Tyrannous Toilets

Mine has flipped its lid. For awhile things were precarious. The seat and the lid were attached to the bowl with two plastic hinge-things, one piece that slipped into another piece super-glued to the bowl-ledge, the entire mechanism too insubstantial for the heft of the seat and its lid together, not to mention the human weight that would compound it virtually every time it was used—as toilets often are. People would sit and find the seat slipping; the little plastic hinge would pop; the lid would clatter to the floor. Time and time again I’d try to fit it together again, not sure what kind of glue—if any—would hold the hinges in place. Finally one day the hinges popped and Desiree found one and chewed it into a little wad that looked like spit out Wriggley’s Spearmint. That was the day my toilet turned into the kind of toilet you see in public restrooms all over Italy—the kind you really don’t want to use, the kind that seem unsanitary even when completely sanitary, simply because they are naked, raw, exposed, and even obscene without the tidy modesty of seat and cover.

Though embarrassed to have such a toilet, I entertain myself watching visitors decide how they want to approach the problem of it. Certain friends consider it a sign: “Congratulations! You really are Italian now--you've got the toilet to prove it!” Others conscientiously make efforts to help me find a way to rig the seat to the bowl. Still others insist on delicately propping the seat on the bowl—for comfort I suppose, if not decency. I argue that people sit on bidets and they do not have seats, if people do indeed sit on bidets; most Americans I know use them to store extra toilet paper or towels or even bath soap and shampoo and rarely is use of them discussed. I argue it could be worse: just last week I had to face one of those miserable kinds with two foot-print looking things to stand on in order to squat over a hole in the ground.

I have shopped far and wide for replacement hinges and no one seems to carry them. I am told that the safest bet is to just buy the whole apparatus—seat and lid with all the little fixtures packed with them in the cellophane. Michelle and Lewis, with all their experience renovating a bed and breakfast, say they have seen countless people buying toilet covers at the suburban plumbing stores. The way it’s done is you get a big piece of newsprint and trace the shape of your toilet bowl. They are all different, one should know. Some are perfectly oval, some are more rotund, others have little dips and flourishes and of course the size differs. So, yes, I should get a sheet of newspaper and trace the shape and cut it out and take it to the nearest plumber.

The challenge reminded me, perversely, of cutting out face silhouettes in kindergarten, the kind mothers always cherish, the shadow of a child’s profile cast on the wall by a high intensity light and traced, little nose and even eye-lashes cut out and preserved on black construction paper. Tracing toilets is a little trickier because of the bowl-full of water and there being no real surface to trace against, but it can be done. I rather enjoyed getting on my hands and knees for arts and crafts and coming up with the pattern.

The problem, alas, is that the kinds of stores that sell such seats are way out on the periphery. I’m sure I could figure out what bus will take me there, once I have a full day and the time. Still, I find myself resisting this particular journey, and think I may just wait for Michelle and Lewis to return from Australia so they can take me in their car. I don’t know why I balk before the image of me and Desiree on the bus: she under my left arm, the toilet seat under my right arm, the bus trip, the walk through il centro home. Toilets should not be a source of embarrassment. After all, everyone has them; everyone needs them; they are common place, a fact of life. Maybe my inertia is not simply embarrassment, but the recognition that buying another may be entirely futile. Surely the new will have the self-same plastic hinges. Surely I have the same frustrations to look forward to—a Sisyphean task of keeping the lid in place. I try to rethink what is happening in the situation: the toilet is reinventing itself beneath our very derrieres! Why resist…why fight the inevitable? We must choose our battles, afterall.