by Mary Roach
You are no doubt wondering why I did not choose www.maryroach.com. The answer is that my online identity has been kidnapped by BuyDomains.com. The ransom has been set, I kid you not, at upwards of $5,000. This is what it would cost to buy back the rights to my name for use with a website ending in dot-com. Simon Cowell did not refer to BuyDomains.com as “the most obnoxious, parasitic, greed-oozing company he’d ever heard of,” but who knows, one day he may. If you do a Google search on “irritant,” the website of BuyDomains.com pops up. I’m lying. It doesn’t. What pops up—true story—is a link to the marketplace eBay: “Great deals on irritant!”
So, for the near future anyway, no one will be able to visit a website belonging to the Mary Roach who does not aspire to a singing career or a cure for eczema.
Dishing Dirt
“It is not necessary to rinse dishes before putting them into the dishwasher.” This is line one, page five of our dishwasher’s instruction manual. I recited these words to my husband, Ed, last week, so he would understand that it is not just me that holds this opinion, it is also the authors of the Frigidaire Dishwasher Use and Care Manual, and if anyone should have the last word on rinsing, it is these fine people.
And Ed doesn’t merely rinse the dishes before putting them in. He all-out washes them—thereby defeating the machine’s purpose. If I’d known I could get my husband to wash dishes for me, I wouldn’t have insisted we buy a dishwasher. This is a device that washes dishes so that people don’t have to, so they have time to go off and pursue their dreams, so they can write the Great American Novel, or the great American Dishwasher Use and Care Manual or whatever it is they dream of writing.
I believe prewashing is demeaning to the dishwasher. If people wash the dishes first, the dishwasher is reduced to a sort of unneeded front-loading autoclave. Imagine the scorn of the other large appliances.
REFRIGERATOR: “So, what do you do around here?”
DISHWASHER: “I make perfectly clean dishes scalding hot for a while.”
REFRIGERATOR: “Why on earth would you do that?”
DISHWASHER: “No reason. Utterly pointless. I’m so depressed.”
Ed says he rinses the dishes before putting them in because if you don’t, they dry out while you wait for a full load to accrue, and then little bits of cereal and egg fuse to the surfaces. True enough. So you don’t put the dishes in until you’ve got a full load; you leave them stacked in the sink with water in them. I acknowledge that there are drawbacks to this method, such as the floating communities of mold and decomposing lunch matter and such that show up after a day or so.
I picked up the Use and Care Manual. Page 10: “Should mold appear on soaking dishes, stop looking in the sink.” Ed grabbed the manual from me. Page 16: “If your wife thinks leaving dirty dishes in the sink for days on end is acceptable adult behavior, call our toll-free number and have her committed at absolutely no cost to you.”
Ed also believes that the dishwasher is for washing dishes, not pots and pans. He pointed out the drawing in the manual of a properly loaded top rack. In the drawing, the area where I typically wedge frying pans and macaroni dishes is filled with neat rows of dessert plates, cups and saucers. In other words, the entire top half of your dishwasher is reserved for those evenings when the Queen of Norway and her entourage drop in for dinner. Outside of the mold community, we don’t get many visitors. Or not the saucer type, anyway. At our house, coffee goes in mugs, and dessert is eaten out of the carton or, in the case of cookies, held in the hand. If the Queen of Norway makes a stink, you serve her her Nutter Butters on a paper towel.
There will be no saucers in my top rack. If I’m going to have a machine help with the dishwashing, I’m going to give the machine all the disgusting, greasy things, and I’ll handle the saucers.
Ed and I have reached a compromise, though Ed isn’t aware of it yet. Here’s how it works. When Ed finds glasses and cereal bowls in the sink, he can go ahead and prewash them and put them in the top rack of the dishwasher. Then, when I need that space for the lasagna pan, I remove the glasses and bowls and put them back in the cupboard. So basically, I have two dishwashers. The Queen of Norway couldn’t have it much better.
