The Hotel's Ladies Room

All day the Bathroom Attendant listened to other people go to the bathroom.  I know because for a couple of months I hung out by the makeup mirrors in between therapy sessions and job interviews.
She wore a quasi maid’s uniform, repeatedly offering paper towels in broken English that belied a sharpness and insight that only comes with starting life over at the age of 40 or 50 or 60.

Rather than deal with intelligence that could hear them in their most intimate moments, I watched her be summarily dismissed by the thousands of perkily dressed Mid-Western mid-management women snappily wearing their versions of the power suit with a Fortune 500 smugness at their New York conference before returning home to bland garden apartments or studios temporarily furnished for a pre-marital life.

One even demanded to know what that smell was and, at the risk of being complained about, the Bathroom Attendant shrugged a fuck-you-lady shrug and said “It’s a bathroom.”