Adamma in the Bathroom

by Chidima Anekwe

Adamma stands in the bathroom. No, let me be transparent with you, Reader. Adamma waits in the bathroom. And she listens. And she watches.

I expect I must assure you that our heroine is not some sort of predator. Her motivations for taking up residency in the women’s restroom of Club Pompier are entirely innocent, and even, some might say, quite endearing. I’d be willing to speak on her behalf in a court of law should the situation ever reach such a point. God forbid it ever reach such a point. Our dear Adamma (and I hope she’ll become dear to you, too, soon enough) can hardly afford bail on a Forever 21 cashier’s salary, and could never survive the conditions of a jail cell. She is in the midst of a six-hour Nollywood movie in which a scorned wife has poisoned her cheating husband, and she will not rest until she witnesses its conclusion.

But Adamma has taken a break from this project to come to Club Pompier on a Saturday night in the hopeless city of Baltimore in hopes of meeting someone.

Isn’t that the reason young people go out at all anymore? Let’s not act as though our Adamma is the anomaly here. Let he that is without sin cast the first stone.

(Note: the context of this common adage comes from a Biblical passage in which a woman was caught committing adultery, a grave offense according to the law of Moses. Adamma isn’t even going to cheat on anyone, here. So allow her to do as she must.)

Adamma is just like any of us. It’s just that her tactics are perhaps a bit unorthodox. Hence her waiting in the bathroom. Hence our observing her doing so. Let us observe, but from the beginning.

Adamma had come to Club Pompier alone that night. She hated going to anything alone. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy her own company. But she loathed the looks people would give her in passing. They were looks that said, I am truly sorry you do not have friends of your own, evidently. But I also do not wish to attempt to befriend you. So I fear this sad tale of yours must continue. Godspeed.

Oh, how she loathed it! But what other choice did Adamma have? She wished to meet people, too. Should she be disqualified from this endeavor for lack of willing companions? (Note: Adamma hadn’t been terribly well-liked in high school. Her co-workers at Forever 21 were not particularly interested in friendship beyond the clock-in and out parameters. This meant her social circle might be described as quite modest in size.)

So that Saturday night in the hopeless city of Baltimore, Adamma waited in line for Club Pompier. It was mid-March. It was still quite cold, especially at such a late hour. But because it was technically spring, this meant it was no longer socially acceptable to wear any sort of jacket. Adamma tried not to care about things like this, but there was also, more importantly, no coat check. Club Pompier was no sophisticated establishment.

She waited in line and in the cold and hugged her arms for warmth and for comfort. She was surrounded by girls also squeezing their arms tight, but then squeezing each other tight. She tried not to look. It felt voyeuristic.

“Need ID and $5 cover.”

Adamma looked up at the bouncer. No—Adamma looked at the bouncer. They weren’t too far apart in height. They didn’t seem to be particularly distant in age, either. Adamma hated these facts. She preferred when bouncers were big and about the age of her father. They felt more like secret allies. Like when she came to the club alone, they were hoping she’d stay safe and be okay. This young, fresh-faced bouncer, however, looked like he would’ve made fun of her back in high school. He did not look her in the eye as he made his demands.

The group of girls before her in line had gotten in with giggles alone. To save some money Adamma might’ve attempted the same, but she wasn’t so foolish as to think this would work for her.

Adamma stepped through the door, eyes adjusting into the endless blackness of the room before her, intermittently interrupted by flashing strobes of white LEDs. They gave her a headache. Why would anyone enjoy this? Whose idea was this in the first place?

She combed her way through the crowd, the thrashing bodies. It was hot and sweaty and damp. Adamma felt the slick back of a man dancing particularly aggressively. How gross! And she didn’t like that he seemed to be enjoying himself. So did everyone else, really. She didn’t understand it. But she tried not to resent them for it. She would be enjoying herself too, soon enough.