Suite Dreams
I recently spent a month on a book tour, living out of hotels. Ed, who joined me for a few days, couldn’t understand why I’d complain about this. The best thing that could happen to Ed is that each day someone would come to tidy his room and pick the towels up off the floor and change the sheets. You might think that Ed, being married, could count upon his wife for this. Unfortunately for Ed, his wife changes sheets the way other people change the oil. I’ve got a sticker on the headboard to remind me when four months have gone by. Shortly after Ed and I met, he told me he could see a faint Mary-shaped outline on my bedsheet.
“It’s a miracle,” I said. “Call the Church! Call the newspapers!”
“Not that Mary,” said Ed.
Suffice to say, I would not last long as a maid at the Marriott. The chain’s founder, J. W. Marriott, believed cleanliness was next to godliness, which possibly explains why there was a copy of his biography alongside the Bible in the bedside-table drawer in my room at the Anchorage Marriott. The book said J.W. would “run his index finger over the furniture, doorsills, and venetian blinds” of his son and daughter-in-law’s home. The biographer doesn’t mention how long the son and daughter-in-law’s marriage lasted, but I’d wager not so very long—two, maybe three changes of the sheets at our house.
Why do I complain about staying in hotels? After all, these were nice hotels, hotels with down comforters and $7 bowls of Cheerios. I guess because it’s not home. Nobody’s home has a stranger downstairs who calls to wake you each morning even though you always hang up on him. Nobody’s home has a wall-mounted hair dryer so loud as to damage your hearing and yet simultaneously so weak as to have no effect on your hair. Nobody’s home has a bed with the sheets tucked so tightly that your feet are pressed flat out to the side. Who sleeps like that?
“The ancient Egyptians,” said Ed, as he slid in beside me. We lay on our backs, saying unknown things in hieroglyphics.
“Do you want to get the lights?”
“You get the lights.” At the last hotel, the lights got me. It took ten minutes to hunt down the switch that controlled the entryway lamp.
Hotel showers are designed by the same sadists who take care of the lamp wiring. Sometimes turning the knob to the left makes the water come out softer. Sometimes it makes it scalding. Some showers deliver a weak drizzle, while others come out as a stinging, gale-force blast. One evening, while soaping my armpits in a Category 3 storm, the shower curtain pulled away from the side of the tub and began billowing like a wet ghost. I’d push it down against the porcelain, and it would pull away again. Water poured onto the floor. Miniature shampoo bottles bobbed in the surf. Suddenly I heard knocking, and a voice I couldn’t make out. No doubt the guy from The Weather Channel. “Go away,” I said. “No interviews today!” It was the maid. I had to stop her. She would see what I’d done, and punish me by setting the clock radio to go off at 2 a.m.
They do that, you know. They’re aware that no one, not even someone with advanced degrees in hotel management such as J. W. Marriott, knows how to work a hotel-room clock radio. You will be forced to yank it from its socket in the middle of the night and hurl it across the room, incurring replacement charges and shame upon checkout. I pushed Casper aside, lunged to the door and locked it. The maid retreated. Then I mopped up the floodwaters and put on my makeup. The hotel had installed special lighting over the mirror that highlighted my eyebags and made me look like Jimmy Carter.
“My fellow Americans,” I said kindly. “It is time to address the problem of inconsistent and downright dangerous shower-fixture design.” Then I had a $7 bowl of Raisin Bran and went out to flog my book.
And There’s the Rub!
I have set all this aside, however, because I recently got a gift certificate for a local spa and have cajoled my friend Wendy into coming with me for a massage. We are now standing in the room known to ordinary (non-cleansing) people as a locker room. The sign on the door says “Women’s Dressing.” As though we are salads. Across the hall is the Water Closet. This spa has tried hard to be tony and European, right down to the medical background forms, which request that we “tick” boxes, rather than check them.
