The Madwoman and the Roomba

by Sandra Tsing Loh

  We can’t guarantee you’ll land in Cleveland.

  We can’t guarantee you a seat that hasn’t been peed on.

  We can’t guarantee you won’t be handed a crying baby.

  4.“Bargain” car rental agencies from which one might catch an infection.

  “Kayak”-ing the white water rapids of cheap car rentals, on that same trip, I’d found a company called ACE, offering a tiny car that looked like a Yugo. Upon arrival, I find out why. Our instructions? Walk past the Ground Transportation counter, get into “lane four,” then turn left and walk half a mile, past all the Avis, Budget, and Enterprise signs and wait, literally, and I quote, “under the sign that is blank.”

  “I know that we’re not Platinum members of anything,” I grouse to my daughters, “but standing under a blank sign? Can ACE at least not tape their logo up there? It’s so humiliating!”

  “Maybe they didn’t have enough money to commission a logo,” says Hannah.

  5.“Breakfast” does not count as a “life hack.”

  Two years ago, Charlie and I stayed at a Residence Inn. Meaning it’s both a residence and an inn. Plus, a Marriott. It is, in short, a kind of “Staybridge.” I literally have no idea what I just said.

  But no. Stepping into the RI at the M is like entering a futuristic, Euro-styled planet. Here are white modular fireplaces blazing in midsummer. Art Deco lamps that have BELIEVE printed on them in twelve languages. Pulsing in the background is a catchy music video: Take Residence at Residence Inn, set to Zeroleen’s rappy “All Good” as hip, racially diverse Silicon Valley twentysomethings gambol through the facilities. They arise, don Untuckit shirts, breakfast on granola and kiwi, Skype on their MACs, clink imported beers, shoot hoops— Yes, there’s basketball on site.

  But the lie is revealed the next morning at breakfast. There are no hipsters there. Just Middle American vacationers who don’t understand breakfast. Instead of little boxes of Special K, there are clear plexiglass towers of cereal. It’s not immediately obvious how to get the cereal out. Using our knowledge of pet feeders, we eventually intuit that you place your bowl underneath, open a drawer, and cereal rushes out. There are copious cereal piles where other guests have discovered that the hard way.

  We now venture near the glowing red bagel-toasting machine. A frantic hand-lettered sign responds to what was clearly a previous traumatic incident: PLEASE DO NOT PUT YOUR HAND INSIDE THE TOASTER. VERY HOT! On to the waffle-making station. It seems to require pouring batter into a tiny cup, emptying the cup onto a hot waffle iron, and flipping it in thirty seconds—? Sure! Batter is dripping everywhere—we and other bumbling guests do our best to sop it up with napkins—the station now resembles a waffle slaughterhouse. It’s clear: none of us is going to be giving a TED Talk any time soon. To my right, a teen girl unapologetically stirs honey into hot chocolate. Her T-shirt says RUNNING ON DR PEPPER AND DRY SHAMPOO. Her dad, in sun visor, sports a T-shirt that reads THIS IS HOW IT’S DONE.

  6.A “Carnival Cruise” is neither “carnival” nor “cruise.”

  But here is the nadir of everything Charlie and I have ever done. One time, maddened by the searing heat of summer, Charlie and I lost our minds via some sort of strange Groupon deal and decided to go on a Carnival Cruise. It was so cheap, it was almost cheaper than staying at home. But the emotional cost! Talk about Third World.

  To get to the ship, you enter a large astrodome thing in Long Beach. It is fluorescent-lit, a vast interplanetary Greyhound Bus Station. Once in line, it’s like a “DMV on the Sea.” There are men in cargo shorts, flip-flops, baseball hats, sunglasses rotated around to the back of the head. There are kids standing in floaties on dry land. In these families, literally three out of five people have tattoos. There are big Asian men with tattoos across the backs of their meaty calves. Skinny white girls whose fresh tattoos suppurate across their backs and shoulders.

  Upon entering the bowels of the ship, now comes a light latrine smell. More horrible is, you seem to be in the bowels of a windowless casino several neon floors high. The décor is garish in a way Las Vegas doesn’t even seem to be any more. Even Las Vegas is seeing natural fibers and a new fusion cuisine by Wolfgang Puck. This was hot pink and turquoise and a color I might like to call “insane magenta.” There were these fake metallic kind of Roman godheads everywhere and fake gold Egyptian sphinxes.

