by Mary Roach
“But I do need it.”
“Yes, but you don’t have it.”
We went on like this for a while. Finally, he offered to walk me through the use of a different CD, one that would erase my entire system. “Of course, you’d lose all your e-mail, your documents, your photos.” It was like offering to drop a safe on my head to cure my headache. “You might be able to recover them, but it would be expensive.” He sounded delighted. “And it’s not covered by the warranty!” The safe began to seem like a good idea, provided it was full.
I hung up the phone and drove my computer to a small, friendly repair place I’d heard about. A smart, helpful man dug out a Windows CD and told me it wouldn’t be a problem. An hour later, he called to let me know it was ready. I thanked him, and we chatted about the weather, which was the same outside my window as it was outside his.
Dinner Party Debt
Our friend Dave loves to cook. Dave will call us up and say, “Hey, come on over. I got a leg of lamb,” as though it had just sort of landed in his lap like a fly ball. Dave talks very fast, which he needs to do to answer the question “What’re you making?” in a reasonable amount of time. The last time we went to Dave’s—for a 50th birthday dinner for our friend Sandy—the answer was, and I’m not even slightly kidding here, “Gonna start with oysters with lemongrass and a blood orange granité, then a fish plate with halibut and preserved lemon, a little cauliflower soup, pasta with anchovy sauce. Meat course, I’m thinking bavette steak with white beans and fennel. Ed eats beef, right? If not, I’ll whip him up some Thai snapper.”
We happen to have a Thai cookbook, which we use constantly (for propping up the Tex-Mex cookbook), and it has a recipe for snapper. So I happen to know this isn’t something you “whip up.” It is something that whips you. The shopping alone would require a month’s sabbatical. The recipe called for, among 278 other ingredients, “1 tablespoon coarsely chopped kha.” As I know from our Scrabble dictionary, ka is what the ancient Egyptians called the soul. Who sells this? What sort of knife does one use to chop life energy?
Generosity like Dave’s is difficult to reciprocate. I once tried to cook for Dave and Kate. It was humiliating. I made angel hair pasta with toasted walnuts and some variety of cheese that had not showered in a while. When I tried to mix everything together, the angel hair pasta simply moved around the bowl in a solid lumpen knot. “You forgot the conditioner,” said Ed, who has since quietly absorbed the cooking duties on the rare evenings when we’re not eating at Dave’s.
I have tried to convince myself it’s okay that Ed and I have not properly reciprocated by preparing 22 six-course dinners for Dave and Kate. “He understands that we’re not up to it,” I said to Ed. “Besides, he’s not keeping score.”
“Everyone keeps score,” said Ed. “How many times have we had Lou over without his inviting us?” Lou is one of a small group of bachelors whom we sometimes invite over for a meal at the last minute. It is never intimidating to cook for these men, as your culinary talents need only surpass those of Mr. Top and his ramen.
But Ed was right. I knew exactly how many times Lou had been over.
Last week I e-mailed Dave to tell him I’m writing a column about dinner party debt. Dave was leaving on a business trip that afternoon. “Have a good trip,” I wrote. “When you get back, you’ll be eating at our house for the next year and a half.” I had anticipated some reassuring reply, something along the lines of: “Oh, Mary, I cook for you guys because I love to cook, and I love you. In fact, what are you doing next Saturday? I got a school of tuna.”
However, Dave wrote: “Gotta run. Look forward to collecting.”
It’s true. Everyone keeps track. We owe Dave, we owe Steph and Jerry, we owe Bill and Adair big time. We actually sat down and made a list. It was shocking. “What should we do?” said Ed. Can we offer them the cash equivalency? How can we ever erase such an enormous pile of debt? Is it possible to declare dinner party bankruptcy? There should be a system in place that allows us to collect credits for feeding Lou, credits that we can then apply to Dave and Bill and Steph.
If I could, I would sell Dave my soul to repay his kindness and generosity. And I know for sure that he’s got the right knife to chop it up.
