The Madwoman and the Roomba Read online

  The

  Madwoman

  and the

  Roomba

  MY YEAR OF DOMESTIC MAYHEM

  Sandra Tsing Loh

  Contents

  PREFACE

  The Tooth

  “Winter” Is Coming HERE

  “January”

  Welcome to the Jungle (aka: Mice!)

  “February”

  Rebirthing Shoots of Grass in the Ice

  “cheese therapy”

  Pema Bollywood/The Goddess Within/Fifty-Sixth Birthday/My Goddess, Myself

  Home Self-Care

  Stanford Swimming

  “Spring” into Action

  “March” . . . into What?

  Forest Lawn

  Sleeping with Arianna Huffington

  “April” Is the Cruelest Month

  It’s Taxing: The Rube Goldberg Machine, Surprisingly, Breaks Down

  Physical Update Number 301: The Flyaway Retina

  The March for Science

  FlabbraMom

  “May” I Have a Couple of Ambien?

  C-Plus Tiger Mom

  “Summer”

  A “June” of One’s Own

  Let’s Commence

  Can’t Think of Anything Clever to Say about “July”

  101 (If You Count Each Piece of “Extra” Checked Baggage) Arguments Against “Summer Fun” (A Wee Rant/Digression)

  July 4th-ish

  A Very Hindu Audit

  I’d Rather Be “August” Wilson

  Tampa

  “Fall” into “September”/“October”/“November”/“December”

  Marriage in the Middle Ages: I Do or I Don’t?

  The Fantasy of Living Alone

  Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes: The Hip

  The Gynecologist

  Down the Tubes

  Going Medieval Atkins

  In a Spin

  Getting Sirius

  Me and My Massage Chair

  Villager Number 31: “Storm of Joy”

  Thanksgiving

  The Gardening Fairy

  Mr. Loh’s Not Afraid to Be Naked

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Preface

  AH, FIFTY-FIVE. The golden years! The heady career summiting, ripening emotional maturity, the confident, gazelle-like loping with a surfboard toward the Pacific blue waters of a sagely planned retirement.

  That’s what we find in airline magazines, anyway. (Which I read deep in coach, starving because I haven’t sagely planned anything, not even a snack that costs less than an eighteen-dollar Wolfgang Puck quinoa/aioli wrap.) Nowadays, coast to coast, I discover, it seems fit “silver foxes” are busy not just surfing but using their American Express Platinum cards to start their own rockin’ garage bands, hitting a rad chord and doubling over in laughter as their bangs (really, they have bangs?) fly forward.

  But no! My fifty-fifth year was more like living a disorganized twenty-five-year-old’s life in a malfunctioning eighty-five-year-old’s body. (And I don’t mean Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s—she is a superwoman who, if arm-wrestled, would clearly dislocate my shoulder.) It felt like trying to live Arianna Huffington’s thrilling global values without her staff (or dry cleaner). It was like junior high without the carbs.

  Let’s talk, for a moment, about “retirement”—a word I’ve never been able to hear without dropping into a kind of Zen waking sleep state. (And now “IRA!” is the sound of bankers laughing.) Let’s look at what many baby boomers are doing in this “Second Act of Life.” (Yes, that’s what my seventy-two-year-old retired Gestalt therapist friend calls it, without irony. Of course, she also wears Tibetan and Native American jewelry without irony—she is from Pennsylvania—but I digress.)

  Here’s what the boomers are doing—compared to activities in my own household:

  Boomers: Oh! We just spent four rhapsodic weeks this summer learning to make bread from Master Chef Ennio from the Food Channel in a sumptuous Tuscan farm villa.

  Sandra: On a recent cobbled-together trip to New York, our Airbnb “bachelor pad” (the only listing without prohibitive cleaning fees) had a single nightstand (next to the futon) bearing action figures, hand lotion, and a box of Kleenex. You do the math.

  Boomers: We are building a second home on land we bought ten years ago on a verdant remote island off the coast of Seattle.

