My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places (6 page)

I went to my own dentist this week, after a hiatus of some centuries, and was excited to see that Dr. Chee had installed a TV set too. An infomercial was on, all about porcelain veneers and whitening procedures and other wonderful things that your dental insurance doesn’t cover. From observing dozens of Before and After shots, I concluded that women are much better at applying makeup after they get veneers.

The hygienist was draping me with a lead bib, in case some of the X-rays dribbled onto my chest. I asked her if we could change the TV channel. She explained that it was not a TV but rather a VCR for showing videos about Dr. Chee’s new services.

Like any successful businessman, Dr. Chee is not one to pass up a revenue-generating opportunity. This is a dentist who hands out free sugar cookies in his waiting room. Dr. Chee is never all that happy to see me, because I never let him replace my fillings. If my teeth don’t hurt, I’m not messing with them.

“So,” said Dr. Chee. “What brings you here? Need a new toothbrush?”

Dr. Chee told me to watch the video monitor while he poked around in my mouth. On the screen was a closeup of some revolting discolored molars. I waited to see how the porcelain veneer folks were going to tackle this mess.

“These are your teeth.” Dr. Chee had been holding a tiny closed-circuit TV camera inside my mouth. He panned from one molar to the next, narrating in the grave, somber tones of a newscaster at the aftermath of a major natural disaster. “Pitted, corroded fillings. Cracks and fissures where the amalgam has pulled away . . .”

He could have said, “Look how nicely these fillings are holding up!” and the images—to my dentally ignorant eye—would have fit. In fact, I’d made the rounds of several other dentists in town, hoping to find one who’d say, “Look how nicely these fillings are holding up!” But they didn’t, so I went back to Dr. Chee, where at least you get cookies.

Dr. Chee said that I needed to replace fillings in three teeth and get crowns on two others. He said that a crown costs $850. I have heard of crowns costing this kind of money, but these are mostly in the Tower of London. To distract me from the bad news, he panned artfully to a medium closeup of the roof of my mouth, which he described as a “high, steep vault.”

“That’s where I keep the gold bullion I’ll be using to pay for my dental work,” I said. Unfortunately, Dr. Chee had his hand in my mouth, as well as the hand of his lovely assistant and a Bissell dual-suction upright rug-cleaning system and another hand and a 93-piece cordless drill set and the Pensacola University Marching Band.

Consequently my witticism came out this way: “Aast aaa aah caaa aga ah ah at ah ah aaa-aa a caa-ah a ent-ull uh.” Over the years, Dr. Chee has developed a remarkable ability to understand the garbled, consonant-deprived utterances of the orally overloaded. “Ha, ha,” he replied.

Then I gave him my usual if-it-ain’t-broke line. He turned to the hygienist. “Make a note in the chart: Hold off on replacing fillings until patient’s teeth rot in mouth.”

He sounded displeased. He sounded like he wanted to send me on a short walk off a long pier with a lead bib.

“Okay, maybe one crown. Will I be better at applying makeup after the procedure?”

Dr. Chee smiled. He’s a nice guy, and he doesn’t deserve patients like me. If I were him, I’d have put my fist in my mouth a long time ago, and not to fix three fillings.

Check This Out

I’m an enthusiastic fan
of the new self-check-in kiosks that the airlines have installed. Having gleefully checked myself in on many occasions, I was eager to try self-check-in’s retail cousin, self-checkout. The local Home Depot has four such devices, and last weekend my husband and I paid a visit.

From our cart, Ed handed me one of seven identical piping clamps. I whisked the UPC code over the scanner as I’ve seen the pros do. Nothing. Ed fished a different clamp from the cart and ran it over the scanner successfully, establishing a baseline of resentment and rancor for our self-checkout experience.

Since the machine seemed to respond to this particular clamp, Ed suggested passing it over the scanner seven times rather than struggling to make the scanner register the UPCs of the other six. The machine took issue with Ed’s sensible and innovative checkout strategy.

“Please Place Item in Bagging Area.”

“Why?” replied Ed, and here was the start of his undoing. A talking machine will talk to you—endlessly, bossily, repetitively—but it will not, no matter how fascinating or urgent your words, listen to you. It is my belief that these machines infuriate men because they remind them of the less pleasing aspects of talking to their spouses.

