The Madwoman and the Roomba Read online

  “But wait,” I say, “wasn’t Dr. Melvoin arrested for that thing?”

  “Oh yeah,” Charlie says.

  “When did you last see him?” I say accusingly.

  “I think I was still living back in Eagle Rock?”

  Somehow this gives me an opportunity to lash out at my partner.

  “Good lord! Look at us! We’re just show trash, aging bohemians who keep trying to phone this all in! We’re in our fifties now—the artsy ‘college’ thing isn’t going to hack it. We can’t just throw a paisley shawl over a peed-on futon anymore! We’re falling apart!” I fling one final triumphant—if slightly tortuously phrased—salvo at him: “There’s probably something about retirement we should be doing also!”

  UPON HANGING UP, I realize this is an emergency situation. There’s no longer any pretending.

  I now remember how my web designer friend Katie Lazar always said how she had the best, most gentle dentist. Trouble is, Katie has changed her e-mail so many times—from Hotmail to Gmail to RoadRunner—from Katie, to KatieKat, to KTG, to KandMSommers204 (was that her husband?)—

  Oh, wait a minute, I think. Facebook.

  I am proud to say I have several thousand friends on Facebook. I’m less proud to admit that this may have less to do with my intrinsic popularity than with Facebook’s curious algorithms. Example: while The Madwoman in the Volvo was my memoir on menopause, it is most often “liked” by Middle Eastern men brandishing rifles whose names are literally in Arabic. (Is it because they object to a woman driving?)

  No matter. I type Katie a personal message: “I’m so humiliated. My dental health is so poor I literally spat a tooth out! I need the sort of dentist who specializes in adult babies in diapers wheeled in hysterical on gurneys! Who’s yours? Help!”

  After a very carefully chewed (on the right side) early dinner, I return to check the computer. Next turn: in my state of disorientation, instead of sending a private message to Katie, I have somehow managed to post tidings of my rotting mouth to everyone I know on Facebook. We’re talking old high school and college friends, professional acquaintances, Goodreads buddies, the Sierra Club, and (if the photos are to be believed) no less than Barack and Michelle Obama.

  On the upside? This thread is hu-u-uge, and (someone is typing . . . ) growing. It turns out, middle-aged people are really obsessed with their dentists. Within one hour, thirty dentists have been recommended, in locations ranging from Marina del Rey to Rancho Cucamonga, each with its own throaty exhortation (“Ignore the others—you must see Dr. Norris!”).

  As the tsunami of comments grows into the night, my dental emergency starts turning into a kind of dental internet café.

  Aside from fascinating details about molars, root canals, and bridgework, there’s riffing on the word “tooth”—the whole tooth, nothing but the tooth, you can’t handle the tooth, and of course, because I am half Asian: “Chinese dental time—tooth hurty.”

  Fellow Facebook friends are starting entire side conversations with one another: “David, how can you go to a dentist named Devoree Prepsky?” and “You should talk, yours is Dr. Alma Vilkus-Stockus—what kind of a name is Dr. Alma Vilkus-Stockus?”

  There’s rapturous discussion of favorite medications—from Valium to Ativan to Tylenol 3, in 2 milligrams, 5 milligrams, 10 milligrams. People go from describing dental emergencies they’ve endured to posting favorite dentist scenes from movies. These range from Dustin Hoffman being tortured by his Nazi doctor in Marathon Man to Tom Conti as a poet with bad teeth in Reuben, Reuben to Jack Nicholson as the crazy dental patient in Little Shop of Horrors.

  At this point, new arrivals are marveling at the very size of the thread. One commentator suggests I dress my piece of tooth in a top hat and a costume, and photograph it like Mr. Peanut. Good God. My tooth has gone viral.

  The bottom line: out of all these wonderful L.A. dentists in my brand new Rolodex, I decide I will go with Nan Thompson in Glendale, who “specializes in terror.” Even before coming in, I indulge in several phone conversations with the extremely patient Dr. Thompson. Emboldened by all those rantings on Facebook, I utter my “inner monologue” aloud—the first official sign of true middle age, to wit: “I am a fifty-five-year-old person who panics. Sure, I’ve had children and everything but the dentist is really where I freak out. I hold on to nurses. I grab them. I attack them. You may need to hit me over the head with a frying pan.”

