An open-and-shut case

Peggy said she doesn't want anybody but me (and the two dozen people who already know) to learn by her full name and pedigree that she is the star of this story.

Well, all right; small price.

When the Thanksgiving festivities had ended and all the guests had repaired to their respective domains, Peggy refrigerated the perishables, loaded the dishwasher, straightened up the kitchen and aimed her happy but weary grandmotherly self toward the bathroom, where, she schemed, she would luxuriate in a long and indulgent bubble bath.

Alas, the door to the bathroom was locked. "I mentally ticked off the departing guests and determined that no one had stowed away," she said. Then, after permitting the entire assemblage enough time to arrive safely at home, she began making her telephone calls. Learning specifically which guest had managed the idiosyncratic latch trick did not unlock the door, of course, but Peggy took some comfort in the successful detective work - though not as much comfort as a hot bath might have provided. And, since her house came equipped with a half-bath, as well, to serve for more dire and pressing needs, she retired for the evening pleased, if not pampered.

On Friday she struggled until she determined that the bathroom door could be opened only from the inside. Therefore, it could not be opened, since nobody was in there. She removed the entire doorknob assembly, opened the door and returned the doorknob assembly to its proper place, though amended in a misdirectional way she did not immediately notice. She did notice that the door was not locking in a consistently predictable fashion. Sometimes it locked. Sometimes it didn't. She resolved to amend her own habits to accommodate the door.

Old habits wield more influence than new ones, though, and one morning recently Peg shut the bathroom door behind her with a thud as ominous as it was thunderous. "It was locked," she said. Also, it was assembled inside out, and she was inside. "I didn't panic for about two minutes. The only tool in the bathroom was a toothbrush. I went to the window, an Andersen, crank-out type with scissor hinges. I had no way of getting through the 12-inch opening. Now, I began to panic."

She learned that pedestrian traffic on her street in Northport was more sparse than she ever had suspected. She waved at every car. "Since the window is in the middle of the side of the house," she said, "nobody noticed. Nor did they notice when I tried yelling, `Help!' I then put out what I must have thought was an international distress signal for Woman Locked in a Bathroom: three feet of toilet paper. It didn't work.

It was 7:30 a.m. Peg recalled her 90-year-old neighbor brought out and installed the little metal flag to his mailbox the same time every morning, 8:30 a.m. "Apparently," she said, "many years ago, some kids ran through the neighborhood taking all the little red flags off the mailboxes, so he responded by taking his mailbox flag in every night and putting it back out every morning. He's been doing it for years."

Finally, at 8:30, she summoned him over. At first, he responded by looking back toward his own house and telling his wife what he was doing. When he realized his wife was not calling him, he shuffled over to Peg's bathroom window, stopping along the way to police the twigs that had fallen during the night and toss them into the woods across the street, thus keeping the side yards tidy between the houses. Peggy enjoys this detail only retrospectively. At the time of occurrence, she could not detect humor in it.

She wanted her neighbor to go to her tool shed at the back of the house and check the bottoms of all the flower pots stored there for the one flower pot to which she had taped a spare key to her house. While he was gone, presumably foraging through the shed for the right flower pot, Peggy flagged down a 12-year-old boy and asked him the same favor. Neither of them found the key, and both returned to the bathroom window to say so. There, the older man valiantly demanded three times that the younger one relinquish the key he did not have.

Peggy remained resolutely unamused by this scene, too, until much later, after she had prevailed upon the neighbor to go home and get a cell phone, which she borrowed until she located a rescuer who drove to her house, found the key, opened the bathroom door with a simple twist - yes, while laughing - and liberated her.