Doomed (21 page)

As the waiter opened his mouth to respond, I’d turn back to the PDA in my lap and say, “Hold on! Jesus is Tweeting.”

My father caught the waiter’s eye and said, “Perry?” To his credit, my dad knows the name of every waiter in every five-star restaurant in the world. “Perry, would you give us a moment alone?” As the waiter stepped away, my dad shot my mom a look. Almost imperceptibly his eyebrows arched and his shoulders shrugged. They were trapped. As former Scientologists and former Bahá’is and former EST-holes,
they could hardly question me as I merrily keyboarded my devotions to my own choice of belief system.

Resigned, my father lifted his fork and waited for my mother to follow suit.

As they each put a first bite of food into their respective mouths, I announced, “Jesus says I should publicly support the next GOP candidate for president!”

Hearing that, both my parents gasped, inhaling food and choking. Swilling wine, they were still coughing, everyone in the dining room watching them wheeze, as my dad’s phone rang. Breathless, he answered it. “A product survey?” he asked, incredulous. “About what? About the
toothpicks I buy
?” Almost shouting, he demanded, “Who is this?” Sputtering, he demanded, “How did you get this number?”

And for that, MohawkArcher666, I thank you wholeheartedly.

Gentle Tweeter,

This, this is how the precious little kitten, Tigerstripe, came into my life.

Post-upstate, post-Nana, my parents and I were staying at the ever-lovely Beverly Wilshire hotel. We were eating breakfast in our suite, meaning: I was watching my parents eat. Meaning: My dad was playing his deprogramming games, withholding apricot Danishes and cheese strudels to make me renounce my torrid hookups with Jesus. In retaliation I kept my phone cradled to one ear, billing and cooing and otherwise ignoring my parents’ withering glances as I giggled. “Stop it, Jesus! Stop being such a tease!” I allowed my girlish eyes to flit across the white tablecloth, bypassing the flowers and the orange juice, and rest on my mother’s glaring expression. Pointedly, I examined her, scrutinizing her lips and neck before resting my attention on her bustline as I said, “No, they’re not! No, Jesus, she didn’t!”

My mom shifted uncomfortably in her chair. She lifted the napkin from her lap and daubed at the corners of her mouth. With elaborate Ctrl+Alt+Casualness, she looked at my father and asked, “Antonio, my love, would you pass me the sugar?”

Speaking to my fake Jesus boyfriend, just as I’d spoken to my entire fake circle of girlfriends, I laughed and said,
“She’s not!” I said, “I’m sitting right here, and she’s
not that bad
!”

My father passed my mother the sugar and said, “Maddy, dear, you need to not talk on the phone at the breakfast table.”

My mother began, with the utmost Ctrl+Alt+Sadism, to spoon copious amounts of sugar into her coffee.

The phone still pasted to my head, I bulged my eyes at my dad and mouthed the words
I can’t hang up
. Silently I screamed,
It’s Jesus!

How to rebel against parents who celebrated rebellion? If I did drugs and pulled a train of outlaw bikers and venereal-warted gangbangers, nothing could make my parents happier.

Acting as if breakfast were sacrosanct family time, my dad was such a hypocrite. Open on the table beside his place was the usual stack of orphan dossiers, among them a photo of two flinty eyes that stared out from a glossy head shot. These stone-colored eyes, they seemed to despise every silly luxury they could see in this sumptuous hotel setting. For the length of a gasp, the trill of my schoolgirl giggling fell silent as my own eyes were held spellbound by the craggy features and churlish expression of that particular Slavic foundling. Entranced was I by that coarse thuggish sneer.

At last my mom broke the silence by saying, “Hang up, young lady.”

Turning on her, I attacked with, “Jesus says you’re the one who’s fat.”

“Hang up now,” said my dad.

And I told them, “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger.” Into
the phone, I said, “JC? I need to call you back later.” I said, “My imperious, all-powerful dad is being a big booger; you know how that goes.” As my coup de grâce, I told the phone, “And you’re right about my mom’s belly.” With exquisite Ctrl+Alt+Deliberateness, I switched off my phone and placed it next to my empty breakfast plate. For the record, Gentle Tweeter, at that repast I’d been served nothing more than a halved grapefruit, a sliver of dry toast, and a meager poached egg. A quail egg, mind you. Such death-camp rations had hardly gilded my mood. Affecting my best Elinor Glyn attitude, I thrust my face at my father and announced, “As you seem so determined to make me suffer …” Here I closed my eyes in the style of a true heroine. “… I’d rather you just lashed out and struck me!” As other preteens might long for a large allowance or shiny hair or friends, I wanted my parents to strike me. A punch with a closed fist or a slap with an open hand, I dreamed of it. Whether the blow came from my mom or dad, those pacifist, idealist, nonviolent do-gooders, it didn’t matter. Across my cheek or into my stomach, I yearned for the impact because I knew that nothing else would shift the parent/child balance of power as effectively. If I could goad them into slugging me just once, forever afterward I could cite that incident and use the memory to win any argument.