The door to the women’s restroom called out to her from afar. She knew it well, Adamma did. She approached it now with great resolve. Now I must remind you, Reader, that Adamma’s plans for the bathroom are strange, indeed, but quite innocent.

However, it is important that you understand: Adamma herself is not some innocent child. There is calculation in this work she performs. There is strategy.

Adamma did not open the door to any bathroom stall. She did not go to wash her hands, or even inspect the state of her makeup in the mirror. She lounged by the door, and tried to look casual. She scrolled endlessly through social media on her phone. Then other apps. The weather. System settings. Adamma, in earnest, had little interest in the contents of her cellular device. But it was important that she appear to be like any other girl coming through the Club Pompier women’s restroom.

Adamma’s deep personal relationship with the girls’ bathroom dated back to elementary school. In second grade, she had a terrible habit of leaving her lunch money behind in the classroom, and only remembering it after their teacher had already walked them down to the cafeteria. “Oh Adamma, you’ve forgotten again?” This came to be the sitcom-style catchphrase of her teacher, every time Adamma would tug on her sleeve to confess that she’d left her lunch money behind again, meaning she’d have to walk her all the way back to their classroom.

But Adamma, at age seven, had the sense to notice the slightest change in her teacher’s delivery of the phrase over time. The kind laughter that would ring at the end of the sentence began to fade, and her teacher’s face began to look more strained. Perhaps even annoyed.

After that, if Adamma forgot her money, she would hide in the girls’ bathroom for the duration of lunch. She couldn’t bear to hear her teacher say “oh, Adamma” in a way that confessed secret irritation.

Sometimes, in the hour-long wait in the bathroom, little Adamma would start to cry. And sometimes, little girls who also happened to be in the bathroom, would come comfort her. They were strangers, girls from other classes and other grades who never asked for her name but always asked what was wrong.

So tonight, in the Club Pompier women’s restroom, Adamma waited. And soon enough, it was time.

“It’s HIS loss, okay?”

“But I just don’t get it. We were talking for weeks. Why would he—”

“Men are stupid, that’s why.”

“He literally went to Georgetown.”

“Yeah, but he’s rich, it doesn’t even count.”

“I wish I were rich. Maybe then he’d wanna be with me. Maybe that’s the problem. He thinks I’m a gold digger or something.”

“I don’t get why men make such a big deal about gold diggers anyway. The way I see it, everyone’s looking for some sort of capital gain from a relationship. Like the social capital men get from being seen with a—”

“Oh please, enough. None of that pseudo-gender-studies shit. This is exactly why boomers think a liberal arts education is a waste of money.”

“Yeah, yeah, we get it, you majored in STEM, you have a real job, alright.”

“Wait shut up for a sec…I think they’re playing our song.”

“STOP, since when does Club Pompier play good music? Come on, let’s go dance!”

“I’m not ready to go back out there. Please. I don’t wanna see him.”

“Girl, there’s like two hundred people in that room. I doubt we’ll run into him again.”

“But I’m still not feeling up to it yet, I’m sorry. I just need a minute.”

“Naomi, my love. Look at me. He is literally ugly. We cannot miss this song over him.”

“You guys go ahead. I’ll catch up.”

A short period of silence, perhaps contemplation. Then Adamma heard four high heels click clack across the bathroom floor. At this, she emerged from the stall where she’d decided to hide for the moment. She flushed the toilet although there was nothing inside. And came out to the sink to wash her hands.

There she was. A beautiful girl with a tear-stained face. Her mascara was starting to run, her eyes were red. Her hair was dyed red, too. Her skin was black. She was perfect.

She was looking at herself in the mirror, then down at her phone, then back up at her face. Adamma tried not to make eye contact through their reflections as she stuck her hands under the faucet. She glanced up intermittently, careful not to stare for too long. Then she glanced at her out of her peripheral vision. How might she begin?

“Are you okay?”

The girl turned to look at Adamma, and nodded, giving her a wry smile. It was quite evident she was not doing well. Oh, Adamma, what a foolish question!

