But I’d been in such a rush I hadn’t given any thought to what I was going to wear. The bra I had on was O.K., but no way was anyone going to see me going lotus wearing a thong.
I went careening over to the woman sitting at the reception desk (so far, yoga was proving anything but relaxing) to see if they had a spare pair of shorts I could borrow. No, but “go to Gowers on the corner,” she told me shortly, looking with disapproval at her watch. “They’re real cheap and you’ll pick up some shorts for nothing. Once the class has started, you can’t go in, though, so quick go, go,” she shooed.
I raced across the street to Gowers, but all I could find cheap was a nasty pair of men’s gray Y-fronts. I held the packet at arm’s length and examined it speculatively. Nathan was gorgeous and these men’s briefs were ugly, ugly, ugly. But I’d never wear them again and they were only nine dollars, so sod it, I was in a hurry. I shoved some cash at the sales clerk and dashed back to the center. In the changing rooms I ripped the knickers out of the package, and, without stopping to inspect them, shoved them on, pulled my top off, grabbed my bags, and bolted for the yoga room.
I got to the doors just as they were locking them. There wasn’t time to introduce myself, so I quickly walked into the class, past mats full of limbering ladies to a free spot at the front of the class, and sat down.
Nathan stood before us, lithe and muscled to the point of being edible. As he walked us through the first positions, I attempted to bend my upper body over my extended thighs. As I strained downward, I caught sight of my pants for the first time.The thick gray flannel was so stiff that the Y flap at the front was poking straight out in a disturbingly suggestive manner. Embarrassed and trying not to draw attention to it, I quickly reached down and pushed the flap back into place.
But it was having none of it and sprang straight out again, veering purposefully like the rudder on a sailboat.
It was horrible. I tried another tack: Leaning into my stretch, I surreptitiously attempted to pin the protruding piece of material flat with my elbow. But it was impossible to concentrate on both this and the yoga, and the front of the pants sprang straight out again, wagging from side to side, like the tail of a dog happy to see you.
The room was as hot as a furnace by now, and soon the pants were thoroughly soaked in my sweat, turning the dark gray flannel an even darker gray—apart from the flap at the front, which, since it wasn’t in contact with my body, remained free from sweat and light gray, sticking out in lewd shamelessness.
After what seemed like an eternity, the class ended. And—all credit to me—I was brave enough to stay behind and introduce myself to Nathan. But as I hadn’t thought to bring a towel for the shower or any clean clothes, our date ended up too yin and yang for comfort: He was serene and self-aware, I was sweaty and self-conscious. I stayed for one drink, then went back to the hotel, lay on the bed, and watched When Harry Met Sally on TV, using biscotti as spoons to eat a tub of ice cream.
Jennifer Cox spent many years juggling two jobs, one as a BBC travel journalist and the other as head of public relations for Lonely Planet, before deciding enough was enough and traveled the world in search of love instead. A correspondent for BBC’s Holiday, co-host of BBC1’s “Perfect Holiday,” and a weekly commentator for Sky News, she has written for publications including The London Times, Marie Claire, Elle, Esquire, and Cosmopolitan. This story was excerpted from Around the World in 80 Dates. Jennifer now happily juggles her old London life with her lovely new one in Seattle.
Because dinner didn’t take as much time as we’d planned, we now had an hour to kill before the show. I’d made the mistake of buying new shoes for the trip and my feet were already hurting. Not only were the shoes brand new, they were also a size and a half too small with four-inch heels. The saleslady at BCBG, Katarina, had talked me into buying them, “They are a very sexy shoe on you and because of the length of the pant, you need the high heel.” And I needed the pants because, according to Katarina, “They make your backside look very good!” (I thought it only a matter of time before Katarina and I began dating.) Of course I couldn’t tell Hank any of this. His response would simply have been, “Well then, take them off.” As if I could do that after spending $200 on the outfit. Ha! I wished.
“Hey, wanna go back to the room for a bit? I mean, since we have an hour until the show and everything,” I asked Hank, grabbing a hold of his shoulder and trying not to wobble.
“Sure,” Hank said, probably hoping this was code for “Hey, wanna go back to the room and have sex before the show?”When it was in fact code for “Hey, my feet are killing me. I need to get these shoes off.”
