52stories

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When a five year old tells you she has to pee, she isn’t kidding. I have found, to my chagrin, that my daughter can’t hold it till the end of a movie, or until the next rest stop, or even, in one embarrassing and recent instance, all the way down the aisle of an airplane.

Your mileage may vary, but I’ve found that when Daphne suddenly stops whatever she’s doing, concentrates, and then announces to me and everyone else within hearing distance of her powerful little lungs, “Daddy! I’ve gotta pee!” I have about five minutes before the situation reaches the point of no return.

So when my wife, Liz, Daphne and I were touring through the lovely and picturesque village of Wherethehelleversburg that Liz had insisted on visiting in our whirlwind tour of The Continent, as she insisted on calling what I always thought of as Europe, looking at the quaint fountains and frescos and panhandlers native to wherever we were in the Alps, or Pyrenees, or Caucuses or whatever (lovely, picturesque and quaint all being Liz’s word choices), and Daphne looked up at the twelfth burbling green-with-age copper fountain we had encountered that afternoon and suddenly stuck a finger in her ear and sounded her siren call of “Daddy! I need to PEE!” I sprang into action. Granted, it may have been simply to escape Liz reading aloud from the guidebook for a few minutes, but it was also from an almost primitive male instinct. My progeny had a need (to pee), and I was in charge of hunting down a solution (a restroom) to that need. Instead of dragging a mastodon back to the cave, I would be guarding the door of a ladies room (Daphne being way too old, in her estimation, to use a men’s room, where I could keep an eye on creepy child snatchers from inside the rest room- and in this country- was it Italy? If today was Tuesday, we should be in Italy, I think- most of the population looked like creepy child snatchers to me). Guarding is sufficiently manly, though. We can’t spear a mastodon every time.

“Hey, Liz,” I said.

She murmured a “Yes?”, eyes still scanning her guidebook, looking for the Historically Significant Fact she would feel compelled to share with Daphne and I about this particular fountain in this particular alley. After the first half dozen, I believe she had started making them up, but I couldn’t prove it yet.

“Daphne and I are going to a restroom- you stay right here, we’ll be back in a jiff.” I caught Daphne’s smile at my turn of phrase- soon enough she would roll her eyes at her embarrassing old man, but I was still in the years when I could do no wrong. Her beaming grin lit the gray stone of the alley as I took her hand and set off down toward what passed for a convenience store in this part of the world. Liz didn’t look up from her book, as she flipped back and forth between dog-eared pages. “Have fun,” she murmured.

Walking down the cement sidewalk, which tilted haphazardly toward the one car-wide street, I looked at Daphne. Her fine blonde hair was stuck in pigtails that were always slightly askew, despite Liz’s best efforts. One tiny hand in mine, her other was swinging wildly, as if our walking down to the store was actually a dance to a rhythm that only she could hear. On impulse I started skipping, in strides that were just short enough for her to keep up with, gasping and running. “Daddy!” she giggled, “Daddy, stop! Stop! I really have to pee!”

Oops. Well, we had reached the store anyway. Someone, possibly generations before, had bought one of the ground floor apartments along this alleyway, and put in a cash register and started selling produce. Over the years, the goods for sale had multiplied, but the space available inside had not, and crates of oranges, tomatoes and other fruit had been stacked outside the door, almost blocking the entirety of the narrow sidewalk. Bunches of flowers hung in vases mortared to the stone wall, almost obscuring the doorway. Looking up and down the street, no one appeared to be watching the merchandise. I wondered how many of the oranges the proprietor had walk off on him every day. I reached out and felt a blossom on a bunch of flowers at eye level- maybe I would surprise Liz with one of these when we went back.

“You! Pay inside!” A wheezing, thickly accented voice sounded from the gloom inside the store’s door. Well, maybe the proprietor didn’t have his goods walk away on him after all. I withdrew my hand from the flowers and pulled Daphne up the step into the store. The shouting had startled her, and her hand pulled gently back against mine as we went into the store, her eyes wide, her other hand in her mouth.

As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, a mechanical orangutan shuffled around a table to the side of the door and onto a stool behind it. As my eyes further adjusted, I realized that the ape was actually a withered old man, skinny, but with flaps of loose skin hanging from every extremity, who had somehow kept his naturally red hair from going all white. Instead, it had turned an appealing color for a pumpkin- though his flowing beard was pure white. Gaining purchase on his stool, he shakily extended a cane, which was nearly as gnarled as he was, until the tip was two inches from my nose. “I see you. You don’t try something stupid.”