“Do you want to talk about it?” Adamma tried. She had never made it this far in her women’s bathroom plan, and was now forced to improvise. It was scarier than she’d anticipated. She hadn’t considered that she lacked the proficient social skills required for this type of work.

“It’s fine.” The girl shook her head, and returned to staring at her phone, as if waiting for something to appear. “Thanks, though.”

“You know, if it makes you feel any better, I cried in this bathroom last weekend.” This was a lie. Adamma hadn’t cried since she was a kid. She’d unlearned it. The skill had gone obsolete for her. (Note: we’ll perhaps return to this.)

The girl looked up. Cocked her head to the side. Adamma noted that she resembled a baby duck. “Really? What happened?”

Adamma sighed as ruefully as she could. “Oh, some guy. You know how it is.” Quick thinking, Adamma! Well done.

The girl shook her head, with a tsk tsk tsk on her face. “It’s always some guy, isn’t it.”

Adamma finished washing her hands. She could only stall at the sink for so long. She switched to drying them, ripping square brown sheets from the dispenser and trying to look casual. “I know. It almost gets to be embarrassing.”

The girl turned her body away from the mirror to face Adamma at last. Beautiful girl. “Yeah. It does. Like, I wonder if guys ever cry over love like this. Probably not.”

“They don’t.”

“I hate that. Like beyond the toxic masculinity shit with how boys don’t cry and all that like the Cure song says—”

“I love the Cure.”

“Me too.”

Adamma handed the girl one of the cheap coarse paper towels to wipe her face. She murmured a thank you.

“I feel so silly. Me and this guy, we were only texting for like, a month. It’s not like he’s my ex of two years or something dramatic like that. We never even…nothing even ended up happening, really.”

“Yeah?”

“We matched on Bumble. I thought that the guys on there would be better since the whole premise is like feminist and shit? I don’t know.”

“Yeah.”

“But here we are again. I’m so done with these apps.”

“Well what happened with the guy tonight?”

“Actually he kind of ended up ghosting me last week. Well not exactly. But you know how guys do that fucked up thing where they aren’t that interested in you anymore but not so uninterested that they’d go as far as to break things off, because like hey, it’s better than nothing, right? And everyone’s so terrified of being alone they’d won’t let themselves be the one to end it, they don’t want to have themselves to blame. So they just start taking longer to text back and stop saying cute shit or whatever and hope you can take a hint. And eventually you do.”

No, Reader, Adamma did not know how guys did this thing. She had never experienced much of anything with a guy. Or anyone for that matter. She typically took comfort in attributing this to the struggles of having a strict Nigerian mother, one who’d strongly believed Adamma needed to focus on getting into a good college like her cousin in Queens had—she would be attending Harvard come fall. But let us lead with candor—this is a girl so hopeless that she waits in a bathroom stall for potential love! Her mother could only do so much damage. Nevertheless, Adamma nodded quickly as though she deeply understood.

“So that’s what happened with me and this guy. Jonah.”

“And the whale.”

“What?’

“The one in the Old Testament. Or Hebrew Bible. I don’t know. I don’t remember the story that well, but I remember that he was…he was too scared to deliver this message…so then God sent a whale.”

Sometimes Adamma didn’t understand how you were supposed to contribute to conversations. This, perhaps, could explain the reluctance of her fellow Forever 21 employees to spend time with her after hours. If she wasn’t able to empathize directly with something being discussed, she would often interrupt and try to find some segue to a topic she did, in fact, understand. Her co-workers would wish to talk about the Beatles and she would bring the conversation to a tragic death by pivoting to Diana, Princess of Wales, instead. (Note: she knew very little about English culture.)

She never realized these things in the moment, but could always be found kicking herself soon after. The girl with the red hair and black skin scrunched up her eyebrows for a beat. There was an awkward silence. Adamma coughed to fill it.

“Maybe this Jonah will get swallowed by a whale, too.” The girl snorted. Adamma breathed again.

