this morning my hands were in both the toilet and the garbage. i may never bite my nails again. why should a toilet flapper leave me sobbing over the tank like Lucille Ball, wailing as if i'd lost my best friend? but i did lose my best friend. he would have known how to fix it. he knew how to do everything and, if he didn't, he figured it out or made it up as he went along. he'd never cry over a toilet flapper, or over cheap trashbags that breed holes and spill cat letter all over the bed of the truck on the way to the dump. he never would have filled the trashbags beyond their apparent "Hefty" capacity. "always trying to stuff ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag," he'd say to me. and it's true. the men at the DPW with their tanned legs and orange shirts look the other way when i don't have enough lime green dump stickers on my trashbags. they let me slide. they knew bob and they know he died. perks to being a widow.
so my hands smell and i find myself wondering what it is about all garbage that makes that singular smell? and why is the inside of a toilet tank black when the water is allegedly clean? i scrub my hands only to get dirtier, spending an hour or so on the back porch roof buttering it with tar patch. my red Vixen nails outlined in tar. i've added gasoline to the mix because that's all i have to remove the tar. if i lit a match would my hands explode into torches?
bob used to put cigarettes out in open coffee cans of gas. it's not the gas that ignites, he'd scoff dismissively, it's the fumes. and if it's in an open container in open air then you got nothing to worry about. still, i'd back way off when he did it, convinced every time that he'd explode into a human torch. but he never did. he always knew his stuff.
a long, achingly hot shower and i'm still vaguely perfumed with Regular Unleaded and my nail beds are still black. the trash is gone and the roof is almost entirely patched, but that goddamn toilet flapper still has me down. when i removed it from the tank i found that the reason the toilet runs is because the rubber stopper is crumbling at the edges, letting water seep. i can't wait to see this month's Water & Sewer bill. bob, always prepared, had a toilet repair kit on the basement workbench. so i brought it upstairs with complete confidence that it should be a snap. but of course it wasn't and now the old flapper is back in its place and i have to remove the tank lid and make sure the damn thing securely plugs the hole every time i flush. so i'm flushing a whole lot less.
i'l try it again tomorrow. surely if i can fix a roof i can fix a toilet. bob never would have imagined me fixing a roof or a toilet. i'll show him i can do both. i'll put on 1.75 strength reading glasses and maybe i can see through that water better. maybe this time i'll read the directions or consult my Tuff Chix Guide to Home Repair. my sister gave the book to me for my birthday five months after bob died. hard to misplace, being bright pre-teen pink. bob would have a good chuckle because he knew i never read directions, much less a guide. but i swear i did read the "how to" stop a faucet from dripping and i'm still intimidated by plumbing. so my answer was to shut the cold water supply off and brush my teeth real fast. the Hot, after all, turns hot real fast.
did so many things break when bob was alive? did he invisibly fix everything before i ever knew it was broken? could he fix me if he was here? if he came back alive, it would fix me, i'm sure.
but the reality is i am stymied by a jammed garbage disposal (hint: there is a Reset button). jammed it trying to stuff ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag.
No comments:
Post a Comment