I stepped out of the shower wrapped in the large white towel I had checked out at the front desk, my wet bathing suit in hand. On automatic, I turned to the left toward the small wall-mounted machine that spins the excess water out of bathing suits. “Wait, it’s not there,” I thought, surprised, standing between the rows of showers. “Am I turned around?”
The shiny new Mashouf Wellness Center opened last August at San Francisco State University, just a few buildings away from where I work. I have been swimming a couple times a week since December, usually about 30 minutes, then taking a few minutes in the jacuzzi before showering. Returning to the locker room from the natatorium, you walk through a short, tiled hallway that jogs once and opens into a section lined by five or six shower stalls on each side. The design probably assumes people will go directly into the showers when coming from the pool, but my routine is to go to my locker to get shampoo, conditioner, and towel before showering, dripping all the way.
This day, my routine was different. After my swim, I was headed directly to get a haircut so wasn’t going to wash my hair at the gym. I skipped the jacuzzi too so my approach to the row of doors on one end of the natatorium – offices, locker rooms, all gender bathroom – was the opposite of my usual path. I opened the door to the locker room from the natatorium, followed the short hallway and went right into a shower stall. I pulled the white plastic curtain closed and took off my bathing suit.
But now, following my shower, ready to go get dressed, I was confused that the bathing suit spinner was not where it normally was. I stood there for 30 seconds looking up and down the room trying to make sense of its displacement without the obvious explanation occurring to me.
It was there I was standing when a young man coming from the pool rounded the corner into the shower section where I stood. He froze when he saw me, and I froze too.
“Am I in the wrong one, or are you?” I asked, wide-eyed and almost shouting. Not responding, the young man turned and ran back toward the door to the natatorium and I took off running after him, towel around me, wagging my dripping bathing suit as I went. I burst back through the door onto the pool deck, where the student, reassured by the signs on the doors, said simply “this is the men’s”, and went back in.
OH MY GOD.
What if I had initially just walked all the way into the locker room as I normally did – and it was the men’s room? What if I had been naked in the shower and heard male voices outside – how would I have gracefully gotten out of there? What if I had stepped out of the shower to find a young man with a towel around his waist – or less?! Each was such a funny and crazy scenario.
I scurried into the women’s locker room and exclaimed to two young women chatting as they dressed, “I just took a shower in the men’s room!” They smiled politely, looking at me with the impatient look of young people wondering why a towel-clad stranger is suddenly speaking to them. It was not a satisfactory interaction.
Still, laughing about the absurdity of my error (and the future comic possibilities of both relating and acting the story out later on), I wondered if the lifeguards sitting across the room had witnessed the farcical tableau. A young Chinese man walks into the men’s locker room and moments later bursts back through the door into the natatorium, followed by a middle aged Caucasian woman in a towel, wet hair slicked to her head, a limp bathing suit flapping in one hand. They pause briefly together before he steps back into the men’s room and she prances quickly on bare feet disappearing into the women’s room. “Did you see that?” one asks the other. “Yes,” the other responds, and they turn their eyes back to the handful of lap swimmers in the pool. Or maybe now when I go to swim, one lifeguard elbows the other and nods knowingly in my direction.
More likely I am the only one who took particular note of the adventure. Well, me and the young man. I hope he too has related it and acted it out for laughs!
