My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

by Mary Roach

  Unfortunately, these days, most Open Homes have been cleared of the owner’s belongings and “staged” with generically tasteful Pottery Barn furniture and accessories. It’s as though there are whole neighborhoods populated by people who own nothing but brocade throw pillows and eat only colorful Italian dry goods, positioned with their labels facing forward. Often, the staging includes a breakfast tray of croissants and coffee lying on the bed, as though the homeowners had been abruptly chased out and left to wander the streets in their pajamas. Frequently, they’ve left so quickly that the fire is still burning. Ed will kneel down and inspect the fireplace. “We just missed them, Kemo Sabe,” he’ll say.

  Last week, I caught Ed eating the staging. On a table out on the deck, a plate of strawberries had been placed alongside a chilled bottle of wine and two glasses. Ed believed they were treats set out to win us over, like the chocolate-chip cookies Realtors will bake just prior to your visit in an attempt to mask evil odors seeping up from the in-law quarters.

  This afternoon, Ed has been threatening to visit the upstairs bathroom for reasons other than having a look. Ed’s GI tract is timed to go off about three hours after the second cup of Sunday morning coffee, i.e., during our afternoon house hunt. This means he routinely faces the existential torment of an endless array of pristine toilets, all of them off-limits.

  Ed looks at our map. “Which place had the outhouse?”

  Perhaps this is our problem. Perhaps we’re paying too much attention to the cookies and the pillows and the old people moaning in the cellar, and not enough to the actual house. However, I remain confident that one day, when neither of us is expecting it, we will walk into a house, look at each other and say, “This is it.” And our Realtor, like the exasperated Persian cat owner, will sigh with relief and collapse onto a tasteful arrangement of brocade pillows.

  Counter Attack

  It is my personal belief that the people who install the mirrors and lighting in department store dressing rooms are in direct cahoots with the cosmetic companies. All down the rows of rooms, you hear the sad moans and horrified gasps of women confronted with their own fluorescent-lit reflections. My eye bags, I realized the other day while shopping with my friend Wendy, had ceased to be an anatomical feature and were approaching the status of an actual piece of luggage. “You can almost see the little handles,” I wailed. Wendy was in the next room trying on a jacket. “My skin is green,” she was saying. I assured Wendy it was light reflecting off the jacket. “But the jacket is brown,” she said.

  We went directly from there to the makeup department, where a facialist determined that we needed help; a whole new approach. As with all major renovations, this one was to begin with foundation. I told the salesgirl I don’t like foundation, because it sinks into my wrinkles and makes them look even deeper, if you can imagine any deeper wrinkles than the kind I’ve got. She could not, of course, for she was 19 and the only wrinkles she owned were the kind that appear on her nose when forced to contemplate the horrors of middle-aged skin.

  “That’s because you’re not using a primer,” said the girl. Her name was Elaine. Her company actually sells a product called Face Primer. “You wouldn’t paint a room without putting on primer first, would you?”

  “Of course not,” I said, because my husband was not around to expose me as a liar. We recently painted our den and I had tried to argue for a single coat. Why spend an extra two days painting when you could just put a lower wattage bulb in the overhead light?

  In keeping with the home repair theme, this brand of makeup was to be put on with brushes. The salesgirl, who had gotten me into the makeover chair, was applying primer with one such brush. She suggested buying their four-pack of specialized makeup brushes, which came in a pink leatherette case. “It’s an investment,” she said. Did that mean that over time the brushes would become more valuable, and that one day I could cash them in and retire? It did not. It meant they were very expensive. The foundation brush alone cost $42.

  “What is it, mink?” I asked. I was trying to be funny, but the line landed far shy of its mark, for the brush was, in fact, Siberian blue squirrel. “I’ve never seen a blue squirrel,” Wendy commented.

  “Now you know why,” I said. I pictured entry-level makeup company flacks, sent out to stalk the northern forests with BB guns.

  “Maybe they just trim their little tails and let them go,” Wendy said charitably.

