Still Life with Tornado(16)

I let Mom go first because she said something about her pelvic floor. I had no idea what a pelvic floor was and, come to think of it, I still don’t know. But I’m thinking it’s something you get later on.

When it was finally my time to pee, I went into the bathroom and saw it had a bidet. It was my first bidet and I didn’t know what it was for. While I peed, I stared at the bidet and tried to figure out what it was. I decided that it was a special toilet where one throws up. It was clean. It had that nozzle thing. It didn’t have any water in it to splash back. And it was right next to the toilet. I’d heard about Montezuma’s Revenge and Mom had warned us not to drink the water in Mexico. She’d packed every type of medication there was for vomiting, nausea, and diarrhea. I decided that this thing next to the toilet was a vomitorium. I’d heard the word. Had no idea what it meant. Now I had a face to put with the name.

I turned on the water in the bidet as I sat on the toilet, peeing the pee of a hundred little girls who’d just deplaned in Cancún after accepting every beverage offered by the flight attendant, and I tried to move the nozzle around and I went too far and the water started to spray onto the bathroom floor and even though I turned the water off right then, the floor was pretty soaked. When I was done peeing, I took the hand towel from the bathroom and cleaned the floor and I threw the towel under the sink basin so everyone would know it was dirty.

I didn’t think it would be a big problem.

I was a kid and I’d never seen a vomitorium before.

A half hour later while Mom was putting sunscreen on me and Bruce was already in his swimming trunks and flip-flops, Dad came out of the bathroom holding the dirty towel.

“Who used this towel?” he asked.

Bruce said he didn’t know. Mom said it wasn’t her.

I said, “I used it to clean up some water I spilled on the floor.”

“How’d you do that?” he asked.

“I just . . . did.”

He was far too angry for our first day in Mexico. Maybe he knew we’d just been had by Alejandro.

Mom said, “Chet, don’t make a big deal.”

Dad said, “We’re not even here an hour and they can’t be mature.”

Bruce said, “I’m mature.”

I said, “I was just checking out the vomitorium.”

Day One: over. Day One: vacation potential, a dirty towel, and a vomitorium.





HELEN’S PENDING CONTEMPT



A vomitorium has nothing to do with vomit. If you’ve been to a baseball game, then you’ve probably been in a vomitorium. The word comes from the Latin vomō, which means to “spew forth.” And as a baseball fan, once the game is over, you spew forth through the vomitorium to get back to the parking lot.

Some dumbshit got the meaning wrong once, and for all time, we think it’s about some gastrointestinal bug that made Caesar hurl in a vomitorium. The irony is fine, but it still doesn’t mean that people go there to vomit.

I hate when people think they know a thing they never even thought about. I have to deal with this every single night in the ER. People hit the Internet for medical advice and suddenly they’re diagnosticians. Last night it was a guy convinced he had gallstones but had indigestion, another one with assumed throat cancer who really just had postnasal drip, and a woman who was convinced she had a tapeworm. She actually did have a tapeworm. Did you know they poke their heads out of the anus at night? True story. If you want to be in medicine, remember—you might one day see a tapeworm wave at you.

I don’t know what Chet sees in his cubicle during the day, but it’s nothing compared to what I see. Whatever he sees, he’s always taken it out on the kids. Poor Chet. That’s what he should call his memoir. Poor Chet. Except his memoir wouldn’t be all that long. All he does is go to work, shrug, and eat vendor hot dogs on the way home because I refuse to buy hot dogs. Nitrites. Avoid ingesting them. Trust me.

? ? ?

You probably think I’m being hard on Chet. I am. Life is hard. Marriage is hard. Parenthood is hard and if you add all three up, it’s harder. Chet’s still acting like he’s at home with his mother. He treats me the way his mother treated me when she was still alive. Mean. Like it’s my problem that he doesn’t do things right.

I’ll own my problem. My problem is that Chet doesn’t do things right and it makes more work for me. When the kids were little and I went to work seven-to-seven, Chet called his time with them “babysitting.” I’d come home at seven thirty in the morning, and the dinner dishes would still be in the sink, the house was a mess, and the kids would be late for school, homework undone. That’s not even babysitting.

Remember this. If you plan to get married and have kids, find someone who will never say they are “babysitting” their own kids. They’ll expect trophies for just being there and by the time the kids grow up and leave the house, you’ll have nothing but contempt for all of them.

The time in Mexico when he yelled at Sarah because she’d played with the bidet and cleaned up her mess, I took Bruce and Sarah out to the beach. Bruce didn’t say much. I told Sarah I was proud of her for cleaning up the mess with the towel.

“It shows real independence that you cleaned up after yourself,” I said.

All she could see was that her daddy was mad at her.