Never have I so wished to be staying in a fleabag hotel with an ass-y manager trying to sneak some sort of erroneous phone charges onto the bill. Or for the Dry Bed Fairy to magically appear and make things all better. I think we both knew what The Ethicist would say.
"Let's have breakfast and see how it goes." The children both ate heartily, but the sight of all those sugar cubes filled me with such remorse, I lost all semblance of appetite. I felt like I was waiting for the chaplain, and then the warden. I checked the sheet. It was nearly dry. No one had slept on it before us, the honored, inaugural guests.
"Do the right thing?" I asked.
"It is the only way," Greg agreed, understanding that he, not I, would be the one to carry out this righteous errand.
"Offer some money, you know, for their trouble."
"I'm sure they won't take it."
In the end, they did take it, and I guess it's a sign of increasing maturity that I was
Did you take my suggestion to draw a toilet, and then a bed? relieved. "How did they react?" I grilled Greg, as we were loading our luggage into the newly liberated car. "And how on earth did you make them understand? Did you take my suggestion to draw a toilet, and then a bed?"
"No, I just spoke really slowly and it took awhile, but then the mother seemed to get what was going on and spoke with the father, who got this very grave expression on his face."
"Oh, god."
"Well, they're parents, too. They understand that these things happen." I suppose, though it's difficult to imagine anyone as self-possessed and together as Meena ever wetting a bed. Maybe she had a brother.
"Do you think they're talking about how awful we are?" I fretted, as we drove out past the former front lines, where abandoned houses look as if they'd been sprayed with machine gun fire as recently as yesterday.
Usually, Greg, irritated, would ask me why I cared. "Honestly? I think they wish it hadn't happened, that it's not a good thing that it happened, but they're at peace with the fact that it did. It's life, and in life, shit happens."
And, to look on the bright side, it was only pee, a much-less-big big deal.
©2007 Ayun Halliday and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Ayun Halliday is author of The Big Rumpus and No Touch Monkey! and the popular zine East Village Inky. She is a columnist for Bust and a frequent contributor to Babble. Visit AyunHalliday.com.
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