Garbage Gone Wild
One day last year, our progressive California city distributed small green plastic compost bins designed to collect kitchen scraps and create marital disharmony. While I was eager to contribute to the municipal composting effort, my husband, being the hygienic sort, was less so. He ignored the little green bin, which was not, after a while, easy to do. Owing to my failure to empty the little bin into its bigger counterpart each Monday when the trashmen came, what was going on inside was not composting, but garden-variety rotting and stinking.
Ed banished the bin to the deck. Now that I couldn’t smell it, I would forget about it for weeks on end. The city was not so much composting as creating subsidized housing for molds and flies and their little squirming children.
One day I saw Ed coming up the driveway holding, at arm’s length, what we had come to call the maggot zoo. He was approaching the trio of wheeled garbage, recycling and compost-toter bins lined up alongside our house. “Which bin do you use for bins?” he said.
So we went back to our old ways: Ed using the in-sink Disposall, and me, having heard this was bad for our waterways, scraping the plates into the kitchen trash. Then we came upon a product called the Touchless Trashcan. Its lid had an “infrared sensor eye” that enabled it to sense your approaching hand and automatically open for you. “It is convenient to use, and it is very hygienic,” said the packaging. We succumbed.
The Touchless Trashcan came in three pieces and included a four-page user manual. One piece, the enigmatic Smart Retainer Ring, required eight steps to install and took up an entire page of the manual. The page was captioned “How Does Smart Retainer Ring Work?” The first thing to hit the bottom of our new can was the user manual. “I refuse,” said Ed, “to read a garbage can instruction manual.”
The Retainer Ring, we finally figured out, had nothing to do with the automatic lid opener. Its purpose was to prevent the top of the bag from sticking out in an unsightly manner. And also to turn the task of changing the garbage bag into a ten-minute ordeal involving, quoting Ed, “an engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic.”
Ed stuck a bag into the can, folded its top over the edge in the usual way and dangled the Smart Retainer Ring over the can. “Oops. I inadvertently threw the Smart Retainer Ring away.”
We lowered the automated top onto the bin and switched on the infrared sensor eye. For three or four minutes, throwing things away was a delightful novelty.
Like many infatuations, that of a touchless trash can and its owners soon sours. For us, it happened that night after dinner. The sensor eye couldn’t see very far, and so the lid tended to pop open at the last second, knocking garbage out of your hand and to the floor. I understood why this was happening, but it came across as impertinence. Also, since the eye didn’t sense garbage per se but rather the heat of your hand, it ignored things like platters and dustpans. Ed came in one day to see me moving the dustpan over the lid in a series of slow, priestly motions, a ritual that became known as “the blessing of the refuse.”
Some weeks later, the touchless can took to intermittently popping open its lid when one of us passed by. Sometimes I’d catch Ed standing there, staring at it. “What does it want?” he’d say.
I had a different interpretation. “It’s trying to imply that you and I are garbage.”
Ed didn’t believe this. “Maybe it just wants to be touched.” Owing to the number of times it had slapped fish heads or yogurt lids out of my hand, its top and sides were spattered with food yuck, and neither of us was willing to test Ed’s theory and embrace Touchless Trashcan.
In the end, the automated touchless trash can was
replaced by the old-fashioned kind of touchless trash can—the kind that opens with a foot pedal. It requires no batteries, and if it has an opinion about its owners, it keeps it to itself.
Alarming Events
Last month, upon hearing that a neighbor had been burgled, my husband voiced a desire to beef up our home security. I was largely unresponsive. It’s hard for me to feel threatened by a verb that is one letter off from gurgle. The previous owners of our house installed a burglar alarm system, but we never got it switched on, because, quoting Ed, I apparently care more about the $29 monthly fee than I do about our family heirlooms. I gave in, even though I question the likelihood of strangers risking jail time for my father’s brass-plated Lions Club paperweight or Ed’s mom’s blondie recipe. (Though that is only because they haven’t tried his mom’s blondies.)
