This Is My Face When You Won’t Stop Talking

My whole adult life, I only peed on the floor once, and it was for a noble cause. I was visiting my hometown, Goiânia, a city in the belly button of Brazil, when I bumped into an acquaintance from seventh grade. After staring at his eager smile for almost a second, his name floated to my mouth: Pedrinho! That exclamation mark unspooled a good three hours of chat. Sidewalk bar, plastic tables, warm evening, small town. Pedro taking me through all the names of our former classmates: married, pregnant, broke. We had ten years’ worth of gossip to review, so when the waiters turned on the lights and emptied buckets of soapy water under our feet, Pedro offered me a ride home.

This is by no means a romantic situation, and the piss won’t end up being a golden shower. This is just an encounter between someone who desperately needs to talk and someone who desperately needs to be nice.

As we approached my mother’s house, I started wrapping up the conversation. Inviting him in was out of the question. To my mother, at two a.m., chitchat in her kitchen and a golden shower would’ve been pretty much the same thing. But as Pedro parked the car, instead of the expected goodnight, he dropped a conversation starter:

Do you remember Adriana?

With my seat belt unfastened and fingers already folded on the door handle, I froze. Was he trying to hold me hostage with gossip? I kept on pulling the handle in slo-mo, as I decided between my old need to be a good listener and a newly discovered need to pee. Before the door clicked open, he went on:

You know Adriana and I had a very sad love story, right?

Not the time for a love story, much less sad, much less very sad, Pedro, dear, is what I thought. But not what I voiced. Whenever I’m in such situations, and I often am, I exist in dissonance: my mind wishes to stop the person from talking, while my mouth somehow produces sounds that mean, Wow, tell me more. I’m involuntarily supportive.

I let go of the handle and slowly turned my head back at Pedro, to find thick melancholy already pouring out of his mouth in the form of a teenage love tale. What kind of person would interrupt a poor creature like this? I was sure he’d wrap up soon. A love story that started in seventh grade couldn’t have lasted longer than a couple movie nights.

Several minutes into the story, I was wondering if those had been Scorsese movies. Gratuitously lengthy. His thing with Adriana was nearing a year, and it’d become an endless stream of tragedies and mishaps. I’d love to have registered them all, maybe write a book and hope Mr. Scorsese optioned it, but at this point I wasn’t paying attention anymore. My whole body was just a vessel for piss.

He was now in year two of his clumsy love affair.

I was a dam on the verge of overflowing.

He was in year three of his disgraced little romance.

I was an eagle flying over a waterfall.

He was in year four of his stupid inferno.

I was wondering if I’d ever get my life back.

This is the kind of person I am: someone who listens. I’ll surrender all my freedoms to His Majesty the Lecturer, if that makes me seem nice.

I’m also a Brazilian kind of person. So, I will always interject when someone is speaking. I’ll get a call to confirm an appointment, and I’ll talk over the person twice during their dozen-word speech. Shit, I’ll talk over bot calls. I’ll say things like, Hmm, or Uh-huh, or Huh. But these are the opposite of interrupting. This is called cooperative overlap. To a Latina like me, none of those sounds are meant to stop the speaker, but rather to nudge them on. However, if the listener is too encouraging, or the speaker too confident, these interjections can be heard as, Please never ever stop talking.

Growing up, I was often interrupted, and not in a cooperative way. My number one interrupter was my mother. My mother took any nanosecond of silence as a sign that the conversation was over. If you were on the phone with her and paused to breathe, she’d hang up. Not as in: brief silence, then bye, then disconnect tone. There wouldn’t be any warning. It was just: brief silence, disconnect tone.

She did it to my father, my sister, her sisters. And remarkably often to me. She couldn’t tolerate slow, and I, on the other hand, was, and am, a slow talker. I talked at 0.75x speed way before YouTube introduced that feature. I pause a lot, I look upward, I look for words—every conversation with me is filled with white space.

I admit I had my share of toiletless peeing even before the Pedro situation. As an adult, I’d peed on grass and tree pits and cracked sidewalks and asphalt—just never on glossy tiled floor, as ended up happening that night. The surfaces were varied, but the reason to forgo a restroom was always the same: to not interrupt a party. Usually, Carnaval. Carnaval is free, febrile, crowded, incredible—and unpeeable. I’m sure dinosaurs had easier access to a porta potty than the thousands of us who dance on the streets every February.

My husband calls my attention to how bad I am at disentangling myself from people. At parties, he has to check in on me every now and then. If I have signs of a long time without a break—empty glass, empty plate, or a body posture that resembles a puddle—he’ll set me free by taking my place in the conversation. On those occasions, my face is that of a smiley balloon. Cheerful on the outside, empty on the inside, and yellowed from the urge to flee.

My mother’s hanging-up habit was considered cute. No one in the family thought it was really rude; everyone thought it was hilarious. Hilarious, I’d laugh along. But each time the line went dead, I felt a lump in my throat, an echo of how she treated me most of the time, mostly when we were alone.

