I was in the bathroom at some faraway airport putting on a fresh face of makeup and fixing my hair after an all-night journey when I heard a woman in the center of the stalls area ask another, “Is she alright?”
That’s when I heard the wailing sounds coming from inside a stall. A young black lady in jeans and a grey shirt told a young white lady in yoga pants and a T-shirt, “I asked her if there was anything I could do for her, and she said no.”
The women turned together to look back at the closed stall door, and the cries from its other side continued, rising in gulps of despair.
Several other women gathered around the stall and looked at each other, and then back at the first woman, who seemed to be the one in charge.
That first lady remained hanging around outside that door. I put on a coat of mascara but kept watch out of the corner of my eye.
“Can I get you anything?” asked that first lady, arms laden with purse and coat and travel back and with a roller-bag leaning on her legs, but still vigilant outside the stall door.
“No,” came a wavery sound from inside the stall.
In front of me, stuck to the mirror, was a sticker that instructed women to be on the lookout for sex trafficking. It gave the warning signs to look out for. It gave supportive comments for women who themselves might be in that situation, and it gave a phone number to call for help.
I looked back toward the bathroom stalls.
A Japanese tourist now stood beside the first lady, looking worried, joining in on the vigil.
Other women of all ages and races came up to them. They looked at the bathroom door and consulted in whispers.
The first lady gave a final look toward the stall, then sadly walked out. She probably had a flight to catch. An older lady took her primary position outside the door, watching quietly.
The atmosphere in the restroom was tense. Women’s faces were drawn tight.
I looked again at the sticker with instructions on sex trafficking, then picked up my curling iron. I was back in the far corner, trying to keep out of everyone’s way, trying to keep my big slippery coat from falling to the floor. One of its sleeves slid into the sink and got wet.
I juggled everything quickly, trying to get the coat in order without bumping the hot curling iron into anything.
When I looked back up, the seas had parted, so to speak. The women who moments before all had seemed united with a single goal had separated to different sinks and mirrors, looking away.
In the corner by the paper towels was a woman with a red face, wiping her eyes with paper towels. Her most recent self-appointed bodyguard or caretaker, as the case may be, stood a distance behind her, watching, then quietly walked away.
The crying woman looked to be in her fifties. She had a fluffy hairdo, a top covered in a garish orange, red and pink floral design, loose khaki-colored crop pants and white sneakers with little anklet socks.
This didn’t seem to be a case of sex trafficking. Perhaps she was on her way to or from a funeral, like I was. Given the intensity of her sobs, it had to have been her mother’s funeral.
One by one, the women who had been so drawn to the outside of the crying woman’s bathroom stall finished their ablutions and walked out. I went back to making myself presentable.
About half an hour later, after I had been sitting at the gate for a while, I got up to look for a coffee shop. About two gates down, I passed the crying woman.
She was by then pulled together, face clear, no signs of tears. She was standing with three men, one or two of them about her age. The immediate impression of them was that they looked like they were ready to play golf. Or perhaps they were all tourists on a fun little vacation. They had matching luggage and some shopping bags from the duty-free shops.
It didn’t look like a mourning crowd, though who’s to say? The scene made my mind shift to a third theory. Perhaps she was having troubles with her husband. He was having an affair, or he abuses her, or she wanted to leave him but didn’t know how she’d support herself, or some such thing.
The men looked jovial and without a care in the world. They looked confident and in control. Did her family take her for granted? Were they totally unaware of her needs, her worries, her problems? Or were they the cause of them and they didn’t care?
If I had passed them without ever having encountered that woman crying with such despair in the bathroom, I wouldn’t have looked twice, other than to think they looked like the kinds of people who probably went on more and better vacations than I do.
It was an eye-opening experience. We just never know what secret troubles plague others.
