The Potty Mouth at the Table Read online

  Once I walked up the tiny staircase to the upper level of the train, I found my seat, and the relief from knowing I was on my way home actually did make me feel a little bit better. I leaned my head against the window and sighed as the train started to move, slowly at first, chugging back and forth as I got closer to my own bed and my own toilet foot by foot. Jostle by jostle. By jostle. By jostle.

  The first wave that rose up from my stomach only hit the bottom of my ribs and I prayed it was a gas bubble or a heart attack. I ate fried food, I told myself. It could totally be a blocked artery! I took a deep breath and tried to focus on the attendant now one row behind me, taking tickets. I got mine ready to hand over and planned to immediately make my way to the bathroom. Just to splash water on my face. That was all. Just some water.

  I was not going to throw up.

  Do not throw up.

  Do not.

  Fifteen seconds later, the next wave reached my neck but apparently did not have enough strength to surge through the several chins that I have. However, I was keenly aware of the danger that was inching forward, about to strike. I can outrun this, I told myself. I just need to give the attendant the ticket and I can run to the bathroom. I just need to hold it together for a minute. A minute is all I need. Just a minute and then everything will be fine. A minute is all I need.

  But the conductor was busy flirting with three college girls, two sitting across the aisle from me and one next to me. I summoned all the psychic powers that I falsely claimed I had at seventh-grade slumber parties, but my fake telekinesis bounced right off the conductor and back into my face, which my hands were now covering.

  Because I would rather give birth in front of people than throw up in front of an audience. At least in the former case you get to be on your pick of Lifetime shows or at minimum in a heartwarming human-interest segment about how even on a train full of strangers, everyone came together to celebrate life and paused for a second at the wonderment of it all. But vomiting in front of people? No one wants to hold that. No one cries because it’s beautiful. No one can really get mad at you if your placenta splashes on their purse, but you know what? You know what happens when you throw up in front of a hundred people? Despite the fact that your hands don’t know what to do except hold your mouth, as if they could effectively catch the horror threatening to spew, that third wave finds its force and rushes up like it’s about to eat an Indonesian beach. And then, as if someone has just punched you in the back, before you know it, a half cup of coffee—with an excessive amount of creamer in it, I might add for the sake of detail—is suddenly riding the express car up, up, up, waiting for the signal of the most disgusting noise ever made to sound the horn of attack. It is that noise—that primitive, guttural, pathetic gag, ehhhhh-ggggg-kkkkk—that grabs the attention of the roughly ninety-nine people seated around you and turns their collective heads toward you to see who exactly is making that disgusting, animalistic sound.

  And if there’s one thing to take away from this story, if there is one lesson to be learned, it is that you should never cover your mouth with your hands in an effort to contain the spill, because that is both useless and foolish. Fanned fingers cannot catch vomit, but what they really can do is turn your little half cup of coffee (again, mostly creamer) into a spray-water feature in a fountain that rivals the Bellagio’s and make it appear that your digestive system is hooked up to the city’s water supply.

  To be clear, I threw up on no one but myself. The coffee all landed in my lap. But that didn’t stop the woman two rows ahead of me from screaming like she was on a Greyhound bus and she just saw someone get decapitated. And it didn’t prevent the adorable, flirty Korean college girl sitting next to me from shooting out of her seat as if the severed head had just plopped into her lap, shrieking at full murder volume, “I wanna change my seat! I wanna change my seat!”

  You can do a lot of things in front of people, even things unseemly, but as long as they don’t see it, it’s pretty much okay. The blame will always fall on the nearest baby or a person in a scooter. But it turns out you can’t throw up. You can take your pants off and shoot amniotic fluid out toward them, but you can’t hurl, not even on yourself. Even if the Linda Blair impression you have just performed for your fellow commuters is not your fault but rather the handiwork of an evil fake meatball, even if it’s just liquid and a smaller amount than any sample size you’d get at Costco. The horrified gasps from the other passengers will fall on you like a judgment. Trust me when I say you will not know what to do in the ferocious hush that follows your public humiliation. Trust me when I say you will be frozen and stunned, like a fawn that just saw its mother get shot and then dragged onto the hood of a Chevy Silverado. Chances are good that you will simply sit there, your hands still positioned over your slack mouth. You will be stunned as if you have been through a war, and not just any war but the really, really bad kind, like a war of the Eastern European variety, as in Ceauşescu-level trauma.

