My daughter was walking down the hall toward the bathroom, a perfectly normal thing to do in the course of the average day. But she stopped midstep outside the doorway. Paused, as if brought up short by a sudden realization. Then she turned around and headed in the other direction.
She was too considerate to say so, but I knew — I had just been in there, and, to my shame, rank would be too charitable a term.
When I was a kid I remember at a friend's house, a house belonging to a family a step or two up the social ladder, a box of matches would always be at the ready in the can. (My phrasing, not theirs.) I later adopted the habit, but after a match left a permanent burn mark on a bowl, I gave it up.
An outhouse clears the air, I've noticed. The why can be skipped for now, but for five years in the 1990s I lived in the Alaskan interior, outside Fairbanks, in one then another cabin with no running water, one made of logs, the other balloon-frame, and as I recall, for some reason — airflow, bacteria, punishing subzero temperatures — the outhouses didn't smell, even in the short summer season when you could read outside at midnight.
Still, in the depths of one long dark winter I simply could not face another trip outside to sit my bare cheeks on a sheet of Styrofoam over a hole, and thought it might be okay to use a camping toilet — really just a little metal folding chair with a plastic bag beneath it — inside the one-room cabin.
My girlfriend was above me in the sleeping loft. We didn't last.
My next girlfriend — a real Alaskan, not a graduate student up from the Lower 48, in fact the daughter of a Honduran mail-order bride — was a bit more down to earth.
One winter we took the Alaska Railroad down to Anchorage for a nice weekend away, a trip during which we could see moose plowing through the chest-high snow to get out of the engine's path. And "nice," that is, Last Frontier-style. To wit, after a fine Italian dinner, we tried walking down to the waterfront, but wound up ducking into a storefront's entryway, gasping with pain, such was the windchill.
Back in our hotel room, the next day, after my own morning constitutional, I was pained to see her enter the bathroom. Cowed, I was, when she emerged, eyes wide and shaking her head. But also laughing, it turned out.
"You know you love your man," she said, "when you're impressed by his big stink, not disgusted by it."
A forgiving girl. But yes, I'm thinking what you're thinking: She deserved better.
As far as I know, she got it, Alaskan to this day, married, a couple of kids, which is pleasant to think about. Because with children you just can't be that squeamish.