Bold Commode

Shelley watched the bald man at the hardware store turn the crank on the auger.

“It’s a little like fishing—letting out a little line at a time,” he said. “The corkscrew-looking thing goes down into your toilet and rips up whatever’s down there, doing the jamming. Then you flush, and you’re home free.”

She nodded.

“The layman’s term for this tool is a ‘snake,’” he continued. “I think it’s a good one.”

“How long does it take to unplug the…jam?” she asked.

The bald man sighed. “Generally a minute or two—depending on who put what down there.”

“That’s more time than I spend praying every day,” she said, with a laugh.

He grinned. “It’s all about flow,” he said and winked.

Shelley was wise to buy the contraption. As a child, her husband, Chuck, was always flushing things down the toilet; he’d continued the habit as an adult. He used the commode to dispose of dental floss, cigarette butts, desiccant packets, and larger objects like apple cores and scraps of perfumed soap. As a kid, he’d wanted to be a magician, but his folks were too poor to buy him a set-up. The toilet was just another way of making things disappear.

Chuck also flushed Shelley’s cooking down the toilet. She liked to prepare newfangled meals, which rarely came out right. Once, it was a viscous white sauce made with heavy cream, diced pears, capers, and caramelized scallions. Chuck put the undercooked ziti in his mouth and scrunched up his nose. He left the table with his plate and deep-sixed the beige clump in a toilet off the kitchen. It was a risky flush. The toilet was, in Chuck’s words, “a weak-willed, water-conservation model with no guts.”

At first, the pasta clogged the pipe; Chuck steeled himself for an overflow. But the sticky mound eventually surrendered to suction and disappeared. He sighed.

On other occasions, when the toilet clogged, Chuck flushed too many times, then failed to shut off the valve in time; everything the toilet had ingested that day cascaded onto a pink tile floor. The valve made a hissing sound that resembled suppressed laughter. He angrily recalled the old-fashioned toilet at his late grandfather’s house, which, when flushed, roared like foaming waves breaking on a rocky shore.

“Could swallow up a Buick…” he mused.

When Chuck and Shelley fought, he sometimes flushed something of hers down the commode. It might be a favorite earring, a Christmas shopping list, or a shoelace from a running shoe—even though their therapist reminded him that such actions were counterproductive. After one fight, he got so furious that he flushed down his own wedding ring. He reported to Shelley that it had been lost after he removed it to change a flat tire.

On Chuck’s 60th birthday, colleagues from an AutoZone in Traverse City took him hunting. He died the second day, hours after he’d bagged a fourteen-point buck in a snowstorm. The guys had celebrated his big kill with a gargantuan Italian meal and got shitfaced on red wine ordered in carafes.

At the motel, before turning in, Chuck moved his bowels and clogged the plumbing. Finding no plunger in the cabinet, he continued flushing, and the bowl overflowed. In his rage and state of inebriation, Chuck got dizzy, fell, and knocked himself out on the floor. His drunken roommate slept through the gushing water.

At 2 am, the night clerk received a complaint about a leak from a family in the room below Chuck’s. After knocking repeatedly, the clerk let himself in. He found Chuck, his burr-speckled trousers around his ankles, face down in an inch and a half of tan water, dead.

He summoned an ambulance, whose crew—after sliding Chuck’s corpse into the boxy vehicle—had to scrape their beshatted heels over the parking lot gravel. A sheriff informed Chuck’s shocked pals that a coroner would have to determine whether the cause of death was a coronary or drowning. The AutoZone manager got a few nervous laughs when he said that, after the autopsy, they should take Chuck to the taxidermist.

When Shelley learned of her husband’s freak death, she made funeral arrangements, then went to her beauty parlor and told her girl to add henna highlights to her shoulder-length hair. After the funeral, she stripped the house of Chuck’s clothing and possessions; she numbly watched the Salvation Army truck take everything away.

Six months later, she took a cruise to the Caribbean and met a crew member, a man from Haiti who’d been widowed for a decade. They fell in love, and during their engagement, Shelley perfected her white sauce.

The night before her wedding, she opened her costume jewelry box and removed the only thing she’d saved of her husband’s—a boyhood photo taken by a school photographer. A peculiar image, it showed a lad with a near-lifetime of disappointment across his face. His crewcut emphasized wrinkles carved into his eleven-year-old’s forehead.

She took the photo to the commode—the one Chuck grumbled was inefficient and effeminate. She held it above the still water. She wanted to tear the picture into bits, but instead floated it, slammed the lid, and flushed. She went to bed with teary eyes.

In the morning, she raised the toilet lid to discover that the commode hadn’t taken (“or refused to accept,” she told herself) Chuck’s photo. There he was, face up, his image faded and crinkled, floating in the bowl like the coffin that saved Ishmael at the end of Moby Dick. With eyebrow tweezers, she plucked out the image and hung it on a twisted bobby pin to dry next to her nylons.

Eventually, she returned the photo to her jewelry box. Over time, something paranormal occurred. Some pins from her costume jewelry poked holes into Chuck’s image so that he looked as if he’d been hit by buckshot. Shelley decided she couldn’t have that, so every year, on the anniversary of Chuck’s passing, she dislodged one of the pins until none was torturing him.