  After what feels like a generation has passed and other passengers and the conductor have still not stopped staring at you, the urge to flee will finally trigger, and 198 eyes will watch you gather up the hem of your dress like you have just been collecting vomit apples, and those eyes will follow you silently as you scurry down the aisle, other passengers recoiling on all sides as if you were handing out said vomit apples.

  Dripping in puke, I staggered down the tiny train staircase and found my suitcase at the front of the car, pulled another dress out of it, and skulked into the bathroom, where I hid/vomited/sobbed/hid/vomited/sobbed for the next hour. And in some measure of good fortune—the only measure of good fortune in this story—when I finally emerged from the bathroom, which was smaller than an airline bathroom and filthier than a port-o-potty on the New Jersey Turnpike, the handicapped car was to my right. I slinked into the quiet darkness of the car, slid into an unoccupied row, and tried my very best to die.

  Shortly after I took refuge in the handicapped car, where no one had seen the atrocity I had committed, the door slid open and the same conductor stepped inside to collect tickets. My cover was blown. After a brief and inappropriate thought that I should pretend to actually belong there by sitting on a leg or snatching the oxygen tank from the seat where its owner had left to go on a smoke break (and I am not kidding)—after all, I was wearing a different dress since my performance of Hurl Girl—I surrendered immediately when he came to my row. He made sure to keep his distance in case I was about to launch another splashdown, and before he could say anything, I fell on his mercy. I didn’t even have my ticket anymore; it had fluttered to the ground when I scampered to the bathroom and was now resting, soaked in coffee but mostly French vanilla creamer, under the seat of an appalled, visibly shaken witness.

  “I’m so sorry. Please don’t make me go back up there,” I begged him. “Please. I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, nodding. “Lots of people get motion sickness. You can stay here and I’ll bring your stuff down.”

  Thank you, I thought to myself, thank you for not thinking I was a junkie and just a big dipshit spaz who forgot her Dramamine. I would have kissed him on the mouth if the situation had been a little different, or if I had just brushed my teeth. Or at least if I hadn’t just rinsed my mouth in a train bathroom sink that was dirtier than the dress I had just changed out of.

  And there I stayed for the next seven hours while that rotten little falafel ball bounced around and contaminated my system with food poisoning and chased me to the bathroom every twenty minutes. It didn’t care that I was on a train. It did not care one bit. I sweated with fever, shivered with chills, and, when needed, assisted elderly and relatively immobile people to their restroom (which was cleaner than the one I had used and big enough for company), although I drew the line at helping with waistbands. I drew the line at unzipping flies in unfamiliar bathrooms, even if people with crystal meth hidden in their crotches were higher in the pecking order than I was.

 
I could barely sit up; my abdomen felt like I had actually used the Living Social coupon I bought for six Pilates classes but let expire because I hadn’t lost enough weight to show myself in leggings yet. I had reached my lowest point of existence, I had very little else to lose.

  “Begging: be at the train station @ 5,” I tapped on-screen as I texted my husband in words I could not bring myself to speak into a cell phone, “bcwause cj=hances are good to excellnt that I waill have beensittign sideways for hours aftr I have shit mt pants. No longer a variable, but a cwertainty.”

  Before we pulled into the station in Eugene, the conductor did me one last solid and gave me this tip: “If you want to put your suitcase by the door in five minutes, you can wait there and be one of the first passengers off,” he said kindly. “That way, you won’t have to see anyone.”