  Elaine said that my brush portfolio would last 10 to 15 years if I took care of the bristles. This entailed using the company’s Brush Bath and Brush Cleanser. “You want to treat them like your own hair,” Elaine said. She was wrong. I wanted to treat them like squirrels treat their own hair. Shouldn’t that be enough?

  Elaine wasn’t listening. She had moved on. She was applying a $35 skin luminizer, which, she said, “minimizes fine lines.” For instance, the fine line between luminous skin and highway robbery.

  “That is so pretty on you,” said Elaine. Notice the structure of this sentence. It is the makeup that’s pretty, not me. Wendy told me I had a bad attitude, that I looked fabulous. She handed me a mirror. I had to admit that I looked, if not fabulous, a bit less washed out.

  I considered buying it all: foundation, makeup, makeup remover, primer, sealant, luminizer, cleanser, moisturizer, brushes, brush cleanser, brush bath, brush masseuse, brush finishing school . . . Instead, I went down the street to the hardware store and bought some 25-watt bulbs.

  Unpopular Mechanics

  My old mechanic, Stephen Lee, was an honest man. One morning I had my car towed to his garage with a note affixed, stating, “Will not start!!”

  He called my office to tell me that the reason it wouldn’t start was that the gas tank was empty. He could have lied and said it was the starter. Then he said, “I’m charging you $50—because you’re stupid!” which was possibly more honesty than was called for, but so be it.

  Stephen Lee retired early, an event I take no small amount of credit for, having owned a sickly 1966 Volvo these past ten years. I did not take the news well, for it meant finding another mechanic. I do not trust car mechanics. I don’t know anything about engines, because I, like other women, lack the take-apart gene.

  From a young age, the male feels a powerful need to pry the backs off mechanical objects and disassemble them to see what makes them tick. If the family is lucky, the compulsion will strike just before the picture tube or what-have-you would have blown or otherwise stopped ticking on its own.

  The female does not share this compulsion, except when it comes to men she is dating. Many’s the time I’ve tried to open up Ed and see what makes him tick (neurosis and bran, so far as I’ve been able to figure out).

  Anyway, men understand motors and women don’t. You may say that this is a stereotype, and I won’t argue with you because I know even less about stereos than I know about cars. So your male mechanic can say to your female car owner, “You’ve got a fraying bammy crank in your left vorculator, and your frunchions are shot. Gonna run you $700,” and there’s no way for us to know if this is true or if, in fact, it’s his home entertainment center that needs the new vorculator.

  My new mechanic, Andy, seems like a nice enough fellow. I base this primarily on the fact that he breeds parakeets in a little aviary inside the shop. Though part of me believes there’s a how-to book out there for shady car mechanics that includes the line: “Set up a parakeet aviary. Women will think you’re nice.”

  I recently took my car in for a tune-up, hoping this would solve the problem it was having. “When I hit the gas, it goes, ‘UNH UNH UNH UNH UNH,’ ” I said intelligently. Andy took notes while I talked, and nodded, like a concerned therapist, though for all I know the notes said, “Total ding-dong. Give her the fraying bammy crank story.”

  Andy’s theory was that water and “sediment” had been getting into the gas tank through my ill-fitting gas
cap. This would cost $450 because, being men, they had to take apart the whole rear end of the car to get the tank out and clean it up.

  “Can’t you just clean it out with a suction thingie?”

  There was a pause, while Andy debated whether it was worth $450 to hang up and never have to listen to my voice again. “I don’t have a ‘suction thingie.’ ”

  Andy said I was putting the cart before the horse. I’m not sure what he meant by this, but a horse and cart sounded pretty appealing right about then.

  Then he said, “If I do it your way, will you sign a form saying ‘Mary Roach agrees that this might not work and that she won’t yell at me if it doesn’t?’ ” I considered the possibility that Andy was an honest man and that my car was the more appropriate target for my anger. I agreed to do it his way and spent the $450. As usual, I went away feeling like a sucker. Or a suction thingie. But let’s not get technical.

