the girls' bathroom

“It’s the only safe space in a surveillance state,” one of my students asserts in a conversation that has left the pages of The Handmaid’s Tale and become about the girls’ bathroom down the hall.

From our classroom, sticky with conversations about consent and state-sanctioned rape, you hang a right then an immediate left, walk straight past the principal’s office, and it’s the flat grey door directly on your left.

This semester, the girls’ bathroom has come up a lot in my gender in literature elective. In Atwood’s novel, the bathroom at Jezebel’s Club, a black market brothel for the privileged architects of Gilead, is like a velvet underground. The whole club is illicit, Christian extremist “commanders” flaunting the laws of their own making by smoking stogies, swigging cocktails, and fucking non-wives, but as in most patriarchies, the joke is somewhat on them: the women’s restroom is where the real secrets are swapped.

in communion

In listening to my students, I realize how much I’ve forgotten about the girls’ bathroom. Not forgotten the fact of it: my students ask to go to the bathroom and most of the time I’m certain there’s another girl on the other side of the wall, maybe even an entire flock of friends, invisible to me and waiting for her.

No, I’d forgotten the mercury answer of it. The whale song from stall to stall. The imperfect perfection of a collective space where a girl can hole up in a stall, door locked, hear the comforting sniffles of another in the next stall over, each catharting and collecting herself before returning to the fray. Naomi reminds me, “we see our own experiences mirrored there, in the girls’ bathroom.” And in our novel, this is a moment of release, where our protagonist at last sees her best friend again, where she gets to hear the whole of her story: “I still can’t believe it’s her. I touch her arm again. Then I begin to cry.”

When Iona writes, “I voyaged to the bathroom, to cry. And there was another girl doing the exact same thing. I could hear her whimpers. She could hear mine,” I’m struck by the word “voyaged” and how the public girls’ bathroom is a sanctuary, a confessional, an island unto itself that we navigate our hulls towards because the seas are angry, taunting, at times tormenting. It makes me think about the heroine’s journey, how that journey is about the internal, dropping into the well of oneself and facing the beasts—all the beasts from a hero’s journey—but from the inside and then instead of fighting the beasts, learning the beasts, accepting them, even letting go of some of the beasts within. How girlhood prepares us to navigate with such dexterity, how the bathroom helped.

And sometimes the voyage requires multiple sailors. This is no single-hero narrative. We must go in numbers.

This collective voyage extends beyond the walls, of course. When I was a 22-year-old backpacker camping on Fraser Island, a girl escorted me into the bush in order to guard my exposed squatting bum against lurking dingos. We stumbled back to camp singing loudly, slinging our trowels in defense and joy.

Sometimes it’s the solitude we need most. The bathroom provides that, too. Sherine wrote,

“In some ways, this is monastic, my being here, my retreat. And I’m here because I came to cry, and I come to cry so often. I’ve closed the seat with my legs tucked. I feel like a starling on a wire, small and perched. I’m careful to be still; I once set off the automatic flusher and startled myself. I think about the hands that have pushed these doors, the women like me who have relished the blowdryer -- I’ve learned it is loud, that it swathes sniffles."

the demand of silent bodies

Being a mother of boys, I’ve been shocked at the liberal acceptance of bodily noises, even in public spaces. There is no horror of a burp or a fart, indifference to the minor offense of a gurgling stomach.

One of the great paradoxes of being female is that the world demands more privacy of our bodies (the prime reason for period poverty), but of course our bodies demand we notice them: the “wild geography” of girls, as poet Dominique Christina calls it. The bathroom has this wilderness about it: the watering hole come to in times of need or respite. I’m not anthropomorphizing my girlhood so much as suggesting a body with an internal clock is perhaps a necessary reminder of all our bodies, our animal natures. In other words, a chiming reminder of being human.

