Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life (19 page)

I was also wide awake. Since the last time they had gone out of town, I had forgotten how to sleep without someone trying to steal my pillow. The bed felt less like open space to be claimed by me than empty space I wasn’t capable of filling up. This is what life would be like without them, I thought, which made me
get up and head into Alice’s room. I curled up in her bed, her stuffed animals weighing down my feet. The cat jumped on the bed and wedged herself into the small of my back and immediately began agitating for me to move. Something hard pressed into my cheek from under the pillow. I pulled it out and flipped on the bedside light; it was the good soap box. I placed it back under the pillow, its soft aroma mingled with my daughter’s unmistakable pillow perfume, and fell soundly asleep.

THIS HOUSE, THE HOUSE IN WHICH WE LIVE, IS NOT LARGE
. There is enough room for all the living things—two adults, the one child, the dog, and the cat—but it was built during a time when people were shorter, had less stuff, and were pretty excited by a roof not made of hay.

When I bought this house, I was the only one living in it. I am not very large. The house is not very large. This worked. At its best, when the house wasn’t collapsing or leaking, I appreciated how it was scaled down for me, like my own domestic Disneyland. When you’re five foot three, twenty-foot ceilings just remind you that you’re paying for square footage only the flies are enjoying. Then Consort moved in and the house contracted slightly. He was off-scale to the house and it punished him by creating extra corners at just about shin height for him to discover. We were starting to think maybe we needed to find a larger place, one that didn’t resent him personally, when Alice arrived and the house went back to being the right size. She was so very small, and I wanted to be no more than a few feet from her at any time, so the house, obligingly, made itself into a cozy nest. I was never more than an arm’s reach from a cloth diaper or a fresh change of clothing for either of us.

About this time, we went to visit a business associate of Consort’s at his mini estate in a fashionable neighborhood. His
wife, a ferociously educated and meticulously groomed woman, gave me the tour of the house, which she had helped design. I was dazzled by the size of it, easily ten times the area of our house, but I was puzzled when she gestured down one long hallway and said, “That’s the girls’ wing.” I peered down the elegantly appointed tunnel toward where I guessed her eight-year-old twin daughters’ rooms were and asked, “And your bedroom is
where
again?”

She laughed an educated and groomed laugh and pointed the other way. “Through the great room, past the gym.” I glanced down at my tiny daughter, asleep in her stroller, and couldn’t imagine designing a house that would put me that far away from her. Must be an older-kid thing, I figured.

As it turned out, the kids weren’t the only ones in that family with distant beds. The husband had a whole second family in another country. The divorce was as sordid as the house had been icily pristine, spare and spacious and perfectly designed to keep every member of the family a stranger to each other.

As Alice grew we kept planning to move, but every time we’d start thinking about it, housing prices would climb to a new and more ludicrous plateau. Around the time Alice turned two, I overheard what someone paid for a bungalow down the block and realized with a jolt that we could no longer afford to move into our own house. The fact remained, there was something sane about the house we had now: the size of it; the environmental footprint; the monthly nut. We stopped talking about the move and started talking about the renovation.

However, talking about renovating is not actually renovating; we have yet to get around to the renovation. At first, the renovation didn’t start because Consort is a perfectionist and I
get bored easily. He would bring home seventy-eight different tiles so we could pick out the ideal kitchen backsplash, and after the third tile I would use my trick of sleeping with my eyes open. Then the renovation didn’t happen because we had to choose between the perfect kitchen or keeping Alice in extracurricular activities. If she didn’t have extracurricular activities, Alice would never get tired, and there is no backsplash in the world that makes up for a child who is not tired and will not go to bed and wants to watch
The Daily Show
with you.

We lived in a small house. We continue to live in a small house. Alice does not live on the other side of the great room because there isn’t one room in this house that could be defined in size or quality as being “great.” If my child calls for me in the night, she doesn’t need to use the phone. We are, for better or worse, a family that knows one another. When a family lives in as close proximity as we do, the first thing to go is privacy. How can I keep forgetting to lock the door when I enter the bathroom? More intriguing, perhaps, is what kind of powerful pheromones do I emit when I enter the bathroom, and why must every living creature be drawn to them? I walk in and shut the door. After the perfect amount of time to get myself into an embarrassing state, the door bursts open and Daughter strolls in.

“Hi!” she announces, cheerily.