  Congested and Confused

  When I was young, a nose had few choices when it came to cold remedies. There were the capsules filled with cupcake sprinkles, and there was the antifreeze-looking stuff with its own little medicine cup. There was also that nasal spray bottle that breathed in and out in the TV ads, but frankly, this was unnerving. It was like having a tiny obscene phone caller living in your medicine cabinet.

  It’s not so simple anymore. Today’s cold sufferer must confront The Wall of Cold Remedies. There are pills for people with stuffy noses and pills for people with nasal congestion, who are, I suspect, simply people with stuffy noses and advanced degrees, or, otherwise put, stuffy people with stuffy noses. Perhaps because I don’t have an advanced degree, I don’t understand some things. For example, the difference between sinus congestion and nasal congestion. Fortunately, there are helpful anatomical drawings on the boxes. These tell us that the sinuses are the sink drain located over the upper nose, whereas the nasal passages are the dripping faucet down below.

  Possibly a cheaper and faster remedy would be to have Ed, my husband, use a plunger on me. The facial suction marks would be a source of embarrassment, but no worse than the embarrassment endured by the guy on the 24-Hour box with the clock installed on his head. Every day at noon he has to pry the hour hand out of his eye socket. No doubt there’s a special pill for that too.

  I’m not a fan of what the drug companies call “cocktail” remedies: a single pill that treats nasal congestion, cough, headache, fever, sore throat, loose shingles, rising interest rates, pushy salesmen, cracked O-rings, and a dozen other things you don’t actually have. Especially puzzling is the combination of a cough suppressant and expectorant. Why would you seek to “loosen chest congestion,” readying it for travel, and at the same time shut down the launching mechanism?

  Seeking the gentle simplicity of yesteryear, I reached for the bottle of NyQuil with its adorable medicine cup hat. Then I stopped. There’s a DayQuil now too. Soon there would be a Dusk-quil, and a Daylight-Savings-quil, and a Darkest-Hour-Just-Before-the-Dawn-quil. Then my gaze strayed two shelves down, to something entirely new and possibly fabulous: Breathe Right vapor nasal strips. These are a variation of the nose strips you see football players wearing. Instead of simply trying to unclog the mess inside your nostrils, the Breathe Right strip holds them open wider, so there’s room for everything: congestion, airflow, toilet plunger, movie tickets. Plus, you enjoy the unique motivational pick-me-up of feeling like a linebacker. Rather than lying around the house moaning for soup, you find yourself up and about, grunting and shoving. People laugh at your shiny nylon trousers and you hurl them to the ground! You dislocate their bones, and when you’re done, an NFL pension awaits. Way to feel better!

  There is one more thing to keep in mind (that’s the area above and to the rear of the sink drain). If you take a pill that cures all your cold symptoms, no one will know you are sick. No one will pity you or let you out of your chores or tell you to take the rest of the afternoon off and read junky magazines in bed. There should be a pill that, while easing your overall distress, leaves intact one or two of the showier symptoms, the sympathy-getters. Whoever comes up with this pill will become very rich, so rich he can afford his own mansion, and another for his mother, and one for the heavy breather in his medicine cabinet.

  I Married a Pack Rat

  For the past decade, my husband’s excuse for not going through his old LPs was that he’d do it when we move. We’re moving on Saturday. The replacement excuse is that he doesn’t have time because he has too much packing to do. One could make the point that there’d be less packing to do if he’d toss some of his stuff. Bracing for high seas, one does.

  “So you’re calling this junk?” Ed is holding aloft a Tony Bennett album.

  I am skating on thin ice here. Possibly I’m already down in the pond water, thrashing about with my skates. “Not specifically.”

  Ed says that many of his LPs are irreplaceable. I recognize this argument. I believe I used it in explaining why I did not throw away, among other priceless items, a Pan Am airsickness bag, some rocks from the Arctic Circle with pretty orange lichen on them, and a 1987 USDA press release entitled “Milestones in Dairy History.” But in those instances, it was my argument, and so it made excellent sense.

