My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places (3 page)

“What?” Ed will ask. “What don’t you get?” Apparently this language speaks to him in a way that it does not speak to me. One night I decided to try putting it to work. It was seven o’clock and cutlets were growing cold. I cleared my throat. “The wife is declared put out when it is dinnertime and the game is still running. The husband’s attention has to be caught and because the wife is put out, the husband may wish to run . . .”

Ed begged leniency on the grounds that it was “the top of the ninth.” Here again, communication breaks down. For me, there can be no understanding of a sport where the “top” of an inning is the first half. “Think of ladders,” I said, as Marvin Benard stepped up to the plate. “You start at the bottom and go to the top.” But Ed wasn’t listening.

Benard struck out, and Ed said hurtful things about him. This is my other qualm with pro sports. I feel bad for the players when they mess up. The ball Benard missed was going 90 m.p.h., and it went all crooked. If I were the umpire, I would have laid a hand on the man’s shoulder and said, “Take your base, Marv. You were really close.”

Last October my tolerance for Ed’s devotion to sports, already threadbare, began to unravel. The baseball season was winding down, leading me to think that we could resume our normal adult activities, if only we had any. I came into the living room one Sunday to find Ed, a man who dismisses football as “a bore,” engrossed in a Broncos game. He wore a guilty grin. “Third and long, sweetie!”

It was around that time that I came across a book about sports “addiction.” It said that for many men, their relationship with their team fulfills a need for intimacy. This got me right there in the whack-me zone. Was J. T. Snow doing more for my husband than I was?

I confronted Ed. There was an NFL game on that day, but he wasn’t watching. He was making banana bread. Though he denied the charges, he wouldn’t rule out the possibility that J. T. Snow could make him happy. Then he asked if I wanted to go for a bike ride. I decided to drop the sports addiction thing, because truly, Ed doesn’t deserve the hassle. He’s the winningest guy I know, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart, which is the part that comes before the top.

Don’t Bring Me Flowers

Some years ago,
a well-known perfume company invented a concept called “the Aviance night.” In the ads, a housewife was shown primping for a night on the town, sashaying around the bedroom and flipping her hair from one side to the other as she puts on her earrings. As she douses herself with Aviance perfume, an unseen chorus conjectures excitedly that “she’s gonna have an Aviance night!”

I never had an Aviance night. I don’t, as a general rule, sashay. But I cannot completely silence that part of me that longs, every now and again, to be heading off confidently and aromatically into a night of candlelit romance. My longing tends to coalesce and rise to the surface, like chicken fat, every February.

A word about Valentine’s Day. This was originally a holiday for a god who protected shepherds’ flocks from the wolves outside Rome. I don’t know how we got from livestock surveillance to romantic love, but if I had to tender a guess I’d say it had something to do with the Hallmark company. We really have to watch these guys, because soon we’re going to find ourselves sending cards for Plumbers and Steamfitters Day (“You bring a special kind of caring to our water-serviced area . . .”).

It’s not that my husband and I don’t go out. Every Valentine’s Day, Ed will dutifully reserve a table at a romantic restaurant. I look forward to it until about five o’clock on the actual date. Somehow the mood never seems to fit. I put on perfume and wait for the unseen chorus to kick in, but hear instead the dulcet tones of my sweatpants calling out to me. Suddenly I don’t feel like going to an unfamiliar, overpriced restaurant. I want to go somewhere comfortable and known, a place where the wine doesn’t cost more than my shoes and the waiter won’t look down upon me for making “daikon” rhyme with “bacon.”

But this is Valentine’s Day, and we must persevere. For tomorrow, the Aviance Day After, friends and coworkers will grill us as to the activities of the night before. “The living room” is not an acceptable answer to “Where did Ed take you for Valentine’s?”

This year is no different. Poor Ed. He’s trying very hard. As we dress to leave, he takes my hands in his and leans in close. He cocks his head to one side, as if seeing me anew, in the fresh dawn of reawakened love. “Are you wearing an odor?”

Ed is romantic, but not in the traditional manner. I once suggested that we bring the dining room candles into the bedroom. Ed brought them in and set them down on the floor near the door, at the farthest point from the bedspread and other combustibles, completely out of our view. “They still provide some nice ambient illumination,” he said. It was like getting into bed with Norm Abram.

