.”
“Are you sure about this?”
He thinks longer and harder than he ever has before. And after 20 seconds he says,
“Yes, mama I am.”
So we allow him to live in the bathroom where he experiences his first heartbreak at the age of 13 and holds his first raging party, drinks too many colored drinks and vomits all he has in him, into the nearby toilet. In the bathroom, he crams for his geometry exam, inventing acronyms for formulas he’ll never remember.
In his bathroom room, he sneaks in a girl one night, the undisputed love of his life and taker of his virginity, and a month later when she tells him she needs space, he tries to drown out the sounds of his sobbing with the pitter patter of the shower but his cries echo through the bathroom’s amazing acoustics anyway.
In this 6 by 4 foot tiled world he calls his own, he pours himself into his work, face lit by the screen’s blue light until the wee hours of the morning, until he gets the promotion he has long wanted, and at a celebratory party meets a new girl, The Girl He Will Be More Careful Around.
But she is a good one, and they hang out often in the bathroom room watching movies, ordering takeout, smoking marijuana, laughter bouncing off the cream tiles. Sometimes there is fighting too, but is there ever a room that doesn’t see a couple fight?
Then one day he asks me to come in, sit on the white pail—don’t mind the soap stains, I’ve been meaning to clean that—and utters the words he knows will break my heart, Mom, I’m moving out.
And I cry of course, though I don’t usually cry, because as he packs his things into a box, memories play like a reel and I relive his four-year-old stubborn self, toes and fingers wrinkly, soaked too long in the water; shampoo bottles, cars, and lego on the floor, waving a hand through the glass door, refusing to abandon the world he has built for himself.
Circling back to that moment, I ask him again: “Are you sure about this?” He thinks longer and harder than he ever has before. And after 25 seconds he says “yes mama, I am” and suddenly the bathroom is empty. Suddenly, the bathroom is just a bathroom again.
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