My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places (15 page)

The alarm lady gave me a hint, as a game show host will do from time to time out of pity for a contestant who is bombing unbearably. “Begins with
G.
” “Groach? Goofy?” This went on for some time. Meanwhile, Natalia had dug through her bag, found the piece of paper I’d given her with the shutoff code and quieted the screaming alarm. I don’t know how effective these alarms are against burglars, but Sprinkles hasn’t been seen on the property in weeks.

RV There Yet?

An RV is a very, very big vehicle,
except when you are inside it with your husband Ed, his daughters Lily and Phoebe, his sister Doris and her ten-year-old Alisha, and your in-laws. Then it is very, very small. RVs are interesting that way.

We are headed for the Grand Canyon, taking the route of a family road trip 40 years ago, when Ed and his sister were about Alisha’s age and 31-foot RVs were just a twinkle in a madman’s eye. The RV, which we rented in Las Vegas, was Doris’s idea. “It’s just like a regular car,” she assured us. “Only long.”

Ed is trying to maneuver out of the RV parking lot. This is not easy to do when the rear of your vehicle is in Las Vegas and the front is already pulling into the Grand Canyon Visitor Center. Ed’s mom puts a hand on his shoulder. “How you doing?”

“Great,” says Ed, without unclenching his jaw. “It’s really fun.”

An hour out, just past Hoover Dam, Ed finally begins to relax, and a tire blows. He pulls into a parking lot, and a bunch of us pile out to look at the damage. A piece of rubber the size of a playing card has been ripped from the tire. We call the RV company, who promise to send a tow truck to fix it. They call back to say that he won’t be there for at least an hour.

Alisha sticks her head out the window. “Hey, what does RV stand for?”

Ed looks at the sky. “Ruined Vacation.” Just then, a bighorn sheep runs across the parking lot, 20 feet away. “Wow!” says Alisha.

“And we wouldn’t have seen it if the tire hadn’t blown,” says Doris. She is determined to make the trip live up to her memories of the last one, which of course she can’t really remember.

The tow truck man arrives and changes the tire in less time than it takes Ed to change lanes. Ed shakes the man’s hand. “You wouldn’t want to come with us to the Grand Canyon, would you?”

Because of the flat, we’re two hours behind schedule and won’t make it to the RV park where we have a reservation. Doris starts calling random campgrounds in the guidebook. “Hey, they want to know how long our RV is,” she calls out.

“About 30 feet too long,” yells Ed from the driver’s seat.

Doris secures a reservation in an old mining town named Chloride. “The lady says just take the I-40 all the way there.”

“But we’re not on the I-40,” says Ed.

Around 9 p.m., we pull into Chloride, a name that suggests an obsession with hygiene uncorroborated by actual conditions. Phoebe looks out the window dubiously. “This reminds me of that movie where the family in an RV pulls into a little town and the mutants come out at night and eat them.”

“It’s adorable!” This, from Doris.

We pull into the town’s one RV park. The attendant comes over and asks us which side our electrical, water and sewer outlets are on. He calls these “hookups,” but we all hear it as “hiccups.” The RV park attendant fails to find great humor in this.

After a dinner of refrigerator-baked chicken, it’s time for bed. Ed pushes a button, activating a motor that causes one side of the floor to slide outward, doubling the vehicle’s width. It’s like something James Bond’s gadget guy might have come up with after he retired from the spy trade and took up RVing in his dotage.

Ed oversees the sleeping arrangements. Nana and Poppy get the bedroom in the back, which is where the toilet and shower are. This is separated from the main room by a stiff beige curtain that you pull closed behind you, as in a voting booth. The bedroom is minuscule. It would be easier, though possibly a federal offense, to get undressed in a voting booth.

The other two beds are in the kitchen. “For this one,” says Lily, “you just drop down the dining table and cut off your feet.”

Doris and Alisha take the sofa bed. It appears to be stuck in the shadowy limbo between sofa and bed. Doris appears unconcerned about her impending spinal deformity. “This is the life,” she says, speaking directly into her navel.

It’s impressive how the RV designers managed to fit it all in, but heaven help you if you have to go to the bathroom—or “go vote,” as we now say—after all the beds have been pulled out. Ed offers me advice: “I recommend taking the overland route, bypassing the legs, and then heading west at the overflowing garbage bag. Good luck.”

