An Apple Core, a Toilet: Misadventures of a 1970s Childhood (2 page)

Inevitably, however, somebody would use it, it would clog, my mother would shut off the valve — everyone told mother about the clog first, because we feared our father’s reaction — my father would soon find out and grumble to my mother, “For goodness sakes, Betty, why can’t they use the upstairs toilets?!” as he collected his tools and commenced his never-ending task.

***

No one caused him more grief, though, where the toilet was concerned anyhow, than Trudy the Avon representative.

It was the early 1980s when Trudy had become a regular guest at our home, staging a monthly Avon cosmetics party for my sisters, neighbors and assorted female friends. She and the others met in our basement family room.

Trudy stood 6 feet tall and surely weighed 300 pounds or more. Shortly after her monthly Avon parties began, the base of the little toilet appeared to seep water worse than it ever had.

My father was convinced Trudy was the cause.

“The big girl is rocking back and forth on the daggone thing!” he complained to my mother and sisters. “Don’t give her any iced tea or soda and for goodness sakes if she has to go make her use the upstairs bathrooms.”

My mother and sisters never heeded his warnings, though, which made him sore.

As Trudy demonstrated the latest Avon products in the basement — as women talked and giggled — my father paced back and forth in the kitchen upstairs, cringing every time he heard the downstairs toilet flush.

Finally, he’d walk down the stairs and tell the ladies — one by one, starting in the back, that if they needed to go to please use the bathroom upstairs.

It usually took a few minutes before my mother, usually in the front row, realized what he was up to. Red-faced, she’d growl at him as she began shoving his 235 pound body back up the stairs.

“For goodness sakes, Betty,” he’d say, backpedaling up the steps, “she’s going to rock back and forth on the daggone thing.”

***

Aware of the toilet’s incredible shortcomings, then, it is remarkable I did what I did.

One Sunday morning, in 1973, I lay on the family room couch, watching an Abbot & Costello movie. Our local UHF channel replayed old black-and-white comedies every Sunday morning.

I munched a delicious Washington apple while I lay there.

One thing my parents never skimped on, when we were children, was fresh fruit. We weren’t permitted Hostess Ho Hos — among the finest junk food ever made — at home, but we always had lots of fruit, despite its high cost.

My father loved that we were getting an excellent diet. But fresh fruit drew ants. If there was anything my father worried about more than clogged toilets, it was ants.

He warned us repeatedly to never throw apple cores, plum pits and so on into the downstairs wastebasket.

Still, some knucklehead — OK, it was I — would sooner or later toss a spent apple core in the can, it would draw ants, my father would discover the infiltration, then after spraying the culprits, would grumble to my mother, “For goodness sakes, Betty, who threw an apple core into the basement wastebasket, I told them it would draw ants!”

So, as I said, knowing the toilet’s shortcomings, it was madness what I did that Sunday.

As I lay on the couch, my delicious Washington apple happily devoured, I couldn’t summon the energy to rouse myself from the couch and go up to the kitchen to properly dispose of the damp core.

I lay there for several minutes, the core now brown and annoyingly damp and cold in my hand, when I noticed the toilet lid was up — just 12 feet away.

I raised my arm, aimed the core at the toilet bowl, flicked my wrist and released my payload.

The core floated majestically in the air, a perfect trajectory, landing dead-center in the bowl —
ker-plunk!

Relieved to have the damp core out of my hand, for the moment, I resumed enjoying the movie. I figured I’d recover the core later and dispose of it in the upstairs garbage can.

But after covering myself with the hand-knitted quilt my Aunt Jane gave our family for Christmas a few years prior, I soon nodded off to sleep, waking when I heard my father’s pounding feet descend the steps.

In a panic, I jumped off the couch, rushed into the bathroom and flushed the core. I flushed three times to make sure it was gone — then became instantly worried that my act would come back to haunt me.

***
 

Surprisingly, after I’d flushed the apple core, the toilet went through an amazingly long period without clogging. I’d wondered, initially, that the core had broken free some obstruction in an underground pipe that had been causing the multiple clogs.

But one Sunday morning some six months later, my youngest sister Jennifer reported the downstairs toilet was clogged again.

My mother shut off the water. My father, steamed that the toilet was clogged on a Sunday morning before he could even go to church, wasted no time collecting his tools from the garage.

We only had two televisions then — one in the living room, one in the basement family room. My sisters were watching cartoons in the living room, so I grabbed a Washington apple and headed downstairs.

I was lying on the couch, watching another Abbot & Costello movie, munching my apple.

Just 12 feet away, my father began his normal unclogging procedures. A maestro with a plunger, he could generally unclog the toilet with a few hard shoves.

But not on that Sunday morning. No amount of plunging solved the problem.

“Son of a …” said my father.

“Now, now,” said my mother.

He decided to escalate. He went next door to borrow a plumber’s snake from the Kriegers.

He worked the crank on one end of the flexible, six-foot steel hose to turn the blade on the other end, cutting and tearing at the clog.

It didn’t work. But it did leave him on his knees, dripping sweat.

“For goodness sakes, Betty, how many times did I tell those kids not to be going number two down here!”

“Now, now,” she said.

***

Desperate to resolve the problem, so he could get ready for mass, he drove to Daniel's for two quarts of Drano — he
never
bought Drano because he hated spending money on the toilet — and dumped both into the toilet.

The Drano didn’t work.

