i like going in Green Mountain Power Equipment. it's reminds me of bob's old Exxon except in mini. repairs on cars shrunken down to repairs on mowers. like the old Exxon there are machines strewn about the place and though it lacks the great big bays and the super-sized air compressor it's still got the feel. a big old fan blowing air around on a hot day. the same cinderblock walls filmed in grease, filmed in grime, filmed in dust. the hand-printed receipts, the dirty cash register, dented file cabinets. all reminiscent of the old Exxon. where bob had Snap-On tool calendars featuring sexy girls hung behind his office door where the public couldn't see them, this guy's got equal opportunity calendar titillation hung by the register. beefy guys in cut-offs and well-rounded chicks in barely-there bikinis, side by side. i like his sense of fairness and his sense of humor. even the guy behind the counter is bob minus 15 years. he's tall and rangy with impressive forearms i like to stare at and the same kind of once-broken nose and sun-bleached blond hair. instead of green garage pants he wears hiking shorts and a tee with the sleeves torn off. not something bob, with his striped Exxon shirts with the script Bob embroidered over the left pocket, would have worn. but to each mechanic his own. i like the smell of the place. it smells like motors and gas. like bob used to smell.
the first time i went in David, the Green Mountain guy, paid me little attention. i was just one of the stream of summer customers with broken mowers. i wore rumpled shorts and a stained tank top, no makeup and my hair disguised in a red bandanna. nothing to look at. i didn't even notice him that much in my lawnmower aggravation. he just grew on me over time. each time i went in i prayed his idiot driver wouldn't wait on me. that guy had stopped over once to re-string my weed wacker. "So," he'd grinned toothlessly through his hairlip, "how long's your husband been dead?" nice. great come-on. "18 months," i said, silently willing the wacker strung already. "Sooooo," he says, all 5'3" and 200+ pounds of him, "time to get back in the dating scene." oh christ. could he possibly think he had a chance? he had the IQ of one of Hugh Hefner's bimbos. am i that bad now that this guy thinks i'm fair game? "no, no," i protested, "not interested in any of that shit." my smile a half sneer, i'm sure of it. i've never been able to control my face.
david, on the other hand, took on greek god proportions over the summer of mechanical breakdowns. he paid me a lot more attention the day i arrived and descended out of bob's giant green Ford F-250 in a summer flowered breezy dress and high heels, curls loose in the wind, workday makeup on my summer tanned face. suddenly the abrupt businessman became a hopeless flirt and i was just as bad, joking that i mowed my lawn in heels to aerate the soil. he rolled his eyes and grinned. lame, i know. but flirting people say stupid things that are only cute to the other flirtee. i found a nice dress and prettier face earned me $20 off the standard cost of the repair for 'water in the gas tank' (a problem i was to have 2 times this past summer). i wondered how much more cleavage might gain me. hell, why not? women get ripped off all the time for the sake of being women. i am not above lowering my bill with cleavage. their weakness should be my power, after all.
so david has now repaired my weed wacker and showed me how to raise the handle and tighten the strap so it's gone from tall bob-size to val-size. i almost thought i'd seriously have to weed wack in heels it was so tall for me. i've got 10 foot tall weeds under the apple tree, a thicket of bamboo. he thinks i exaggerate but i could always send him a bikini-clad photo, "Me With Tall Weed" as proof. and maybe free repairs for the life of the wacker...
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
the toilet god
when i told a good friend that i'd cried over the open pool of a toilet tank, he wisely said, "valerie, you weren't crying over the toilet." well, literally i was. tears really were dripping into the tank. and it really had made me cry. but he was right. i was crying over far more than a wayward toilet. crying because i had to fix it and it should have been so easy and it wasn't and because i never would have had to if bob were alive. for him it would have been a two-second job and me? i didn't even know enough to turn off the cold water supply before plunging my hand in to the elbow. he would have known that the toilet fix-it kit in the basement was not for our toilet, but for those at my parents' house. but me, i'm trying to make a little flapper cover a big drainhole. so for a week or more i took the lid off every time i flushed to make sure the crumbling old flapper i'd reaffixed covered the hole right because of course it no longer fit right when i reinstalled it. i simply couldn't face the toilet all that time. a little job was just too big a job for me.
sometimes everything's too big for me. i feel so useless and incapable. lost and floundering. and i'm really no slouch. i mean, i know how to run a chop saw, a skill saw, a table saw. i have my own drill. i've been stripping the aluminum siding off the house, sometimes up on a steep roof, sometimes on a scaffold. i've been scraping and painting and replacing window glass. i've lost all fear of menacing carpenter bees and instead stand there like a warrior princess, brandishing my weapon paintbrush, daring them to bring it on. i can move huge ladders. i can patch a roof with tar. i can run a bead of silicone, of caulk. i can do alot of things. pop raised me as if i was his oldest son instead of oldest daughter and though he pretty much floundered as a carpenter because he was really a professor and the two don't readily seem to mix, we still made do. we built fences and horse stalls and a hay loft. later still, with bob's help, we built a shed out of the old barn's wood once it fell down. i had my own tool belt, like a holster. i was tough and i could work side by side with the men. now the men are dead and sometimes my holster seems empty against all the enemy things wrong.
