At the Request of Notarius: Miss Edith and The Tale of the Ring

Many years ago, when Notarius and I had been shacked up for maybe a year or so, we had a dramatic moment.

It began when I was making a huge pot of vegetarian chili. This was something I did every week or so, much as I do now; the pot I use today is the same pot I used then. It’s a huge black Le Creuset Dutch oven, an absolute monster of a pot that weighs a ton when empty and even more when full of chili. It was one of the first things Notarius and I bought together when we forged our domestic partnership. I expect we will use it until we are dead, unless one of us manages to shatter it first, but that seems unlikely.

I wore on my hands, in those days, two rings, one on the ring finger of each hand. One was a plain silver band, like a wedding ring, but sterling silver. The other ring, on my right hand, was also sterling silver, but much heavier, thicker, and had set into it a highly polished garnet. I had designed this ring myself and having the ring made was a special gift my mother made to me when my brother got married. I never took off these rings; I slept with them, I bathed with them, I cooked with them – I took them off, as best I can recall, only when I was doing something really really messy, like mixing dough or meatloaf by hand.

So there we were. As I recall it was a rather placid Sunday afternoon, though I can’t be sure of that. What I remember was that it was an entirely unremarkable day – I only make chili on unremarkable days – and the chili was simmering happily in the pot when I noticed that one of my rings, the one with the garnet, was not on my hand.

“Hey,” I said to my beloved, “Do you know where my ring is?”

My beloved did not. “It must be in the kitchen,” he said. This sounded reasonable. Was it on a counter? By the sink? On the kitchen table? No to all. The ring was nowhere. I was not happy. How could I have lost my special ring? The “wedding” ring was also special – I’d bought it for myself to commemorate my graduating from college, to replace a lovely but distinctly undignified silver ring in the shape of a snake that wrapped up my ring finger and had an amethyst on the back of the snake’s head. It was punk and cool and it looked great on me, but I had known it would not be a good accessory on job interviews, and so I’d convinced myself to acquire the “wedding” ring instead. It had cost $42 (the same amount as the snake ring, which I had felt was a sign). The ring with the garnet, the retail value of which I did not know, was worth far more to me than the “wedding” ring. I was very, very upset about not knowing where it was.

Notarius tried to keep me calm. “It’s got to be around here somewhere,” he said. “Maybe it’s in the chili!” I said hopefully. I had a method (which I no longer use) of mashing up the canned plum tomatoes for chili by sticking my hand in the can and just crunching up the tomatoes. A ring could easily slide off in those circumstances, and there were at least two cans’ worth of tomatoes in that big pot. I carefully and methodically began to transfer spoonsful of chili into a smaller bowl so that I could inspect the chili, hunting for the ring. This was time consuming, and netted me no ring.

“Maybe it’s in the garbage,” I said gloomily. “It probably is!” Notarius said. I spread garbage bags and newspapers out on the floor and dumped the kitchen trash onto the floor. The ring was nowhere. At this point, I was really at a loss. How could I explain to my mother what had happened to the ring?

“It’s going to turn up in some totally unexpected place,” Notarius said, trying to comfort me. “It can’t have gone far.” He used a flashlight to look under the refrigerator and under the stove; we found dustbunnies but no ring. Finally he urged me to come watch TV and relax. “It’ll turn up,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

In those days we used the living room of our apartment as our bedroom; the two bedrooms in the apartment were used as studies. (This made entertaining a little weird occasionally, but when it was just the two of us at home it was a perfectly fine arrangement.) So I followed Notarius into the living room/bedroom, where the TV was on. He sat in his rocking chair, and I perched nervously at the foot of the bed, wondering what the hell had happened to my garnet ring.

After a few minutes, I decided to keep looking for it. I’d already spent probably an hour scouring the kitchen for the ring, but it had to be around someplace. It wasn’t like I’d lost it around town; I was too nervous a person to’ve let that happen. I felt too weird without the ring on to let that happen. So I stood up. Notarius looked over at me, clearly thinking, “Oh, Christ, here we go again.” Standing up, I looked down at the folded blanket I’d been sitting on. And I noticed a little round imprint. Just the size of a ring.

All this time that I’d been sifting through chili and garbage and dustbunnies looking for the ring, I realized, it had been on my person the whole time… just not in its usual place. I slid my hand tentatively over my butt, which was in a pair of jeans at the time. Indeed: a small, circular lump. I slid my hand under the denim, under my underwear… and there was my garnet ring: stuck to my ass.

We were immediately convulsed with laughter, and also immediately remembered the classic Nicholson Baker scene – I believe it’s in his much-underrated second novel, Room Temperature, which I’ve just begun to re-read – when our protagonist/narrator remembers a night when his girlfriend gets out of bed to pee in the middle of the night. Sleepy, she notices some coins have somehow landed in the bed, and she’s been sleeping on them. “Dime on my bottom,” she says, removing a coin from a cheek.

It was just like that, except instead of “dime on my bottom,” it was “ring on my ass”.

In case anyone is wondering, I happen to know exactly how this happened, by the way. I had, while cooking, taken a little potty break – hey, these things are necessary sometimes – and after washing my hands but not drying them perhaps as thoroughly as I ought to have done, I had straightened out my shirt (tucked into jeans) and underwear (slightly crumpled in tucking-in process) by sliding my hand into the back of my jeans at my ass. Somehow, the ring had slid off, and I had not noticed it while sitting…because I’d been cooking, i.e., standing up ever since leaving the toilet. It was only once I sat down again that I could re-discover the ring.

To this day, in our household, whenever something goes missing, Notarius will helpfully suggest that I check my ass.

What a charmer.