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.

here comes my saturday nervous breakdown

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.