“What did I say about knocking before coming into the bathroom?”

Alice tries to remember, and decides whatever I said was superfluous, so she answers with, “I want Mexican food for dinner.”

“Well, this isn’t a restaurant, you always want Mexican food for dinner, and it’s nine thirty in the morning. Did we really need to discuss this now?”

We stare at each other. Then she remembers something vital to her health.

“I cut my leg. I need a Band-Aid.”

“Where?”

“In the medicine cabinet.”

“No. Where did you cut your leg?”

Alice cannot find said injury to her leg.

“No, wait. It’s on my hand.”

“Alice, please go find your father and talk to him and leave me alone.”

She leaves. After a beat, there is a knock. “Person in here!” I bark.

“I know,” Consort answers through the door, somewhat perplexed. “Alice said you wanted to talk to me?”

“No, I want
you
to talk to
her
. I want
you
and
me
to have some romance left in our relationship, so can I please have some time to myself?”

“Of course. Of course.”

Out in the hallway, I can hear Consort retreat and Alice approach.

“What did Mommy want?”

“She wants some alone time, honey. Let’s take the dog for a walk.”

“I don’t want to.”

I could have told him that. Alice, athletic as she is, is growing up in Los Angeles and views her feet as something to be adorned, not used. The dog, having heard the word “walk,” comes prancing excitedly to join Consort and Alice in the hallway. The dog needs his nails trimmed, so now, along with the
sounds of my family negotiating a walk, are the sounds of a touring company of
42nd Street
rehearsing a big number right outside the bathroom door.

“Put on some shoes, sweetie, and we’ll go out for a nice walk.”

Alice sighs and, sensing the inevitability of being forced to use her feet, tries to make the whole experience at least visually pleasant. “Can I wear my new shoes?”

Simultaneously, from two different sides of the door, Consort says, “Sure, whatever.” And I shout, “Not the new shoes!”

Alice stands closer to the door and negotiates.

“Pleeease?”

“No.”

“PLEEEEEEEEEEEASE!?!?!?!”

“Absolutely not. Those are your new dress shoes.”

The door slams open again. Alice and dog enter as one. The dog places his head on my knee and looks up adoringly. Consort stands just beyond the threshold, looking apologetic. The cat slips through the open door and starts batting around a disposable razor.

Alice begins pleading, “I want to wear my new shoes!”

Seeing no hope of ever being alone, I offer a compromise. “How about cowboy boots?”

“Fine,” Alice snorts, after a sulking beat.

Consort tries to hustle everyone out, but Alice stands her ground.

“Now what?” I demand.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she explains. “You all have to leave.”

When you live in a small house with a child, you can’t get away from the child as easily as big-house owners can. There is no gift-wrapping suite or maid’s yoga-room where I can banish my offspring should I feel so inclined. There is only her room, and eventually I will have to go in there, if for no other reason than half my winter clothing is stored in her closet. In a small house, the kid is always around. For the most part, this pleases me. I rather enjoy looking at and talking to my kid. Still, I lose all composure when it comes to being the governess of good habits. I blame this on proportion.

In a large house, the bed of a child, lavishly unmade, might represent less than 1 percent of the entire domestic acreage. In our house, if Alice throws off the blankets just right, I will be stepping over them on the way to and from the garage. Dishes left on the kitchen table comprise less of a big home’s overall visual composition than the hand towels in the downstairs guest’s second bathroom. In the more modestly sized home like ours, you can see the dishes on the table from almost any point in the house, just as you can see the Eiffel Tower from almost any point in Paris. In the small house, every design choice takes up a larger proportion of the visual space. That’s what I mean by “proportion.” Were we to move into Hearst Castle, wet towels on a bathroom floor wouldn’t even register on my housekeeping radar. In our house, a wet towel either needs to be picked up immediately or risks being designated as sculpture by a city inspector.

Another aspect of snug living means none of us will ever say, “Gosh, how long have you had that unconscious habit?” We know exactly how long you’ve had it. We even remember how good life was before you had it.

Consort hums a single line of a song, over and over. He doesn’t hum the whole song because that would give it closure. He doesn’t sing it, which might draw his attention to the fact that he’s doing it and cause him to stop. No, he gets some unimaginable subconscious joy humming the same line over and over. Forever. Or until I start to claw at my skull.