Ah, to be Helen Burns, Jane Eyre’s childhood cohort who was stood before the students of Lowood School and roundly pulverized by Mr. Brocklehurst. Or to be Heath-cliff and have a large stone bounced against my tender head by young master Hindley. Such public abuse was my fondest desire.

Eyes closed, face serenely presented, I eagerly awaited the painful blow. I heard my mother stir her coffee, the tiny song of the spoon ringing within her china cup. I heard the rasp of my father scraping butter on his toast. Finally, my mom said, “Antonio, don’t let’s prolong this.… Go ahead; smack your daughter.”

“Camille,” my father’s voice said, “do
not
encourage her.”

I continued to lean forward, eyes closed, offering my face as a target.

“Your mother’s right, Maddy,” said my dad. “But we’re not going to start beating the crap out of you until you’re at least eighteen.”

In my mind, dear CanuckAIDSemily, I wore a blindfold and dangled a smoking Gauloise from between my lips. I prayed to be pummeled like a girlish punching bag.

My mom said, “We wanted to help you process the grief you must feel about your grandparents.”

“We have a present for you, dear,” my dad’s voice said.

I opened my eyes, and there was Mr. Wiggles. A fluttering, jolly golden fish hovered in my water glass. His protuberant eyes swiveled to ogle me. His gulping little hatch of a mouth gaped open and shut, gulped open and shut. My hard-bitten facade crumbled at the sight of the paddling, gasping little sun-colored sprite suspended in the unconsumed water of my meal. In a word, I was delighted. The name Mr. Wiggles came instantly to mind, and in that moment I was joyous, a hand-clapping, happy child wreathed by my smiling family. Then, tragically, I was not.

In the next moment, Mr. Wiggles foundered. He keeled over and floated belly-up in the glass. My parents and I stared in shocked Ctrl+Alt+Disbelief.

“Camille?” my dad asked. “By any chance did you get the waters mixed up?” He reached across the breakfast table and lifted the glass with dead Mr. Wiggles. Putting the rim to his lips, he carefully sipped around the expired fish. “It’s just as I thought.”

My mom asked, “Did Maddy get your GHB?”

“No,” he said. “I’m afraid her new goldfish did.”

My former-pothead, former-junkie, former–speed freak parents, they’d accidentally overdosed my fish by presenting him to me in a glass full of GHB. Meaning: liquid Ecstasy. Meaning: gamma-hydroxybutyric acid. Unfazed, my dad kept drinking even as my pet’s tiny golden corpse bumped and bobbed against his lips. He pinched it out with two fingers and passed the tiny victim to the Somali maid. “To the commode,” he intoned solemnly, “and henceforth to return to the great circle of life.”

Even as I reached for my phone to speed-dial Jesus and relate the details of this latest atrocity, my mom pushed the basket of pastries within my reach and sighed. “So much for Mr. Fish … What say we go out today, Maddy, and adopt you a pretty little baby kitten?”

Gentle Tweeter,

My parents never adopted anything without issuing a minimum of ten million press releases. Tigerstripe was no exception. A documentary film crew shadowed us to a no-kill cat shelter in East Los Angeles, where my father and I weighed the merits of the various abandoned strays. My mother led the phalanx of cameras to a wizened tabby, alone in its wire-mesh cell. Examining the index card on which was printed the animal’s curriculum vitae, she said, “Ooooh, Madison, this one has leukemia! Its prognosis is death within four months. That sounds perfect!”

Topmost among the criteria my parents sought in any dependent relationship was impermanence. They wanted homes, employees, businesses, and adopted Third World orphans of which they could divest themselves at a moment’s notice. Nothing offers better public relations fodder than something you can rescue and love intensively for a month and then be filmed burying at a lavish funeral.