  Sandra: The closest I’ll get to the invigorating scent of the ocean is half-off oysters via Groupon Happy Hour. But those gastrobar Happy Hour menus are so confusing (“It’s $3 off on ‘well’ drinks before five? What is a sunchoke?”). Eighty dollars later you’re still starving. It’s a recurring bagatelle (fancy words at least are free) we call “highway gastrobbery.”

  Boomers: Steven has been learning to speak Khmer in preparation for our six-week Norwegian Silver Star Cruise to Cambodia.

  Sandra: I have to admit, I am obsessed with those glossy cruise pamphlets that fall like satiny papaya skins out of the Sunday New York Times (which our household purchases at the reduced “teacher’s rate” of forty-nine dollars/month). Not only can we not afford $15,000 per person, I couldn’t even afford the tasteful luxury/casual musliny blouses and fine linen palazzo pants all the serenely medicated salt-and-pepper-haired cruisers seem to be wearing. (In neutral colors! What about red wine stains? Once again—“middle” age—the dry cleaning alone!)

  The only aquatic vacation my partner Charlie (he of the 2000 VW Beetle that smells like melted crayons) and I could afford was a three-day Carnival Cruise to Mexico. A traumatic Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride (it’s in the chapter entitled “101 Arguments Against ‘Summer Fun’ ”), this floating DMV from hell was survivable only via the weed Charlie’s mobile L.A. delivery service had prescribed for his (put Modelo beer can down to make big air quotes) “glaucoma.”

  Which is to say, technically, yes, I am a baby boomer (those born between 1946 and 1964), but my birth year—1962—was at the drooping tail of the boom. Born late in the game, think less true boomers than “Baby boom tastes on a Gen X budget,” or “X-booms.” (This can also sometimes look like “First World guilt on a Third World budget,” resulting in what I call “Second World problems,” but more on that to follow.) Now in “middle age” (for those planning to live to 120), the boomers are those silver-haired surfers (former doctors and attorneys) loping toward several million in retirement. By contrast, the “life hack” many of us aging X-booms have worked out regarding our retirement, health care, and leisure activities? Two words: “medical cannabis.” (PS: The people who buy that “six-dollar red table wine blend” whose black-and-red label features a devil with horns or a woodcut of a pirate with some sort of medieval or Old English font on it, because as you know, an ornate font with lots of serifs suggests . . . classier . . . wine? Us!)

  Okay, let me double back to say the cannabis thing may be overstated. I myself have always had little tolerance for pot. In “midlife,” Charlie has tried to give me just enough “glaucoma medication” so I can tolerate Game of Thrones, but the result is always me losing consciousness fifteen minutes in and yet still waking up the next morning covered with a dragon breath’s worth of Maple Bacon Kettle Chips crumbs. This is an amazing new menopausal innovation: sleep-eating.

  However, it’s no secret that our “whirling blue marble” has been going through some tumultuous, almost apocalyptic-feeling times lately, about which literally millions of words have been written. (Bumper sticker: WHERE ARE WE GOING, AND WHY ARE WE IN THIS HANDBASKET?) So even if one isn’t getting stoned regularly, though no judgments if you are, I do think, as we struggle through day by day, there’s something to be said for checking out a little occasionally, taking a breath, and finding some restorative joy—or at least some humor, damm
it—in the small things.

  So this, in short, is what this book is: a simple year in midlife. True, being this age did not seem golden, but feeling old and young at the same time can turn out to have silver linings. (“Gratitude” is not just a word on a throw pillow any more, although it is, in fact, also a word on a throw pillow.) Yes, the daily news is surreal—but the Walmart reading glasses I bought for the fun Tina Fey frames with the slightly too-low prescription—fuzzes it. Yes, there are some weird hip-joint things going on, but no more periods—f@#$ing awesome! Yes, the personal trainer you booked is commanding you to do burpies, but that’s the beauty of not being in junior high any more—fire him!

  Speaking of junior high, this year my golden years included parenting my somewhat maturing/somewhat not school-age daughters. This is the year I woke up from all of that you-go-girl nurturing (“And do we feel you have a soy allergy, honey?”) to full-on freaking out about college. There were some unexpected (and I blush to say, not entirely unwelcome) funerals. There were the joys and surprising annoyances of spending the “Second Act” of one’s life with one’s “soulmate.” (We are both “bohemian”; we are both messy; we both do not understand home repair—or pest control. Charming at twenty—not so charming approaching sixty! Although, as always, those Tina Fey/slightly-too-low-a-prescription reading glasses help take the edge off.)

