Mary Roach - My Planet

This is where it gets ugly. This is where Ed tries to turn his wife into—as the men in the blazers like to say—a serious student of the game. Plainly put, this cannot be done. You’d have more luck getting a pug to understand Jeopardy! Take, for instance, the Infield Fly Rule, which begins, in the breezy parlance of the Official Baseball Rules, like this: “The batter is out when it is declared, and the ball does not have to be caught. Because the batter is declared out, the runners are no longer forced to run, but they can run if they wish, at the risk of being put out…”

“What?” Ed will ask. “What don’t you get?” Apparently this language speaks to him in a way that it does not speak to me. One night I decided to try putting it to work. It was seven o’clock and cutlets were growing cold. I cleared my throat. “The wife is declared put out when it is dinnertime and the game is still running. The husband’s attention has to be caught and because the wife is put out, the husband may wish to run…”

Ed begged leniency on the grounds that it was “the top of the ninth.” Here again, communication breaks down. For me, there can be no understanding of a sport where the “top” of an inning is the first half. “Think of ladders,” I said, as Marvin Benard stepped up to the plate. “You start at the bottom and go to the top.” But Ed wasn’t listening.

Benard struck out, and Ed said hurtful things about him. This is my other qualm with pro sports. I feel bad for the players when they mess up. The ball Benard missed was going 90 m.p.h., and it went all crooked. If I were the umpire, I would have laid a hand on the man’s shoulder and said, “Take your base, Marv. You were really close.”

Last October my tolerance for Ed’s devotion to sports, already threadbare, began to unravel. The baseball season was winding down, leading me to think that we could resume our normal adult activities, if only we had any. I came into the living room one Sunday to find Ed, a man who dismisses football as “a bore,” engrossed in a Broncos game. He wore a guilty grin. “Third and long, sweetie!”

It was around that time that I came across a book about sports “addiction.” It said that for many men, their relationship with their team fulfills a need for intimacy. This got me right there in the whack-me zone. Was J. T. Snow doing more for my husband than I was?

I confronted Ed. There was an NFL game on that day, but he wasn’t watching. He was making banana bread. Though he denied the charges, he wouldn’t rule out the possibility that J. T. Snow could make him happy. Then he asked if I wanted to go for a bike ride. I decided to drop the sports addiction thing, because truly, Ed doesn’t deserve the hassle. He’s the winningest guy I know, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart, which is the part that comes before the top.

Some years ago,a well-known perfume company invented a concept called “the Aviance night.” In the ads, a housewife was shown primping for a night on the town, sashaying around the bedroom and flipping her hair from one side to the other as she puts on her earrings. As she douses herself with Aviance perfume, an unseen chorus conjectures excitedly that “she’s gonna have an Aviance night!”

I never had an Aviance night. I don’t, as a general rule, sashay. But I cannot completely silence that part of me that longs, every now and again, to be heading off confidently and aromatically into a night of candlelit romance. My longing tends to coalesce and rise to the surface, like chicken fat, every February.

A word about Valentine’s Day. This was originally a holiday for a god who protected shepherds’ flocks from the wolves outside Rome. I don’t know how we got from livestock surveillance to romantic love, but if I had to tender a guess I’d say it had something to do with the Hallmark company. We really have to watch these guys, because soon we’re going to find ourselves sending cards for Plumbers and Steamfitters Day (“You bring a special kind of caring to our water-serviced area…”).

It’s not that my husband and I don’t go out. Every Valentine’s Day, Ed will dutifully reserve a table at a romantic restaurant. I look forward to it until about five o’clock on the actual date. Somehow the mood never seems to fit. I put on perfume and wait for the unseen chorus to kick in, but hear instead the dulcet tones of my sweatpants calling out to me. Suddenly I don’t feel like going to an unfamiliar, overpriced restaurant. I want to go somewhere comfortable and known, a place where the wine doesn’t cost more than my shoes and the waiter won’t look down upon me for making “daikon” rhyme with “bacon.”

But this is Valentine’s Day, and we must persevere. For tomorrow, the Aviance Day After, friends and coworkers will grill us as to the activities of the night before. “The living room” is not an acceptable answer to “Where did Ed take you for Valentine’s?”

This year is no different. Poor Ed. He’s trying very hard. As we dress to leave, he takes my hands in his and leans in close. He cocks his head to one side, as if seeing me anew, in the fresh dawn of reawakened love. “Are you wearing an odor?”

Ed is romantic, but not in the traditional manner. I once suggested that we bring the dining room candles into the bedroom. Ed brought them in and set them down on the floor near the door, at the farthest point from the bedspread and other combustibles, completely out of our view. “They still provide some nice ambient illumination,” he said. It was like getting into bed with Norm Abram.

I once asked him to pick up some massage oil, and he came home with an unscented variety. I didn’t know such a thing existed. Another time he tried to surprise me with a romantic bubble bath, not realizing that sometime during the day, something had gone wrong with the hot water heater, and the bath water was stone cold. No doubt we’d forgotten to send flowers on Plumbers and Steamfitters Day and the Local 486 had sabotaged our tank.

The Valentine’s Day dinner itself is always a bit of a trial. From the moment you’re seated, the gazing and hand-holding must begin. Everyone else is doing it, and so you must too. No matter what kind of day you’ve had or how long you’ve been married, the two of you must appear to be utterly, helplessly captivated by each other, unable to think about anything else. This does not work, for one simple, incontrovertible reason. A man at a restaurant table is thinking about food. He cannot help himself. He knows this isn’t allowed and will try very, very hard to appear to be thinking thoughts of love. The effort typically fails, and he achieves a look somewhere between hypnosis and acid reflux.

I say Valentine’s Day should have term limits. I say if you’re old enough to have trouble reading a menu by candlelight, you’re old enough that you shouldn’t have to bother. Kiss each other across a plate of spaghetti, while an unseen chorus admits that the Aviance night was always a little overrated.

I have always wanted and not wanted a cleaning person.On the one hand, I want very much for someone else to clean our house, as neither I nor my husband, Ed, has shown any aptitude for it. On the other hand, I’d feel guilty inflicting such distasteful drudgery on another human being. No one but me, for instance, should have to clean up the dental floss heaped like spaghetti near the wastebasket where I toss it each night, never catching on that floss is not something that can be thrown with a high degree of accuracy.

You can imagine my joy upon reading that the iRobot company of Somerville, Massachusetts, has invented a robotic vacuum. They call it Roomba. Their website plays an animated clip of what appears to be an enlarged CD Walkman scooting across a living room carpet, sucking up conspicuous chunks of unidentified detritus. Meanwhile, sentences run across the screen: “I’m having lunch with a friend”… “I’m planting flowers in the garden.” The point is that you can go out and “enjoy life” while your robot cleans up the conspicuous chunks strewn about your living room floor, no doubt rubble tracked in from the garden plot.