My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places (10 page)

Ed will keep looking at his paper for three or four seconds. Then he’ll go: “What did you say?” By now the birds have moved on to the next backyard. Or worse, they’ll still be there, forcing me to repeat my inane, mind-numbingly dull comment, a comment not worth repeating to anyone, and in particular, a man transfixed by the latest on Roger Clemens’s salary negotiations.

I have come to believe that Ed’s hearing loss is also limited to the specific tonal register of my voice. His brain has learned, over time, that this particular vocal range is best ignored because there’s a high likelihood it will be a) saying something mind-numbingly dull or b) accusing him of not listening. If someone else—Roger Clemens, for example—were to sit down at our breakfast table and make reference to the cedar waxwings, Ed would look up and respond.

“You bet I would,” said Ed when I pointed this out. “You don’t take Roger Clemens for granted like you do your wife.” He added that there is no such team as the Cedar Waxwings. Then he went back to his paper.

Ed believes that I, too, have a unique form of conjugal hearing loss. I can’t make out the first two words of almost anything Ed says to me. I say he mumbles. He says it’s me. He printed out a page from a website called Ten Ways to Recognize Hearing Loss. Number 6 said: “Do many people seem to mumble?”

“Not many people,” I said. “Just you.”

Ed didn’t hear this, as he’d walked into the kitchen. This is the other problem with married couples’ communications: They attempt to carry them out while standing in separate rooms or on separate floors, preferably while one of them is running water or operating a vacuum cleaner or watching the Cedar Waxwings in the playoffs. Just last night I was at the sink brushing my teeth when Ed responded to something I’d said with the line: “Yours is not to do or die.”

“WHO died?” I yelled through the bristles.

“DO OR DIE!!”

“WHO’S DEWAR?”

This is how our conversations go these days. I don’t believe it has anything to do with our ears. We’re just too lazy to walk down the hall and address each other face to face, like civilized, respectful adults. Ed recently saw a specialist about ringing in his ears, and I went along to get a professional’s view on spousal hearing issues.

Dr. Schindler came into the examining room and sat down on his little wheeled stool. He was wearing one of those strapped-on headlamps, for looking down throats or coal mines.

Ed smiled at him. “You have something on your head.”

I shook his hand. “I’m here because I have a question about hearing and marriage.” Then I launched into the story of how Ed doesn’t listen at breakfast, and how he thinks I don’t listen when anyone could tell you he’s mumbling.

Dr. Schindler said that he wasn’t a counselor. The look on his face said,
What part of “otolaryngologist” do you not understand?
Wisely, he did not actually pose this question, or we would all still be there.

Then the doctor began talking about age-related hearing loss. “Around 40, we start to get worse at filtering out background noise . . .” Ed and I are both deep in denial about this so-called “aging” thing. Ed cocked his head toward Dr. Schindler. “Did you say something?”

Cheaper Than Thou

My husband, Ed,
once called me the cheapest person in the world. I believe this was around the time he discovered that every night I remove my eyeliner with the end of a Q-tip and then set it aside to use the other end the following night. Ed was appalled. “Do you rinse and reuse your dental floss too?”

I gave him a look of utmost scorn, though it’s possible he saw through the scorn to the little light shining behind it, the light that said, “Wow, great idea!”

I know for a fact that I’m not the cheapest person in the world, because it’s a matter of record—Guinness record, to be specific—that the world’s greatest miser was Hetty Green. And do you know what the
Guinness Book of World Records
cited as evidence of her miserliness? She saved scraps of soap.

And who in our house saves scraps of soap? That would be Ed. When the bar of soap gets so tiny that you can’t wash without it crumbling like feta cheese inside your underarms, Ed will take the delicate sliver and fuse it onto the new bar of soap. I can recall the first time I saw this. It was touching in a way, the little infant soap clinging to its mother’s back like a baby monkey. The charm wore off over the course of umpteen showers during which the sliver would repeatedly dislodge from its host, forcing me to stand under the water for five minutes at a time fusing it back into place, wasting precious pennies’ worth of water—pennies that could be put to good use buying six months’ worth of Q-tips.

In Ed’s case, it’s hereditary. I will always remember the sight of Ed’s dad, Bill, eating a salad dressed from a gallon vat of dressing purchased at Costco.