“I wonder if there are any whales in the Chesapeake?” Adamma returned, making herself chuckle, starting to feel stupidly happy.

“Let’s take Jonah out back to the dock and let him find out!” the girl squealed. The two of them laughed together, and Adamma felt sure that she loved her.

She was also sure she loathed Jonah. “Is he here tonight? Is that the problem?’

“Yeah. We ran into each other at the bar and he pretended not to know me. It was humiliating.”

The girl hoisted herself up onto the bathroom sink to sit on the countertop. Adamma wanted to do the same, but didn’t want to make it seem as though she was copying her.

“I don’t know why I even still go out like this. I always leave feeling worse than when I came.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.”

“Sometimes I’ll come to the bathroom, not even to cry, but actually to use it. And the music is shut out by the door, so it feels like you can hear everything. Like your own heartbeat. And you look at yourself in the mirror, and it looks like a stranger. Well, obviously you don’t actually look different. But it’s like there’s someone else moving your body, and you just have to watch. You’ve been possessed or something. And suddenly you don’t want to go back out there, you wish there was a second door in the bathroom that took you straight home, to your bedroom, where you look like yourself in the mirror.”

The girl looked at Adamma with widened eyes, as if trying to determine whether Adamma was possessed right now, too. Adamma was sure she wasn’t.

“Why do you still go out then?’

“Oh come on. You know why.”

Suddenly, Adamma felt sick to her stomach. Red-haired girl too? She suddenly felt a bit meaner than she’d anticipated.

“Do you really think you’re gonna meet any decent guy at a place like Club Pompier?” she said bitterly.

The girl laughed. Adamma was filled with a strange concoction of relief and embarrassment.

“Course not. But it feels good to feel wanted. Like, sometimes I think I want a guy to decide I’m attractive enough to try to go home with, more than I ever actually want to go home with him. Pathetic, I know. But you get it.”

Adamma didn’t tell the girl what she believed to be true. Or hoped to be. That maybe the red-haired girl was like her, too, but in a different way. And that the red-haired girl didn’t really want to feel wanted, but instead wanted confirmation that someone had seen her, verified her existence. Seen her. Like, she might have stuck out her hand while lying in bed at night, moved her fingers around, and not really believed she was the one doing it. Or that she even existed at all. But if someone approached her at a club, it not only meant for certain that she did, indeed, exist, but maybe she even existed more than anyone else there. Like there was a darker outline around her figure. She’d always suspected as much, but it was nice to get proof.

When Adamma was quite small, her father used to act as though she wasn’t really there. But being at a club made it hard for people to pretend not to see her, to pretend she didn’t exist. On any given night, the bouncer at the door might look at her fake ID and evaluate her with furrowed brows, deliberating whether or not to expose her. If her eyes looked kind enough, he’d let her go. The dancing figures she pushed through in the crowd might make room for her. More likely not. But she would feel their breathing bodies and be reminded of her own. Someone might tap on her shoulder to get past her, too. She’d eagerly move out of the way and hope they’d love her for it, and feel in that moment that they did. She could look around at the room, full of the young and beautiful and happy to be alive, and trick herself into thinking that maybe she was too. At the very least, she was alive. It was confirmed. But then she’d stare for too long. She’d catch too many faces in shadows of colored light. She’d try to smile at them, but they’d look back at her with disgust. Like she’d done something to them. She’d start to be filled with a dreadful feeling. She’d go to the bathroom to hide. The people there were nicer.

“Oh, I’m not really into guys.” Adamma coughed. She didn’t make eye contact with the girl when she said this. She held her breath.

But the girl only nodded. “That’s cool. Hey, sorry for keeping you here so long. Your friends must be looking for you.”

How nauseated Adamma felt at this, dear Reader. The red-haired girl was trying to get rid of her. Of course she had scared the girl away. Why, oh why, did she have to admit to the one thing that could threaten to spoil this all?