And of course the third aspect in the paradoxical trifecta of having a female body is that while the world demands a contained politeness to our bodies despite our bodies’ need to shed the internal out, our bodies are also appraised constantly

. Made public even in their private politeness. The bathroom is stepping away from the day’s performance, away from the searching gaze. A chance to slide off the wig, wipe off the make up, acknowledge the self underneath all the armor. When Atwood’s protagonist enters the bathroom at Jezebel’s for the first time, she observes, “This is like backstage: greasepaint, smoke, the materials of illusion.” Here, in the girls’ bathroom, a body might have an unscripted monologue.

the friction

But it’s a place not just of sanctuary. It can wound. “When I read the scrawls left on the walls of the girl’s bathroom, I know I am lucky,” writes Sherine. Here the inked and scratched walls elicit the competing feelings of betrayal and self-importance. Are those my initials? I’ve wondered at a scratched “AM is a whore.” Likely not me, they’re common enough initials, but whether the message is positive or negative, what a thrill to think the small self leaves impression enough to warrant such effort defacing a powder-coated steel door. The teenager’s launching of 1000 ships.

I’m sure I contributed at some point to the carved and inked palimpsest of loves and hates and envies, my professed love for Mark P—- in blue ink long outlasting my actual love for Mark P—-.

“We don’t have much time left,” the protagonist whispers to Moira, “tell me everything.”

It’s sometimes in this whispered gossip, not just in the written confessions and revenge, that the bathroom wounds. In grade school, snacks started disappearing from my lunchbox. In front of the bathroom sinks, when Alison told me she thought S— was the culprit, I didn’t agree but stayed quiet, listening to her theory. From a far stall, S— emerged then, impossibly, like an apparition, a goddess we had wronged horribly. I hadn’t defended her. Then and now, that moment has been my lesson in silence’s culpability. We learn the best and worst of ourselves within those tiled walls.

Besides the carvings, the inkings, the whispers, there’s also today the reminder of violence done or anticipated to be done to our bodies: “Walls graffitied with club promotions and ‘Ask for Angela’ posters. You don’t know if these posters should make you feel safer or fearfuller,” writes Iona.

But I’m interested in how the friction of a place—its potential to offer respite or revelation, betrayal or warning—turns up the dial, makes us alert to our lives. I’m glad now for that friction. My friend calls these “inoculations for the big stuff to come.” The classroom, too, is supposed to be a safe place for ideas and experimentation and risk, and in its riskiness it sometimes wounds. But we read hard things, dangerous things to innoculate ourselves when the harder things come, and they will come, they always do.

who belongs

We’re going backwards now, my students and I, reading A Room of One’s Own, but perhaps forwards, too. 100 years ago, Virginia Woolf was arguing for women to have a room of their own, money of their own in order to write. It would take another 50 years after she wrote these lectures—until 1975— for women in the UK to legally open their own bank accounts without a man underwriting it. Shortly after women could have their own accounts, Atwood wrote about women losing them in her 1984 dystopian novel, and she wrote about the need for a collective space as women were assessed, divided into rigid categories with specific functions. Jezebel’s bathroom is the one place of reunion. The protagonist, new to the club, asks her long lost friend if it’s bugged. Moira responds, “I can’t imagine they’d care about anything we have to say.” And so they share everything.

These bodily spaces of collective grief and joy and relief and fear are necessarily exclusionary. Not just of boys, but of me, too. I’ve aged out. It’s a place I no longer belong. I won’t intrude. I want to be their choice not their circumstance. Because they have each other. And there is something so magnificent about these girls weeping, breathing, recovering next to one another filled with events and nonevents and responses to those events and nonevents that they understand on a level I’ve forgotten. My age has developed an immunity that isn’t helpful there, maybe helpful later, after the bathroom’s event, but not there. There warrants an intensity and vulnerable rigor that I envy for its gong of presence.

So much of my self developed in a girls’ bathroom where privacy is given a primacy, and where betrayal is sometimes enacted, more often grieved. I’m grateful for all the girls who were in there with me, the ones I knew, and the ones I only heard between muffled sobs in the next stall over. All of their wild bodies and the spaces that made a home for our wildness.

It’s a lesson in outlets, in resilience. An understanding that emotion is rigor, takes strength, as my student Gus says subversively, “feeling is the best form of intellectualizing.” One of my students asked, with no small amount of justified despair and rage and irony, “If a girl cries in a bathroom stall, alone, and emerges without a trace—no tear-streaked cheeks, no swollen eyes—did she cry at all?”

And I want to say to her, “yes, she cried, and because she cried, she survived.”