“Please Place Item in Bagging Area.”

I put a bag onto the bag holder, and Ed dropped the six clamps into it. Now the machine had a new gripe.
“Unexpected Item in Bagging Area. Please Remove Item.”

As it turned out, there was a scale underneath the bagging area, enabling the machine to ensure that the two-ounce clamp you scanned is exactly what goes into the bag, rather than the two-ounce clamp plus the Makita cordless drill kit you are endeavoring to steal.

From the cart, Ed next picked up an eight-foot length of conduit pipe. The UPC code sticker had been placed midway along the shaft. Scanning the thing would entail knocking over a display caddy of roofing tiles and Roof Wear Warning Signals (“1. Loose granules . . .”) located on the far side of the machine, while simultaneously tripping up customers passing by behind us.

At a store that sells lumber and toilets and bags of cement, self-checkout isn’t a convenience—it’s a Chevy Chase movie.

Ed was perturbed, and this takes some doing. Ed is the most level-headed person I know. You could take one of the carpenter’s levels from Aisle 5 and place it on his head and the little bubble will always be right there in the middle. I mention this by way of explaining why it was that at this particularly tense juncture, I chose to further aggravate my husband by idly asking what’s inside the little bubble on a carpenter’s level.

Ed looked as if he was trying to decide who—me or the machine—more clearly deserved to have their granules whacked loose with a conduit pipe.

“Liquid,” he said, in a not overwhelmingly cordial tone.

In any other store, I might have stalked off to go flirt with the customers. This isn’t possible at Home Depot. A man in Home Depot can’t even
see
a woman.

A woman appeared at our side with a handheld scan gun and a marriage counselor. She explained that self-checkout was for small items only, and then she scanned the piping and reset the machine. Though self-checkout has enabled Home Depot to hire fewer checkout clerks, it has had to hire instead a team of special self-checkout troubleshooters.

I asked the woman how her new job was going. She looked like she was ready for self-checkout of the personal, I-quit variety. “Sometimes customers get so mad they throw stuff on the floor and walk away.” And then the self-checkout machine makes them sleep on the couch.

The Naked Truth

Once you hit 40,
it is time to think twice about miniskirts. Also, string bikinis, midriff-baring tops, skintight or low-rise jeans that have been sanded white the length of the thighs, as though the wearer had been tied to a bumper and dragged facedown around the block a few times. These are clothes for young people.

Alas, this is what the stores are selling. Today’s popular clothing chains appeal strictly to teenagers, who can be counted upon to change their tastes every 30 days, as the latest
Cosmo Girl
or
Teen Vogue
arrives in the mail. Customers like me cannot possibly afford new clothing more than once a decade, owing to the financial strain of paying for teenage children’s rapidly shifting fashion needs. So no one bothers to make clothing for us.

This is a dangerous situation. Expose a middle-aged woman to nothing but miniskirts and abbreviated tops for long enough, and she’s bound to cave. One day, when her self-esteem is dangerously high and the dressing room lights dangerously low, she’ll try on something designed for her daughter and say to herself, “Oh, why not?” If she happens to be shopping with her children, the answer to this question will be provided for her. But middle-aged husbands offer no such reality check. They live in a candy-land of denial and residual carnality. They still, bless them, like to see a little flesh.

My husband recently made me try on a bikini. A bikini is not so much a garment as a cloth-based reminder that your parts have been migrating all these years. My waist, I realized that day in the dressing room, has completely disappeared beneath my rib cage, which now rests directly on my hips. I’m exhibiting continental drift in reverse.

The buttocks, too, have overrun their boundaries, infringing on territory that rightly belongs to the thighs. I have encouraged my thighs to do something about this—restraining order, guard dog—but they have not. Your thighs are rarely there for you.

“Cute!” says Ed dementedly. “Turn around.”

“You turn around first.”

Ed does not understand what all women my age understand. The mature lady’s buttock does not wish to come out and take a bow. Designers of mature ladies’ swimwear know this. They’ve built little curtains into their designs, enabling the sagging buttock to keep hidden, and/or cast votes in privacy. God help me, I’ve entered the Age of Skirted Swimwear. This is the age right after Accessorizing with Reading Glasses and a few years before Can’t Name Anyone on the Radio.

