Where is the toilet?

Warning!

Desensitizing training:  Toilet.  Toilet.  Toilet.  My great-grandmother rolls in her grave that I’d be so common, so coarse, as to speak the word toilet.

Never used in polite conversation in the US.  Never. The pretentious “Ou est la toilet?” That, possibly.  But, “Where’s the toilet?”  Never.

“May I use the ladies room?”  ”The ladies?”  ”The restroom?”  ”The powder room?”  Slightly downscale: “The lavatory?”  ”The bathroom?”   And if you know your hostess to have travelled to Europe — “The WC?” or “The loo?”  But never, “May I use the toilet?”  Never.

My mouth goes into something like my great-grandmother would call a moue.  Pursed.  Shrinking shoulders.  Stomach tensed.  “Toilet.”  Cue: eye roll.

In Australia, the word “toilet” is used in polite company.  Perhaps not in our grand parents’ company, but certainly in today’s world.

To be frank (but not too frank — great-grandmother, grave-rolling…), the toilet is not always located anywhere near the lavatory or bathroom in Australia.  It may be entirely separate from bathing facilities.  Even separate from the sink. Bathe.  Cleanse.  As separate from toilet.  Unless one has a bidet.  But rarely in America.  (Too many options for pleasure in nether-dom).

Downstairs in our Australian semi-detached townhouse, built just 6 years ago, the toilet stands alone.  One cannot wash one’s hands in the toilet.  One can only excrete, flush, and exit.  One has to walk across a small hall (other guests politely ignore the exodus from toilet to wash basin), enter the laundry where there is an enormous laundry sink, and cleanse one’s hands.  I’ve tried to devise ways to hide the laundry from the sink function, including burning an incense-laden candle in the laundry, to adding the sink function to the toilet — all to no avail.

To be fair, there is a device one can add to the back of the toilet, making the tank into a basin.  It is costly (more than $500), and one has to straddle the toilet (that word again) in order to access the basin/tank at the rear of the device.

No Aussie seems fussed by this arrangement, but my American/Puritan sensibilities are offended by, first the blatancy of the need to wash one’s hands (and the awful pause if one doesn’t cross the hall to wash), and then the indiscretion of having to enter and exit in full view of the lounge (living) room.

Our Puritan fathers would rather not acknowledge we have bodies, nor concede that  those bodies have needs that must be met.  We Americans, as their descendants, also have a need to avoid mentioning, or even acknowledging, bodily functions in polite company.  But how to find a place to “go,” as it were, is more a more delicate negotiation.

Only euphemisms will suffice for us:  bathroom, restroom, ladies room, lavatory, loo.  Short of clutching one’s nether regions like a child, short of using the dreaded word “toilet,”  we scan and search for appropriateness.

I cannot remember the word “toilet” being used in my childhood.  My mother would have cringed — although many things made her cringe.  Certainly the word “toilet” would have shocked her carefully learned Victorian sensibilities with which she struggled to train me.

I’m getting used to using the word “toilet,” although each usage makes me pause and consider the alternatives.  But pairing of the desperation of timing and the puzzled looks when I ask for the “ladies room” has pushed me to ask the unmentionable, the unthinkable:  “May I use the toilet?”

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