My mother had me at forty-one. An accident, is how she’d describe it. My siblings were already in their teens, and my mother herself had lost all interest in children’s play by the time I happened. So instead of ball-tossing or peekaboo, we talked. I talked. I talked, and sometimes I paused. At any of those pauses, no phone separating us yet, my mother would just turn on her heels and walk out mid-story. Mommy, I’d call, puzzled, only to see her stop, sigh, look back at me and ask, Is there ‘mommy’ written on my butt? Then why do you call me every time I turn around?

Thank you for staying with me through my pauses.

When in Carnaval, leaving a bloco to go find a restroom means you’ll either miss one full hour of partying, or get lost from your group, or get robbed. Probably all three. So, my friends and I shield each other as we squat at the margins of the parade, careful not to get our sneakers wet, while the caramel-colored mutts look at us in disgust.

That type of unpottied peeing, though, is meant to keep something good going. It’s a choice. Whereas Pedro’s never-ending story wasn’t even good. I didn’t exactly choose to keep it going, yet I didn’t choose to stop it. This decision limbo led to me peeing halfway between his car and my bathroom.

Once, at a birthday party, my friend Ian was telling me about an ancestry website where he found amazing data on his family. I was deeply interested. Putting together a family tree in Brazil is a tough feat. Especially because we, as a country, have been on a five-century effort to erase any trace of Indigenous existence. Since we can’t delete our dark faces or petiteness or hairless arms, genealogy in Brazil has become the science of deleting our stories. This leaves impossible gaps. Whenever I question my family on our roots, they mumble something about Portuguese blood then ask me to pass the salt.

So, I was genuinely curious to hear about Ian’s heritage. My curiosity and his self-confidence, though, made for that explosive combination, where my uh-huhs became unlimited fuel for his words. As we talked—he talked, I interjected—Ian inched forward, I inched back, until I was trapped in a corner, the centuries-long branches of his family tree shielding me from the laughter and chatter of the party.

Ian zoomed in on each twig of that tree: in 1920, in 1860, in 1750, in 1600. At some point, I was perversely thankful to whatever racist colonizer who came up with the idea of redacting our past, because even though that meant I’d never learn my own history, at least I wouldn’t have to learn Ian’s for much longer either. He’d have to stop in 1500, the year the Portuguese invaded.

But, who knew, the psychopaths on that ancestry website took Ian’s family tree all the way back to Europe. They sailed that stupid boat backwards on the Atlantic, docked it at some port in the Iberian Peninsula, and had all the greasy-haired conquistadores walk in reverse out of the ship, rewinding their lives and their parents’ lives until they reached some obscure great-grandfucker who was born in 1338, and who Ian so wanted to tell me about.

This is the kind of person I am: someone who pretends to be listening—but not only will I not listen, I will actually complain later. I’ll complain behind people’s backs, and yet, publicly. I’ll complain as if I didn’t have the option to interrupt.

I know the option exists; only, I can’t choose it. I can’t risk being brusque like my mother. She knew that her habit of ignoring me wouldn’t cut off the ever-flowing supply of love I had for her. Whereas I, raised on spilled droplets of love, can’t afford treating anyone—not even Babblerman—like my mother treated me.

Peeing is a process that involves both voluntary and involuntary components. Our bodies alert us to the need to pee, and a fully formed adult with a fully healthy bladder is usually able to manage this need. When and where we pee is mostly up to us. Even in Carnaval, it’s up to us.

My mother’s interruptions hurt because they felt like payback. Like she was reclaiming space I shouldn’t have taken up. Maybe my insistence on going on and on had long been unbearable to her. Maybe since the day she saw those two lines on the test strip, and hoped I wouldn’t stick. At forty, she was a successful professor, the mother of two grown teenagers, and a charming woman considering divorce. Then there was me. Then she was a woman with regurgitated milk on her blouse.

Still, she could’ve interrupted me once, definitively, instead of incrementally over my life. She let me be born, but didn’t let me exist. I often felt that my mere presence was getting in the way of her day, her life.

I was the interruption.

Of course, the option existed to avoid this situation. I could’ve stopped Pedro’s love odyssey instead of peeing on the floor. Just like I choose to pee under trees in Carnaval, I could choose to interrupt people who talk and talk. Part of me knows those dudes don’t even need a listener. If you replaced me with an actual smiley balloon, I bet Pedro or Ian would go on rambling.

But another part of me is afraid. I know too well how people treat me when they perceive me as an interruption. It’s not Mr. Ted Talk I’m protecting with my subservience, it’s myself. So, I don’t interrupt, but I also don’t own my decision to keep listening. Just like my mother, I inhabit this void between the choice and the consequences.

My mother—I could talk about her a ton. But, for once, I want to be the one taking up the space in my story.

That night in my hometown, when Pedro finally ended his Thousand-and-One-Nights recital, and I emerged from the passenger seat of his car, emotionally drained and urine filled, I could only make it across the small front yard. As soon as I unlocked the entry door, I heard the bladder operators yelling from inside me, Open the gates!, and then the noise of piss hitting the tiles of my mother’s house.