On Father’s Day, my husband Maarten, our dog Chaka and I hit the road for Maryland to spend time with my Dad. Our original plans were to leave on Saturday, but since I was too ill to travel, we postponed our road trip by a day. Far from escaping the sweltering heat, we knew we had to contend with high temperatures as well as the last of Brood X – those frightening cicadas that scare me beyond reason.
We arrived at my Dad’s house just in time to see all the family licking their fingers and smacking their lips on the catered BBQ meal that they’d been so voraciously enjoying.
Dad still lives in the house I grew up in – a two-story duplex with a combo vinyl and brick siding. Downstairs, it was nice and cool, thanks to the Arctic-like blast from the air one conditioner. A couple of summers ago, I made the mistake of accidentally sitting directly in front of the AC and my legs were so numb I couldn’t walk for two days. Now upstairs is a whole ‘nother story. The fiery heat is like the 7th gate of hell. Not many people can boast of the sweltering heat in their home on purpose. I’m not entirely sure how my 92-year old dad can stand it up there. But stand it he does, and that’s the way he likes it. And he subjects anyone who goes upstairs in his humble abode to the heat, too. There are a couple of air conditioners upstairs – one on the landing and one in his room – but it’s really like using an ice cube to cool down a hot tub.
When Maarten and I travel to Maryland, we’re already aware of the inferno-like temperatures upstairs, but that never fully prepares us for the blast that assaults us as we cross the great divide from downstairs to upstairs. This trip was no different. It really gets to a point where we just need to shut up and suck it up, but that’s difficult to do when the air is sucked clean from your lungs as soon as you breathe in and your hair is full-on wilted before you make it past the first bedroom.
In the bedroom that we normally stay in at the back of the house, we often open the window to try and fool ourselves into thinking a comforting cross breeze will finds its way in the window and help cool us down. That never happens in the summer, unless a thunderstorm is on it’s way, but in the winter . . . hell yeah! So instead, to help our bodies do battle with the heat, we turn on fans. Lots of fans. An oscillating tower fan. An overhead ceiling fan. And my husband’s latest MacGyver move, a green oscillating floor fan that he’s propped up on a chair and braced with a typewriter to provide cooling trade winds. I was convinced the fan would come crashing down in the middle of the night, sending me to an early grave from sheer fright, but luckily his contraption proved to be solid.
We slept throughout the night in various forms of distress with the door closed, the window open and three fans beating down upon us. This in and of itself is a major feat. Maarten hates the sounds of fans, believing them to be far too loud and interruptive, whereas I love the lulling, soothing white noise that they provide. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve always kept the fan on well past the heat of winter and into the winter nights because the feel of it beating against the comforter was, well, comforting.
As the night wore on, I rolled my nightgown up completely over my head and hooked it behind the back of my neck to avail myself of the air that the three fans swirled around the room. Once I fell asleep, that was it; I was gone. Down for the count. Out 
like a light. Slapped in the face by the Sandman. At 5:15 in the morning, my slumber was rudely interrupted by the noise (because, yes, at 5:15 a.m., it’s not melodic…it’s just damn noise) of a bird having a serious, nonstop split personality conversation with itself right outside the window. Just mere inches from my head. Loudly.
Justifiably irritated, I reached above me – actually, it was over Maarten’s head – shoved my hand noisily between the wooden slat blinds, and slid the window shut.
“Wha–, wha–, what’s wrong? What’s going on? What are you doing?” Maarten asked groggily, snatched from his fitful sleep.
“I’m closing the window,” I said a bit too irritated, “because there’s a damn bird out there just a bit too talkative for my tastes.”
My loving husband, deprived of a comfortable, cool night of sleep, sat up and rubbed his eyes like a cranky four-year old. The sun hadn’t quite come up yet, so the room was still darkened. I swear I could hear his eyes blinking in confusion.
“The sound of a little bird chirping wakes you up, but you can sleep through the roar of the jet engine fans?!?”
I was too irritated to laugh.
“Look at me,” he motioned at himself. Despite my large eyes, I don’t share the same nocturnal gift as an owl and I barely saw the outline of the man I promised to love and cherish in sickness and in health. He felt around on the bed until he found my hand, grabbed it and forced me to feel his damp pillow. “THIS is how hot I am,” he said pitifully. I felt a little sorry for him. As I moved my arm back, my hand brushed across his t-shirt. A t-shirt. A T-SHIRT! “If you’re so hot, why are you wearing your t-shirt?” I ceased feeling sorry for him. In a huff, I rolled over and did my best to fall back to sleep.
In a small voice coming from the other side of the bed I heard, “Can we turn the air conditioner on?” He made it sound like I had personally put a Schlage padlock on the darn thing surrounded by barbed wire surrounded by an alligator-infested moat surrounded by the Plague.
