Smoky Plum is the New Black

My poor husband.

Friday  night, he helped coach at Twin B’s basketball practice. They came home, both dripping sweat, and didn’t say much other than to ask who won the national spelling bee. However, about a half-hour later, Husband walks out of the kitchen holding a bag of ice to his face and says, “Uh, I ran into Brooke’s head tonight at practice and now my eye has suddenly blown out.”

“Blown out????” I say, blasting my migraine-plagued head off the couch. You don’t say the words “blown out” to a panicker like me unless you’re at the hair salon.  ”Lemme see!”

He pulled the bag of ice away, revealing a Cadbury-egg-sized purple lump on the corner of his left eye.

“Ahhhhhh! What did you do now?” I shouted, or something similar that made him go, “Well you don’t have to get mad about it!”

“I’m not mad, but it’s just why are you always getting hurt?” I said, reminding him that he was still healing from his neck injury of three days ago, when we heard Little Miss cry out in the monitor at 3 a.m. and he flew out of bed but got his foot stuck in the blanket and fell shoulder-down smack into the door.

I took a closer look at the eye injury, which made my own eyes water.

“Want a raw steak on it?” I asked, because that’s what they did once on The Brady Bunch, when Peter got socked in the eye by Buddy Hinton while sticking up for Cindy.

“No. I don’t even know what that does,” he said.

“Me neither,” I said. “And anyway, we don’t have any. How about a bag of frozen peas?”

“What for?” he asked. “I got this!” he said, nodding toward the unwieldy bag of ice cubes in a Ziploc wrapped with a dishcloth pressed to his eye.

“Should I take you to urgent care?” I asked, already knowing what his answer was going to be.

“I don’t think so,” he answered, as if I had just asked “Will it snow here in Arizona tomorrow?”

I still wasn’t sure, so I took a picture of the injury and texted it to my sister, whose husband is a paramedic. “HELP!” I put in the subject line, and then waited. They live in Michigan, and it was going on 2 a.m. there. Still, my phone rang a few minutes later.

“Is his eye hanging out of the socket?” my sister said, repeating questions fed to her from her groggy husband, whom she jolted awake when she got my text.

“No!” I said. “It’s on the outside, not the eye BALL.”

“Is there fluid leaking out?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Is there fluid leaking out?” I asked Husband.

“I don’t think so,” he said, dabbing away the condensation from the ice bag.

“You don’t want to mess around with the eye, I’d take him in,” I heard my brother-in-law say in the background.

But since nothing was hanging or leaking out, we decided to skip the dreaded E.R. waiting room and just ice it and sleep on it.

“If I wake up and his eyeball is on the pillow, then I’ll bring him in,” I said to my sister.

Well, the next morning, I didn’t wake up next to an eyeball, but what I did wake up next to was Adam Lambert:

The swelling had gone down, but his entire eyelid was swathed in a deep plum color with a perfectly straight line of kohl black right by his eyelashes.

“It looks kinda pretty!” I said, after the initial shock wore off.

Throughout the day, I kept staring at that eye, thinking, “Now how can I get my makeup to look like that?”

I always thought that when one gets hit in the eye, one gets a black eye. But no. This one was the perfect shade of smoky plum mixed with a hint of shimmery lavender. In fact, I have an eyeshadow palette just like that called “Time for Wine.”

Even more disturbing, the swelling had pushed the outside edge of his eyebrow up into a nice little arch, the kind that some of us girls go through the pain of waxing to achieve. With a little plucking here and there, and the application of some guyliner and guyshadow to the other eye, he’d be make Adam Lambert and Pete Wentz look like amateurs.

I emailed some pictures to a half-dozen family members who I thought might be be interested or entertained. (Luckily, Husband is a good sport when it comes to these things and indulges me while I make a spectacle of him.)

My sister-in-law said, “Well, so much for trying to do a ‘guy thing’ for a change. Maybe he should stick to princess bedtime stories.” (Ah-ha, so you do read my blog! See previous post.)

My aunt said, “OK, if he starts singing, bumping and grinding, I’m running for the hills. But seriously, I’d take that photo with me to the nearest MAC counter and tell them to do their stuff.”

And now if only I can get that annoying Adam Lambert song, What Do You Want from Me? out of my head.

Poor guy. He can’t even get a decent, cool-looking shiner. And adding insult to the pretty injury?

It came from a 13-year-old girl.