  And in fact . . . are we so different?

  I sense you too need a break.

  Take a load off.

  Pull up a virtual ($1,000-off!) Costco massage chair. Let it pound your buttocks while a Roomba (guilt-free housekeeping) gently circles.

  I’ll put Pandora on to some soothing spa music, never mind that it is neither spa nor music. Let me pour you a glass of “varietal” wine with a fourteenth-century wizard on the label (don’t worry—it has been “decanting” since Tuesday).

  Forget the bigger world; let’s celebrate the smaller world. Relax. Enjoy. Have a laugh.

  When the world has gone mad, it’s mad not to!

  The

  Madwoman

  and the

  Roomba

  The Tooth

  IT’S THAT MOMENT that comes only in dreams.

  I’m standing in my kitchen in the gauzy soft-focus pocket of the midafternoon. 3:15. The quiet space between lunch and cocktail hour.

  I’ve just gotten off a family conference call with my older sister Kaitlin, known within the family hierarchy as Eldest Daughter, Alpha Dog, or, to the younger ones, Tiger Aunt K. The territory under her vast military command is that of estates, trusts, elder care, life insurance, property deeds, and safety deposit boxes with possible forgotten silk kerchiefs of family gems.

  Sam was also on the call. Affable, seventeen years old, the first Loh grandchild (of five), Sam is applying to college. According to Sam’s perhaps admirably Zen dad (my brother Eugene, an engineer), Sam’s GPA is “somewhere in the high 3’s if you count AP classes.” Sam’s SAT’s? Oblique, slightly tortuously phrased answer: “There are kids who have been known to have gotten into college with SAT scores somewhere in that range.”

  Tiger Aunt K has gone around the back, done some digging of her own, reporting that Sam has a 3.987 GPA—basically a 4.0, right?—and a surreally high SAT score that sounds like my weight on Jupiter, but which according to the “new” scoring is apparently well up into the 90s percentage-wise. These stats more than match those of his late mother, who went to Stanford, his first choice, right before UCLA, UC Berkeley, and, for safety, UC San Diego.

  The one problem?

  The personal essay. Here Sam needed his two aunts’ help. As they say, It Takes a Village. Tiger Aunt K directs a K–12 STEM nonprofit, so is no stranger to energetic grant writing. I am a freelance writer, theater artist, adjunct teacher of science communication . . . I am no stranger to putting a “sounds more professional than it really is” face on things.

  He read us the prompt: “ ‘Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?’ ”

  There was a beat.

  Sam followed it with a sound like “Henh?”

  Tiger Aunt K pounced in, eager, Tony Robbins-like: “What are your passions, Sam? That’s all they’re asking. What do you love to do?”

  “Well, you know, just stuff.” His inflections now went up, as though tentatively fishing. “Biking . . . ? Running . . . ? Hanging out with my friends . . . ?”

  “But what drives you?” she pushed on, inspirationally. “Aren’t you driven to learning, doing, inventing, creating? Think back to your childhood!”

  I remembered that when Sam was six, when playing chess, he liked to attack with his king. Those pawns would fan out and, instead of castle-ing, his king would come out kicking, one square at a time. Not a killer strategy, but highly original.

  “Legos,” Sam said. “I’ve always built stuff with Legos . . .”

  “Good,” I said, encouragingly. “That suggests a native love of building . . .”

  “Which clearly suggests,” Tiger Aunt K quickly added, whipping up a heady self-actualization soufflé, “that Sam has a passion for international travel so he can visit African villages that need him to build water towers that are probably solar powered!”

  “Yes!” I agreed. Sam’s light protests were drowned out by my sister and I congratulating each other. No matter, her angle was brilliant—he would come round.