Even the knees are in on the betrayal. I recently saw a tabloid photograph of a 40-something Demi Moore with her knees circled in red, highlighting the fact that they were disappearing under the shifting shoals of her thighs.
Ha-ha,
I said to myself. Just deserts for having a face and breasts (and a boyfriend) that look 25. Then I looked at my own knees, which I plan never to do again.

The foot is more or less the one body part that time leaves alone. Well into your 70s, you can wear whatever style shoes you feel like wearing. Positioned, as they are, at the bottom of the heap, gravity is not an issue. Or so I thought. Shortly after the swimsuit debacle, I tried on a pair of pointy-toed black pumps, the sort that actresses on
Sex and the City
were wearing for 30 days back in spring.

“How do those work for you?” the salesgirl asked. I told her they were pinching me, and not in an appreciative, you-look-just-like-that-gal-on-
Sex and the City
way.

“You know,” she said brightly, “your feet flatten as you age.”

I went to find Ed, and I told him about my flattening instep. He smiled and put his arm around me. That still fits, and for this I’m happy.

Bug Off!

As far as my husband, Ed, is concerned,
the greatest thing about the Great Outdoors is that it remains outdoors. In particular, Ed hates ants.

“I don’t hate ants,” Ed will insist. “I just want them to live in their own houses. I don’t go barging into their homes uninvited, do I?” Ed would have you believe that it’s a matter of etiquette, of shoddy ant manners, and that if we’d gotten to know the ants, come to think of them as our friends, he’d be happy to have them over.
Six thirty, then? Great! Will the soldiers be coming or just the workers?

I tell him to ignore them, because they’ll be gone when the rain ends and their homes stop flooding. I care about drowning ants because once I left my cousin’s Ant Farm outside when it rained, and the farmers all died. I guess I’m still working through the guilt. Whatever the reason, I think of our kitchen as a port in the storm, an ant refugee camp, providing crumbs and shelter in time of need.

Ed just wants to slay them. And there are products on the market to help him do this. They tend to come in two categories. The first appeals to the man who loves a good battle, especially one where the enemy is unarmed and the size of Wheatena. These products have names like Maxforce and the aggressive if ungrammatical Real Kill.

Ed knows better than to try to get UN approval for this sort of thing. He knows I believe in a humane, organic approach. I once got Ed to stop killing the spiders in our bedroom by telling him the spiders eat the ants. Of course, this isn’t true. Unlike humans, spiders are no good at what my mother used to call “drawing ants.” They do not leave wet Popsicle sticks on windowsills or open honey jars out on counters. Ed bought my theory, but only for a while. I’d come into the room and see him on his hands and knees in the corner, inspecting the webs. “If I don’t see ants by Friday, you’re in trouble, my friend.”

Pesticide companies understand the husband-wife ant dynamic. Many have a separate line that emphasizes the nontoxic quality of the products, which is quite a bold marketing move for what is essentially a weapon of mass destruction.

One company tries to make ant death seem like a holiday in France. They have a product called Ant Café, so that rather than picturing the little guys gasping and writhing, you picture them sipping bowls of café au lait, smoking Gitanes and leafing through
Le Figaro,
which is hard to do at the same time unless, like the ant, you have six hands.

The last spray bottle Ed brought home was a brand called Safer’s. He read to me from the label, pausing now and again to make ant pâté on the counter. “It combines bait with borax,” he said, as though this made any kind of sense, as though helping them have whiter whites had always been the idea. “Fresh Mint Odor, honey!”

I’ve never encountered this kind of fresh mint odor. Imagine smelling some mint that’s growing on the lawn of a petrochemical plant. It’s
that
kind of fresh mint odor. When Ed wasn’t looking, the Safer’s went away on a holiday in France.

For a long time, Ed didn’t say much about the ants and I thought he’d made his peace with them. Then I found some of those little ant cups that leak brown, sticky, evil stuff and do not match our décor. He thought I’d like this idea, because no spraying and dying-on-the-countertops was involved. “They take the poison home and die there!” Ed said cheerfully.