He had bought the largest size because it was the most economical, but as it turned out, he hated the taste of it. Ed encouraged him to throw it away.

“I bought it,” he said, chewing miserably, “and I’m going to finish it.” This was in 1997. Every time we visit, we check in the refrigerator for the Dressing of Bill’s Discontent, marking off his progress in half-inch increments.

We figure his sentence will be up around 2030. We’re hoping that he lives that long, first because we love him dearly, and second, because if he doesn’t, that means Ed and I will have to bring it home and finish it. Otherwise it would be a waste of perfectly good dressing, “perfectly good” here meaning “not immediately life-threatening.” And when the bottom of the evil vat is finally in sight, one of us will turn it upside down, to be sure not a drop goes to waste. We had a honey jar upside down on the breakfast table for the better part of a decade. “Pass the YENOH,” Ed would say.

I’d be hard-pressed to say who’s more pathetic, Ed or me. We both make ourselves feel better by berating the other person. Ed takes great joy in reminding me of the time a car salesman told me I was the first person he’d ever met who ordered a car with NO extras. I, in turn, take great joy watching Ed rummage through his box of stray, salvaged screws in a predictably hopeless effort to find one that fits.

Yesterday Ed caught me using the Water Miser dishwasher option (I prefer the term Water Conservationist) even though there were dirty, greasy pots inside. I tried to explain that by adding a little extra soap, I could make up the lost cleansing power. Perhaps this might be a good use for those little slivers of bar soap. Ed told me I had a screw loose.

It’s possible he’s right. And when it falls out, we know where to look for a replacement.

The Grass Menagerie

My father was English,
so gardening, I’ve long assumed, is in my blood, along with gin and fryer grease and a fondness for long, tedious war movies. I recently got a chance to test my theory when we moved to our new house and for the first time in my life I had a yard.

For the first few weeks, I ignored it. Denial is apparently the first stage of gardening. When I finally checked back in on the situation, our lawn had disappeared, the victim of a hostile clover takeover. Ed couldn’t see the problem. He pointed out that the clover was coming in thicker and greener than the grass had been. “Let’s just mow it and say it’s a lawn.”

So Ed mowed the clover and the 10 or 20 sad, frightened stalks of lawn grass that the clover were apparently keeping alive as slaves. Presently, he came into the kitchen holding two plastic-and-metal discs at arm’s length. “We’ve got land mines, honey!” Ed had mowed the automatic sprinkler heads.

A yard is not the benign, pretty, passive world it appears to be. It is a war zone. The neighbor’s ivy is constantly scaling our fence and attacking on the western front. From the north, dandelions launch airborne spore assaults. Every evening Ed and I meet in the general’s tent and plot strategy. Usually I get to be Peter O’Toole, but sometimes Ed makes me be Omar Sharif. “Sir, there’s nothing to be done,” Ed will say. “They’re tunneling under the fence now, coming up from below.”

“Bastards.” I’ll narrow my eyes and set my jaw. “Wire headquarters for more Roundup.”

About six weeks into the gardening experience, I noticed that some of our plants were turning brown. “Is this a seasonal thing?” I asked Ed. I had heard of leaves changing color at a certain time of year.

“I think,” said Ed gently, “that it’s more likely a watering thing.”

Watering your plants, I have learned, is not as simple as watering your dog or your car radiator. Not only can you water too little, you can also water too much. To water just right, you must figure out what type of soil you have (brown is not an acceptable answer) and how much shade each area has and how sunny and humid it’s been.

But before any of that, you must figure out what type of plants you have. Ed and I have no idea what’s growing in our yard, though we give them names anyway. “There’s white fuzz growing on the grotticulpis leaves!” I’ll shriek.

“And the pifflewort bush has dibblies!” Ed will yell back.

One day I noticed that the trees in our yard had begun dropping dead leaves onto the lawn. “Are we overwatering?” I asked Ed.

“I think,” he said gently, “That it’s a seasonal thing.”

For three solid weeks, it rained leaves. We raked until we had blisters, and dibblies, and blisters on our dibblies. I was fast approaching the third stage of gardening: the calling-in of the professional.

Here’s what pushed me over my limit. It was a Saturday afternoon. I was down in the basement failing to understand the sprinkler control console, when I came across a small cabinet crammed with bags and boxes. Organic Bulb Fertilizer, said one label. Azalea and Rhododendron Food, said the next. I looked over at Ed. “What—they
eat
too?” Where would it stop? Would we have to clothe them and drive them to track practice?