  “Thank you,” I said gratefully, and did just that. I was moments away from a clean escape when I looked at the person standing next to me and my mouth fell open.

  “Oh my God,” I said to the adorable Korean college student. “I’m so sorry. It was mostly creamer, I swear. I’m so sorry!”

  Then she smiled back at me and said, “It’s okay.”

  And I looked at her and really wanted to reply, “Well, I wish you would have said that about eight hours ago when you looked at me like I was a little dead girl with long wet hair who just climbed out of a well,” but then I realized I was just about to throw up in front of her twice, so I ran into the bathroom again.

  When I came out, most of the train had emptied except for the lady with the oxygen tank who already had her fingers curled around an unlit menthol cigarette. I didn’t wait for her. I climbed down off the train into the heat of the afternoon and insanely bright light. I saw my husband and walked toward him, but he didn’t see me until he was close enough to enter my splash zone.

  “Honey?” he said to me, his eyes squinting, unsure if the green-hued creature who had just stumbled off the train with crumpled clothes, crazy Charles Manson hair, and vague traces of red lipstick smeared upward toward her right nostril was indeed his blushing bride.

  “Get me to the car,” I mumbled, fighting the temptation to lie down right there on the gravel along the tracks.

  In a moment, we were heading for our house. We live three minutes from the train station. I was going to crawl into a motionless bed in a dark room as soon as I got there and gag without being judged by humanity. I was going to gag for the sake of gagging—gagging just to feel alive. In the meantime, on the way home from the train station, my husband looked at me sympathetically as he slowed down for a yellow light.

  “My poor girl,” he said, as he tapped his hand on my leg and shook his head.

  “What the hell are you doing, you idiot?” I screamed as I sat sideways in the passenger seat, a nausea wave away from baring my teeth. “Did you not get my text? Run that goddamned light! Run it now!”

  When I wasn’t throwing up during the next two days, I was curled up in bed like a tiny zygote in my dark little room, and it took me the rest of the week to sit up without help. And even though the scars of public vomiting will take a while to heal, I know that two things will never change:

  I hate falafel’s stupid chickpea guts.

  And every fifteen minutes when I hear a train whistle a mile from my house, I want to throw up.

  WRITERS’ GROUP

  I have read Harry Potter erotica. Sometimes, life is like that. In one moment, you’re getting ready to read what you think will be a fun little short story about a magic girl and boy and in the next, Ginny and Draco are getting it on during a study session. And three days later, while I was sitting at a small table in a cafeteria, surrounded by people I did not know, it was my turn to say something about the story to the person who wrote it.

  Half an hour earlier, when I entered the cafeteria, I felt nothing but complete terror, even though I was just here on assignment from a local newspaper as an experiment. A social experiment, if you will, that raised the question of how status changes perception in art and culture. My story was only a segment of a larger feature that included what happened when a principal ballerina went for a dance audition and how the work of a renowned and respected artist was received at a street fair; I was asked to write a piece about how a published author would fare in a writers’ group.

  I had agreed to join this writers’ workshop comprised of people I’d never met and submitted an essay for their critique. Yes, I was scared. Some writers are lovely people, but more often than not, they become insecure and Hunger Games competitive when hierarchy is being established in a room with more than one writer present; it’s like watching wolves hash out a pecking order before tearing into a fresh kill. It is rarely pretty, and someone usually gets too drunk and is found hours later unconscious and uncomfortably close to a litter box.

  I know this because I am a writer. By trade, occupation, tax forms, you name it. This is how I’ve made my living for a long time, decades. But none of that history has any bearing at this cafeteria table. Here, I am simply a girl named Laurie who is waiting for her essay to be led up to the workshop altar. And if the aisle up to that altar involved discussing Harry Potter porn—which I still don’t get—then so be it.

  “Well,” I say to the woman sitting next to me, “it feels like you just had a lot of fun with this.” And then I smile. I think she wants me to say more. I simply can’t. Because Ginny and Draco and their naughty bits have already taken a front-row seat in my brain, blocking access to the fifty-seventh password for my iTunes account. And that is a bad thing: now I’d have to contend with images of randy wizards getting it on every time Hipstamatic comes out with a new lens to download.