The locker room is pristine, and smells like no locker room I’ve ever been in. The smell turns out to be the lockers themselves: They’re lined with cedar. “Check, I mean tick, this out,” I tell Wendy. “In case moths attack while we’re off getting our massages.”
A beautiful young attendant arrives to show us how to operate the locks on the lockers. Then she leaves to get us bathrobes and towels.
Wendy looks stressed. “Do we have to tip her for this? I hate these places. I don’t know how to behave. What do I tip? Do I take everything off? Do I leave on my underwear?” Wendy is going to need a second massage to relieve the stress that’s accumulated while being here for the first one.
We are told to wait for our masseuses in the lounge. It’s a gorgeous, perfect lounge with expensive cheeses and orchids and pitchers of lemon water. We pour ourselves some water and finish our medical forms. Wendy is reading aloud: “Are you pregnant? Ha! No, I just look like it!”
A different beautiful young attendant comes into the lounge to refill the water pitcher and clear away the empty glasses. She glances briefly at the flabby, wrinkly things on the sofa, as if giving thought to how she might clear those away too.
At last our masseuses arrive to take us to the treatment rooms. I watch Wendy disappear down the hallway, her voice trailing off: “I left my underwear on. Was that bad? I wasn’t sure . . .”
My masseur, Leo, tells me to “disrobe to my level of comfort” and get under the sheet on the massage table. Then he leaves the room. I notice that a small pink flower is lying on the sheet at the head of the massage table, as though the last person was a shrub. The massage table is outfitted at one end with a small, heavily padded toilet seat. When he returns, Leo tells me to put my face inside the toilet seat, which he calls a “face cradle.”
Leo says he’ll be “opening up my muscles” and “getting blood into the area.” This doesn’t sound relaxing. It sounds like the tiger scene in Gladiator. I bury my face in the toilet and pray for leniency.
Eventually I relax. Things are going swell. Then Leo asks me if I want the “complimentary parafango treatment.” There are so many things I need to learn before I can answer this question.
“Fango means volcanic,” Leo adds, bringing me no closer to a decision.
“Oh,” I say. “In what language?”
He doesn’t answer. He must think I’m testing him. For the next few minutes, Leo gives me the complimentary silent treatment. This is fine with me. In my experience, conversations in which one party has her head in the toilet bowl are always trying.
I find Wendy waiting for me in the lounge. She got the parafango treatment on her feet. “And how was that?” I ask her.
“Really relaxing,” she says in a strangled voice that I have heard her use only once before, when raccoons got into the compost. “Can we go now?” Wendy gets up and moves toward the door very fast, faster than you would expect for someone whose feet have been dipped in molten magma.
Nivea Man
Men are moisturizing, and I’m a little concerned. One of the things men have always done best is not waste money on personal grooming. You could depend on a man not to slap down a day’s pay for a thimbleful of “age-defying” face goo. Men wash their faces with soap, and then—provided there’s a towel or curtain hem handy—they dry it. This is the male skin-care regimen in its entirety.
Now men are starting to question themselves. My own husband recently said to me, “Should I be moisturizing my face?” We were in The Body Shop, which now has a “For Men” line of skin care. This includes a moisturizer that they have named Face Protector, no doubt an attempt to make male customers feel more comfortable by evoking a familiar sports-gear image.
The concept of moisturizer is confusing to men, because the traditional male moisturizer has nothing to do with wrinkles. This is a substance that comes in plastic tubs, like spackling compound or bait, and has manly names like Mariner’s Hand Cream and No-Crack Hand Healer. The idea is that you’ve been out in the elements, doing rough, masculine things, and your hands are calloused and chapped and cracked. Your hands, like your saddle or your rifle stock, are simply practical objects that need oiling now and again. Nothing sissy about it.