The alarm company sent over a sales representative, a well-coiffed professional in a suit and heels. She recommended adding some infrared motion sensors. I was not wild about this. I like to keep things simple. My idea of home security is to hire cheap, disreputable painters who can be counted upon to paint the windows shut.
“Besides, can’t the motion sensors be set off by a pet?” I said.
Ed leaned in close to the sales rep. “We don’t have any pets,” he whispered. The sales rep looked me over: the sweatpants, the Goofy slippers, the unbrushed hair. You could tell I was fitting right in with her mental image of People With Imaginary Pets.
“We don’t have a pet now,” I conceded. “But we might someday.” I knew this to be a lie. Ed is a dog person, and I’m a cat person. We cancel each other out. Though sometimes I let Ed take the slippers for a walk.
I pointed out that every now and then, the neighbors’ cat, Sprinkles, who likes to sleep on our deck, will sneak into the house when the back door is open. The alarm woman started talking about “pet resistance.” This was a feature of the motion sensor whereby it was set to cover the room from the waist up only. “Though of course . . .” She hesitated. “The cat would have to stay on the ground at all times.” She did not verbalize the logical follow-up: “So you’ll want to induce a coma before heading out for the evening.”
We got the sensors, and we got the system switched on. We never got a pet, each of us practicing his or her own particular brand of pet resistance, but we did, after many years of cost-based bickering, get a housecleaner. Here we compromised by having her come less often than normal people’s cleaners. Every other month, Natalia can be seen machete-ing her way through the filth and cobwebs. I gave her the alarm code but promised to leave the alarm off the day she came.
Naturally, I forgot. Later that morning, my work phone rang. It was Natalia, yelling in harmony with the shrieking of the alarm. She couldn’t find the code. On top of all this, my cell phone started ringing. This was the alarm company, responding to the alarm and calling me to get the secret password—which was different from the shutoff code—required for them to shut off the system and prevent the police from rushing over to arrest Natalia for breaking and entering. The machete was bound to complicate her defense.
Some weeks back, Ed and I had spent 15 minutes arguing over the secret password for the alarm. Ed is a fan of the complicated, hacker-proof, identity-theft-foiling password, the kind that involves alternating capital and lowercase letters with obscure foreign accent marks, interspersed with the square roots of street numbers from 35 years ago. Whereas I’ll use my name. I had no recollection of what we’d settled on. “Ummmm.” The alarm, and Natalia, continued to go off.
The alarm lady gave me a hint, as a game show host will do from time to time out of pity for a contestant who is bombing unbearably. “Begins with G.” “Groach? Goofy?” This went on for some time. Meanwhile, Natalia had dug through her bag, found the piece of paper I’d given her with the shutoff code and quieted the screaming alarm. I don’t know how effective these alarms are against burglars, but Sprinkles hasn’t been seen on the property in weeks.
RV There Yet?
An RV is a very, very big vehicle, except when you are inside it with your husband Ed, his daughters Lily and Phoebe, his sister Doris and her ten-year-old Alisha, and your in-laws. Then it is very, very small. RVs are interesting that way.
We are headed for the Grand Canyon, taking the route of a family road trip 40 years ago, when Ed and his sister were about Alisha’s age and 31-foot RVs were just a twinkle in a madman’s eye. The RV, which we rented in Las Vegas, was Doris’s idea. “It’s just like a regular car,” she assured us. “Only long.”
Ed is trying to maneuver out of the RV parking lot. This is not easy to do when the rear of your vehicle is in Las Vegas and the front is already pulling into the Grand Canyon Visitor Center. Ed’s mom puts a hand on his shoulder. “How you doing?”
“Great,” says Ed, without unclenching his jaw. “It’s really fun.”
An hour out, just past Hoover Dam, Ed finally begins to relax, and a tire blows. He pulls into a parking lot, and a bunch of us pile out to look at the damage. A piece of rubber the size of a playing card has been ripped from the tire. We call the RV company, who promise to send a tow truck to fix it. They call back to say that he won’t be there for at least an hour.
