They bought their toilet paper at Costco, where cases of jumbo-sized three-ply extra-soft rolls were cheap. Their bathroom, built (along with the rest of the house) in the 1930’s, was full of arches — one over the doorway, one over the green porcelain tub, and one mini arch carved into the wall by the toilet, where a concave piece of lath and plaster was perfectly formed for rolls of toilet paper to sit tucked into the wall so that the toilet paper’s profile just broke the vertical plane. But it had all been built before Costco, before jumbo-sized three-ply extra-soft rolls, and though a jumbo-sized three-ply extra-soft roll could be crammed to fit its custom niche in the bathroom wall, it always took a few days before it was small enough to start spinning smoothly.
Various Writings by Erin Bregman 