He’ll be in the office, cleaning out e-mail. I am in the living room, mere feet away, reading a book. He is humming the first line to “Can the Circle Be Unbroken,” an upbeat little number about someone burying his mother.

Of course, our little Alice is test-driving her own unconscious habits, which I won’t go into here because on her they’re adorable and I think she inherited most of them from me anyway. Still, I think she’s pleased to note how virtually all of them make her mother fly from the immediate area and hide in the bathroom, where, as we know, no sanctuary can be found. Sometimes I hide in the garage and dream of a day when I can shout imperiously, “Alice, you go to the lesser playroom and you, Consort, stay in the music salon, and I don’t want to see either of you until 6:30 tonight, when we’ll meet in the light green dining room.” But the reality is that I’d go looking for them within an hour; the magazine-reading room would be too lonely without them.

Consort, Alice, and I were curled up on the couch watching a documentary about meerkats. We watched them dart down into their underground dens, curl up with their family members, and groom each other with loving care and surgical preci
sion. The narrator told us how meerkats, after days spent in the hostile desert, thrived in the closeness of the den.

I looked down. I was absentmindedly braiding Alice’s hair as Lu slept in her lap. Somehow the cat continued sleeping as my daughter snapped Scrunchies on her tail. Alice’s feet were propped on Consort’s leg. Rupert, not allowed on the couch, was attempting a flanking invasion of Consort’s lap with a move best described as “oozing upwards.” Every member of the family was within inches of one another. I considered getting some pretzels but realized there weren’t enough pretzels to bring back and share, nor was there a hidden place in the kitchen where I could jam a handful of food in my mouth. Instead, I leaned back against Consort and watched these exotic mammals gather strength and comfort from one another against the harsh world outside.

WHEN I WAS PREGNANT WITH ALICE, MY WISHES WERE SIMPLE
. A boy would be fine. A girl would be fine. He or she should be a happy little person who didn’t have my immune system or my coloring. A girl arrived and fairly quickly it was established that, unlike her mother, she did have a hope in hell of tanning. This was good. Within a year it was determined that, again unlike her mother, her immune system didn’t take every cold germ as a personal challenge to spawn lung disease. Again, good. Having done so well on the first two wishes, I leaned close over my new child and whispered, “Sweetheart, now try to get Daddy’s teeth.”

I was born with Wal-Mart-sized choppers in a bodega-sized mouth. This led to all sorts of excitement as my adult teeth erupted in places not traditionally thought of as chewing areas. For the sake of future eating, I was rigged with a palate stretcher, a plastic-and-metal apparatus that extended across the roof of my mouth up behind my snaggly teeth. In the very top, in the dark recesses of my palate, there was a lock—a lock that needed to be turned a quarter turn every night, using a key of dollhouse proportions. One of my earliest memories is of my mother hovering over me, flashlight tucked in the crook of her neck, peering and poking into my gaping maw. “DO! NOT! MOVE!” she commanded. “DO. NOT. SWALLOW.”

There’s really no card that conveys, “Thank you for widening my head, Mom.”

You’d think something that medieval would be adequate to the task of straightening my teeth, but all it did was create enough room for the adult teeth to find their way into my mouth. It didn’t make them any smarter. My teeth slid down sideways. My teeth leaned against one another like drunken frat boys. A couple of teeth, showing an embarrassing lack of initiative, came halfway down and stopped. I spent the next six years in one tooth-improving gizmo after another.

Because I was acting at the time, they couldn’t just give me Big Iron and be done with it. Instead, they kept putting me into Half-Assed Plastic, which was one-quarter as effective and took three times as long—sort of like near beer. The logic was that metal braces were obvious and unattractive, while plastic braces were unnoticeable. I’ll grant you, braces made of metal are noticeable but at least the human eye registers there is something on the teeth. With plastic braces, my teeth were simply out of focus, and what you saw of them had a shade of yellow that suggested I was the only sixth grader starting her day with three cups of coffee, a glass of red wine, and a Camel. Eventually, sometime before I was old enough to rent a car, the last retainer was lost, the last payment was made, and I was declared to be orthodontically sound.

Considering that my mother’s teeth came in straight, as did my father’s, it seems especially unfair that my parents had to go through such effort. Whichever ancestor foisted these dental genes upon me had the good sense to die before blame could be assigned. Now it was my turn and as each of Alice’s teeth came in, I’d look at it and think,
Not sprouting from her nose. This is good.
Because that’s what I’m all about: realistic expectations. Alice tanned, she didn’t have a runny nose eight months every
year, and her teeth were approximately where they should be. Maybe my more troublesome genetic material had been given a generational time-out.

