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.