He tried the plunger again. He tried the snake again.

Nothing worked.

He went ballistic.

Cussing loudly, he raced to the garage for more tools. I heard the clanging of tools thrown against the workbench as he searched for the right ones.

Back in the bathroom, breathless, he unscrewed the toilet from the water line. He unbolted the toilet from the floor.

“Now, now,” said my mother.

On his knees, he heaved the toilet off its mount in one thrust. He got to his feet and set it in front of the television.

Abbot & Costello still were on. But as I couldn’t see them through the toilet, I roused myself and walked to the bathroom. 

My father knelt before a black hole in the floor.

Nobody who knew the sorts of things that went through that hole would do what my father — veins on the side of his head bulging red — was about to do.

“Don't do it,” my mother said.

He said nothing. Calmly, he reached a mighty paw inside the dark hole. Then his forearm. Then his biceps. He reached so far into that dark hole that his head pressed against the damp floor. I thought the veins in his temples would explode.

His eyes grew large. He had something.

“What the — ?!”

“What is it?!” said my mother.

He carefully drew his arm back out. He stared at his clenched fist. He moved away from the hole. He unpeeled his fingers slowly.

A black, rotten apple core sat in his palm.

***

He couldn’t have looked more puzzled if he’d opened our refrigerator and been greeted by a small barking hippopotamus.

“For goodness sakes, Betty, who flushed an apple core down the toilet?!!”

His booming footsteps shook the foundation as he tracked down every one of his daughters, beginning with the youngest:

“Jennifer, did you flush an apple core down the toilet?”

“Mary, did you flush an apple core down the toilet?”

“Lisa, did you…”

His booming footsteps caused Jingles, our dog, to jump through that Plexiglas pane in the kitchen door, not to return for hours.

By the time each of my sisters had denied being the culprit, I suppose, he just wanted closure — his energy was spent.

But he knew who’d done it. If none of my sisters had, that left me.

He returned to the basement, the black core still in his paw. I was right where I’d been when he began his jaunt throughout the house — because I was too scared to move.

As he walked past me back into the bathroom — almost as an afterthought — he said, “Tommy, did you flush an apple core down the toilet?”

Much like George Washington, who took an ax to his father’s prized cherry tree, I never could tell a lie.

“Yes,” I said.

His face froze. He had the look of a dog trying to do calculus.

The silence stretched on.

“Why would you flush an apple core down the toilet!”

I had no good answer. All I could do was stand there, a total disappointment to my father.

***

It has been nearly 40 years since I clogged the toilet with an apple core.

Though the incident is a source of family humor now, my phone sometimes rings in the middle of the night, a familiar voice on the line.

Why would you flush an apple core down the toilet?” says my father.

Grocery Night

Thursday night was grocery shopping night and the best night of the week.

Right after dinner, my father and I would board our 1972 Plymouth Fury station wagon and head to the Del Farm grocery store. It was located in a small plaza one mile from our suburban home.

Like all grocery stores then, Del Farm was a utilitarian place. There were no lobster tanks or gourmet food displays. The daily specials were written in black magic marker on torn sheets of white wax paper and taped to the front windows.

Inside, everything was painted white and illuminated by the bare florescent bulbs that hung above.

I got to push the cart as I helped my dad find the dozens of items on my mother's shopping list. The two watched their spending carefully, as my father was the sole breadwinner, but he'd usually give in a little.

On a good night, he'd buy a box of Del Farm's fresh-baked oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies and a bag of Snyders of Berlin potato chips and onion dip (my mother's favorite).

One Thursday a month, we'd stop at the beer distributor for a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon and twelve 64 oz. bottles of Regent soda pop. The small store was packed with boxes of beer. The store's owner gave me a pretzel rod, then the subject shifted to sports, new car models and other things that dads and beer distributor owners liked to talk about then.

Sometimes, my dad and I would make a run to the drug store or drive to the butcher's in another plaza to get a Sunday pot roast. On the way home, we'd stop in at the "little store" — the privately owned convenience store in our neighborhood — to load up on lunchmeat and cheese.

When we finally pulled the loaded-down station wagon into the garage, everyone in the house was alerted and the massive unloading process began. We usually got everything packed away by 8 p.m., just in time to head to the downstairs family room to watch "The Waltons."

The ritual was the same every week: We'd bring down a bowl of ice and then open some bottles of Regent soda pop, the orange being our favorite. (Grape was the next most popular, followed by cherry, then cola, then root beer.)

I was usually the first one to open the Snyders of Berlin chips. And as I tore open the heavy foil bag, my senses were overcome by the smell of freshly fried chips. I'd load them into a few bowls and set them on the tables.

And there sat my sisters and my parents, watching "The Waltons," eating the finest chips ever made, sipping our soda and feeling safe and secure.

It was Thursday, after all, and the weekend was soon to come. The house was loaded to the hilt with food, which was always a fine feeling. My mother and father were together and with us and all was right with the world.

I didn't know then how lucky I was to know such security. I didn't know that my happiness was a result of two people who put their children's needs so far before their own that we didn't know they had needs.

What a tremendous impediment we must have been to their comfort.

But I know it now. And I know how important my father was to my happiness and security.

Unlike too many fathers today — unlike the bumbling idiots portrayed on television — my father was a man. He was demanding of us, but that is what we craved. He wasn't much good at telling us he loved us, but he was a master at showing us his love through repeated actions.