Today riding home in the passenger seat while your husband curses the traffic from behind the wheel, all you can do is remember that hand on your lower back, that breath in your ear, that stench of sanitizer and feces.
"Beautiful night," he said when he saw you.
"Yes it is."
You'd already been waiting for five minutes for the person inside the Port-a-Potty to come out and you really had to go. You tried not to dance while talking to him.
"Here with your family?"
"My husband and son," you nodded.
"My wife and daughter," he said with a little bow of his head.
"I guess we're both on the same page," you said, almost immediately regretting it. What did you mean by that?
"My dad used to take me here when I was a kid," he said. "Weird that I would take my daughter here too. I don't remember ever liking these trips."
You heard a noise hoping the Port-a-Potty door was opening but you were let down.
"It's hard to break tradition," you said. "Sometimes I wonder if I'm ever going to do anything that I haven't already done a hundred times before."
"You just have to decide what you want to do and do it," he said.
His two top shirt buttons were open. You saw his chest. It glowed in the lamplight. The Port-a-Potty door opened and you ran inside and locked the door behind you.
While peeing, you could only think about him out there, waiting, listening. What had he thought when you said "we're on the same page." You didn't mean anything untoward. Did you? And that line about new experiences. Good God, your husband was in a tent only two hundred feet away.
So it had to happen fast.
Your pants pulled up but left unbuttoned, you flung the door of the Port-a-Potty open, grabbed him by his open shirt collar and yanked him inside with you.
It was a matter of minutes. He lifted you up above him, bending your head awkwardly against the curved plastic ceiling so that your neck still hurts this morning. You worried about the surfaces your hand might touch so you made sure to keep them on his body.
You kissed, you grappled, you negotiated the space around you and the space inside you with a man whose name you didn't catch. You were ravished and you ravished, all the while with your sneakered foot resting on the toilet paper roll for balance. When the minutes had ended you left the Port-a-Potty first. You said goodbye only with a "wait thirty seconds after I leave." Then you returned to your tent and hid yourself inside your sleeping bag.
Last summer and the nine summers before that, you'd spend the drive home wondering if you remembered to clean up your campsite. Driving home today you wonder if your footprint was visible on that toilet paper this morning in the Topahanga Campground Port-A-Potty. So nice to have a new place for your thoughts to go, no matter how bad it smells.
Happy You Left Your Heart At The Topahanga Campground Port-A-Potty Day!