  She calmly listens as I ruminate and hypothesize about the various ways this could go (“I might jump out of a window”). I doubt eHarmony.com supports this much prescreening.

  SO DR. THOMPSON and I seal the deal. The next day, Charlie drives me. In one of those signature romantic outings of middle age, we have made dual overdue dental appointments.

  And let me tell you what a “terror specialist” does. She welcomes you. She seats you. She quietly adjusts the chair while making small talk. Then she says, very gently, “May I look into your mouth?”

  Even though a chunk of fairly strange-looking tooth has fallen out and clearly something has gone terribly wrong, instead of screaming, “Good God! It’s the worst thing I’ve seen! The entire mouth is unsaveable!” Dr. Thompson warmly murmurs, without missing a beat, “Nice! Beautiful veneers! And not too many cavities!”

  Do you see? This is a dentist with a very low bar. She’s saying, “Wow! Look at these! You appear to have teeth! Good job, young lady! You also have a head! Neat!”

  In fact, Dr. Thompson is so mellow and friendly and complimentary that it takes totally happy and relaxed me a moment to process her review of my X-ray. To wit: “This may not be the news you want to hear, but due to a split root, infection, and bone loss, we should really extract that tooth.”

  The “good news” is that an implant will be just $5,000 and quote, unquote: “You’ll be buried with it!”

  Even better news: “I can pull it out right now.”

  With novocaine! I balk. Novocaine.

  Shiver. No can do. Not today.

  I pad defeatedly out to the waiting room. Charlie goes in next. He emerges, looking pale. Because we’re damaged goods, he too needed a tooth pulled. However, being a cheerful WASP (“I’m unkillable!”), he just went for it, on the spot. His queasy report: “She kind of put her knee on my chest and there was this ‘EE ee EE ee EE!’ ” He makes a squeegee sound and moves clasped hands back and forth as though jacking up a car.

  There was no choice but to schedule oral surgery the following Monday and to medicate. I got Valium, Vicodin, and amoxicillin when my (possibly infected?) sinus went temporarily numb.

  The night before my procedure, it was a bottle of merlot and the only movie I could stomach, Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. I felt after three hours of watching raggedy Scots beat the hell out of one another, a simple Glendale tooth extraction would seem like a spa treatment.

  And it was. Wow!

  I’m thinking of naming my first grandchild “Anesthesia.”

  And of changing my Facebook relationship status to “In love with Nam Cho, DDS, Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery.” But perhaps I’ll wait until the pain medication runs out.

  “Winter” Is Coming HERE

  “January”

  Welcome to the Jungle (aka: Mice!)

  I AM IN A household that’s less mixed race or mixed religion than—if this is even a phrase—mixed pest.

  My creed? I believe creatures of all types may live in this world. Just not in my kitchen. I pay the mortgage. This is my building. These are my rules. And the first rule is, no ants. If I see a trail on the floor or cluster in the sink, gently swarming, I will grab a Windex bottle and frenetically pump the plastic trigger, spraying the magical blue fluid everywhere, until all is still. Then I’ll wipe up the whole mess with paper towels and stuff them in the garbage.

  Unfortunately, the human pests—I mean, inhabitants—in my home do not approve.

  To begin with, my two daughters, Hannah, fifteen, and Sally, eleven, are idealists. Bossy young idealist
s. I didn’t make my daughters that way—California did. California really is different. It’s not just the election that showed us that. California just is. All the jokes are true.

  Think of our longtime former leader Jerry Brown. Years ago known as “Governor Moonbeam,” that’s long over. I don’t know how it happened, but once he started losing his hair and not replacing it, Jerry Brown just got older and tougher and more leathery and didn’t give a damn, like some dude from the HBO series Oz.

  Jerry Brown survived a deficit and fires and droughts and Jane Fonda (right?). And so it became “We’re California, everyone, f@#$ you!” We’re armed with hemp bullet vests, pita chips set on stun.