When I declined the dying tabby, my dad steered me toward an aged calico tom. The shelter staff estimated it had approximately six weeks left to live. “Diabetes,” my dad said, nodding solemnly. “Let that be a lesson to you, young lady, for the next time you want another sugary snack.”

The documentary cameras followed us from one doomed
kitty to the next. From cats with infectious peritonitis to those with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Some struggled with the effort to lift their dying heads as I scratched behind their feverish ears. This seemed less like a cat shelter than a feline hospice. Confronted by kitties suffering from intestinal tumors and terminal pyometra, I felt awful. It’s true, they all wanted love and a home, but I didn’t want any of them. I wanted something that would live to love me back.

A Siamese lay on disposable paper training pads, too weak to control its bladder. A Persian cried plaintively and blinked gummy, cataract-clouded eyes at me. When my dad saw the long list of medications it required day in and day out, his face brightened into a smile. “This guy can’t last for long, Maddy!” With one hand, he coaxed me toward the cat’s smelly cage, and he said, “You can name him ‘Cat Stevens’ and give him the biggest memorial service any cat ever had!”

My mom mugged for the cameras and added, “Children absolutely adore holding little funerals for their pets … creating a little cemetery and filling every grave! It teaches them awareness for subsoil bacterial life-forms!”

If my mother possessed respect for any life-forms, her own mother wasn’t among them. When my nana died of a stroke on Halloween night, from an errant blood clot generated by her cancer, my mom flew in from Cannes the next day carrying the infamous aquamarine evening gown encrusted with sequins and seed pearls. “Haute couture,” she’d said, entering the office of the backwoods mortuary, the dress sealed in a clear plastic garment bag and draped across her arm. The upstate undertaker was dazzled: Sitting on the opposite side of his desk were Antonio and Camille
Spencer. Fawning, he acknowledged that the dress was gorgeous, but then he explained patiently that it was a size four and Nana Minnie’s cancer-riddled corpse was a size ten. Without missing a beat, my dad slipped a checkbook out of his inside jacket pocket and asked, “How much?”

“I don’t understand,” said the undertaker.

“To make the dress fit,” prompted my mom.

The poor naive mortician, he asked, “It’s so lovely. Are you certain you want me to split the seams?”

My mother gasped. My father shook his head in bitter disbelief, saying, “That dress is a work of art, buster. You touch one stitch of it, and we’ll sue you into bankruptcy.”

“What we want,” my mom explained, “is for you to perform a little trimming … a touch of lipo here and there … so that my mother looks her best.”

“The camera,” my dad said, “adds ten pounds.” By this point he was penning a steep six-digit number.

“Cameras?” asked the undertaker.

“Maybe you can also take a little tuck behind her ears …,” said my mom as she demonstrated by pinching the skin at her own temples until her cheeks stretched smooth and taut. “And a little breast augmentation, a lift, maybe some implants so the bodice will hang right.”

“And hair extensions,” my dad added. “We want to see lots of hair on the old gal.”

“Maybe,” my mom suggested, “you could just snip out her kidneys and move them up here a little.” She cupped her hands over her own flawless breasts.

My father signed the check with a flourish. “And we’ve contracted with a tattoo artist.” He tore the draft from his checkbook and waved it beside his face, smirking. “That
is, unless you have any objections to Minnie’s getting inked …”

“Oh,” my mom said, snapping her fingers. “And no underthings, not a thong, nothing. I do not want the world watching this funeral live by satellite and seeing panty lines on my beloved, dear, dead mother.”

I thought my mom might cry at this point of the funeral planning, sitting there in the mortician’s office. Instead she turned to me and asked, “Maddy, honey, what’s wrong with your eyes? How did they get so red and swollen?” She took a vial of Xanax out of her bag and offered me one. “Let’s get you some cucumber slices for that puffiness.”

I had, Gentle Tweeter, been weeping nonstop since Halloween. Not that my mother ever noticed.

When I recall my nana’s kiss, I taste cigarette smoke. By comparison my mother’s kisses were flavored with anti-anxiety medications.

In the no-kill cat shelter, she was once more foisting Xanax on me in an effort to make me accept a large Manx with a thick coat of black fur. It didn’t seem to matter to her that the cat had died moments before. My dad lifted its still-warm body out of its littered cage and tried to settle the stiffening corpse into my pudgy arms. “Just take it, Maddy,” he whispered. “On-camera it will read as only being asleep. We don’t have all day.…”