My new company (after a month, it feels dodgy to persist in saying “new,” but it is just that) shares a Ladies’s Room with what seems to be the customer service division of a financial company. This company employs a large number of young females who regularly congregate in the restroom to apply make-up, style their hair, or stare vacantly at the mirror. When in a group, they’ll spew boredom, whisper gossip, gush excitement, or sometimes let loose a foul deluge of bitter complaints. Potty mouth, if you will.
The communal aspects of the lavatory prevent me from overhearing anything too juicy. There’s a lot of fantasy catty retorts to unnamed adversaries. “Oh, God, when she said that? I was, like, ‘get off your high horse, and remember that you are not my manager. Because if you were my manager, I’d so be gone tomorrow'” is a typical rant.
Today I was privy to an interesting exchange between two young woman who I often see brushing their glorious manes of dark hair in front of the sinks. “I learned in school, that, like, there are some tribes that send women to these special huts when they have their periods,” one young woman said, “and they just do nothing but sit around for an entire week.”
“Really?” said her friend. “That sounds great!”
“I know! And my professor made the hut sound bad, like it was demeaning, like it was a punishment, but I’m thinking, ‘Omigod! Send me to the hut!'” The women laugh. This is the sort of conversation that could only happen in a Ladies’ Room: for some a place of biological necessity, for others, a place of respite and bastion of womanhood.
