Christmas is Draining

What, one may ask, does someone like me, living alone with a fixed income, a term always sure to conjure up shuffling old ladies in bathrobes, whose lives are no more their own, put on her Christmas list? Since it would be an exercise in futility to ask for, say, a midnight blue Jeep Wrangler, or for a man who looks like Eddy Merckx before he stopped “riding lots” and succumbed to all those Belgian waffles, or for the man who had recently broken my heart to develop a condition in which he was perpetually trailed by packs of sexually excited male dogs, I had a very short list. Mainly, I wanted tea from Upton Tea Imports. But before I could utter the words “Sword of the Emperor,” or “Da Zhang Shan,” my mother sniffily told me that she wasn’t about to waste her time figuring out what kind of tea I’d like, and so my list was reduced to nothing, a non-list. I learn from my mistakes, however, and next year I will be able to ask, with total certainty, for sulfuric acid.

So my kitchen sink clogged again. A week before Christmas. When Sam was living here we used to argue about my tendency to let small bits of food get down the drain. So the real pisser about this latest problem was the fact that somewhere, Sam was gloating about how right he’d been.

The grocery store in our town sits across from the Small Mall parking lot, where, when I was in high school, the kids used to do their drug deals. This was until the local P.D. caught on, so now the Small Mall is the place, as far as I can tell, for legal activities like engine-revving, wheelchair racing, and seeing who can get the hottest girls to lean on their hoods, which is somewhat, I imagine, strategically similar to choosing sides for gym class. Bobo gets some girl with a name like Hepetitia, who’s pretty hot, but Bubba gets Absinthia, who brings her three friends. Soon the gathering of cars is like a beach full of sea lions, horny and loud, filling the early evening with their mating cries and recordings of “Free Bird” and “In Da Club.”

The day after Drano bottle #1, my lower-level seniors, my 12-2s, were doing research when one said, “I saw you go into Hannaford yesterday.” I nodded; my refusal to make a grocery list means that I hang out at the grocery store at least three times a week, so my appearance there is hardly news. “Getting the old coffee brandy?” said Cookie. I shook my head, but they all waited, a room full of eighteen year olds in Carhartts suddenly eager to hear about my purchases. Of course, since they were doing research essays, they would have been just as eager to discuss toenail clippings—anything to get out of writing papers.

“I was getting drain cleaner,” I told them. They relaxed; this was something they knew about.

“It’s probably hair,” Drew said.

“It’s in my kitchen sink.”

Drew eyed the length of my braid, which reached my belt. “Yeah. It’s still probably hair.”

The day after Drano bottle #3, Travis asked, “You get your drain clear yet?” The fact that I hadn’t caused them some amusement, and they offered their usual suggestion that we use English class to take a field trip to Ms. Mouse’s house and fix the problem. When I made the unlikelihood of this contingency clear, they suggested that I call a plumber.

Calling a plumber, however, fell into “the easier s. than d.” category, for a number of reasons. The first was the financial aspect. I hadn’t been to the dentist since before my wedding; I certainly didn’t have cash to throw around on something as whimsical as a sink full of putrefying water. There was also the condescension. I hate being told what to do. I especially hate being told what to do by men to whom I’m about to hand over a check. I know now that I shouldn’t have let half a tomato, some peas, an apricot, and some shredded zucchini go zipping down the drain. I’ve learned. I don’t need to be reminded of that by a guy who will track mud all over my floor. And finally, I hate making appointments. I hate calling and begging repairmen to come out to my house, but only after school because there’s no one else to let them in during the day. Sam used to do that stuff.

So I didn’t call a plumber. Instead, I used the same bowl for everything, and rinsed it in a minuscule stream of water that gradually made the seas rise to the brim of my sink. I also emptied about a bottle of Drano a day down into the murk, but to no avail. I asked the man at the hardware store for advice, and he offered me something he said would work, though it had what he called “a slight odor.” When I raised an eyebrow, he said, “Open your windows and it’ll go right away.” Neither of us brought up the fact that open windows in December in Maine are hardly homey and Christmas-y.

The Bottle of Death, as I came to think of it, came in a sealed plastic bag, with so many warnings that Tolstoy himself would have yawned and suggested some edits here and there. My first step was to empty the sink with a bucket, and I came comically close to dousing my Uncle Joel, who had quietly showed up at my door and was standing in my path as I wound up my pitching arm with a bucket of stagnance. Once I had recovered from my near miss with Stooge-like antics, we agreed to tackle the job together.

At the risk of turning this into a 1930’s murder mystery, I offer brief logistics of the scene. My kitchen has two doors, which sit directly opposite each other; one leads to the front lawn and one goes out back through the shed. The rest of the house is only accessible through a single door from the kitchen to the living-- and other-- rooms of the house. Joel slit open the bag, opened the bottle, and poured about half the contents into the sink. The immediate effect was impressive; smoke poured out of my sink as if fleeing a 1980s music video. We stood watching for a minute, taking in the effect. Then we both ran, spontaneously, for a door, him out the front, me out the back. To an outsider, it would have appeared that we’d both remembered urgent appointments elsewhere, like the White Rabbit.

I haven’t retched like that in a long time, and I’m sure it was good for my digestive system to get a bit of a workout. The “slight odor” the maniac at the hardware store described was the type that sneaks down your throat, bursts into your lungs, and proceeds to wreck the furniture. The dogs wouldn’t even go back inside. My kitchen had suddenly become the site of a war movie; instead of mustard gas, we were dodging sulfuric acid, attacked from all sides.

Joel and I shouted to each other from each door. “Should I get a fan?” I called.

“Okay, but take a deep breath before you come in.” I did, and ran for the living room. I ran out of breath before I could plug the fan in, and had to dash for the front door, gasping, bent double on my icy steps. Joel took over, swept in a breath of air, scouted for an outlet, and charged in, installing the fan with the no-nonsense determination one must have seen in the old commanders at Normandy. I passed the remainder of the evening standing on my front step as snow fell pleasantly about me, covering my red fleece pajamas with a festive touch. Hand me a holly sprig and I could have been one of a series of portraits of Christmas cheer: the baking of gingerbread, the hanging of mistletoe, the pouring of sulfuric acid.

The bottom line is, the stuff worked. It made my pipes too hot to touch, it made me lie awake with the window open all night long, and it turned my stainless steel sink a shade of pink reminiscent of The Cat in the Hat's tub, but all in all, my kitchen sink is now as free and clear as a mountain spring. My cats, should they feel the urge, could have pool parties in the thing.

All in all, it was the best part of my Christmas. The family gathering at which I was all too aware of being newly spouseless thanks to my family's tradition of Not Talking About It, the church service at which the minister stuttered through a sermon on the potential outcome of Mary aborting Jesus, and the perpetual and obstinate silence of my phone, were all enough to make me consider moving to some desert town in northern Mexico and waiting to be kidnapped, but my clogged drain got me through. It gave me an ally in my uncle, and it forced me to fight for my survival. I laid awake all night refusing to give in to the fumes. I’ve had many nights without sleep, and I’ve had many nights in which, temperatures notwithstanding, I thought I’d shiver out of my body, but this was the first time in a long time that I laid awake for no other reason than a putrid stank. It was neither merry nor bright, but it was my doing; I was in my house, with my dogs, my cats, and my stench, and I was still alive. I could tell by the shivering.