Mary Roach - My Planet

We are in the grip of a nationwide container mania.We have Tupperware and Rubbermaid. There’s Hold Everything and a chain called The Container Store. Soon the earth will need a special caddy to organize its container franchises.

This is creating conflict in our home. We don’t need conflict in our home, as we’ve got nowhere to put it. My husband, Ed, is one of those people made nervous by the thought of throwing things away. There may come a day when he’ll need bank statements from 1979 and adapters for long-extinct electronics goods. (Everyone saves adapters, thinking they will work on other gadgets—that they’re adaptable —but this has never happened since the dawn of adapters. Go and throw them away.)

Places like The Container Store only encourage people like Ed. Now they can pretend to be doing something about their clutter. They can put adapters in a special Useless Adapter Bin. They can organize their junk rather than doing the sensible thing and junking it.

Ed came home from The Container Store last week with a Pull-Out Lid Organizer for all our plastic container lids. Why don’t we just get rid of some of our plastic food containers, I said, raining on his parade, as is my wifely wont. At the moment, we’ve got, oh, 345 of them. But according to the Ed system, you can’t throw away perfectly good food. You must put all leftovers in plastic containers until they smell, whereupon you may throw them away, because they’re no longer perfectly good food. So it is that our refrigerator does not contain food, but variously sized petri dishes. There’s waffle batter in there dating back to the dawn of adapters.

Ed relented on the plastic containers, on one condition: I’d agree to come with him to The Container Store. For he knew what I did not: These stores cast a spell on people. Soon I would be just like him. I’d find myself entranced by a Clear Panty Box, thinking, Yes, I need to see my undergarments at a glance. I would catch myself eyeing an acrylic Coffee Filter Holder, thinking, Handy, attractive, only $8.49. Were I thinking straight, I would realize that I already own a coffee filter holder, because the filters came in a box, and the box was free.

The last time we were there, Ed fell for an in-closet shoe rack—a good idea, except Ed’s shoes rarely make it into a closet. Ed has a near-religious belief in the tidying power of special storage devices. If you buy the rack, the shoes will come.

Half of the first floor of The Container Store is devoted to walk-in closet systems. Thankfully, we have no walk-in closets, so we didn’t have to fight about this. Though some people would argue we do have a walk-in closet, and we’ve chosen to use it as a bedroom. My stepdaughter recently informed us that Mariah Carey’s closet is as big as our house. “So our house is the size of a closet?” I said, sounding hurt.

“No.” She gave me the implied duh . “I mean it’s the size of Mariah Carey’s closet.” The conversation went on in this vein for a while.

I told Ed I expected to get up in the morning and find Mariah Carey wandering forlornly through the dining room in her underwear. He raised a brow. “Wake me, will you?”

Getting back to The Container Store, I had gone away to ponder Gravity-Feed Can Racks, and when I returned, I found Ed by the built-in closet organizers, looking wistful. I could tell he aspired to be the owner of this system, the tidy, color-coordinated man with the wife who wears only suits and pumps. “Where are their sneakers?” I said. “Their sweatshirts? Where’s their stuff? ”

“Besides,” I said, “we can’t afford to be this organized.” One wall of the closet system costs $400. I told Ed I loved him the way he was, with his T-shirts heaped on a chair and his shoes willy-nilly on the rug. I told him I didn’t want the dull man with the well-hung tan suits in The Container Store catalog. That no matter how many boxes of bank statements he kept, my love for him would remain as wide and deep as an ocean, or anyway Mariah Carey’s closet.

If my husband, Ed, had his way,you could pop by our place any given night and see me sitting in bed, struggling to hold my head up under the weight of a night-vision headset. Ed is an early-to-sleep sort of chap, who’ll announce around 8 p.m., “Just going to change into my pj’s and read for a while.” Once he becomes horizontal, however, it’s pretty much over.

This makes it difficult for yours truly, for I really do read in bed, including the part where you turn the page and read a second one and then a third one. Ed would like for me to do this in a quiet, motionless, pitch-dark manner. Instead, I do it in a chip-crunching, light-on, getting-in-and-out-of-bed-for-more-chips manner. In the spirit of compromise, I bought Ed earplugs and a black satin sleep mask. “It’s dashing,” I said of the mask. “You look like Antonio Banderas in Zorro .” This was a lie. He looked like Arlene Francis in “What’s My Line?”

“Zorro didn’t wear a sleep mask,” countered Ed. “His had eyeholes cut out.”

“It was a special fencer’s sleep mask. Come on,” I said. “That movie is all about sleep. Why do you think he writes Z ’s everywhere?”

Ed’s argument was that as the awake person, I should have to wear the uncomfortable headwear.

We were inching toward the marriage counselor’s couch when in the nick of time, I found a product called Light Wedge: “The only personal reading light that has the ability to save the 50 percent of marriages that end in divorce.” It’s a thin, glowing slice of acrylic that lies on the page, enabling one to read “in the dark without keeping his or her partner awake with an irksome reflection.”

I settled in with my Light Wedge and a bowl of chips. “Happy now?”

“No,” said Ed. “You get crumbs in the bed and steal the blankets. I’m still going to want that divorce.”

A married couple can best be defined as a unit of people whose sleep habits are carefully engineered to keep each other awake. I offered to stop eating in bed if Ed would agree to wean himself from his need for multiple pillows. I roll over in the middle of the night and find myself suffocating against a towering mound of goose down. We call it Pillow Mountain.

Ed has fallen for the great marketing ploy of the decade: the decorative pillow ploy. It is no longer enough to buy one pillow per head. There must be a decorative pillow behind one’s normal head-resting variety, and a spray of bolsters and scatter pillows in front. Each of these must be of a unique size and shape, so as to require the purchase of a specially fitted pillowcase.

Ed corrected me. “It’s called a sham.”

No argument here. It’s a total sham. To outfit the modern bed with its indulgence of pillows and their little pillow outfits costs hundreds of dollars. Beds now contain entire pillow families, six or seven of them, all nestled together against the headboard, as though watching Leno. “That’s okay,” I tell them, backing out of the room. “I’ll go sleep on the couch.”

As we were arguing over the pillow issue, Ed got out of bed to open the bedroom door, which I’d closed so as not to hear the odd poppings and clickings of our refrigerator. Our refrigerator is unique among large appliances, in that it appears to suffer from insomnia. Every night around 4 a.m., it begins shifting, fidgeting and cracking its joints. No doubt it wants some warm milk, which, for a refrigerator, is an existential crisis of considerable weight.

Ed claims not to hear these sounds. He says he needs to have the bedroom door open; otherwise it gets so stuffy he can’t sleep. I can’t tell him to open a window, because then it’ll be too cold. There’ll be an all-night struggle for blanket superiority, and no one, to quote Zorro, will catch any Z ’s. We’ll end up out in the kitchen at 4:30, playing cards with the refrigerator.