When Alice was four, the dentist took her first X-rays, cleaned a little, poked around for a few minutes, and motioned me over. We stood by the dental chair while my daughter sat paralyzed with pleasure at the
Toy Story
video on the plasma screen above her head.

“Do you have dental insurance?” he asked.

“Yes?” I said hesitantly, hoping this was some sort of poll.

“Because Alice is going to need braces,” he said.

I felt that was a little abrupt. If you are consigning me to years of monthly dental appointments and having to buy generic cheese it seems to me I should at least be taken into a private room and offered a box of Kleenex, a glass of water, and a package of flavored floss. When my future earnings are being pillaged, I don’t want to hear Tim Allen’s voice.

“But,” I spluttered, “they’re so nice and straight! These are good teeth!” I was about to explain how she couldn’t possibly have my teeth because she could tan when he stopped me.

“Yes,” he said, gently lifting Alice’s lips to show me her choppers. “They’re straight. They are also tightly packed. When these teeth fall out, there will be no room for the next teeth. They will come in up here,” and he motioned to her gums, “and here,” pointing to her cheekbones, “and maybe a few here,” he said, indicating her forehead. Alice flapped away his hands, which were interfering with her television viewing. I plunged into despair. My dental shame was coming home to roost. My troublesome DNA slipped away from the time-out corner and did a dance of triumph in the middle of the room.

You don’t just
get
braces for your child. You
earn
braces for your child by virtue of numerous appointments for plaster cast making, mold forming, and credit checking. By the time Alice and I arrived for the official presentation of the gear, I was humming “Pomp and Circumstance.” We were brought into a small room with a model of Alice’s jaw already wearing the apparatus. Alice, alert to any opportunity for self-improvement, agitated to put lipstick on her plaster doppelganger. This time, I was offered water by the hygienist. It came in a tiny cup with the cast of
High School Musical
grinning out at me in their perfect, gleaming teeth.

The appliance was presented. Alice was to wear a palate stretcher for eighteen months, which, over time, would create enough room for her adult teeth to grow in. I wouldn’t have to attack her open mouth with a key every night, but we would have to haul across town every three weeks for a tune-up. This would comprise a ten-minute appointment with a forty-five-minute commute on either side. Years from now Alice will ask, “Mommy, what did you do about global warming?” and I’ll be able to tell her, “I contributed.”

This expansion process was referred to as Stage One. Math was never my gift but calling something Stage One implies there will be other, equally expensive and time-consuming stages to follow. My dental insurance caps orthodontic payments at fifteen hundred dollars, which we reached when Alice touched her first
Highlights
magazine. I toyed with not doing Stage One and just letting the Stage Two chips fall where they may, but by then Alice would be chewing with her eyelids and elbows. Holding the plaster model of her teeth in one hand, I signed the contracts with the other. The term “indentured” kept popping into my head.

For everyone involved, the palate stretcher represented new levels of commitment—financial, emotional, and logistical—and within weeks it became abundantly clear this was not the best time to bring new levels of responsibility into our lives. I was distracted and overbooked by life in general and Alice had reached a developmental stage that was driving me out of my mind. To her credit, at least she was giving me something new to find maddening. This wasn’t the limit-testing of an earlier time, or the spike of sassiness that recurred every ten months or so. When the palate stretcher arrived, Alice was more than willing to work within the system, as long as the system rewarded her periodically with visits to Web sites that featured pictures of kittens. She was just vague. There was no request so small that I didn’t need to spell out every single detail, and no part that was self-evident to Alice. If, six months before, I would have said:

“Please make your bed before we leave.”