  Swallowing revulsion, we are directed to our stateroom on God knows what level (Lido level, Promenade level, Disney Prince in Rocky Horror fishnet stockings level), which is like four faux-gold-crusted miles away down a windowless mole tunnel. Our smallish “stateroom” has a smeary metal porthole and undecorated gray walls. Upon entry I feel claustrophobic. I’m not going to make it. I’m literally going to have to sleep up on deck somewhere. I am fighting panic and rising nausea.

  We go to the “Lido Café” for “lunch.” As we walk in—neon disco lights flashing above us—we understand what was meant by Charlie’s mom Tweedie, a veteran of many cruises (think Holland and Norwegian lines), when she exclaimed, “You’re going on a Carnival Cruise? You’ll never cruise again!”

  Charlie had laughed at that, and packed several “jackets” for “dinner.” Now he’s eerily quiet.

  There are heat lamps over tureens of gluey brownish slop, optimistically known as “chicken piccata.” The bright spot is we can take our plates outside. True, there are nets over the side of the ship to literally keep us from being attacked by seagulls, but we do have the place to ourselves. Almost all of the large tattooed people prefer to eat inside, perhaps working on their “fry tans.”

  I had pictured sinking into a warm pool overlooking the Pacific and being handed a blended drink. After “lunch,” we ascend to the supposedly sunbathing-friendly “Promenade” deck. There are more heat-lamp stations of greasy food, deafening music—you know that calypso tune that goes “Hot, hot, hot”?—and, just beyond a sea of deck chairs, a small pool bisected into even smaller pools, almost kiddie pools. It is—get this—completely drained, covered by a net, and posted with signs that say POOL CLOSED.

  Gum-chewing cruise personnel direct us instead to the Serenity deck, an adults-only corner at the back of the boat with two medical-sized Jacuzzis. The Jacuzzis are filled with beer-swilling seventeen-year-olds and their patriarch, pro-NRA Dad. Pro-NRA Dad soliloquies loudly about his guns and hunting and how Candy, his wife, cried when she put the deer down “with all the blood.” Everyone clinks beers in hysterics, including, apparently, Candy. It is a warm family story.

  On the next level is a boutique selling hellacious trinkets and duty-free CÎROC orange vodka. There’s a hellacious “art auction” with some truly terrifying paintings—you know, sharks in pink lipstick playing poker.

  In case you were wondering, yes, the biggest discussion Charlie and I had before boarding the ship was about alcohol consumption. Carnival was touting the forty-five-dollars-a-day “Cheers!” beverage plan, where your drinks were free, up to fifteen cocktails a day.

  Cawed a young woman in heart-shaped Barbie sunglasses next to me, the second day at 1 p.m., “Oh my God! The drink limit is fifteen and he said I have just four to go!” Plastic cups clicked in celebration.

  I will not end up going into a pool once in four days. Even when they put water back into the pools, there’s no room. The twin Jacuzzis around the tiny bisected pool are in constant churn. The signs say MAX OCCUPANCY 13, even though each can barely seat eight. That said, at several points, in amazement, I count eighteen humans per spa.

  Granted, several are children on laps, whose heads will disappear underwater for minutes at a time. Like whack-a-moles. Life is cheap!

  Because there is no lifeguard on duty. The pool sign says DEPTH 4 FEET: ABSOLUTELY NO DIVING. And yet, there is so much diving. Particularly by the fortysomething dads, man-breasts jiggling. Later there will be a “hairy chest contest,” with men running about in drag and doing suggestive booby dances for lady volunteers.

  So of course the only way to get th
rough these four days is TO DRINK HEAVILY. Our third day begins with a Bloody Mary, for breakfast, at nine, lunch, white wine, a martini to unwind after, drop an edible around two . . . and that’s when I finally lose it. I feel reality swimming before me, like I am in an IMAX movie theater, seated in the dark, and the 3-D “reality” of Carnival Cruise is floating before me.

  That night, we will end up singing karaoke. We will join the waitstaff in celebrating a birthday by singing and dancing, “Ce-lebration time, come ON!”

  Though weirdly, as Charlie pointed out later, “We did not fight.”

  July 4th-ish

  BUT CAN SUMMER get worse? It can.

  Time has passed. The wounds have healed. I can finally talk about my fourth of July.

  On the one hand, as a divorced mother? I’m frankly delighted not to have to spend the fourth of July with my family, your family, or anyone’s family.