—Elizabeth Ellen, “Pain and Fumbling in Las Vegas”
MEGAN LYLES
Riding the Semi-Deluxe
Didn’t your mother tell you to go at the very first opportunity?
IT WAS A WARM, BRIGHT MID-MORNING AND I WAS bumping down the road on a semi-deluxe bus. My fellow passengers nodded at me in a friendly manner, I had a mango Frooti drink and a roll of chocolate-chip biscuits to snack on, and the scenery of goats and huts and sari-clad women was picturesque. Exactly the sort of bus experience I had imagined when I planned my trip to India. The only problem was I wasn’t entirely sure where I would end up. And I had to pee.
I was hoping to get to Gokarna, a beach town in South India which, according to an Australian girl I’d met in Delhi, was supposed to be a tranquil, relaxing place, a Goa without the rave kids. As a solo female traveler who had been overwhelmed by crowded, grimy Delhi and who had a low tolerance for trance and techno, I thought it sounded great.
The trip had seemed simple enough when I started out in Hampi. I successfully took the 7 A.M. bus to Hospet, where I was supposed to get on the 9 A.M. bus to Gokarna. But in Hospet the plan crumbled. After an hour and a half of confusion and contradictory announcements, it was official: the Gokarna bus was cancelled.
A crowd gathered to discuss my options. Some thought I should take a bus to Sirsi and then transfer, and others argued for taking a bus to Kumta to transfer. A minority was against both of these plans. I was worried about getting stuck in some tiny town with no hotels and no ongoing buses, but when I asked about this either nobody understood the question, or I didn’t understand the answer. Anyway, my input wasn’t under consideration in the matter. What did a foreign tourist know about anything, even if she did look almost Indian? When the shouting died down, the pro-Kumtas and the fringe parties had been overruled. I was put on a bus and told to transfer at Sirsi. “Don’t worry,” said the station manager, “The driver will get you to Gokarna.” So I was on a bus, at least, and I had a flimsy promise to hold onto, and hopefully there would be a bathroom stop along the way.
The first stop was a lonely roadside restaurant full of scowling men. Around back, in the middle of a field, a decidedly non-picturesque concrete wall shielded three door-less toilet stalls from view of the restaurant. I stepped behind the wall.
Shit.
There was shit everywhere. In the squat toilets, on the footrests, around the toilets, on the concrete floor between the wall and the stalls. Shit, in globs and heaps and puddles and mounds, every color of the shit rainbow. I stared for a while, thinking longingly of the restroom at Hospet, where an old woman was employed to pour a can of water over the concrete toilets after every use. “I’ll just wait for the next stop,” I thought.
The next stop was an hour later at a similarly lonely location. The toilets there were free of fecal matter, but had instead been taken over by spiders. Webs festooned the rafters, stretched across the stalls, blocked the doorways, and crowded the corners, each presided over by a plump, black, jellybean-sized spider. Unlike their apathetic daddy-longlegs cousins who hang motionless for weeks at a time, these spiders were busy. Industrious. Moving. Even someone without a spider-phobia as strong as mine would have been freaked out. I kicked myself for being too picky to use the last toilet. I mean, what’s a little shit?
If it had been dar
k, or if I had been wearing a long skirt, or if I had a travel buddy, or if I were a man, I would have just gone in the field behind the bathrooms, but none of those things was the case, so I got back on the bus. No matter what confronted me, I promised myself, I would use the bathroom at the next stop.
Another hour passed jouncing over potholes and wishing I hadn’t had that mango Frooti.Tree branches scraped past the open windows and sifted a fine dust onto me as I wiggled and worried. What would be worse, I wondered, being stranded overnight or wetting myself? I wished there was a toilet on the bus. Semi-deluxe, I decided, must be a euphemism for not deluxe at all.
At last we drove into an actual town, with a real bus station like the one at Hospet. I had high hopes for this station’s facilities, hopes that rose even higher when I saw that said facilities were actually indoors and that people were actually going in and out of them. In fact, the area positively boiled with activity. Vendors hawked bananas and nuts and newspaper cones of puffed rice, bottles of Thums Up and Limca, strings of the tiny white flowers that South Indian women affix to their glossy dark braids. One problem solved, I thought as I galloped off the bus and across the lot.