Grinning into the face of this shining example of (were we in Germany? Was this German?) customer service, I said, clearly and loudly, “Actually, could you just show me the restroom? My daughter, she needs to pee.”

The man didn’t lower the cane, though the effort was taxing his scrawny arms. The tip wobbled, and described a small circle in the air in front of my mouth. “No restroom. Store.”

I looked around the place. It was about the size of the interior of a typical SUV, and was stocked mainly with things in dusty jars, hand labeled, and one row of dried spices, stacked in heaps. It wasn’t much of a store, but it had to have a restroom somewhere, right? “Look, buddy,” I placated, “You have to have one somewhere, right?”

“No. You buy, or you leave.”

Daphne looked up at me with wide, dewy eyes. Her little knees were jiggling as she danced in one spot, cautiously keeping her outfit from touching any of the dusty goods heaped onto the store shelves.

“Buddy- sir. My girl, she’s about to burst, and you’re about to have a pissed off man, a pissed-on floor, and a crying little girl in your store. You may not care about the man or the girl, but you will care when you have to mop. Now where is your bathroom?”

The old man’s eyes, rheumy with yellow-tinged whites, flicked towards the rear of the store, a door in the rear wall that was the only place not blocked with packages and shelves. He caught himself, and his eyes snapped back to mine, cunning and quick. “No. No bathroom! You leave!”

Daphne began whimpering, and her hand in mine clamped harder than I would have thought a kindergartner could. I tightened my own grip on her hand and started walking her to the back of the store, towards the door in the back wall. Behind me the old man lurched in his seat. “No! No!”

I opened the door, revealing a closet sized bathroom, lit by a bare bulb hanging by a wire from the ceiling. In a quick inspection, it seemed satisfactory- no bacteria big enough to see with the naked eye, check. Toilet? Check. Toilet paper? Check. We weren’t going to get anything better by the time Daphne’s internal timer went off. Her brown eyes looked up at me, questioning, and I motioned her in with a victorious sweep of my arm, glaring over my shoulder at the old man, still on his stool. He seemed paralyzed by rage, shaking on his stool, the cane rhythmically cracking against the ground. “No,” he mouthed over and over, quaking.

Closing the door behind Daphne, I leaned against it, putting one foot on the wall and crossing my arms. My eyes locked with the old man’s for a full minute, as I waited for Daphne to call out that she was done.

The old man slowly got off his stool, two gnarled hands grasping the head of his cane, putting all his small weight on it as he unfolded his legs to the floor. Keeping his eyes on mine, tottering steps brought him closer and closer to me. I stood my ground, arms crossing tighter. Maybe it was rude, maybe I should have found another bathroom, but dammit, he wasn’t using this one, if Daphne made a mess I would clean it up, how could he deny a five year old in need? My forehead tightened as I lowered my eyebrows in a more intense glare at the old man.

He stopped three feet in front of me, winded from his walk from the front of the small store. “You…” he gasped for breath, “you… complete and utter fool. You absolute buffoon. You have no idea what you have done. Why couldn’t you have listened to me?”

The accent had changed. No longer was it pseudo-German (or Italian?)- now it was completely unplaceable. I lowered my foot from the door but kept my arms crossed. His eyes, locked with mine, glinted with moisture.

“Daphne?” I called, half turning my head towards the door. “Daffy, we have to go, are you done?”

Silence.

“Daffy, your mom is waiting, come on! Are you okay? Daffy?” I uncrossed my arms and stepped back from the door and knocked on it. And knocked harder. Silence. I tried the knob, and eased the door an inch open. Daphne had just discovered the idea of privacy in a bathroom. Bright light spilled into the dusty dank store from the crack. “Daphne?” Nothing.

I pulled the door open entirely, in the start of a panic, when your adrenal glands first open up and you taste copper in your mouth and your palms prickle and tingle as they start to sweat. On the other side of the door, the sun was bright in the sky, and a green meadow rolled to the horizon, where a dark forest started. Wind stirred the grass in slowly marching waves. And it was utterly empty, devoid of life. A knobby hand, with fingernails like talons, gripped my shoulder, in a grip surprisingly strong for such an old man.

“It’s okay. You did not listen. But you will if you want your Daphne back.” The old man stepped out onto the grass, and raised his cane, gripping it just under the dragonhead carved into the top. The wind swirled around him, tossing his orange hair and snow white beard, as he raised himself to his full height, and beckoned me through the door.