  This is the time of year my ex-husband Ben takes the girls to Minnesota for lake fishing at his family’s cabin. I celebrate them all: Ben’s perfectly nice family, all the friendly Midwestern fisher folk raising icy Pabst Blue Ribbons, and the plentiful and delicious walleye. That said, I’m just as happy to make space for others to share the sandy bunks, the swarmy bugs, and the ankle bites—so-o-o many bites.

  That said, the divorced mother’s question remains: On the fourth of July, what the hell should I do?

  I’m discussing this with my friend Trayce, another divorced mom.

  “This is the time of year when, oh, the ranks close,” she agrees. “Our married parent friends all disappear into their families, driving to see the grandparents in San Diego, or similar.”

  “Our childless gay male friends should be a help, but they also go silent to our frantic texts as they disappear into fabulous parties in the hills, having been at this family-free fourth thing longer than we have.”

  “Exactly. They’re keeping us divorced moms—the weeds—out of their carefully husbanded ecosystems.”

  Not to face the lone hibachi with a single skinless chicken breast and a tumbleweed, we made a pact that if either of us get wind of any barbecue—good, bad, or ugly—we will invite the other person.

  Last week of June goes by. Nothing.

  July 1st, July 2nd . . .

  On July 3rd, at 8 p.m., glass of wine in hand, I type an e-mail:

  Dear Very Close Small Circle of Friends* to Whom We Are Not Ashamed to Admit We Have Absolutely No 4th of July Plans,

  If you either can’t decide amongst your BULGING CORNUCOPIA of 4th invites or if you too came up bupkis, join us at 5 for cocktails. And eventually some BBQ. If you have any other 4th of July orphans they are welcome; if you are horrified that we have extended such a last-minute invite, please delete this e-mail and forget you ever saw it.

  *A lie. I have opened the e-mail circle wide to guess at ANY SINGLETONS WHO MIGHT BE ALONE on the fourth of July. It is a Rogues’ Gallery of C and D guests.

  WITHIN A MINUTE OF hitting “send,” I get an e-mail back from my friend Paula. I’m thrilled! Paula is a wonderful person I haven’t seen in ages because she has been single-mothering her daughter—who is now eighteen and off to college! Reunion time!

  But no.

  “Oh my gosh,” she writes back. “I was just about to invite you to a last-minute thing I’ve suddenly decided to host, a picnic and wine and hike to see the fireworks over Santa Monica!”

  “Dang!” I write back. “That sounds much more fun than what we’re doing—huddling in a landlocked backyard full of dead leaves and tumbleweeds. But you didn’t invite me on time, did you?”

  “I didn’t have your old Compuserve e-mail. Who’s still on Compuserve? Trouble is, I don’t have quite enough people. I have a painfully shy JPL engineer with a nerdy math teacher from my daughter’s old school plus my cousin Barbara who literally IS a nun plus this droopy guy I met on match dot com—no sparks but I always feel sorry for him over the holidays. I’m going to hide in the kitchen and drink myself into a Bolivian.” She literally types “a Bolivian.”

  “Sounds better than my guest list,” I write. “It looks like my married couple friends Will and Annalise just now RSVP’ed with their angry twenty-year-old son, who still lives at home. Oh, and look at this—my perennially depressed fifty-two-year-old bachelor friend Frank is coming. He is absolutely euphoric to be invited and is bringing FIGS, FIGS, FIGS—all in CAPS! This is going to be the barbecue from hell!”

  JULY 4TH 8 A.M.

  Charlie has cut short his usual morning forty-five-minute-minimum reading session of the New York Times. This literally never happens. But momentous events are in play today. Charlie is launching a gigantic BBQ project.

  It’s Cochinita Pibil, cooked in actual banana leaves. The complicated New York Times recipe he has printed out appears to be five single-spaced pages long, with multiple breakout sections. It looks as complex as a Bach oratorio. It’s supposed to take four hours, but last time he tried, it took eight, so he’s trying to aim for nine.

  Trayce arrives at three to help set up. She’s looking festive in a yellow sundress and strappy red sandals. She puts bags down on the kitchen counters.

  “Where’s Charlie?”

  I point out the kitchen window. We see the bottom half of a pale humanoid—pink Bermuda shorts and lime tennis shoes—struggling under a cloud of white smoke.

  “We won’t see him for a while,” I say. “He’s having a little trouble with the coals.”

