Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life (5 page)

Agonizing silence.

After
The Goodbye Girl
, I joined a television show that had already been on the air for two years. By then, every other actor on
the show had told the publicity people they’d rather perform their own hemorrhoidectomy than do another interview, which is why I was frequently drafted to talk to reporters. The problem was that entertainment reporters sent out to interview children usually bear resentment so palpable it leaves a stain on the carpet:

This led to a string of frustrated reporters hoping and praying for me to say something—anything—stupid and inflammatory to justify their expense report. These weren’t the most subtle of predators. Oddly enough, many of them were named Skip.

In most of these interviews I’d be sitting on my couch at home, while my mother was sitting nearby.

In fact, she hadn’t. Brilliantly sensing it would prevent me from ever having to lie or accidentally slipping up, she didn’t tell me until I was eighteen. This added to Skip’s frustration.

Then there were the reporters who would keep rephrasing the question until I gave them something not entirely unlike what they were already planning to write:

We both wait for something to occur to one of us.

See the article the next day. See the publicity picture of me the paper chose to use. Note how I am scowling. The caption underneath says, in big block letters, “KRISTY IS NO SISTER OF MINE!” See me apologizing to Kristy for the impression the reporter has given that I have a secret voodoo altar with black candles, Kristy McNichol dolls, and a few dozen well-placed pins.

Not every reporter was setting traps and snare pits into our conversations. If two out of the five resented my very existence, another two were irrationally proud of their ability to talk to children.
I love children!
they’d think.
My nephew is a child. He’s…what is he now? Four? No, he just went to college so that makes him…fifteen? Something like that.
Armed with almost a total lack of experience talking to anyone who didn’t
live through the Cuban Missile Crisis, they’d arrive and we’d enjoy a conversation that whipsawed between
Romper Room
and
Meet the Press
. Skip would ask me if I liked dollies. If I mentioned that I wasn’t so interested in dolls—being eleven and all—he’d ask me what I thought the Fed was going to do in response to the inflation rate.

The bulk of my interviews occurred between the ages of nine and eleven. That’s less than one-thirteenth of my life. I’ve spent more time trying to grow out a bad perm. Yet I never really considered how spending three formative years being asked intrusive questions by aggressive, microphone-wielding strangers might possibly damage one’s brain. In my teens, I was frozen with self-loathing and self-consciousness, but John Hughes movies taught me we all felt that way, and he was right. John Hughes movies also convinced me I could wear a short, bright-red bob and mismatched used clothing and not look like someone’s grandmother in Boca Raton. In that case, he was mistaken.

In my twenties, I assumed that my conversational problem had something to do with meeting people at parties, which meant I was already two or three glasses into something delightful mixed with tonic. And if you mix it like this…

GIN
(or)
VODKA
(and) Lime (and) Tonic

…you say many things that don’t measure up to the usual requirements for polite social intercourse. But there was no Bosworth noting all of my idiotic and inflammatory ramblings since the smartest of my friends were usually vomiting into a hedge.

In time, I outgrew my need to be the short girl who could keep up, drink for drink, with the tall boys. I also got a job as a
talent agent—a career choice that didn’t improve my conversational skills in any meaningful way, but no one seemed to notice. If the bulk of the people with whom you are communicating are actors, it’s safe to say you aren’t doing a lot of the talking. A few more years went by and I found myself pregnant. Once again, I was a dreadful conversationalist, but this time I could blame hormones. For the entire pregnancy all I wanted to do was sleep, smile off into space, or find another woman in the room who either was pregnant or had been pregnant at some point, with whom I could compare bizarre symptoms. It’s really the last time until retirement age when a person can discuss bladder control with a stranger in a public space.

Then Alice was born and she turned out to be one of those children who only slept for minutes at a stretch. She was delightful and I was happy, but I was also getting by on ninety minutes of sleep a day, sometimes while driving. No one at a social gathering ever confused me for Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker. If I determined the person standing next to me had children, I would begin quizzing them about wait-lists at local preschools. If they didn’t have children, I would rack my brains for a conversation starter.

We weren’t going anywhere on vacation, I wasn’t reading any books not dedicated to fostering good eating habits for preschoolers, and I kept insisting Julianne Moore was in every movie I saw so pop culture was out of the question as conversation fuel. If witty conversation is a garden, I was the strip of dirt between the dog run and the easement. But this will pass, I kept telling myself as I rummaged through my purse scrounging desperately for something to talk about. I will get one good
night’s sleep and I will rise up the next day as the sparkling conversationalist I hallucinated I had once been.

