The Faucet
Fiction by Leila Register
Oasis, by Lori Taschler. Copyright the artist. Courtesy the artist.
He wants to know what happened. He wants to know why we’re standing here, staring at a hole in the bathroom wall where a faucet used to be. I tell him the faucet handle broke. It broke yesterday. I tell him I went to the hardware store but they didn't have the part in. We don’t have the part in, they said. Come back tomorrow. I said tomorrow would be fine because the faucet handle was broken in a way that wasn’t actually broken. It was broken in a way that still works.
The outer knob fell off. The thing we call faucet. It’s the kind with two knobs: one for H and one for C. It was the H knob that fell off, I don’t know how. It’s an old house with old things. I turned the handle the way I always had, the way I’d been taught, and it just screwed right off. Underneath was a long, white plastic piece that looked to me like a broken bone sticking out of someone’s arm. A hideous limb: the real faucet. The knob I’d been using with the label “H” was just the facade faucet. I thought about an old manager I once had and pictured him calling it the “guest-facing” faucet. I had to use a rag to turn the plastic piece, the real faucet, but it worked fine. I was even proud of using the rag. Called it “a workaround” to myself.
I tell him the real problem happened this morning. It’s what caused the hole in the wall. It started when I tried to take a bath. I turned the C knob the regular way and the other one the workaround way.
Oh before I forget, I say, I noticed another slug on the bathroom mirror. I screamed but I dealt with it. I picked it up with a paper towel and closed my eyes and flushed it down the toilet. It’s the third slug I’ve seen this week. It’s turning into a real dilemma, I say. He says he’ll look into the slugs but that right now he only needs to know about the faucet, about how it happened.
I don’t know how it happened, I want to say. Why would I know how it happened. I don’t know how these things work, how I’m here, in this old broken house with problems and rags and slugs. Except I do know. People say they don’t know but they usually do. I guess that’s not entirely true. You can know something and also not know it. I understand why I’m in this house, why I have to live here now, why I had to leave the place where I used to live. I did something bad, the kind of bad thing that makes someone say “how could you.” So now I’m here. I understand that. Other things, I don’t understand. The paper I got in the mail, for example. A wedding announcement of a man and a woman smiling underneath a font so ugly it made me laugh. It’s funny to see the man’s face smiling. The last time I saw it, it was screaming how could you. I wondered how he had my address. Then I remembered that when it ended he had to send me my things. Like the framed photo of Albert Brooks holding a telephone. He hated Albert Brooks, said he always seemed too delighted with himself.
Seeing the man’s face on the wedding announcement reminds me of the house we shared and his dog that hated romance. Anytime two people kissed he would bark and bark and bark. The dog not the man. That’s a sad way to be, I would say to him. The man not the dog. By the end we all hated each other. Me, the dog, the man.
All of this I know. I know it and I don’t know it. When I think about the man and the dog it doesn’t feel like my life. It feels like something I made up. But sometimes vivid scenes will rush into my brain. I can’t control it. For example, I’ll remember the woman across the street who placed matching lamps with mismatched lightbulbs in her front window for all of us to see. One glowed perfectly gold and the other was so white it made me dizzy and also blinded the neighborhood. I fantasized about making a sign for the window: You’re Blinding the Neighborhood. It was the kind of lightbulb dentists use for mouths. It’s one thing to live your private life that way but to display it to the world?
While I was staring at the woman’s lightbulbs, the man would be anywhere else, usually working in his office down the hall, sitting at a desk made of an old headboard and I forget what he used for the legs. He was easily distracted, especially by me. Once I opened the freezer door while he was in the middle of something. I’m in the middle of something, he said to me, as if my opening the door was being done to him.
Suddenly I’m back there: on a street named after a color, on the second floor of a brick building with ivy all up the side, standing in a living room with a view of a woman’s mismatched lightbulbs, being a distraction.
Except I’m here. And he’s on the tub, holding a wrench, waiting for me to tell him what happened. He’s not looking at me because we’re both looking at the hole where the faucet used to be. It’s nice in a way, the hole. It’s obvious, like the ocean. It gives you something to look at when you’re at a complete loss for what to do with yourself.
I want to say, I’m supposed to be in a different house. I’m supposed to be wondering about the lightbulbs, living with a man who hates Albert Brooks and a dog who hates romance. Instead I’m here, dealing with the dilemma of three slugs in one week and a broken faucet that can’t be solved with a workaround and a hideous plastic limb. But I don’t say this.
I say: Here’s what happened. I got in the tub. I turned off the cold water the regular way and grabbed the rag to turn off the hot. I say it wouldn’t turn. I say somehow, the plastic piece got stuck. I say one thing led to another and before I knew it, it had broken off and a metal piece too–now that I think about it–and also a number of other crucial parts. I say it all happened so fast and violently. I say water gushed out of the wall like a hydrant. I just stood there and let it.
Leila Register
Leila Register is a designer based in New York. On her desk is a framed print of a speech bubble that says “As If I Wasn’t Embarrassed Enough.” Her writing has appeared in Hobart, Rejection Letters, and Maudlin House.
Lori Taschler
Lori Taschler was born in Brooklyn, New York and received her MFA from Pratt Institute. She has had numerous one person shows in New York City and group shows throughout the United States. Her work is included in many private and public art collections including : The Herb and Dorothy Vogel Collection, The Yale University Art Gallery, The Akron Art Museum, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Honolulu Academy of Arts, Portland Museum Of Art, University of Alaska Museum, Plains Art Museum North Dakota, Academy of Art Museum Maryland, Weatherspoon Art Gallery: the University of North Carolina, University of Wyoming Art Museum, University Museum of Southern Illinois and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum: University of Minnesota.