The Toilet Fairy
It was among the most ridiculous things any of us had ever seen in our lives, yet the damn thing felt like part of the family somehow. She had sat upon the upper lid of Gramma Andy’s toilet tank for all the years and all the visits we made to her house in Santa Rosa, staring at us boys as we stood to do our business. Her porcelain face and torso were smooth and mostly pristine, the look of an angel, but Lord knows how many men and boys’ private parts she’d seen in her day. She had a grand variety of colorful, billowing dresses that covered the extra roll of toilet paper underneath, the selection chosen to match whatever color hand towels my grandmother had out at the time.
From an early age, we knew the doll’s story. It came from Germany with our grandmother in the 1950s when she emigrated here as a young woman. The post-war years proved to be too much for her, and she jumped at the chance to come to a land with so much opportunity. She came with only her dreams, a suitcase, and the Toilet Fairy. Only, it wasn’t the Toilet Fairy back then. Then, it was only half a doll on a stick —a childhood puppet that kept my grandmother company during the dark days of the war and the sometimes darker years that followed. How and when it became the Toilet Fairy was a mystery to us grandchildren, but we knew that the ugly thing had had a colorful life.
After Gramma Andy’s passing, our mother adopted the creature and kept it as a part-joke, part-heirloom in the display cabinet in her beautifully appointed San Francisco living room. The thing stuck out among her collectables and other oddities, always catching the attention of visitors. We kids just rolled our eyes whenever someone mentioned it, or we made jokes about how many times it had seen us pee. We ostensibly hated the thing, but it had always been a part of our lives.
Then our mother died.
I had already moved to Germany to teach, but mostly to reconnect with the country and my German heritage. It had always been a void inside me. When my grandmother moved to the U.S., she married an American, adopted a bland last name, gave her children American-sounding first names, and stopped speaking German. Instead of Wolfgang, Claudia, and Lothar speaking German around the house, Robert, Linda, and Thomas spoke American English. In her desire to move forward and assimilate, she left her country and culture behind. My mother continued that pattern of leaning into American-ness, but there was always a whisper of something inside of me that knew there was something more to be learned. Maybe it was the memory of how my grandmother pronounced “w” and “v.” Maybe it was in how she always had a layout of cold cuts, cheese, and bread when guests came over. Maybe it was that damn Toilet Fairy who carried history and memory like a torch across a foggy field to keep something alive inside of me.
"When it happens, you don’t have to come back over,” my mother said on the phone a few weeks before she passed, “You were just here this summer.”
“Won’t there be a funeral or something?” I said it like I wasn’t speaking to my mother about her own death.
“Like I’ll care. I know you’ll miss me. I don’t give a shit what other people think if you’re not there.” In her illness, my mother had lost some of the refinement from her upbringing. Within the month, she slipped away to join her mother.
My sister Marie had the unpleasant task of dealing with our mother’s possessions. She was both the eldest and the geographically closest. I, the baby, safely far away chasing yet another dream, was once again shielded from responsibility. Our dead brother was also free of his duties here.
“I want the Toilet Fairy,” I said when asked which of Mom’s things I wanted. “I know just where to put her.” It was an impulsive ask, and I hadn’t thought of it until the instant my sister brought the subject up. Just the mental image of the cursed thing brought to mind the dusty rose color of the tiles in Gramma’s bathroom, the cloying scent of the decorative hand soap, the rough feel of the fairy’s wool dresses, and the little scar on her left ear from where my grandfather had to glue it back after I knocked her off her pedestal trying to peek under her dress when I was five.
“Don’t put it on your toilet lid. You’ll creep out all the men.”
I rented the cottage outside of Darmstadt that I did because, based on an old photo, it looks like the one my grandmother grew up in: a white stucco rectangle with a tiled roof and a garden with a half-wall. In another photo from that era, my grandmother, perhaps eleven or twelve years old, sits in a wooden chair near the fireplace, holding the Toilet Fairy as she was before we knew her: a half-doll on a stick. I don’t have a fireplace in my cottage, but I have a wood stove with a shelf above it. That will be the new home for the fairy when she arrives.
When I click on the tracking number for the package my sister sent, I see that it has been stuck at the DHL distribution center for almost two weeks now. I can see the Toilet Fairy, with all of her colored dresses, sitting alone in a box, scared and lost somewhere in a warehouse. It’s not the homecoming that I would have chosen for her.