I was now saying:

“Please go into your room, where you sleep. Not our bedroom, where you sometimes sleep, but the room where your bed is. Please remove all stuffed animals from your bed. Please remove the cat from your bed. Do not dress the cat in your clothing. Put the cat on the ground. Stand up again. Flatten the sheet on the bottom, to remove wrinkles. Take the top sheet, the one that is in a pile at the bottom of the bed, and pull it up to your pillow, and flatten the sheet against the bed. If there is a lump under the sheets, press it. If it’s soft, it’s your stuffed animal; remove it. If it squeaks, it’s your cat; remove it; put it on the ground and do not dress it in your clothes. If the lump is neither a stuffed animal nor the cat, flatten it out. Now, you will notice
another pile at the bottom of the bed. This is your quilt. Please pull it up and straighten it. Straighten means the quilt is on the top of the bed. If it’s covering half the bed and puddling on the ground, that isn’t straightening the quilt, that is giving your mother the headache she gets behind her eye. Having straightened the quilt, please take all the stuffed animals and place them on your bed. Finally, you will notice a third pile at the foot of your bed. It is a nest of socks that need putting away. They needed putting away three weeks ago when I first mentioned them. They desired to be put away two weeks ago when we had a discussion very much like this one. Last week, they were practically begging to be put away. Either you match them and put them away, or I cut them into tiny squares, soak them in kerosene, and use them as fireplace starters. I will give you no new socks, and you will develop smelly feet and that’s all anyone will remember of you from grade school.”

To which Alice would hear:

“Put socks on the cat.”

Until her brain came back online, we weren’t good candidates for new, pricy, fragile, expensive, tiny, costly, custom-made dental objects. But if we waited until she could actually hear me, her palate-stretcher case would be sitting next to her estrogen-replacement pills. Every now and then, I’d think,
Forget the sweet and temporarily absent-minded child, I’ll just be responsible for those expensive doohickeys that look exactly as if the orthodontist plays with paper clips while he’s on the phone
, but there were two problems with that approach:

One, I’m supposed to be teaching Alice personal responsibility and accountability and all that stuff that takes far more energy than just doing their work for them.

Two, I can’t handle constant, low-level responsibility any better than Alice can. At least she’s going to grow out of it.

I’m great in a crisis and epically bad at maintenance. My feeling is that if I do something boring and virtuous, I should be rewarded by not having to do it again for many months. Doing your taxes, as grisly as it is, fits perfectly into my model. It’s horrible, it takes over your life for a few days, and then it’s gone again until next year. [If you are the sort of person who just thought,
But Quinn, if you did a little bit of your tax preparation every month of the year, you wouldn’t have to live on chocolate-covered espresso beans for five days in April
, then fine.
You
come over and take responsibility for the palate stretcher.]

I can keep track of more details than NORAD. Alice’s shoe size? Got it. Presents for the godsons for Christmas? In a bag behind the extra ironing-board cover in the laundry room. The cat gets the eye drops, the dog gets the ear drops. Don’t walk outside at night in spring without making a lot of noise ahead of time unless you’ve always wondered what a skunk looks like up close and startled. Without prompting, I can sing “My Sharona” from start to finish. For fun—and because I was afraid people might think I was too hip—I do crossword puzzles, which means that every month or so I learn three new names of rivers in Belize. I know all of the names of Alice’s stuffed animals, which is no small statement because their names change an average of once every eight days. I also know the names of all of Alice’s classmates who, because we live in Los Angeles, are frequently named after rivers in Belize. At last count, the moist computer in my skull has over three thousand small programs up and running. There is simply no room left to take on two
objects that weigh less than a butterfly and cost more than my first car.

I could try asking Consort to be the keeper of the dental gear, but his day is pretty full trying to find any one of his many pairs of eyeglasses. Consort has reading glasses, driving glasses, driving glasses that allow him to read maps, reading glasses that allow him to drive short distances, sports glasses, glasses that are scratched and worn but still good enough for cleaning the garage, and glasses that keep him from falling down while walking the dog but aren’t clear enough to let him see what he is picking up in the plastic bag. A man driven to flailing despair because he can’t find his picking-out-paint-chip glasses doesn’t want to hear about a palate stretcher.

In the end, the kid and I were in this together, and I am both pleased and shocked to note it didn’t go as badly as I might have predicted. She’d leave her night gear someplace bizarre, but I’d find it while trying to locate my keys. I’d start the lecture after finding her palate stretcher in the drying rack by the kitchen sink, and she’d point out that, in fact, I was holding
my
night guard, which keeps me from grinding my orthodontically straightened teeth into a fine powder. We have discovered a nice bakery near the orthodontist’s office where, post-stretching, we get sustenance for the long journey home. I think we might actually make it through this adventure.

And someday, when my mental decline is complete and Alice has put me someplace soft, warm, and—if she’s feeling generous—accredited, I will live for her visits. And I’ll use my last bits of sentience to demand that she smile.