So I gave up. As Omar Sharif said in
Lawrence of Arabia,
“Let the English have their gardens. We will make do with barren ground and brittle, unsightly ground cover.” Perhaps he didn’t say exactly that. But he was thinking it. And I am too.

On the Road Again

A family is a collection of people
who share the same genes but cannot agree on a place to pull over for lunch. Ed and I, plus his parents and sister Doris and eight-year-old niece Alisha, are on a road trip to Yosemite. Poppy wants Subway, Ed wants In-N-Out Burger, Mary wants Sonic. In the end, we compromise on McDonalds, where Alisha will get an “Incredibles” action figure that will come in handy later for breaking the heater vent.

We’ve rented a minivan that seats eight, yet somehow, there are not enough cupholders. How can this be? This is America: To every passenger, a cupholder, and to every cupholder, a watered-down soda big enough to baptize a harbor seal.

“Alisha!” says Doris. “Take Mr. Incredible out of Poppy’s cupholder.”

It’s a three-hour drive to Yosemite, but we’re taking a little longer, as we’re working in a tour of Highway 80’s public restrooms. As the saying goes, Not one bladder empties, but another fills. I am reminded of that track and field event wherein one person runs for a while, and then hands off the restroom key to the next person, who runs until she’s done, and then another person runs.

Unhappily, many of these restrooms belong to gas stations. Gas-station customers, perhaps inspired by the nozzles on the pumps outside, are prone to dribble and slosh. Though I almost prefer this to the high-tech humiliation of air travel, where the restrooms have faucets programmed to respond to precisely executed hand signals no one has taught you, and the toilets flush mere seconds after you sit down. It’s like having your plate cleared before you’ve even salted your potatoes.

We get back on the road. Poppy’s driving now. We’ve entered the road-trip doldrums, the point when all the cheesy tabloids have been read and the travel Etch A Sketch has grown boring, and anyone under age 12 is required to say “Are we there yet?” at ever-shortening intervals. Ed and his sister, two middle-aged adults, are playing with the highway bingo set. Alisha is making Mr. Incredible fight with Poppy’s earlobes.

Doris covers the bingo square that says motel. “BINGO!”

“No way,” says Ed. “A motel is only one story high and has a swimming pool full of algae. That was a hotel.”

“Same diff,” says Doris.

“MA! Doris is cheating!”

Alisha kicks the back of Poppy’s seat. “Are we there yet?” If by “there” she means the end of our rope, then, yes, we’re pulling in right now.

Just outside Manteca, we stop for coffee. Coffee is an important feature of the relay-restroom training regimen. Without it, the chain could be broken, the gold medal lost. At a Starbucks checkout, Ed buys a CD of Joni Mitchell’s favorite musical picks. The hope is it will have a calming effect.

The first cut is by Duke Ellington. Alisha makes a face. “Is Uncle Ed trying to annoy us?”

“It’s not my favorite Ellington number,” agrees Nana. The CD returns to its case, pending the day Joni Mitchell joins us on our annual vacation.

Pulling back onto the highway, it starts to pour, which at least quells the debate over whether to have the windows open. Depending on whom you ask, the temperature inside the minivan is either “freezing” or “so hot I’m going to suffocate.”

Then something amazing happens. As we climb the Sierras, the rain turns to snow. The pines are flocked with white. We’re struck dumb by the scene outside. For a solid 15 minutes, everyone forgets about their bladder, their blood sugar, the temperature in the van. Alisha has never seen snow, so we pull over to make snow angels and catch falling flakes on our tongues. Then Ed realizes we need tire chains, and we have to turn back and drive 30 miles to Oakhurst.

“Good,” says Poppy. “There was a very nice restroom there.”

It’s Your Fault

We recently moved to a house
that lies a quarter-mile from an earthquake fault. For some reason, we did not give this a lot of thought when we bought the place. At the time, the distance from Quick & Juicy Burger or a decent espresso place seemed of greater import. The fault is named Hayward, which may have contributed to our nonchalance, for it makes it sound kindly and avuncular. Prone to tweedy outerwear. Not the sort of name that sends one running for the gas valve.