Ten days ago, our bathroom sink sprung a leak. Actually, it’s been weeks or even months that the thing has been leaking. Up until the moment I noticed that there was a pool spreading from beneath a set of shelves into the main area and heard water freely running down the elbow pipe, I thought the constant wetness on the floor directly beneath the sink was because of sloppy hand washing. You see, my son is six and my husband loves to flop around in the water when he washes his hands or takes a shower and lets it drip everywhere. Between the two of them, I’m always mopping up the mess on the floor. So you can see how I could have assumed the fault lay at the feet of the Y-chromosomes I live with.
So it was ten days ago when I noticed a serious pooling problem, beneath those shelves. And after a little nosing around, I quickly discovered our sink was leaking. Badly. Today, a plumber came to fix it. And when I saw the man walk through our door, I wanted to hide. I was still angry at him about our last encounter, and also horribly embarrassed.
When we first moved here a little over a year ago, we noticed a funny smell in our downstairs toilet. The smell got worse and worse, until finally, around the end of summer, we begged our landlady to get someone in there pronto to check it out. Up until that point, she had been dragging her feet, about the matter, telling us to pour water down the effluence drain in the boiler room to dislodge whatever might have gotten stuck in there. Never mind that I insister to her and to my husband that the smell wasn't coming from the toilet, but from the hole near the ceiling where a small fan used to be.
After insisting the problem would not go away on its own, our landlady finally called the local plumber. He was an older gentleman and a cloud of cigarette smoke wafted about him like a tarnished aura. He stuck his head in the toilet room and said, “I don’t smell anything.”
I insisted there was, in fact, an odor, and a very unpleasant one, at that.
“I don’t smell a thing,” he protested. And there we stood, arguing about whether or not there really was an odor.
I finally pulled out my trump card. “Well, we don’t smoke, and I can tell you for sure that it smells like something died in there. If you don’t smell anything, then you better figure out whether there’s anything to smell at all.”
So, about two weeks later, his thirty-year-old son came to sniff out the problem. His visit was a surprise. I had no idea he was coming. If I had known, then things might have turned out somewhat differently.
I led him downstairs to the strange-smelling toilet. He took one look around and said he didn’t smell anything, either. And wouldn’t you know it, the smell wasn’t so bad that day. In fact, it was hardly there. Still, I insisted that there was a bad odor.
He sniffed around the air vent (I suspected a bird, mouse or bat had fallen into the PVC piping that leads from the bathroom up into the attic where it remains open to anything that cares to fall in there), and said, “Nope, nothing.” Then he sniffed around the base of the toilet, pointed to the floor and said it was urine that was stinking up the joint. I looked to where he pointed, and I saw the unmistakable evidence of drying piss on the floor.
I was mortified. I knew that that morning, after a long night’s sleep, my son had been the last person to use that toilet before decamping to the main area of the house upstairs. Like most young boys, he isn’t always very accurate, especially when still crusty from sleep. He usually tells me when he misses, or cleans it up himself. But this time, he didn’t do either.
I insisted to this man, who has farmer-boy good looks and eyes that make my heart jump, that the pee left on the floor was a one-time occurrence, that it wasn’t the odor of urine that we’d been smelling. Really. There was a distinct smell of dessication going on somewhere behind the wall. Really really.
But the man wouldn’t believe me. He left the house shaking his head, and I, angry and irate, nearly shouting at him to believe me.
And now, eight months later, he was gracing my doorstep once again.
Neither one of us was very happy about it.
He uses a very thick SW German dialect, and it’s very difficult for me to understand him and the many other Schwarzwald natives in our neighborhood. When he spoke, I had to ask him to repeat himself and he was clearly unhappy to oblige. Mustering every last bit of adult reserve I had, I stopped myself from getting snotty back, and silently led him to the bathroom. He spent all of five minutes in there dismantling the elbow pipe and installing a new seal. He asked me for some paper towels, and when I gave him the roll, he smiled nicely at me. I managed to smile back, though I imagine my expression must have looked more constipated than friendly simply because he took me off guard.
When he was done, he politely said goodbye and left. And as I pondered the change between us, the doorbell rang again. I buzzed him in and he poked his head up the stairs and wanted to know if we were paying the bill. I said that I thought our land lady was going to do that.
He shook his head no.
Back on uncertain footing, I asked if he could send us a bill. And of course he said he would.
I know his daughter is in my son’s kindergarten class, because I’ve seen him there twice in the past few weeks. Both times, I did an about face and hurried out the door, feeling the residual anger and embarrassment of the summer before staining my cheeks. I’m not a bad housekeeper, and I certainly don’t let piss dry on my floors if I know it's there. But that one time, it got overlooked. And someone found out.
And I know we were not imagining the stink from the toilet. It’s not as bad now as it was last year. In fact, it’s almost gone, now. And I’m more certain than ever that something had fallen down that impromptu air duct and died.
We’ll never know for sure.
And I’ll also never know how many people now think the new folks on the hill (you never get over being the new folk in small towns) let piss dry on their floors until they have to call a plumber to find out what stinks?
I know I shouldn’t still be embarrassed, but I am. I might be able to face him the next time I see him at the kindergarten, but the memory that he caught me with piss on my floor will never fade.