  In Hannah’s California public middle school, there was supposed to be a debate about gay marriage, but the teacher couldn’t find one student to argue against it. The teens literally couldn’t fathom what such an argument would be. Now in high school, Hannah is in the LGBT Club, like all the other cool teens. It’s the law, but what she’s really become passionate about is the environment. She follows various things about it on Instagram, which I could describe to you if I understood Instagram, or Snapchat (is that still a thing?). Bottom line, the sight of plastic bags makes her nauseated. “People are just so lazy,” she says, snapping her gum in disgust. “People are lame.”

  As am I.

  “COMPOST? We don’t have a COMPOST?” Hannah exclaimed recently, rolling her eyes.

  “Why don’t you start by picking up all the old Halloween candy stuck to the floor of your room?” I said. “Or is that some kind of ‘compost’? PS: Ants in your ‘compost’—have you noticed?”

  My fingers itch for my Windex bottle. And roll of paper towels. Which Hannah points out is killing both innocent living creatures and forests.

  Hannah’s younger sister Sally is one of California’s disturbing new wave of child vegetarians. I think she caught it from a youthful, pretty vegan yoga teacher who was mysteriously allowed on public school grounds. Although some child vegetarians catch it from the other child vegetarians. It is not because these children like tofu and actual vegetables. Oh no. #secretbacon. The reason for the vegetarianism is always more connected to a vague emotionally upswelling dreamscape. There are misty eyes, there is tearing up. As part of the tale, the sullen overweight family cat is—against his wishes—tightly cradled. It’s the same cat that kills birds and leaves them headless on the bathroom floor. The fish feed is, as usual, forgotten. (Never mind that fish eat other fish.)

  The bottom line being, Sally refuses to let me kill anything, not even a spider. We’re supposed to trap it in a water glass and release it gently into the wild, even if this is a project that takes the greater part of an hour.

  And finally, of course, we come to Charlie. Both divorced from our first and only marriages, we’ve been cohabiting for eight years. We’ll leave aside the matter of equality. Yes, because I make more of the money, Charlie theoretically does more of the “housework”—although in practice that’s a loosely defined term.

  We’ll leave aside the fact that ours is the sort of couple where the man believes his woman is neurotic, impatient, and continually overreacting. Which is to say, I’ll observe something with my own eyes—

  Perhaps the computer is acting up. A porch bulb has burned out. Flames are coming out of the dishwasher—

  And, not even looking up from the New York Times food section, Charlie will tell me why what I’m seeing is not possible. (A girlfriend of mine is married to an extremely intelligent, know-it-all paramedic. In her pregnancy’s third trimester, she turned to him in the middle of the night and said, “My water broke.” Literally in his sleep, he said, “No, it didn’t.”)

  We’ll leave aside the fact that Charlie, a Scotch-Irish white-as-the-driven-snow Columbia English major from Evanston, Illinois, is a practicing Hindu. And I don’t mean California Lite Eastern Mysticism, where a single “Om” after yoga class is followed by a trip to Whole Foods for kombucha tea. Charlie chants loudly in Sanskrit at home before his little attic altar and attends, without laughing, Hindu fire festivals.

  So, re: insects. Charlie (a) doesn’t see insects, (b) believes, if they do appear, they have the same karmic rights to exist as us, so (c) no action should be taken as, in any case, they are natural, seasonal, and ebb and flow on their own (he one time asked, “Aren’t maggots seasonal?”), and (d) he has this thing about toxic chemicals.

  “You’re spraying Windex over where we eat!” he’ll say. “You’re poisoning us!” Fair enough. So over the years, thanks to YouTube and wikiHow—I love wikiHow!—I’ve developed what I call the Organic Killing Fields.

  I’ve learned how to keep pests at bay in a more healthful and organic manner. For instance, did you know that ants do not like mint or peppermint? So to disinvite them, just smear the threshold of your kitchen door with toothpaste! Do you know “wikiHow” to make a fruit fly trap? Simply take a plastic deli container, fill it with an inch of apple cider vinegar, and jab holes in the top with the sharp tip of a meat thermometer—jab, jab, jab! It’s very satisfying.

  It’s true that when it comes to regular flies, with their teeth-grating buzzing, kindly Sally tries to “dance” them out. I just smack them, hard. My weapon of choice? Forget a fly swatter or a newspaper—that’s for amateurs. For size and heft, I’ve found the perfect fly-killing tool is a rolled-up New Yorker magazine, which Charlie has piles of. He won’t miss the February 27 issue. Unfortunately, it’s so effective I recently broke a window pane. So I now compromise with AARP Magazine, which now seems to be omnipresent in our home. I use the one with Dave Matthews on the cover.