Alisha sticks her head out the window. “Hey, what does RV stand for?”
Ed looks at the sky. “Ruined Vacation.” Just then, a bighorn sheep runs across the parking lot, 20 feet away. “Wow!” says Alisha.
“And we wouldn’t have seen it if the tire hadn’t blown,” says Doris. She is determined to make the trip live up to her memories of the last one, which of course she can’t really remember.
The tow truck man arrives and changes the tire in less time than it takes Ed to change lanes. Ed shakes the man’s hand. “You wouldn’t want to come with us to the Grand Canyon, would you?”
Because of the flat, we’re two hours behind schedule and won’t make it to the RV park where we have a reservation. Doris starts calling random campgrounds in the guidebook. “Hey, they want to know how long our RV is,” she calls out.
“About 30 feet too long,” yells Ed from the driver’s seat.
Doris secures a reservation in an old mining town named Chloride. “The lady says just take the I-40 all the way there.”
“But we’re not on the I-40,” says Ed.
Around 9 p.m., we pull into Chloride, a name that suggests an obsession with hygiene uncorroborated by actual conditions. Phoebe looks out the window dubiously. “This reminds me of that movie where the family in an RV pulls into a little town and the mutants come out at night and eat them.”
“It’s adorable!” This, from Doris.
We pull into the town’s one RV park. The attendant comes over and asks us which side our electrical, water and sewer outlets are on. He calls these “hookups,” but we all hear it as “hiccups.” The RV park attendant fails to find great humor in this.
After a dinner of refrigerator-baked chicken, it’s time for bed. Ed pushes a button, activating a motor that causes one side of the floor to slide outward, doubling the vehicle’s width. It’s like something James Bond’s gadget guy might have come up with after he retired from the spy trade and took up RVing in his dotage.
Ed oversees the sleeping arrangements. Nana and Poppy get the bedroom in the back, which is where the toilet and shower are. This is separated from the main room by a stiff beige curtain that you pull closed behind you, as in a voting booth. The bedroom is minuscule. It would be easier, though possibly a federal offense, to get undressed in a voting booth.
The other two beds are in the kitchen. “For this one,” says Lily, “you just drop down the dining table and cut off your feet.”
Doris and Alisha take the sofa bed. It appears to be stuck in the shadowy limbo between sofa and bed. Doris appears unconcerned about her impending spinal deformity. “This is the life,” she says, speaking directly into her navel
.
It’s impressive how the RV designers managed to fit it all in, but heaven help you if you have to go to the bathroom—or “go vote,” as we now say—after all the beds have been pulled out. Ed offers me advice: “I recommend taking the overland route, bypassing the legs, and then heading west at the overflowing garbage bag. Good luck.”
We arrive at the Grand Canyon the next morning. It’s beautiful, but it seems empty and lonely and way too quiet. We’re all happy to hit the road and get back in each other’s faces. RVs are interesting that way.
Yours, Mine & Mine
Our friends Tina and Joe have installed his-and-her sinks. The last time we had dinner there, we all got up with our wine glasses and went in to admire the remodeled bathroom. We stood awhile, sipping our wine and chatting about this and that, as though having cocktails in the bathroom before sitting down to eat was the new thing. It made as much sense to me as individual bathroom sinks did.
“What’s up with that?” I said to Ed on the way home. How often does it happen that you are wanting to brush your teeth at precisely the same moment as your spouse, and in such a grave hurry, that you can’t wait 40 seconds? Me, I enjoy the goofy intimacy of brushing your teeth together, talking over the day’s events in an unintelligible foamy garble. That’s what marriage is all about. Isn’t it?
“It would be nice to have your own sink,” Ed said. “I can’t say why.”
I launched into one of my tiresome laments about modern life, about how couples don’t live like couples anymore, what with his-and-her washbasins and separate phone mailboxes and mattress adjustments and car temperature controls. Couples don’t share, because no one’s willing to compromise.