We arrive at the Grand Canyon the next morning. It’s beautiful, but it seems empty and lonely and way too quiet. We’re all happy to hit the road and get back in each other’s faces. RVs are interesting that way.

Yours, Mine & Mine

Our friends Tina and Joe
have installed his-and-her sinks. The last time we had dinner there, we all got up with our wine glasses and went in to admire the remodeled bathroom. We stood awhile, sipping our wine and chatting about this and that, as though having cocktails in the bathroom before sitting down to eat was the new thing. It made as much sense to me as individual bathroom sinks did.

“What’s up with that?” I said to Ed on the way home. How often does it happen that you are wanting to brush your teeth at precisely the same moment as your spouse, and in such a grave hurry, that you can’t wait 40 seconds? Me, I enjoy the goofy intimacy of brushing your teeth together, talking over the day’s events in an unintelligible foamy garble. That’s what marriage is all about. Isn’t it?

“It would be nice to have your own sink,” Ed said. “I can’t say why.”

I launched into one of my tiresome laments about modern life, about how couples don’t live like couples anymore, what with his-and-her washbasins and separate phone mailboxes and mattress adjustments and car temperature controls. Couples don’t share, because no one’s willing to compromise.

Ed was quiet for a moment. “What do we share?”

I thought about this. We share a home e-mail account that neither of us checks or uses or even remembers how to log on to. We share a Netflix account, though it is Ed who manages the film queue. Not long ago, a Jack Black movie featuring the portly actor in a full-body leotard dropped through our mail slot. I ran out the door in my sock-feet, convinced that the mailman had given us a neighbor’s envelope. We don’t share the same shampoo or breakfast cereal or even toothpaste. I couldn’t come up with an answer.

For an experiment in togetherness, I suggested that we share iTunes, the software that allows you to bleed your bank account dry in 99-cent increments—oops, I mean, download songs to create an online music library. Ed already had an iPod, and I had just bought one. (When I was nine or ten, I used my allowance to buy a jack-in-the-box. The toy store clerk, an older woman with dry, permed hair and a grim set to her mouth, not that I harbor any resentment, said, “Aren’t you too old for that?” I got to relive that moment right there in the Apple store.)

Our shared music library lasted less than an hour. It was too embarrassing to have Ed know that I’d downloaded a song by, say, Al Stewart. I actually paid the 99 cents, and then, seeing it there on the list between Frank Sinatra and acclaimed avant-garde accordion and glockenspiel trio Tin Hat, I deleted it. And while Ed could skip over my music on the playlist, I had the kind of iPod that chooses songs at random. I’d be bopping along the sidewalk, and “Sweet Home Alabama” would suddenly segue into a neo-klezmer band.

“How could someone not like the Klezmatics?” said Ed. There was an implied “and like Al Stewart” at the end of the question.

“I do like them,” I said. “I just would always rather, you know, listen to something else.”

Ed made me a separate library file for my music, which he labeled “Out-of-Date Pap,” or anyway wanted to. Then he showed me how I could easily copy any of the hundreds of songs in his music library to my own. So I did that. Now there were six songs in my library.

He looked at the list. “Those are the only ones you want?”

I nodded.

“Huh,” said Ed. “We’re very different, you and I.”

We shared that sentiment, and then we went upstairs to spit toothpaste on each other’s hands in the sink that, for the moment at least, we share.

Gratuitous Gratuities

Not long ago,
a mysterious Christmas card dropped through our mail slot. The envelope was addressed to a man named Raoul, who, I was relatively certain, did not live with us. The envelope wasn’t sealed, so I opened it. The inside of the card was blank. My husband explained that the card was both from and to the newspaper deliveryman. His name was apparently Raoul, and Raoul wanted a holiday tip. We were meant to put a check inside the card and then drop the envelope in the mail. When your services are rendered at 4 a.m., you can’t simply hang around, clearing your throat like a bellhop. You have to be direct.

So I wrote a nice holiday greeting to this man whom I had never seen or met, this man who, in my imagination, fires the
New York Times
from a howitzer aimed at our front door, causing more noise with mere newsprint than most people manage with sophisticated black market fireworks.

