My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Night Light Fight

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.

I know a lot of other couples have similar bedtime issues, and I hope this column has been helpful. I hope this column has the ability to save the 50 percent of marriages that end in divorce. Or that, at the very least, it helps put one of you to sleep.