Inside the women’s end I found three stalls with doors on the far side of the room and three doorless squat toilets on the near side, separated from each other by low walls. A baby girl squatted in the toilet closest to the door, displaying remarkable balance for such a tiny thing. Two older girls, maybe eight and ten, dark-eyed and pretty, exchanged smiles with me. I headed to the stalls with doors first, but found them inhabited by more of those spiders.The middle toilet even had some shit floating in it for good measure. It didn’t occur to this privacy-loving American girl to use one of the open toilets, so I was reduced to an uncertain shuffling.
The first time I used a washroom in Japan, I pulled the toilet paper and nearly fell over backwards into the toilet. Music was definitely not what I was expecting, much less Beethoven. That’s right, bars of “Für Elise” chimed out happily as I steadied myself in shock. I really wanted to ask someone about it, but how do you go about doing that without being rude? Everyone knows about the polite factor in Japan, and besides to them, music in the toilet is normal. So I saved the story for my friends back home, who found it quite amusing.
—Catherine Tully, “Painfully Obvious”
As I stood there, a woman in a gold-shot sari entered the restroom. Regally, elegantly, she squatted over the drain in the middle of the floor and urinated into it, her sari providing a remarkable amount of privacy for someone peeing in the middle of the room. She fixed a gaze of disdain on a point in the middle of the wall like someone undergoing a disgusting but necessary medical examination. Finished, she stalked back out the door without acknowledging anyone’s presence. Even the jewel in her nose glittered a little sneer. I should do that too, I thought, impressed. But how could I? Seeing my hesitation, the older girl poured some water over the muddy footrests of one of the open toilets near the door and indicated that I should use it.
Just then a big gray pig walked in the door. I don’t know how big pigs are supposed to get so I can’t say for sure where this one stood in the spectrum, but if it had been a dog it would have been a pretty huge dog. The pig made straight for the baby and started snuffling around her, eliciting a shriek of terror and nearly knocking her into the toilet before one of the girls scooped her to safety. Apparently disappointed, the pig veered off to the stalls on the other side of the room and poked its head into the first stall, and then the second. Now, I had heard rumors about certain porcine dining proclivities, but I was still shocked by what I saw next. “What is it doing…it’s not going to eat the…oh yuck…” I watched for a while in disgusted fascination as the pig gobbled down the contents of the toilet.
Oh well. I seemed to be the only one who found the pig’s presence or behavior surprising and I still had to go. The girls looked at me expectantly. I waited for them to discreetly busy themselves elsewhere, but finally I realized they were planning to watch the whole process. I was not too keen on this idea, but I had no choice. I could not possibly hold it in for another hour. It’s a natural function, I told myself. Everyone does it. Besides, they’re little girls, not spiders. Resigned, I stepped onto the newly rinsed porcelain footrests and pulled down my pants.
The pants. Bought in Hampi solely because my long skirts hindered a bicycle tour of the ruins, they were the most hideous article of clothing I could imagine—a baggy, elastic-waisted, narrow-ankled, multi-colored cotton nightmare that made me feel like a giant hackeysack. The shop owner had seemed to think I would be delighted to purchase a pair of “Indian” pants, but anyone with the gift of sight could see that no Indian woman, or even an Indian man, ever wore such a garment.Their saving grace was that they were comfortable, and that’s why I had worn them on the bus trip. And now the hideousness of the pants would be highlighted as I pulled them down in front of two eagle-eyed little girls who were about to watch me go to the bathroom all wrong.
There is a correct way to squat, with your butt very close to the ground, your hamstrings pressed against your calves and your feet flat. Once you master this position, it’s quite comfortable, but I could only achieve it sporadically. Weighing the embarrassment quotient of peeing incorrectly against peeing correctly but possibly falling into the toilet, I chose to pee wrong and stay clean. I squatted awkwardly, with my feet bent uncomfortably and my behind way too far up in the air. Under the rapt attention of my audience, curious as a couple of scientist kittens, I needed to find something else to focus my attention on. The most interesting thing in the room had to be the big, gray, shit-eating pig, so that’s what I looked at.
