My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

by Mary Roach

  Interestingly, Ed considered this a positive comment. Ed enjoys the scent story of the car wash bathrooms. I can’t say for sure, but I feel it is unlikely Ed will one day be employed by a leading fragrance-design firm.

  Ed wanted to know what would happen if we put a regular CD into the disc player. He used the example of “Graceland.” Would the room smell like Paul Simon? Elvis’s bedroom? The instruction-pamphlet writers at Scentstories are prepared for people like Ed. Under the WARNINGS section, it actually says: “Only use Scentstories discs in Scentstories player.”

  The pamphlet writers take a dim view of the American intellect. Users are advised: “Do not drop player. Do not use player upside down.” It was as though the device was being marketed to chimps. But only free-range chimps, for the next paragraph said: “Do not use in small confined pet areas without adequate ventilation.”

  Later in the week, I opened up the box and was met by an alarming and overwhelming smell. I had stored all five scent discs together in the box, with the result that many of the Scentstories had wafted out and blended together. So now the room smelled like Gazing at the Tall Firs Exploring the Mountains Vanilla Nut Cake Comforted with Lavender Vanilla Taffy Relaxing in a Hammock Walking Beside Wildflowers. Ed stopped in on his way to feed the chimps. He sniffed. “Bubblegum paint. I like it.”

  I Gotta Be . . . You

  I never used to worry about identity theft. If you were a thief seeking to get rich and live the high life, becoming Mary Roach was not the way to go about it. You’d have the money to paint the town red, yet you’d be compelled to drive across town to the store that sells paint 50 cents a gallon cheaper. You’d be a thief with an identity crisis.

  But lately, owing to a spate of ads and news stories about identity theft, I worry. I recently threw away some ten years of old bank statements and tax forms. In the old days, I’d just toss them. Now, because I noticed that my Social Security number is at the top of every page of my tax forms and many of my old check stubs, I get out a Magic Marker and black them all out.

  After about a minute of this, I get bored. The last time, as a distraction, I decided to call up the IRS and let them know they were putting Americans at risk of identity theft. A man named Jim answered. I suggested to him that they use people’s birth dates as an identifier at the top of the forms instead of Social Security numbers.

  Jim replied that there are 270 million Americans, and that many of them have the same name and birth date.

  “Well, something ought to be done about that too,” I said indignantly. “Think about how easy it would be for Peter Smith, 5/13/66, to steal the identity of another Peter Smith, 5/13/66.”

  Jim was quiet. Maybe he was thinking about it. More likely, he was jotting my name down on IRS Form 498872: Request for Audit of Irksome Journalist. I thanked Jim and went back to my stack of forms and my Magic Marker. To make the time pass more quickly, I pretended I was a World War I counterespionage specialist, censoring troops’ letters home lest Allied information fall into enemy hands. Shortly after taps, my husband, Ed, arrived home.

  “Good evening, Colonel,” I said. It’s possible the marker fumes were affecting me. “Something of a backlog here. Looks like I’ll be at it till reveille.”

  Ed blinked. “You’re getting black marks on the rug.”

  Ed doesn’t worry about identity theft. He has his own security protocol, which is to cut expired credit cards in two, throw one half away, and put the other half underneath a yellow bowl in the kitchen. “The next time I use the bowl,” he explained, “I throw away the other half.” I had come across these snippets of plastic and been perplexed. It was as though our house was infested with strange banking squirrels, stockpiling credit for the winter ahead. Financial statements and tax forms aren’t a problem for Ed, as he has yet to throw one away.

  I decided I needed a paper shredder. I drove over to our local office-supply store, which sold several models. “Did you want the cross cut or the strip cut?” said the salesman, whose identity had obviously been stolen by a butcher. He said he was a fan of the cross-cut model that “turns eight sheets at a time into confetti.” Perfect for the Allied victory parade, I thought to myself, adjusting the cuffs on my imaginary uniform.

  I was ready to hand him my credit card. Then I stopped. “How do I know you’re who you say you are? I can’t give you my credit card number. That’s top secret information.”

  “Okay,” he said, and turned to the next customer.

  I put the paper shredder back on the shelf. In the end, I gave my old tax forms to a friend’s fourth-grader, to line the bottom of her hamster cage. If you see a rodent with my name on its checks, let me know.

  Furniture Fight

  When you move, your head fills with idiotic dreams. You get rid of perfectly good furniture, thinking that when you arrive in your new home you will magically acquire the good taste and cash needed to redecorate. Har.

  Last week my husband and I, tired of standing up in front of the TV, found ourselves in a hip, modern furniture store called Design Within Reach. This is a place that sells $3,000 sofas rather than the $10,000 sofas that professional interior designers will reach for. I fell for a three-seater in maroon leather. I motioned to Ed, who was submerged in a chair that resembled the bottom half of a terrifying orange bivalve.

  “It’s only $3,000,” I called. Ed stretched his arm out in the direction of the $3,000 sofa. “I can’t reach.” As we left, the woman handed me a swatch of the leather, as though perhaps it were possible to grow a sofa from a small cutting.

  Ed and I realized that before we could argue about whether we could afford the sofa, we needed to spend some time arguing about how big it should be and where it was going to go. Ed wanted to line the sofa up alongside an armchair against one wall. This is a distinctly male school of thought as regards living room decor: All large seating items are to be placed against a wall, facing the television. This way, if the lights go out while you are returning from the refrigerator, you need only place one hand upon a wall and begin walking. Eventually you’ll hit a place to sit down and nap until the power is back on and the TV is working again.

  I pointed out that if three or four people wanted to have a conversation in these seats, they would need to constantly lean forward or back to see around one another’s heads. I explained the concept of the “conversation pit,” wherein you arrange the sofa and chairs at right angles, so that you can easily see each other while talking. Ed said some disparaging things about women and their endless need to talk, and I replied with an unflattering statement about men and TV-watching. We were in a different kind of conversation pit, the kind the Romans would toss poorly muscled, verbally inclined gladiators into and then watch to see who remained standing.

  A few days later, a friend gave us some home décor magazines. These consist of hundreds of pictures of imaginative, tastefully decorated interiors. The pictures are meant to give you ideas for your own home, but mostly they make you feel really, really bad about it. Also, though it isn’t written down anywhere, the magazines imply that you will need to clear out all personal belongings except bowls of lemons and vases of artfully arranged twigs. Who are these strange, monklike lemon-eaters? Where are their piles of bills, their overdue videos, their newspapers from last March?

  One article suggested cutting out pieces of paper in the dimensions of the furniture we were considering. We could then move these around the floor in different configurations. Ed cut out a sofa, two armchairs, a coffee table. Then he set to work on two more large, square paper cutouts. “Ottomans,” explained Ed. “I mean ottomen.”

  This is a long-standing disagreement between us. I’m a leg-curler-under. Ed is a leg-stretcher-outer. Ed would put an ottoman in front of the toilet if he could. His idea of a winning business venture is to open a store that sells only ottomans and call it The Ottoman Empire.

  Two weeks
passed. Still we had no furniture. Ed sat down on the paper sofa and patted the space beside him. We lit a fire in the fireplace. In the spirit of compromise, Ed crumpled up a paper ottoman and threw it on the flames. I moved a paper armchair over against the wall. Tomorrow we’d buy some twigs. It was beginning to feel like home.

  Can You Hear Me Now?

  There is a special form of hearing loss that afflicts couples. They don’t have to be old, or even middle-aged—just married for a while. Ed’s condition is most noticeable when he’s reading the newspaper over breakfast. I’ll say, for instance, “Oh, look at the cedar waxwings in the birch tree!”

  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 st
alks 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.