I once asked him to pick up some massage oil, and he came home with an unscented variety. I didn’t know such a thing existed. Another time he tried to surprise me with a romantic bubble bath, not realizing that sometime during the day, something had gone wrong with the hot water heater, and the bath water was stone cold. No doubt we’d forgotten to send flowers on Plumbers and Steamfitters Day and the Local 486 had sabotaged our tank.

The Valentine’s Day dinner itself is always a bit of a trial. From the moment you’re seated, the gazing and hand-holding must begin. Everyone else is doing it, and so you must too. No matter what kind of day you’ve had or how long you’ve been married, the two of you must appear to be utterly, helplessly captivated by each other, unable to think about anything else. This does not work, for one simple, incontrovertible reason. A man at a restaurant table is thinking about food. He cannot help himself. He knows this isn’t allowed and will try very, very hard to appear to be thinking thoughts of love. The effort typically fails, and he achieves a look somewhere between hypnosis and acid reflux.

I say Valentine’s Day should have term limits. I say if you’re old enough to have trouble reading a menu by candlelight, you’re old enough that you shouldn’t have to bother. Kiss each other across a plate of spaghetti, while an unseen chorus admits that the Aviance night was always a little overrated.

Roomba’s Revenge

I have always wanted and not wanted a cleaning person.
On the one hand, I want very much for someone else to clean our house, as neither I nor my husband, Ed, has shown any aptitude for it. On the other hand, I’d feel guilty inflicting such distasteful drudgery on another human being. No one but me, for instance, should have to clean up the dental floss heaped like spaghetti near the wastebasket where I toss it each night, never catching on that floss is not something that can be thrown with a high degree of accuracy.

You can imagine my joy upon reading that the iRobot company of Somerville, Massachusetts, has invented a robotic vacuum. They call it Roomba. Their website plays an animated clip of what appears to be an enlarged CD Walkman scooting across a living room carpet, sucking up conspicuous chunks of unidentified detritus. Meanwhile, sentences run across the screen: “I’m having lunch with a friend” . . . “I’m planting flowers in the garden.” The point is that you can go out and “enjoy life” while your robot cleans up the conspicuous chunks strewn about your living room floor, no doubt rubble tracked in from the garden plot.

Roomba joined our family last week. Right away I changed the name to Reba, in order to indulge my fantasy of having a real cleaning person, yet still respect its incredibly dumb-sounding given name. As techno-gadgets go, the iRobot vacuum is surprisingly simple to use. All you do, beyond switching it on, is tell it the room size. This I calculated in my usual manner, by picturing six-foot guys lying end-to-end along the walls and multiplying accordingly.

I started Reba off in the bedroom. I was on my way out the door to enjoy life, when I heard a crash. My vacuuming robot had tangled itself up in the telephone cord and then headed off in the other direction, pulling the phone off the nightstand and onto the floor. “Maybe Reba needs to make a call,” said Ed.

I couldn’t, in all fairness, be annoyed, as I’m the sort of person who gets up to go to the bathroom on airplanes without first unplugging my headphones. Only the fact that my head is attached to my neck prevents it from being yanked off onto the floor. Also, it tells you right there in the Owner’s Manual to “pick up objects like clothing, loose papers . . . power cords . . . just as you would before using a regular vacuum cleaner.”

This poses something of a problem in our house. The corners and the floor space along the walls and under the furniture in the office, for instance, are filled with stacks and bags of what I call Ed’s desk runoff. My husband is a man who does not easily throw things away. Whatever he gets in the mail or empties from his pockets he simply deposits on the nearest horizontal surface.

Once a week, like the neighborhood garbage truck, I collect Ed’s discards and throw them onto a vast, heaping landfill located on his desk. At a certain point, determined by the angle of the slope and the savagery of my throws, the pile will begin to slide. This is Ed’s cue to shovel a portion of it into a shopping bag, which he then puts on the floor somewhere with the intent to go through it later,
later
here meaning “never.”

I looked at the floor in our office. There were newspapers, piles of files, socks, pens, not to mention the big guys lying along the floorboards. Picking it all up to clear the way for Reba would take half an hour, which is more time than I normally spend vacuuming. It was the same sort of situation that has kept me from ever hiring an assistant.