Then two things happened simultaneously. One was that the pig finished her meal and started trotting towards me. Pigs are smart and this one obviously knew the area well. I didn’t need Pavlov to tell me what she was hoping for.
The other thing was that a bus began honking its horn. I had no way of knowing if it was my bus or not, but it could have been. It must have been. Of course it was. The pig would knock me into the toilet and my bus would leave and I’d be stranded in the middle of India wearing hideous pee-soaked clown pants while the town’s little girls gathered around to stare at me.
The pig came at me, her snout decorated with what looked like beads of chocolate milk. I was stuck; I couldn’t escape. I peed frantically, trying to finish so I could flee, but I’d been saving it up for a long time and anyway, you can only pee so fast.
But then the girl who had cleaned off the toilet for me came to my rescue, shaking her water bottle at the pig. Surprisingly, and a bit anticlimactically, her tactic worked; the giant pig backed off under the threat of a small, empty, plastic bottle and trotted out the door.That was good. Then the bus stopped honking. That was not so good, at least, not if it was my bus and if the silence meant it had given up on me.
Finally I was finished. Pulling my clothes together, I raced for the exit. The older girl headed me off at the door and politely asked for two rupees. A small price to pay. I gave a rupee to each of the girls.Then I was outside, rounding the corner, searching out the spot where my bus had parked.
It was gone. Gone, with my non-ugly clothes and my journal and my camera and my chocolate-chip biscuits from Hospet and my Walkman and my mix tapes. I was stranded. I cursed the bicycle trip that had forced me to buy those wretched pants, now the only clothes I owned.
Then I saw my bus. Halfway out of the lot, engine running, windows bristling with a dozen frantically beckoning arms. I took a deep breath of relief and started to run for it, but a little boy blocked my way, running backwards and chirping, “Hello, one rupee! Hello, one rupee!” over and over again like a mantra. He giggled and bounced like it was all a big game. But I had no time to play—clearly the bus was seconds away from leaving without me. Reaching the bus, I climbed the steps panting and embarrassed, but glad to see my seat with my little plastic bag of snacks on it and my backpack on the shelf above it.
> “We waited for you,” said another passenger sternly as I passed him. I gave my best “gosh, I’m sorry, I’m such a goofy tourist, thanks for putting up with me” smile and said thanks, hurrying to plop down on the hard, dusty, semi-deluxe seat. I didn’t want to fall over when the bus went tearing out of the lot trying to make up for the time I had cost everyone. I caught my breath and waited for the bus to take off, my only worry now where I would end up. We sat. My new friends stood under my window and waved to me. I waved back. We sat some more.The driver got off the bus and walked away. Weren’t we supposed to be in a hurry?
After an interlude of bafflement on my part, the driver got on the bus and strode down the aisle toward me.
“Come,” he said.
Wondering what I had done wrong, I grabbed my bag and followed him off the bus and across the lot.The little boy went back to his imaginary soccer game in front of me. “One rupee! One rupee! Hello, one rupee!” Another boy, even smaller and cuter and higher pitched joined in.
The driver led me to another bus. “This bus will take you to Gokarna,” he said, gruffly but not unkindly. It was just as the station manager had promised—the driver would make sure I got to Gokarna. How could I ever have doubted it? I glanced around at the clamoring mill of people, the mingled woodsmoke and exhaust drifting past the green, red, and yellow busses.This must be Sirsi.
“Thank you,” I said simply, knowing I couldn’t convey all that I was grateful for.That no matter how clueless I was, the people around me knew what they were doing. And no matter how mistrustful I was, they were willing to help me. I gave each of the little boys a rupee and got on the new bus, which was exactly like the old bus, except for the curly script above the windshield that proclaimed its destination to everyone but me. The passengers all nodded at me as I passed them. I sat down in my new seat and saw all the kids outside my new window, the girls from the bathroom with the older one holding the baby, and the two little soccer boys, all grouped family portrait style and smiling big beautiful smiles up at me. Genuine smiles.They waved at me and I waved back, and they kept waving as my bus pulled out of the lot and onto the road to Gokarna.
The Thong Also Rises Page 5