  ALL OF WHICH is a lengthy backstory to this: recently, during dinner, I get up to go to the kitchen to refill the bread basket. And I see it. Amid the friendly array of metal bowls, colorful dishes, and moist cutting boards— Across the top of the stove— Across the metal lip that abuts the wall—

  A furry gray thing the size of a stick of butter quickly scuttles, right to left. Long stringy tail. To say I scream would be like saying Beyoncé is slightly confident about her body. The family rushes in to support me, as I collapse. “I saw a mouse!” I shrill.

  That is a lie. I feel I have actually seen a small rat, due to the tail. But all of this unwelcome data is coming too quickly. And now, of course, with an attentive audience of four, the thing is gone. The rodent has deployed his five-second performance for the exact moment when Nervous Mom entered the kitchen.

  “I mean, like a bear, couldn’t he hear me coming?” I exclaim. “I’m wearing clogs, for God’s sake! Was that really the moment to run across the stove?”

  As usual, Charlie insists this is not possible. Why? Our house, I should mention, is a large wooden 1906 craftsman with many nooks and crannies. In the honeycombed crawl space below lives a feral cat that we have dubbed “Rico.”

  “So you can’t have seen a mouse,” he says.

  At which point, I thank God I have a sensible life partner. My Second Husband. Whose name is Angie. Who has a List.

  Although, to be honest, when you type the words “rodent control” into Angie’s List it’s a little horrifying. Word of advice, to pest control people. In selecting images to advertise your business, we’re already a bit freaked out by the grisly details. Think of the gentle artistry of feminine hygiene ads, or Viagra ads. Help us out with feel-good metaphors. We want to see a woman in pink capri pants skipping joyously through a field, or an attractive silver-haired couple chuckling in side-by-side soak tubs in wine country.

  For “rodent control” companies, a reassuring image might include a smiling family in matching cardigans enjoying a candlelit picnic on their living room floor. Or perhaps a mom in shorty shorts lolling on that same floor eating Triscuits and reading O Magazine— Think, essentially, people not afraid to come in contact with their floors, as opposite to me, who now traverses my home by hopping as though electrocuted, with my hands over my eyes, screaming “No! No! No!”

  No such luck. Scrolling th
rough the ads and coupons, I see intimate color close-ups of rats and mice, with reddish eyes, shiny noses, and trembling whiskers, either outside, gazing victoriously to the sky, Willard-like, or, most memorably, on a cheese plate. That’s right. I see a furry, sparkly-eyed rodent slyly turning to us—essentially, photo bombing—an otherwise tasty-looking cheese plate.

  But, oh! To its right, there’s a 30 percent-off coupon for “live animal trapping.” I click on it, cinch my spa robe belt, cross my fingers.

  THE VERY NEXT DAY, a pest control specialist comes to my house. He is a youthful tattooed man in blue coveralls named Fabian, whose narrow facial features, truth be told, make him look himself like a mouse. Fabian finds mouse droppings under the sink, indicating that we do indeed have rodents.

  I’m elated! Until now, I was the only person in my house who thought I saw a mouse. This means I am not crazy!

  My elation fades when I learn Fabian-the-pest-control-guy’s plan.

  It’s true that I am not an expert in getting rid of rodents. I guess I was vaguely hoping for some kind of computer-driven laser beam or humane technology involving sonic waves. (SLEEP THRU DENTISTRY!) But no. Fabian is now trundling in an old-fashioned wooden mousetrap, with the gnarly metal spring, two big white glue boards, and, yes . . . a jar of Skippy peanut butter. Creamy style.

  Under the stove the glue boards go. We can call Fabian when we catch something. Nothing happens, day after day, so we assume that the mouse simply ran back outside. Then Friday noon, I’m eating a salad, in my home office, and to my disbelief, I see, just a few feet in front of me, a small gray shivering fur ball. It’s a tiny baby mouse, the size of my thumb, plodding around in methodical circles, looking confused, on the shaggy IKEA rope rug under the computer table where I work. Oh my God.