  “Low-carb mojitos.” Trayce licks lime off her finger, hands me a glass. We clink, sip. They’re fabulous!

  Our moods immediately go to festive.

  “Until my divorce,” Trayce says, “I never realized how much I’ve always absolutely hated the fourth of July. The awful family ‘event’ of it!”

  “ ‘Independence’ Day?” I agree. “It’s actually the exact opposite!”

  “Exactly!” she says. “Fourth of July is huge crowds, parking miles away from a crowded beach, a poop accident, an ice cream scoop tumbling to the ground, wet children in shivering wet swimsuits that you’ll end up carrying, one-by-one, like potato sacks across searing asphalt (flip-flops left on the wrong side of the parking lot or washed away in a rising tide), the shrieking and tears when the fireworks are, like gunshots, too loud.”

  “Oh oh oh,” I say. “The other day, I was in Target and it struck me how many summer toddler items—swimsuits, sandals, water wings—are incredibly brightly colored. Like poisonous frogs in nature. Bright colors hypnotize sleep-deprived mothers into thinking that summers with children are actually fun.”

  “It’s so the opposite!” Trayce exclaims. “It’s packing them into the car with all of their endless beach shit—the bathing suits, towels, sunglasses, sunscreen, juice boxes, and . . . ominous drum roll . . . swim diapers.”

  “Oh my God. The swim diapers!”

  “If you can’t control your bowels?” Trayce waves her mojito. “Guess what? Forget the freedom of ‘Independence’ Day. You don’t get to swim.”

  “What’s next? A little American flag on a . . . baby snorkel catheter?”

  But then again, the way the evening unfolded, it almost made us nostalgic for the horrors of actual children, as opposed to adult-shaped children.

  Which is to say, at promptly 5:45, the Island of Misfit Toys starts arriving.

  The Gentlemen Callers trickle in. Jerry pairs a red kilt with a Bob Marley T-shirt. Tex brings a mysterious Serbian girlfriend named Svetlana, all in black. Bradford is in a white eye patch. Never explained.

  Carol, a poetess and physical therapist, has brought her small Pekingese in a plaid carrying case. There is much disturbing licking of each other’s faces. Carol has been dating, and things are not going well.

  “I was messaging with this guy on Match.com,” she says, “but he was always suggesting a quick coffee near his home at odd times of the day, never evenings. It eventually comes out that he still lives with his ex because he can’t afford to move. He said it’s cal
led a ‘stayparation.’ A stayparation—is that a thing?”

  Charlie seems to have calmed his coals but still looks worried. Julia and Andie arrive.

  Frank arrives, his dress shirt soaked in sweat, with FIGS, FIGS, FIGS! Assessing the food, I see that someone should have hostessed this party.

  The potluck items include meat, meat, meat, chips, a lopsided strawberry pie, a very sweaty salad with way too many ingredients, and FIGS, FIGS, FIGS!

  “When will dinner be ready?” Carol asks worriedly. “Mr. Pimpernel”—her dog, apparently—“is hungry.”

  “Charlie?” I yell out, toward the backyard, engulfed in white swirling smoke (does that mean the cardinals have picked a pope?). “What time do you think the food will be ready?”

  “Hard to say,” he replies. “I’m still having some . . . trouble with my coals!”

  Because it’s so hot, people are drinking without hydrating. . . . They’re getting increasingly agitated. The sky darkens to a murky brown dusk.

  And now here it comes. Ranting, both energetic and futile, about politics. The place where all party conversations go to die.

  “Have you heard?” Carol says, feeding little Mr. Pimpernel meat off the table. She nods sagely. “He’s building ovens.”

  “What?”

  “Do you read J. C. Yewell—you know, the writer?” None of us do. “It’s what he said in this amazing op-ed here on Facebook.” Carol proffers her phone. “There’s a list, for the ovens, and the Jews are going first.”

  “I think if I were Muslim I would be more scared,” counters Andie. “Or Mexican, for that matter.”

  “Maybe we should just get off Facebook for five minutes and stop hyperventilating,” Trayce says.

  To which Carol ominously murmurs: “That’s what they said in Germany.”

  “What did they say?” Julia asks.

  “ ‘Blah, blah, blah. Take a rest! Get off Facebook! Stop hyperventilating!’ ”

  “Carol, I’m concerned as you,” Trayce says, “but I’m pretty sure they didn’t have Facebook. So that can’t be exactly what they said in Germany.”