  I now gaze dreamily out the kitchen window into the backyard. Tree branches sway in the sun. There’s a graceful flutter of leaves. The world hovers before me, I hover outside of it. On the counter the NYT Tuesday crossword sits, not too hard, the perfect one, a quick little reward. I’m enjoying the coolness of the refrigerator, open before me. I find this a most relaxing way to snack, standing, no utensils, just hand to mouth, before a world of possibility. An open refrigerator door is a personal midafternoon wormhole to crawl into, a cosmic way station, a psychic rest stop.

  It isn’t really eating. It’s just pausing before a crumpled paper bag of last night’s Zankou chicken. Hello, friend! I pull off a morsel, take a hearty bite. It’s so moist and tender. Though it seems to contain a small round pebble.

  Hm. I pull it out—sometimes with Zankou, L.A.’s gourmet Armenian chicken chain, they’re in such a hurry to stuff those blue-and-red take-out bags, a pepper may accidentally fall into your hummus—Though this is more like a popcorn kernel, or little piece of bone—

  I fumble around in the reading glasses bowl, a lopsided blue ceramic one of my daughters made years ago at Gifted Children’s Camp— Inside is a snarl of reading glasses, half missing a stem—

  Glasses on, I look at the pebble. In contour, color, and sedimentary detail, it harkens back to a more prehistoric time. Burnt sienna, ancient, and mottled, it’s like a small chunk from some caveman tool or terra-cotta pot, from some long-forgotten Assyrian dig.

  With dawning horror I take an experimental fingertip up into the left back corner of my upper palate. It’s the location of a weirdly sharp-edged molar that I would call just a bit “squeaky.” The tooth has long had a filling, I think, from early adulthood, that has perhaps understandably gotten a bit loosened—

  But no. This is no filling.

  I am holding a piece of tooth. In my hand.

  I feel my knees buckle. I collapse against the kitchen counter.

  Obviously, by age fifty-five, I’ve lived through more than a few traumatic life events: illness, death, birth. (Never mind how I often wished for a martini-strength epidural drip that would begin in the second trimester and last until my kids turned twenty-one.) I’ve lived those totemic bleak life moments—pushing open those double doors to the ICU, or to the horrible new assisted living facility with your panicked aging parent. But with the big stuff, at least, you typically have a moment to pop three Advils, to arrange your face, to arm yourself with a stiff bouquet of flowers fr
om the fluorescent-lit gift shop.

  The last time my knees literally buckled was some ten years ago when, after a shower, I saw my towel seeming to breathe with small dark flecks. I shrieked, sprinted to the back porch, locked the door behind me, and called 911. “It’s an invasion,” I told the female dispatcher. “Should we call the CDC?”

  “You have lice,” she said. “Go buy some RID.”

  But those were temporary visitors. This chunk has come out of my mouth.

  I call Charlie.

  “Hello?” he says. Then: “Yes, the registration—”

  Charlie is at AAA trying to do a “work-around” for the fact that his 2000 VW Beetle rarely passes a smog check. “The car runs fine, it just makes smog!” he keeps repeating to anyone who will listen, as though smog testing is a violation of the bug’s basic right to exist.

  “Argh . . .” I moan. “My tooth . . . fell out!”

  “No it didn’t,” my WASP partner says immediately. When it comes to bad news, sunny denial is Charlie’s reflex response.

  “I’m looking at it. In my hand. Glasses on.”

  He has to drop the pretense.

  “Does it hurt?” he asks.

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Is it?” I find my mood brightening. I flash on a freeway billboard I’ve seen a lot of a smiling brunette, eyes dreamily closed, under the magical caption: SLEEP THRU DENTISTRY.

  A somewhat circular discussion ensues. It is true that I’ve stopped going to my dentist in Van Nuys since my move to Pasadena— More than, was it four, five, six years ago—? Oh God.

  “You can see my dentist,” Charlie offers. “Dr. Melvoin.”

  “Jack Black’s dentist?” I ask. Charlie is always one step away from stardom, as he’s a freelance theater producer. (True, there isn’t much theater in L.A., but fortunately, nor are there many theater producers.) His son’s pediatrician had the dubious honor of being the father of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss. I myself had my veneers done by yet another “dentist to the stars”—unfortunately, the “star” was one of those affable old character actors fourth barstool from the left on Cheers rather than a real star with a real nervous condition like Barbra Streisand.