With a start, I realized that perhaps the reason for the 4 a.m. wake-up thonks was not ordinary rudeness but carefully executed spite: I had not tipped Raoul in Christmases past. I honestly hadn’t realized I was supposed to. This was the first time he’d used the card tactic. So I got out my checkbook. Somewhere along the line, holiday tipping went from an optional thank-you for a year of services well rendered to a Mafia-style protection racket.

Several days later, I was bringing our garbage bins back from the curb when I noticed an envelope taped to one of the lids. The outside of the envelope said MICKEY. Unless a small person named Mickey had taken up residence in our garbage can and this missive was intended for him, it had to be another tip solicitation, this time from our garbage collector. Unlike Raoul, Mickey hadn’t enclosed his own Christmas card from me. In a way, I appreciated the directness. “I know you don’t care how merry my Christmas is, and that’s fine,” the gesture said. “I want $30, or I’ll ‘forget’ to empty your compost bin some hot summer day.”

I put a check in the envelope and taped it back to the bin. The next morning, Ed reported that on his way to the gym, he’d noticed that the envelope was gone, though the tra
s
h hadn’t yet been picked up: “Someone stole Mickey’s tip!” Ed concocted a scenario whereby an enterprising colleague of Mickey’s had done a late-night sweep of his route, stealing all the tips. He made me call the bank and cancel the check.

But Ed had been wrong. Two weeks later, Mickey left a letter from the bank on our steps. The letter informed Mickey that the check, which he had tried to cash, had been canceled. The following Tuesday morning, Ed ran out with his wallet. “Are you Mickey?”

The man looked at him with scorn. “Mickey is the garbageman. I am the recycling.” Not only had Ed insulted this man by insinuating that he was a garbageman, but he had obviously neglected to tip him. Ed ran back inside for more funds. Then he noticed that the driver of the truck had been watching the whole transaction. He peeled off another twenty and looked around, waving bills in the air. “Anyone else?”

Had we consulted the website of the Emily Post Institute, this embarrassing breach of etiquette could have been avoided. Under “trash/recycling collectors” in the institute’s Holiday Tipping Guidelines, it says: “$10 to $30 each.” You may or may not wish to know that your pet groomer, personal trainer, handyman, hairdresser, mailman and UPS guy all expect a holiday tip.

The Mary Roach Institute has something to say: Enough! People hate tipping. It forces them to make an unpleasant choice between feeling cheap and feeling taken. Americans are nickeled-and-dimed from every direction. Just factor it into your rates and be done with it, I say!

Ed got that look he gets when my true nature breaks through the sweetness-and-light exterior that I prop in place about 20 percent of the time. “Who
are
you?” he said.

I hung my head. “My name is Scrooge. I live in your trash bin.”

Color Me Flummoxed

I am a fan of the Sherwin-Williams Company,
if only for the crazy audacity of their logo: a giant paint can spilling its contents over Earth. What I want to know is, how did they decide on the color? Painting the earth is a big job. You don’t want to do it twice. And red is a bold choice for even the smallest home décor project.

As is yellow. Last year, Ed and I spent 45 minutes flipping through yellow paint chips when we redid our TV room. Seeking something subtle, we went with Peace Yellow. Ed covered two walls. “Whoa!” he said, squinting. It was like living inside Easter. We had failed to observe the Universal Law of Paint Chips: Whatever you choose will be two times brighter, darker and more garish than it looked on the chip.

This time, repainting the guest room, we decided to go with Benjamin Moore. They sell trial paint containers the size of baby-food jars, and, as with baby food, the idea is to smear patches of the stuff all over the walls. This enables you to try the colors out before committing to a full gallon. Off we went to the paint store.

“This is nice,” said Ed, holding up a chip of Wyndham Cream. The name was pretty but largely devoid of useful color associations. This bugs me. I like a paint namer who calls it like it is―for instance, the person who came up with Benjamin Moore’s American Cheese. Although who in their right mind―not that anybody in the midst of a home décor project is in their right mind―would cover their walls with something suggestive of Velveeta? “Some dogs I know,” Ed said. “My nephew. Your friend Clark.”

Because Wyndham Cream sounded so lovely, we bought the little jar of it, as well as a jar of Asbury Sand, Crowne Hill Yellow, Hathaway Peach and a couple of others. Only when we got them on the wall did we recognize the colors for what they actually were: Caulk, Jaundice, Band-Aid and Cheap Drugstore Foundation.