Since few men repair crankshafts or build docks with their faces, the male had no need for a facial moisturizer. Indeed, they are hazy on the concept. Ed asked me if he should use my Nivea Creme on his face. “That’s hand lotion,” I said. To a woman, this is like, I don’t know, shampooing with dishwashing soap, which I have seen a man do, yes I have.
“You can’t use hand lotion on your face?” Ed looked flummoxed. I explained that while hand lotion is for dryness and chapping, facial moisturizer is for softening and reducing fine lines. He pointed to the parentheses on either side of his mouth. “Will it get rid of these?”
Those aren’t fine lines, I told him; those are deep grooves. There’s a fine line between explaining and insulting, and I had just reduced it. Ed stomped from the room, though the drama of his exit was marred somewhat by his having to rush about and paw through his affairs for his cell phone, wallet, car keys, sunglasses, and ChapStick.
Today’s men badly need purses, but here they’re resisting the urban trend toward girlification. Like many a modern male, Ed has taken to wearing his camera and cell phone on his belt. The belt has become a sort of contemporary holster, blending practicality and frontier masculinity. Hold it right there, pardner, I’ve got a call coming in.
Eventually, Ed left the room. He walked out the door with a wide, confident stride, a manly swagger that said, I’m gonna go mend some barbed wire. Maybe fix a crankshaft with my face. And when I get back, woman, you best have my exfoliant ready.
Grape Expectations
When Ed’s parents visit, we try to take them to someplace new and different. Since they don’t drink or even especially like wine, we felt confident a wine-tasting trip to Napa Valley would fit the bill.
Ed’s parents are in their 80s now, so pretty much any option that ends in “ing,” you can bet they would secretly prefer to skip. This includes paddle-boating, tandem bike-riding, and a host of other activities they have gamely submitted to, all the while dreaming of Scrabble or a nap in the sun. I don’t know why grown children do this to parents. When Bill and Jeanne aren’t visiting us, Ed and I are content to spend weekends lolling around reading the paper, napping in the sun, playing Scrabble. The outings, I suspect, are an attempt to convince them that our lives are fascinating and fulfilling.
Ed and I aren’t the kind of people who taste wines because they plan to actually buy some of them. But thank God for these people, because the money they spend helps wineries recover from the huge amounts they lose on people like us. We go wine tasting because it’s free.
Things started off swell, because the first winery we stopped at had food tasting too. There were cheeses, olives and pâtés everywhere you turned. Ed made straight for a roasted-garlic olive oil. Bread had been cut into slivers, to make it clear that you were tasting here, not having lunch. This did not deter
Ed.
“Wow,” he said. “Taste this olive oil again and again and again.”
Here is one of the great things about America, possibly the best thing. No one cares if you take five free samples. This is not true in, say, Tokyo. Japan subscribes to a strict moral code regarding the sampling of wares. I didn’t realize this when I was there some years ago with a friend. We had figured out that an affordable early supper could be had by working a circuit of the food section of any major department store. By the third circuit, they were onto us. They’d see us coming and rush over to pull away the sample tray, like peasants scrambling to hide their daughters from marauding Huns.
In the next room, the wine staff was pouring tastes of five wines at the bar. Every few feet was a small bucket, and some fellow tasters were pouring out their samples into the bucket after the first sip.
“That seems rude,” said Jeanne.
“And wasteful,” said Bill. We all nodded and drained our glasses.
As we sampled the next wine, Bill divulged that he and Jeanne had once taken a class on wines. Ed was shocked. “Dad, the last time you were at our house, Mom put a red wine in the refrigerator.”
Jeanne stepped back in mock horror. “Oh, my God, what’s wrong with me!”
Bill defended her. “You want it to be cold. That way you can’t taste it as much.” I asked what they’d learned about wine. Bill thought a moment. “Some of it’s red, some white.”
Jeanne nodded thoughtfully. “And some of it is in between.” They were in fine spirits. We all were. We were on the fourth wine by now.
The last one was a Cabernet. “This one has more body,” the winery woman told Bill.