Nine People, One Bathroom, No Lock

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. As always links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. Pocketful of Prose is free for everyone so please share with friends.

Without further ado, today’s pocket.

It is our final day visiting our family in Madison, Wisconsin. Nine of us are sharing one bathroom with no lock. We are packed in my brother and sister-in-law’s house like sardines. Everyone sort of fits on the large red couch in their living room, but it’s a tight squeeze, and the more agile members of the family are relegated to the floor. Dan, Anna, Seabass and I are sleeping in the basement, and it is a bit of a “ten in the bed” situation. There are not actually ten in the bed, but there are more of us than there should be, and at some point, someone is forced to “roll over.”

In the house with one bathroom and no lock lives one beautiful black cat and one sweet, elderly dog. The cat loves it when my sister-in-law pets her, but she has no such love for the rest of us. She gives us the evil eye as we climb the stairs to the bathroom, and she is still glowering at us when we descend the stairs having had no luck with the bathroom. The sweet, elderly dog does not give off any death stares, but she did sneak into the basement and poop on my clothes. In addition to the beautiful cat and the sweet, incontinent dog, three chickens roam the yard. They have been supplying us and the sweet dog with breakfast all week.

I like spending time with the people I love, but I recharge by being alone. In our house back in Spokane, I sometimes escape into the guest bedroom, for solitude and self-care. Sharing a house with nine people doesn’t offer a lot of alone time, so you might be thinking that tomorrow when I return home, my airplane middle seat will feel cozy and spacious, and the quiet will be glorious, and in this thought, you would not be wrong, but the truth is, I will spend most of my quiet time on the flight thinking about the house with nine people, one bathroom and no lock, and I will miss it… the crazy cat, the incontinent dog, the chickens. I will miss all of it.

In The Berry Pickers, the book I read this week, while sandwiched between someone’s shoulder and someone else’s leg, Ruthie, one of the main characters is tragically separated from her family at a young age. When she finds them again in her fifties, she feels like a part of herself is returned, and what she cherishes most is the laughter. Often the laughter comes out of nowhere and makes no sense, but it feels so good. “Joe began to laugh, a raspy, deep laugh. Then Mae’s shoulders started to shake. Her mouth pursed, trying to hold in a laugh, but it burst open. Then Ben joined. Laughing, like yawning, is infectious, and I had no choice but to join in, too. Soon, we’d shed so many tears that it was hard to see. Mae slumped over, holding on to her belly.

“Stoooop.” She tried to stop laughing, but each time she caught her breath, she’d look at Ben and the laughing would start all over again.”

Solitude offers peace of mind. It puts things in perspective. It restores sanity, but so too does laughter, and the truth is that laughter is a lot more fun.

I laughed harder this past week than I have in a long time.

I laughed when Dan played Bob Dylan songs on the guitar for my nephew Ben who knew every word but insisted that Bob Dylan was singing “There’s a girl I used to do,” instead of “There’s a girl I used to see,” until Dan just acquiesced and sang the song as directed.

I laughed when the boys went to see the Bucks play basketball and the rest of us decided our activity would be to dye our hair blue, and some of us were much more excited about this idea than others. In the store, Aunt Susan asked the store clerk questions like, “What exactly does semi-permanent mean?” and when the store clerk started to explain the definition of semi-permanent, she said, “No, let me rephrase that. How long will my hair be blue?”

And when the store clerk told her a week to six months depending on certain factors, we all cracked up laughing, knowing perhaps we should stop, but we couldn’t.

The store clerk tolerated our laughter and told Aunt Susan, “You could try temporary dye,” pointing to another section of the store, to which Aunt Susan replied through tears of laughter, “My family won’t let me. I’m being held hair hostage.”

I laughed when we played games at night, and the first time we played one of the games, which requires you to write words on a sheet of paper, like tree, lamp, snowball etc., Aunt Susan didn’t quite understand so she wrote things like “love to bake,” and then desperately tried to get the rest of us to guess her words by saying, “Mmm, delicious, so delicious” over and over again, and when her next clue came up and was “can’t draw well,” it was the same side splitting laughter all over again, and our team knew we were definitely going to lose, but it was worth it because we were having so much fun. After that, the clue to describe “love to bake” and “can’t draw well” was simply “Aunt Susan” which resulted in even more laughter.

“Thank you,” Ruthie says to her siblings in The Berry Pickers.

“‘For what?’ Mae looked over at me.

“I don’t think I have ever laughed that hard in my life.’”

This kind of laughter, the kind that makes you feel so good, that you never want to leave, is a gift.

Dan’s family says they plan to head our way in a few months for Anna’s graduation, which means that our house will be full to the brim. I’m sure that as the graduation gets closer, I will fret over the details…what everyone will eat, where everyone will sleep, how many hot showers can be taken before our hot water heater gives out.

But for now, while the memory of all nine of us huddled together in one room, laughing and singing, is still warm, I’m not worrying about that. Instead, I’m thinking about Cynthia Rylant’s beautiful children’s book The Relatives Came.

“The relatives weren’t particular about beds, which was good since there weren’t any extras, so a few squeezed in with us and the rest slept on the floor, some with their arms thrown over the closest person, or some with an arm across one person and a leg across another…”

“Then it was into the house and so much laughing and shining faces and hugging in the doorways. You’d have to go through at least four different hugs to get from the kitchen to the front room. Those relatives!”

For now, I can’t stop laughing.

I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What are you reading these days? What are your favorite books about family? Who always makes you laugh?