  I press on. “But if you never listen to any of these albums, why would you want to replace them?”

  Attempting to apply common sense in these scenarios is useless. I know this. Earlier in the week, I tried to discard a box of expired Super-8 movie film for which Ed has no camera. He vetoed the move, stating that he might one day find a Super-8 camera in a Goodwill store. Also vetoed was the throwing away of two shelves of college paperbacks. The pages were yellowed, and there was mildew on the covers. If you listened carefully you could hear them reaching out and making friends with my lichen. “Some of these books have meaning to me,” said Ed, and then he paused. “I just don’t know what the meaning is.”

  I recently read an article about hoarding in the animal kingdom. The male black wheatear bird, the article said, collects piles of heavy stones before the mating season. “Those with the largest piles are more likely to mate,” the story explained and at the same time didn’t really explain. If I should die suddenly—which seems more and more likely as the week wears on—Ed should consider expanding his dating pool to include female wheatear birds. I’ll make a note of it in my will.

  Ed tries to explain why he would want to keep a pile of records he never listens to. “It’s just knowing that they’re there. That I could listen to them if I wanted to.” I remind him that his turntable doesn’t work. “So, actually you can’t listen to them.” Which reminds me. I pick up the turntable and put it on the designated throwaway pile, which I had envisioned at the beginning of this undertaking as a towering, teetering mound engulfing most of our front entryway and portions of the sidewalk, but is in reality closer in size to the little mounds of toenail parings Ed occasionally stacks up on the bedside table. These are, happily, replaceable, and I encounter only token resistance when I throw them away.

  “You can’t throw the turntable out. It belongs to Andrea.” Andrea is his ex-wife.

  “So let’s return it to her.”

  Ed looks genuinely puzzled. “It’s broken. Why would she want it?”

  In the end, we compromised. He kept some, and he sold some. He forgave me for the anguish I’d caused him, because he was able to get $240 for his LPs at the new and used music store. This he used to buy 31 used CDs, which take up not quite but almost the same square footage as the LPs, and will impress the heck out of the next female wheatear who comes to town.

  Makes Scents

  We just moved into a new house, and it has smell ghosts: pockets of mystery odors that the previous owner left behind, along with wiper fluid and a bag of frankfurters which, like cats, are busily marking their territory in the refrigerator. Soon our own odors will set up camp and conquer the smell world of th
e previous owner, but in the meantime, I thought we could use some professional help.

  “People today are more actively involved in their ‘smell’ world.” These are the words of a “scent expert” from Brown University. The expert’s words are being used to help promote an electronic gizmo that plays the latest CDs—not music, or books on tape. Just odors. It’s the new Scentstories fragrance disc player, whose inventors seem not very actively involved in their capitalization and spacing world.

  The marketing material said that the twenty-five Scentstories on the five discs were chosen by a leading fragrance-design firm, from “a pool of more than 1,000 creative scent possibilities.” Here was a pool I plan to stay out of, at least without my wet suit.

  The idea behind a “multiple scent experience”—instead of a solitary scent experience, as most room fresheners and perfumes and aging hot dogs provide—is that this way the nose can’t adapt to the scent and stop smelling it. The discs advance to a new scent every half hour, to keep the nose on its toes.

  As with CDs, both the scent discs and the individual scent selections have names—in this case, names like “Following the Winding Creek,” and “Shades of Vanilla.” Unlike CDs, there is no performer, though I suspect Yanni might somehow be involved. I chose the disc entitled “Wandering Barefoot on the Shore.” The scents were pleasant, but I did not recognize them as ocean- or foot-related. Barring oil spills or salt or dying marine life, I would be hard-pressed to describe a shore scent.

  I switched discs and fast-forwarded to the second cut: “Picking Peachy Freesias.” I asked Ed to tell me what the air smelled like. He answered that it smelled like the bathrooms at the car wash after they’ve been cleaned.