  “But is it commercial?” the older and most likely retired man across from me in the hat insists.

  “Absolutely,” the author replies. “Fifty Shades of Grey was originally Twilight fan fic.”

  Fan what? I don’t know what she means and have to ask what fan fic is. The group looked at me like I was insane.

  “By commercial, do you mean you intend to publish this?” I ask earnestly. “Because there might be some copyright issues with characters created by someone else.” Specifically, the richest, most famous author on Earth, who I wouldn’t want to tangle with in a court of law, lest everything I own, including my dog, end up in a van delivered to the Rowling house to be disposed of or used as cauldron kindling.

  “I checked it out,” she assured me. “It’s a gray area.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You sure do use the word ‘pussy’ a lot,” the man in the hat comments. Out loud.

  “I’m playing off the cat in the room,” the author defends.

  I am dizzy. I have just read an NC-17 version of Harry Potter and now an older man who I have known for fifteen minutes has uttered a word that I have been trying desperately to skip through all eleven pages of the Hogwarts porn. This is the same man who asked me when I first arrived what kind of stuff I wrote and asked for a hard copy. “First-person narrative, humor,” I replied with a shrug.

  He scanned the first paragraphs and then looked at me over his reading glasses. “Humor? Really?” he said as he handed my essay back to me, his face blank.

  I am still feeling a little faint when we move on to the next writer, another older man with thick glasses who produces a book cover he has just paid a graphic designer to produce. It looks fantastic, although kind of young adult, with a photo of two pretty young girls and a dog in a hat.

  The older man in the hat takes up the charge. “You lost me when the dog is writing a letter to the girl about how she needs to open herself up to people more,” he says to the older man in the glasses. “Dogs would never do that. A dog needs to earn your trust; he never just gives it away. That’s dog nature.”

  “No, no, no,” the man in the glasses disagrees. “I don’t agree. You forget that the dog is her dad, but her mother is a robot, so she has the DNA in her, too, that has no emotion. Her dad is just try
ing to balance that out.”

  “I think your cover is awesome,” I say.

  The man in the hat is not going to give up. “I also—I also don’t understand why the dog is suddenly putting on a sports coat,” he says, looking annoyed. “Where did the sports coat come from?”

  “The dog wears clothes,” the man in the glasses says, clearly irritated. “That’s clear from the beginning of the chapter.”

  The next writer up is a woman about my age who arrived a little late, popped open her laptop, and began nodding as comments were made about her piece—which consists of the first five chapters of a novel about a film consultant/demonologist who I suspect is about to have sexual relations with a lady ghost. But I like it. There is not a single cat in the whole thing.

  Others, however, find fault in several paragraphs, calling them “infodumps.” (I have to ask what that is, too.) Apparently, it’s when a writer gives information in a block of text, otherwise known as “backstory.”

  “Actually, I found your dream sequences to be very well paced and subtly done,” I say. “I love the part when he blurts out that he used to be a priest. I was surprised!”

  The woman looks at me and smiles. No one agrees with me.

  Now it’s the man in the hat’s turn, and the Harry Potter lady tells him how helpful the character list was in navigating through the chapter, and when I see it, it’s an entire page of characters. I’m guessing at least thirty. That’s a lot for a book, let alone a chapter.

  “So while I think that your opening paragraph is great with description, the next paragraph had such a vivid image with Mamoud removing his bronze, unadorned helmet,” the man in the glasses says to the man in the hat. “Maybe you could switch those paragraphs and open with that picture?”

  The hat goes quiet, although his eyes dart to the man in the glasses.

  “No,” the hat says.

  I’m no psychic, but I suspect that in the coming weeks of the writers’ group, there is going to be a tussle that results in one or possibly two older men on the ground with broken hips.