Why a Woman Edged Away from Me on the Bus the Other Day
When I was six, and my sister was four, our family lived in a small rented house on the banks of Lake Ponchartrain in Slidell. It was a wild, remote, very beautiful place set in a broad cleared space surrounded by trees and brush. The blazing Louisiana sun made the leaves glitter and the long grass hot against our legs in the daytime. The nights were loud with frogs and insects and the long burp of gators. To step outside at dusk was to walk into a curtain of mosquitoes. I remember the interior of that little house as cool and dim and faintly rustic, with lots of dark wood and a stone floor in the living room. My sister and I shared a room at the back of the house, where, to save space, our twin beds had been pushed together. Mom and Dad’s room adjoined ours.

I liked our parents’ bedroom because it had what I called “secret passages.” It was so completely and totally lined with the dark wood paneling popular in the early ‘60s that it didn’t have proper doors. Both the door to the hall and the door to the master bathroom were little more than man-sized vertical flaps cut into the room’s paneling, with little knobs added on as an afterthought and “locks” that were nothing more than hook and eye arrangements. Once the doors were closed – and they both swung closed completely unless propped open -- they were pretty much invisible to anyone in the room who didn’t know exactly where they were.

One night our parents, who were still in their twenties, had a party. An advantage to being that age and renting a house out in the middle of a Louisiana swamp is that you can throw loud parties without the neighbors complaining. My sister and I were always entertained by our parents’ parties. Even after we’d been sent to bed, we could usually hear and enjoy what was going on.

That night, Crosby had come over. I think every family has a Crosby, the naughty bachelor friend who tells good stories and brings a different girl with him on every visit. Late into the evening, a bit after the music and laughter had peaked but while the liquor was still flowing, Crosby needed to go to the bathroom. There was already a long queue to the little hall toilet, so he decided to use the one that adjoined our parents’ room.

From our bedroom my sister and I heard him announce this intention. We heard several tipsy, ribald “good lucks” to him from the people in the queue to the other bathroom. We heard the “door” to our parents’ room open, then shut behind him. We heard a metallic rattle as Crosby fumbled with the little hook and eye on that first door and managed to latch it.

We listened with great interest.



There was a long pause, where we mainly heard the usual sounds from a waning party. Then, after a minute or two we heard a thump, as of a hand striking the wall in the next room. There was a pause. Another thump, slightly fainter. Then another slightly louder and closer. Then another from someplace else in the other room. My sister and I nudged each other.

The thumps were becoming increasingly frequent and loud. At the point where Crosby began beating a tattoo along the wall, circling frantically in search of a door, any door, we both began giggling uncontrollably. At the point where he began yelling for help, “I gotta go!, I gotta go!” we were rocking and squealing with suppressed laughter. When a crowd gathered outside the door to my parents’ room, discovered it was locked, and began shouting questions to the almost hysterical Crosby (who was now blundering against the walls of the room like a moth in a glass jar and roaring for help), we had given up trying to be quiet and were practically screaming.

We managed to subside into weak gasps during a moment of relative silence and calm, as Dad was summoned from the front porch to deal with this crisis. But when he began trying to talk Crosby through the door to the door, and we heard the Dad’s deeply serious voice saying “To your right…Your right. Well which way are you facing Crosby? Are you facing the dresser? The dresser, it has a mirror… Look, try moving counter-clockwise…” girlish shrieks again erupted from the back bedroom.

It’s not clear to me how Crosby was eventually decanted from that room. Dad may have just decided to break the latch, given how cheap and flimsy it was. All I know is that even today, four decades later, that experience left its mark on me. I had to stop typing this twice in order to get ahold of myself and wipe my eyes.

The memory of Crosby trapped in my parents’ room has made me laugh ever since. It made me laugh in grammar school and high school classrooms, on long flight layovers, and during business meetings at telecom companies and real estate agencies. It makes me laugh walking to work and waiting for BART.

I don’t have one of those lovely, musical laughs that some women have, and I can no longer giggle like I did when I was six. My laugh is more of a deep throated, slightly sinister chuckle that kind of bubbles up from deep in my chest. (Heh-heh-heh-huh-huh…) When it suddenly becomes audible from someone who’s walking beside you on the street or sitting next to you on a bus I’m sure it’s a little disturbing. Which is a pity.

There are other memories that make me laugh out loud, but that one is something to be cherished, taken out and enjoyed, and kept as fresh as possible. I will never give it up, no matter how many strange looks I get from anyone in earshot when it occurs to me.

Hopefully when I’m on my deathbed, I’ll be able to hearken back to it and let out one last mordant “Heh-heh-heh.”