so why the hell should a toilet flapper beat me? once i regrouped (so what if it took a week or two?) i revisited that toilet like a woman to be reckoned with. i could hear bob saying honey, you can do this. so i flushed the enemy toilet and turned the water supply off and removed the offending flapper. marched my Jeep right over to the hardware store with the crumbly rubber wrapped in paper towel because i didn't like touching it. Universal Toilet Flapper one package said. universal should mean what it says, but i double-checked with a man in a name tag. yes, it should fit. should? i didn't like that word. i needed a definite yes or no with all i'd been through with this toilet. so he obliged, yes it will fit. as an extra treat i bought myself a pound of my favorite philips head screws. i love screws. you can never have too many screws. there's a certain satisfaction you can't beat when you powerdrill a screw into wood. but my toilet awaited.
i detached the little hose that helps refill the toilet so i could slip the new rubber ring on the little pipe and attach the robust new flapper to it. i am sure they have official names, but i don't know them, and frankly i hope not to see the inside of that tank for a long time to come. my flapper fit perfectly first time in. i even got the chain length right on the first try. just one flush and i would know for sure if i'd mastered the flapper. so i leaned over to that place we all hate, the place in back of the bowl where the plunger and the toilet brush hide, and turned the metal knob to refill the tank with water. then i stood up with proud satisfaction only to be sprayed full in the face by a wildly flopping nozzle. i'd forgotten to reattach the filler nozzle to the tube. face full of toilet tank water. i had to capture it as one would a hissing snake and clip it back where it belonged, but this time i could laugh instead of cry. sure, the toilet had the last laugh with its porcelain chilled Fuck You but i laughed along. and i think bob, surely watching as always, had a good laugh too. after all, this was a show he would have loved.
sometimes everything's too big for me. i feel so useless and incapable. lost and floundering. and i'm really no slouch. i mean, i know how to run a chop saw, a skill saw, a table saw. i have my own drill. i've been stripping the aluminum siding off the house, sometimes up on a steep roof, sometimes on a scaffold. i've been scraping and painting and replacing window glass. i've lost all fear of menacing carpenter bees and instead stand there like a warrior princess, brandishing my weapon paintbrush, daring them to bring it on. i can move huge ladders. i can patch a roof with tar. i can run a bead of silicone, of caulk. i can do alot of things. pop raised me as if i was his oldest son instead of oldest daughter and though he pretty much floundered as a carpenter because he was really a professor and the two don't readily seem to mix, we still made do. we built fences and horse stalls and a hay loft. later still, with bob's help, we built a shed out of the old barn's wood once it fell down. i had my own tool belt, like a holster. i was tough and i could work side by side with the men. now the men are dead and sometimes my holster seems empty against all the enemy things wrong.
so why the hell should a toilet flapper beat me? once i regrouped (so what if it took a week or two?) i revisited that toilet like a woman to be reckoned with. i could hear bob saying honey, you can do this. so i flushed the enemy toilet and turned the water supply off and removed the offending flapper. marched my Jeep right over to the hardware store with the crumbly rubber wrapped in paper towel because i didn't like touching it. Universal Toilet Flapper one package said. universal should mean what it says, but i double-checked with a man in a name tag. yes, it should fit. should? i didn't like that word. i needed a definite yes or no with all i'd been through with this toilet. so he obliged, yes it will fit. as an extra treat i bought myself a pound of my favorite philips head screws. i love screws. you can never have too many screws. there's a certain satisfaction you can't beat when you powerdrill a screw into wood. but my toilet awaited.
i detached the little hose that helps refill the toilet so i could slip the new rubber ring on the little pipe and attach the robust new flapper to it. i am sure they have official names, but i don't know them, and frankly i hope not to see the inside of that tank for a long time to come. my flapper fit perfectly first time in. i even got the chain length right on the first try. just one flush and i would know for sure if i'd mastered the flapper. so i leaned over to that place we all hate, the place in back of the bowl where the plunger and the toilet brush hide, and turned the metal knob to refill the tank with water. then i stood up with proud satisfaction only to be sprayed full in the face by a wildly flopping nozzle. i'd forgotten to reattach the filler nozzle to the tube. face full of toilet tank water. i had to capture it as one would a hissing snake and clip it back where it belonged, but this time i could laugh instead of cry. sure, the toilet had the last laugh with its porcelain chilled Fuck You but i laughed along. and i think bob, surely watching as always, had a good laugh too. after all, this was a show he would have loved.
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