Turning on the air conditioner on the landing meant leaving the bedroom door open. I had absolutely no qualms with this and, quite frankly, I’m not sure why a couple of intelligent life forces such as us hadn’t thought of it hours earlier.
“Can you show me how to turn it on?”
“It’s an air conditioner. You should be able to figure it out.”
As we settled into an uncomfortable silence, I assumed the matter was settled. That whole assume thing, right? About three minutes later, he pleaded, “Baby, please, I’m begging you, can you please turn the air conditioner on?”
I’m still not sure why my husband was so averse to getting up, walking the 15 or so feet to the steps, going down the stairs to the landing, flipping open the air conditioner panel and turning the blasted thing on himself. For what it’s worth, I got out of bed, stomped the 15 feet or so to the steps, stomped down the stairs to the landing, yanked open the air conditioner panel and turned the blasted thing on myself.
After I returned to bed, primed and ready to go back to sleep – surprise – I couldn’t fall back to sleep. So I fumed for a little bit. As I began to finally drift off into a cooler, bird-free sleep, I heard the floorboard creak under the thin carpeting in the bedroom. I rolled over and, in the pre-dawn dark and without benefit of my contact lenses or eyeglasses, saw a hulking figure standing in front of the jerry-rigged fan setup. “Maarten?” I whispered. I hate whispering.
Silence. I didn’t hear a peep out of who I thought to be my husband standing in the shadows.
In the space of one second, a myriad of thoughts flew through my mind. 1) Dammit, I know there’s somebody standing there. 2) Maarten’s not beside me so it must be him, right? 3) If it’s him, why isn’t he answering me? 4) If it’s not him, then who the f*** is it and what is he doing standing in my effin’ bedroom?!? 5) I’ve gotta defend myself! 6) There’s a pair of earrings on the nightstand; I can gouge his eyes out. 7) There’s a lamp on the nightstand; I can clobber him upside the head. 8) There’s a half a cup of tea; I can pour it down his nostrils and drown him. 9) My phone! My phone is on the nightstand! I can call the cops! 10) Oh dammit, this so reminds me of that movie, Paranormal Activity, where the majority of the movie is shot from a series of video cameras around the house, and eventually some sort of paranormal oogey boogey gets all up into somebody’s soul and then that person goes on a killing spree and stabs or bludgeons or eats everyone to death and then the killer is left standing there in the dark the same way Maarten/Not Maarten was standing in front of that damn MacGyver’d fan. 11) I’m too young to die. I still haven’t been to Disney World. 12) Maarten!!!
During the next second, I hissed, “Maarten?!?” and he’s all casual, like, “What?” like a surfer dude high on life.
“Why didn’t you answer me?”
“I just did.”
“Well what are you doing just standing there hunched over like that?”
“I’m trying to cool off in front of the fan.”
“But you didn’t answer me.”
“I did. I just answered you.”
“No, I mean the first–”
“I answered you when I heard you.”
There was no point in pursuing that line of questioning. I had less than two hours before the alarm would announce my unwilling arrival to the day and I needed to milk every second out of my lost sleep.
But then the strangest thing happened. I began to laugh. It started as a little giggle then unfurled into this huge uncontrollable thing that I recommend everyone experience at least once a month. Every cell in my body was bursting with the stress of laughter pressed into it. I clamped my hand over my mouth, curled up in the fetal position and tried to swallow the king-sized giggles whole. In the meantime, my body was shaking the bed so much that Maarten could feel the rumble of the bed and, even through his ear plugs, hear the choked, gagging sound that he could only interpret in one of two ways: 1) I was crying from neuropathic pain, something that he’s caught me doing more than once in the middle of the night since my MS diagnosis or 2) having lived with me and my extreme level of goofiness for the past 12 years, I was laughing about something that he just wouldn’t understand. He chose to go with option number one.
He gently placed his hand on my hip. “Baby,” he asked tentatively, “are you okay?”
He was the Bud Abbott to my Lou Costello. “I’m I’m–” I choked out, “okay…” I said, my voice muffled by my hand placed so tightly over my mouth that if my nose had been obstructed, I would have passed out.
“I mean, are you, what, what’s that noise? Are you crying?”
“No…” hee hee haw haw, “I’m laughing.” He rolled over with his back to me and faced the wall, no doubt rolling his eyes dramatically as he did so.
For the next 20 minutes, I tried to maintain some modicum of composure, but the giggles just wouldn’t stop, and I failed miserably. I knew that until the cold air from the down-on-the-landing air conditioner that I’d stomped my way to earlier reached up to the bedroom, he was still oppressively hot (and still wearing the t-shirt), so I tried to spare him the sight of seeing me comfortably cooler with the bedsheet wrapped around me and pulled all the way up to my nostrils like a makeshift low-rent mummy. I continued giggling until I fell off to sleep wrapped in my little cocoon of happiness.
Such are the joys and pains of married life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
