There many ways I deal with stress. The chronic, day-in, day-out variety like the splendid and noble insanity that comes with working in a prosecutor’s office, usually calls for chocolate. On a regular basis. Cops and co-workers have even been warned on occasion to not approach unless they’re bringing some good chocolate to feed the beast.
Other spikes in adrenaline or responsibility have been dealt with by buying yet another pair of spike heels. Lime green with perforations, magenta suede with patent leather bows, leopard print brocade slingbacks, I can tell you a story behind nearly every pair of stilettos in my closet.
And yet another favorite release is to escape to the shoreline of my favorite state park on Lake Michigan with a soy mocha with whipped cream from Starbucks and bury my hands in soft white sand as seagulls and sandpipers look on, unmoved. That has been a luxury untouched for a long time. The annual state park pass on my dashboard is two years old.
But right now, neither chocolate nor shoes nor nature will do. I want a clean, functioning bathroom. My father is dying in a hospice and my youngest child is leaving for college in a week, and an imported chocolate bar with hazelnuts is just not going to cut it.
Reclaiming and repairing the bathroom is symbolic, there is no doubt. I’ve been juggling family emergencies from insane distances for months now, and in the past few weeks the carpets in the house have grown another layer of cat hair. The carpets are oatmeal. The cat is black with long hair that never stops shedding. My kitchen and dining room are awash in paperwork related to the complicated business of getting old and navigating medical issues and applying for public benefits, a fitting payback for a long life spent dutifully paying taxes.
And I don’t just want a routinely clean bathroom, I want it gleaming. And so the other day I brought the step-stool up from the basement, went to my maximum fear-of-heights two steps and unscrewed the four frosted glass shades and chandelier bulbs from the brass fixtures above the sink and washed them with soap and water for the first time since they were installed. I think that was about ten years ago. The dust around the edges has been bugging me for a long time. A feather duster only gets so much.
Today, in between visits to the nursing home where my father lingers in hospice care, I decided to tackle the sink. It’s a two-basin sink, with fittings of brass and white porcelain that resemble upside-down tulips. Remodeling the bathroom about ten years ago, with fresh flooring and a cherrywood cabinet, was a major bone of marital contention for several years leading up to it. The green-light for the remodeling project came, unfortunately, too late to save the marriage. But I ended up with the house in the divorce, and so I’ve still got the lovely sink and the cherrywood cabinetry.
The cold water handle in the sink I use, however, has been getting looser and looser for the past couple of months, and today, with an empty house and a few hours to myself, I tackle the project.
Only one of the two sinks actually works anymore. Several years ago something went seriously wrong—the kind of “wrong” you actually call a plumber for—with one of the sets of faucets. I couldn’t find an exact replacement anywhere. And so, loathe to replace both sets of pretty porcelain tulip faucets, I suggested swapping one set for the other. Because of the bathroom layout, nobody ever used the second sink anyway. The plumber cannibalized what he needed from the working side of the counter and shut off the water supply to the sink less traveled.
To my optimistic eye today, it looked like another round of cannibalizing was in order, this time swapping one handle and screws for another. It had to be done sometime. I could envision the handle falling off in my hand some morning as I was brushing my teeth. I took all the junk off the counter, wiped it down, and grabbed the smallest screwdriver I could find from the collection in a ceramic planter next to the kitchen sink. I don’t know why I have a bunch of screwdrivers sitting there next to my birdwatching binoculars, they date back to the early days of marriage and full-time motherhood when screwdrivers just sat wherever my ex-husband decided to put them.
Now, more than twenty-five years later I look at the ugly yellow ceramic planter and think “I should do something about this.” But in the meantime, as pathologically disorganized as I am, I know I can at least find four things in an emergency—my car keys, my cell phone, clean underwear, and a screwdriver.
Unfortunately, this turns out to be not a job for a regular screwdriver, which I discover when I insert the screwdriver in the first tiny hole relevant to the project and start to turn (“lefty-loosy, righty-tighty”). I grab my huge floating boat flashlight from the closet—okay I can really find five things in an emergency—and take a closer look. I don’t have a boat, by the way, but I love these flashlights. For about five bucks at the hardware store you get something that could pretty much light up a stadium on a foggy night…with the battery included!! And they’re so big they are impossible to misplace.
What will be required here, I discover, is a tool called a “hex wrench.” And I actually, believe it or not, own one. Since the divorce I have gone out with a couple of men who liked to impart knowledge of some of the mysteries of “the man zone,” and as a result I can now use a cordless drill, appreciate the necessity of draining the water heater once in a while, cut firewood with my pint-sized chain saw, and hang a picture. One of my favorite mottos is that a girl can never have too many box-cutters.
The intricacies of a hex wrench were first explained by the man in my life, the guy with the longbow and the motorcycle and the black leather pants, when we needed to disassemble and then reassemble my wrought iron bed a couple of years ago for the carpet installers. It is a weird folding tool comprising many small metal rods that fold into a sheath like my Swiss Army knife (okay, now we’re up to finding six things in an emergency!). I pick the smallest prong, which is not much bigger than a toothpick, and get to work loosening things that seem to be important. The screws that awkwardly emerge are about the size of peppercorns, and I can foresee absolute disaster if I drop one of the four down the drain. Who invented these things, I wonder? My hands are tiny, with chickenbone fingers that wear a size four and three-quarter ring, and I can’t imagine how men with much bigger hands ever navigate these contraptions for a living.
And yet I persevere, and swap the wiggly faucet handle for the tight one, and with one miniscule crank at a time I feel a sense of control, and satisfaction, and pride, and finality, and closure. I snap the metal prong back into the casing, under the larger wrenches, and think that I’m glad I know how to use a hex wrench. And that I have my own tool kit. Even though it’s technically a fishing tackle box, picked because of its lovely color scheme of turquoise and translucent white plastic. It’s nice to get rescued some times, but it’s nice to fix your own household problems once in a while too.
The bathroom looks just lovely right now. I haven’t put all the hair supplies and toothpaste and makeup and perfume back on the counter just yet. It’s too pretty a sight to mess up just yet with the mundane. Later in the day I’ll be back en route to my father’s bedside, a helpless spectator in a play which I have absolutely no control over. My son will be leaving the nest not long afterward, creating a void I have no idea how I will fill.
But for right now, at least I can walk into the bathroom, look at the sink, and grin.