Billy and Mom had both gone off to work and I was alone in the house, sitting on the toilet, unable to shit. I wasn’t experiencing morning sickness or swelling in my ankles, I wasn’t needing to piss every time I took a sip of water, but I was lucky if I could shit even once a day.
Shitting was one of my simplest life pleasures. Before I was pregnant, each of my mornings would start off with me stumbling to the bathroom, plopping on the toilet with the lights off, and having one quick shit before my eyes were even fully open. It had been a little over a week without this routine and I was slowly going insane. That morning, I’d been determined to have my morning shit, no matter how long it took. I sat myself on the toilet and brought Billy’s laptop with me. I was trying to watch Kevin Garnett highlights, something that always calmed me, when an ad came up before the video.
A kid shooting hoops in a backyard with a net made from a milk crate, the backboard a piece of ripped cardboard. Another kid kicking a soccer ball alone in a field, a large bale of hay her goalie. The third kid just throwing a baseball against his bedroom wall, catching it, throwing it, catching it, over and over and over. A deep voice booms, “A mouse is drowning in a bowl of cream.” The kid shooting hoops pushed to the ground as he walks to class, his ball flies out from under his arm and bounces down concrete steps. “Most mice would just give up.” The soccer girl sitting on the sidelines watching a group of boys play a game without her. The baseball kid with his hands over his ears and his eyes closed as the yelling of his parents bleeds through the walls of his room. “But not this mouse.” The first kid gets up off the ground and rushes down the steps to retrieve his ball. The girl stands up and hops into the game without asking. The third kid’s eyes snap open and his fingers wrap around the baseball and squeeze until his knuckles turn white. “This mouse had fight. And, eventually, all that fighting churned that cream into butter.” The basketball boy practicing relentlessly on his milk-crate hoop transforms into the leading scorer in the NBA. The soccer girl into the forward that kicked the winning goal for Team USA at the Olympics. The third, the star shortstop for the New York Yankees. They stand together, in a line, a powerful trio. “And that mouse simply climbed out.”
The screen fades to black, and bold white letters flash across—“We’re all just a kid from somewhere—Powerade.”
Commercials were manipulative, I said to myself, a kind of evil, even the nice ones. The message didn’t matter, they were all essentially saying the same thing. They spent thousands of dollars on actors and writers to make a script, produce thirty or so seconds of content to tug on your heartstrings so, in turn, you’d open your wallet to buy whatever product they were pushing. I knew all that, endlessly ranted about it to Billy when we were watching TV. So why did I spend the next thirty minutes watching that commercial on repeat, crying nonstop?
When my eyes finally remained dry through the entirety of the Powerade commercial, I clicked on others. Nike, Budweiser, McDonald’s, Walmart, Toyota, Gap, Axe, Petco, Crate and Barrel, a small business that sold meat-flavored chewing gum—they all knew how to squeeze my heart, make my eyes blurry and wet. The minutes ticked by as I clicked and cried. I eventually stopped on a Tide commercial where a dad and daughter spend a day doing laundry together to surprise Mommy, to show her she doesn’t have to do everything. She comes through the door and sees them folding crisp, clean shirts and pants on the couch and she bursts into tears. As they embrace, a Tide logo pops up in the corner of the screen.
By the end of that commercial, I had no tears left and decided, finally, it was time to get up and ready for work. Two hours had passed and I still hadn’t taken a shit.
* * *
—
DARRYL HAD CALLED me earlier that day and asked me to please, pretty please, take Doug’s shift that night.
“Why would I cover for Doug?”
“Because I need Sally to take my day shift tomorrow and she’ll only do it if I find someone to take Doug’s shift tonight. Did you know those two were dating? Personally, I think they both can do better.”
“Okay, well, why can’t you fill in for Doug?”
“I was already supposed to work tonight, but I got out of it, called in a favor with Kim.”
“So, this is you calling in a favor with me?”
“Please? You know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. I’m putting on my good underwear and buying wine that doesn’t come from a box.”
“Special occasion?”
“Carl called and wants to come over tonight. If things go well, I don’t want to have to be rushing out of bed and into work tomorrow, you know?”
“Who’s Carl?”
“Damn, bitch. Do you not listen to anything I say about my life?”
“Oh, Carl, your cheating, lying ex-boyfriend.”
“Do I pick up your shit and shove it in your face?”
I agreed, even though I hated night shifts. Pizza deliveries past nine weren’t for dinner. Rarely families or couples sitting together at the dining-room table after a long day, cuddled into each other on the couch, no “tell me about your day” conversation. A lot of parties, or people in groups of three or more who had been smoking and drinking all night. They could be fun, would ask me to come in and chill for a little before I went back to work. Mostly, though, night shifts meant people alone in their houses, apartments, opening the door a crack and then only slightly wider when they saw it was me. They’d pay quickly, sometimes tell a hurried, stuttered story about how they didn’t do this often, they were usually out with friends at this time of night, had cooked a healthy dinner hours ago, it had just been one of those days, you know?
Kim was also working at Eddie’s that night. She wasn’t bad, she kept to herself, cracked open one of her textbooks and read as she answered phones and jotted down orders. She was in her fourth year of community college, hoping to transfer next year to somewhere out of state. She told me once, in an uncharacteristic chatty mood, that she dreamed of becoming a doctor and moving to a third-world country to help decrease the infant-mortality rate. That night, she just said “ ’Sup?” when I walked through the door. I said “Hey” back. She returned to her organic chemistry book, I turned the volume up on my iPod. A song was playing that made me think of smashing things, large things, like watermelons, flat-screen TVs, wooden tables and chairs, jugs and jugs of milk.
* * *
—
A MAN WITH SIX CHIHUAHUAS standing in an unmoving row behind him, one with its tongue sticking out of its mouth. A woman in scrubs with a large stain on the pants that was either blood or coffee. Three girls with braces wearing their moms’ clothing and heels, face masks, curlers in their hair, drying fingernails all the same shade of alligator green. A guy who took ten minutes of knocking before he answered the door, yelled at me that I should’ve knocked louder, the pizza was probably cold now. A grandma type who tipped me a single dime. A small party, door answered by two dudes in sombreros. They offered me a can of PBR, icy cold, beautiful condensation, and I hesitated, but turned them down. A motel off the freeway, a dark parking lot that made me nervous, so I laced my keys between my knuckles, in 411 a guy in a robe that barely covered anything, a pair of crossed legs on the bed behind him. Several nondescript men and women in quiet apartments, every movement—the knocking, the lock clicking open, bills being pulled from wallets, change from pockets, cardboard shifting, that final slam, lock back in place—sounding unbearably loud.