Meme 1

I need to remember. The end of the thread—that is, its beginning—spools from the upstairs bathroom, the toilet. Pam and Ted crammed in there with a three-year-old, dim, the low-watt bulbs blurred through a thick scrim of discolored plastic topping the medicine cabinet. Diffused, there'd be no shadows in the room, and so why do they avalanche the ambered wallpaper, the yellowed shower curtain? Why do they bind the scene like bars do a jailcell?

The American Academy of Pediatrics, "dedicated to the health of all children," has said this:

A number of other cognitive developments greatly facilitate your child’s ability to use the potty successfully beginning at around age two and a half or three. Her memory will have improved a great deal, enabling her not only to remember where she is headed when she starts toward the bathroom but to recall previous toilet-training experiences and benefit from them. Her imagination has expanded, allowing her to explore potty use through imaginary play with stuffed animals, dolls, and puppets. (An expanded imagination may also create new problems in toilet training, leading to such anxieties as the fear of a flushing toilet or the fear of being flushed away.)

The house is a split-level, and through the floor of the upstairs bathroom is a room unfinished, studs surrounding every sixteen inches the open space, the fluff of fiberglass exposed to curious fingers. Here were stuffed animals, puppets, and dolls. Here was Barbie slickly neutered and nondefecatory. Here were the limbless tubes of Fisher-Price's little people, pleased faces factory-pressed, plastic haircuts. Here weren't Betsy Wetsy, Everybody Poops, imaginations expanded in certain favorable dimensions. Ted kept a bench in a corner with enormous monkey wrenches hung from screws, scary tools—weapons—we never once saw used.

Upstairs, screaming. Shouts and pleas. It wasn't the fear of being flushed away, it was such other anxieties as: separation; discomfort; independence. What do you tell the boy who will not stand to piss? You tell him this: "No, David. No, you can't sit." Ted sitting haunches on heels, Pam sitting on the bathtub's lip. Jenny and Shani sitting glass-eyed on a sofa, the living room's carpet. Grads in Brussels sitting outside a chocolatier at the corner of Stoofstraat and Eikstraat. Ronald Reagan sitting freshly at his oval office desk. Everyone's ever-spoiled leisure time. A world of sit.

Years later, soiled rims of the toilet's bowl. Jenny's whined laments, her grandmother calling from the couch: "Do you aim where you shoot or do you shoot where you aim?"

Pam's more than sixty now. She's never once scrubbed a toilet.