“Oh, I don’t. I didn’t really…come with any,” Adamma said helplessly. “I usually end up making friends with strangers for the night.” Adamma hoped this addendum made her seem like less of a freak.

  The girl looked at her thoughtfully. “Why?”

“What do you mean, ‘Why?’”

“Why do you think you do that, like instead of keeping close friends?”

Adamma laughed nervously. “I don’t know.”

The girl nodded. She patted the counter space next to her, and Adamma lifted herself up onto it. It was a tight squeeze. Her hands were now sweating.

“When I was little, I was such a crybaby.” Adamma laughed again. “It was like my whole thing. Probably some anxious attachment thing. It was like, crying meant guaranteed affection. Hugs and stuff. So I did it all the time.

“But then I got a bit older, and it just became a weird thing. People got annoyed at me. Started to hate me a bit. Obviously I cut it out. I haven’t cried once since I was like, what, twelve? I don’t know.

“But I grew up in Towson, where everyone knew each other. And I kind of got branded as that one annoying, attention-seeking girl. Who no one liked. It lasted through high school, too. So I don’t know, I guess I stopped trying.”

Adamma didn’t like the feeling of talking about these things. It was like she was living it again. She could feel all the terrible sensations she’d experienced years ago flying again through her body, getting stuck at her throat, falling back down to rest in her stomach! The girl was staring at her, and Adamma could only imagine what she was thinking. Oh, how humiliating this was.

But then the girl touched her hand. “Well, I like you,” she said with a soft smile.

Had Adamma begun to hallucinate? She wasn’t sure. Perhaps she’d hit her head while hopping up onto the sink and was promptly knocked unconscious. But I must interrupt here, Reader! I can assure you, despite Adamma’s irrational thoughts, this was all quite real.

“Really?” Adamma squeaked.

The girl laughed. “Come on, we’ve been in the bathroom for too long. Let’s go dance before the night ends.”

The girl slid off the sink, and waited for Adamma to do the same. She then took her hand. Together, they walked out of the white light of the Club Pompier women’s restroom, and into the rainbow darkness.

A song played that Adamma didn’t know. But she believed, then, that it was the most beautiful music she’d ever heard. She was floating through the air. She was flying.

The girl grinned at her, threw her arms around Adamma’s neck. They danced together, and Adamma finally understood. This was the real reason to go to a place like Club Pompier. This was how it could make a person feel alive. Those other people weren’t pretending. They weren’t faking it, like she’d always secretly suspected. How little she’d known then. How much she knew now. She didn’t notice the other faces in the shadows. She no longer cared if they smiled back at her.

A guy approached. Adamma paid no attention. The girl did.

“Naomi, hey.”

“Jonah.”

They broke apart.

“You look really good tonight.”

“Thanks.”

“I couldn’t stop watching you dance with that girl. That was…so hot.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I know it’s been a minute. Is it okay if I buy you a drink?”

Adamma was forgotten.

If you feel badly for our heroine, dear Reader, you can hardly begin to imagine her own state in this moment. Or mine, for that matter! I’ve grown quite fond of the girl.

Adamma stood alone. The girl—Naomi—was gone. She turned back to wave goodbye to Adamma, a sheepish smile on her face. But Adamma felt like she had just been spat in the face. Now she stood alone.

Adamma tried to keep going. She is a resilient one, we must give her that. She tried to keep dancing by herself, to see if she could scoop up that violet feeling that had spilled on the floor with her own hands, and pour it back inside of her. It didn’t work.

But she wanted to keep trying! She jumped up and down. She spun herself round and round in a circle, letting herself get dizzy, letting the moving figures surrounding her turn into blurs of dark light. She started to feel a bit nauseated. She stumbled to the floor. It felt like drowning.

Now Adamma started to cry. She cried and cried like a 12 year old much too big for this behavior. Not cute enough for this behavior. How annoying Adamma was. What an attention seeking girl!

A security guard who looked like he could be her father took her out of the venue. He was big and silent, like a whale. She closed her eyes and held on tight.