It would take longer to explain my filing system to someone else (“Okay, so takeout menus and important contracts go in the orange folder labeled ‘Bees’ . . .”) than it would to do the chore myself.

The bathroom promised to be less problematic. I lifted the hamper into the tub and put the bathroom scale in the sink, where it looked as though maybe it wanted a bath, or maybe it had a date with a vacuum cleaner.

Then I went into the bedroom to fetch Reba, who was at that moment engaged in a shoving match with one of my Birkenstocks. She had pushed the shoe across the room and under the bed, well into the zone of no-reach.

“Good one,” said Ed, who has always harbored ill will toward comfort footwear for women.

I set Reba down and aimed her at the crud-paved crawlspace beneath the footed bathtub. I have tried this with Ed and various of my stepdaughters, but it always fails to produce the desired effect.

The wondrous Reba was not only willing but actually enthusiastic about the prospect, motoring full bore across the tile and under the tub and whacking her forehead on the far wall. You just can’t find help like that.

The living room was a similar success. Reba does housework much the way I do, busily cleaning in one spot for a while and then wandering off inexplicably in the opposite direction and getting distracted by something else that needs doing. The iRobot people call this an “algorithm-based cleaning pattern,” a term I will use the next time Ed catches me polishing silver with the mop water evaporating in the other room.

Halfway across the living room carpet, Reba stopped moving and began emitting undelighted noises. Ed leafed through the troubleshooting guide.

“It’s a Whimper Beep,” he said, employing the concerned baritone that used to announce the Heartbreak of Psoriasis as though it were the Cuban Missile Crisis. I turned Reba over. Wound around her brushes was a two-foot strand of dental floss. Apparently even robots have their limits.

How I Caught Every Disease on the Web

The Internet is a boon for hypochondriacs
like me. Right now, for instance, I’m feeling a shooting pain on the side of my neck. A Web search produces five matches, the first three for a condition called Arnold-Chiari Malformation.

This is the wonderful thing about looking up your symptoms on the Internet. Very quickly you find yourself distracted from your aches and pains. The symptom list for Arnold-Chiari Malformation is three pages long. Noting the four out of 71 symptoms that match, I conclude that I have this condition. A good hypochondriac can make a diagnosis on the basis of one matching symptom.

While my husband, Ed, reads over my shoulder, I recite symptoms from the list. “ ‘General clumsiness’ and ‘general imbalance,’ ” I say, as though announcing arrivals at the Marine Corps Ball. “ ‘Difficulty driving,’ ‘lack of taste,’ ‘difficulty feeling feet on ground.’ ”

“Those aren’t symptoms,” says Ed. “Those are your character flaws.”

Ha, ha. But I know how to get back at him. “Hey, what’s this thickening, or nodule, on the back of your neck?” Ed is more of a hypochondriac than I am. “Looks like it could be Antley-Bixler Syndrome,” I say.

I got this one from the National Organization for Rare Disorders website, which has an index of rare diseases that I’ve pretty much memorized. I move in for the kill. “Ever feel any fatigue?”

Ed gets on the computer to see if there’s a self-test for Antley-Bixler Syndrome. We’re big fans of self-tests, and the Internet is full of them. I once happily passed the afternoon self-testing for macular degeneration, emotional eating, hypochondria, bad breath. Ed found me taking the Self-Test for Swine Farm Operators. (“I conduct manure nutrient analysis: Annually. Every five years. Never.”) It’s probably fair to say that I’m addicted to self-tests, but until there’s a self-test for self-test addiction, I can’t be sure.

The dangerous thing about Internet diagnosis is that most hypochondriacs will attempt it late at night, when everyone else is asleep and no one is around to reassure them that they’re nuts. This is what happened to me on October 2, sometime past midnight, when I entered the words “red spots on my face” into the Google search page. I’d noticed the spots while scanning my face for starlike speckles, an early symptom of Ebola virus.

I ignored the 20 or 30 entries for broken capillaries and zeroed in on the following: “Leprosy . . . begins with red spots on the face. . . . Bones are affected and fingers drop off.” I began to feel panicky and short of breath. I added those symptoms to my search and found this: “I developed little red spots on my face and arms. Then last spring I started becoming short of breath. . . .” Bottom line, I had interstitial lung disease.