Years have passed. I sleep now. I occasionally read a book. I know that while Julianne Moore does many movies, she isn’t in every single movie I see and sometimes I mean Laura Linney and sometimes I mean Liev Schreiber. And still, I make an ass out of myself at least twice a day. Alice and I attended a Chinese New Year festival in Chinatown. There were, conservatively, a billion people crammed into a two-block radius, all of them shouting. Firecrackers were going off. On the streets, people had given up driving and were reduced to leaning on their horns in some desperate attempt to create a travel wormhole by irritating the universe.

A large family passed by and, in the thick flow of pedestrian traffic, somehow appropriated Alice, her small frame getting swallowed up in the multigenerational wave of Chinese people eager to buy fish. Sensing an adventure, she threw herself into a crevice between a grandmother and a couple of teenagers. What I thought was:
Daughter of mine, do not insinuate yourself into other people’s families, even if they are buying live fish, which, let me assure you, are not anticipating a long life of beloved pethood. Come back to your mother, flawed though she may be, and she will love you deeply and buy you sesame noodles.

That’s what I thought. What actually came out of my mouth?

Alice, get back here! These aren’t our people!

So quiet. No firecrackers. No horns. No one shouting in any language. Not even a cracked knuckle. Only my voice, pitched
for clarity and distance, ringing with insensitivity and prejudice all the way past Chinatown, through Little Tokyo, into Koreatown, and halfway across Lesser Armenia. Grimly, I took Alice’s hand and said, “Come on, sweetie. It’s time to go. Mommy needs to start dinner and sever her vocal cords.” Silently, we headed home.

I AWOKE TO THE SOUND OF OUR DOG RUPERT MAKING A
spectacle of himself, burrowing under the Bench of Random Objects, an Indonesian settee that had been placed temporarily in the bedroom ten years ago. Unless he’d developed a sudden fascination with folded sweaters, extension cords, and back issues of
The New Yorker
, I couldn’t imagine what the charm might be. I lay in bed, focused my eyes, and watched. Rupert wasn’t interested in the bench as much as the rear leg, nearest the hamper. He threw his butt in the air and tried repeatedly to reach something with his paw. I assumed he had somehow tossed his beloved stuffed lizard behind the furniture, and I knew neither of us would rest until he retrieved it. We hadn’t had him long, but I already knew that Rupert was hugely—some might say unnaturally—devoted to his toys.

I got out of bed and crouched down to recover the prize. I squinted in the shadows. It wasn’t a stuffed blue lizard. When did we get him a stuffed mouse? An incredibly realistic stuffed mouse? An uncannily realistic simulacrum of a mouse?

“Oh, eeew,” I moaned, still fixated on the little gray corpse. The dog thumped his tail. “Yes!” he seemed to be saying. “Oh wondrous day! An object that is small enough to carry around and also smells intoxicatingly of death. Please pull it out and we can take turns holding it in our mouths.” Lulabelle the cat was
nowhere nearby, but I recognized her handiwork. God knows, I’ve seen enough of it.

My life as coroner for the tiny began several years ago. Consort had taken Alice out for a daddy and daughter date, which can also be translated as “Daddy wants pizza.” Taking good care of myself during child-free moments in the way the parenting magazines suggest, I stood over the sink having a cheese sandwich and a glass of wine. (Please pick up my book,
Elegant Dining for One,
when it’s published later this year.) I finished my sandwich and stood for a second, trying to decide if a cheese sandwich over the sink was charming and bohemian, but a cheese sandwich over the sink followed by a Popsicle over the sink was just sad. That’s when I noticed that even though I had finished eating I still heard chewing.

After tiptoeing daintily through the kitchen in a manner honoring the lead hippo in
Fantasia
, I determined the chewing was coming from within the walls. Whatever was having its dinner in there had enough jaw strength to make a sound discernible through an eighty-year-old plaster wall and all the way across the room. Considering my options, I did what any modern, equality-seeking, home-owning woman would do: I grabbed a Popsicle and hid in the bedroom until Consort returned home.

Because I am an animal lover by nature, we began our domestic de-rodentification with Havahart traps. I am unaware of any rescue and rehabilitation shelters that specialize in vermin so I can’t imagine what I thought we were going to
do
if we actually trapped any of these critters alive, but that issue never materialized. The Havahart trap turned out to be more of a
Have-a-Snack buffet for our prey. There was no morsel so sticky the critter couldn’t spring it, devour it, and walk away completely unscathed, clapping the dust from its palms like a teamster. I use the term “critter” because even though Consort insisted it was a mouse, I was sure that anything I could hear flossing inside a wall was probably large enough to loan me a jacket. In order to settle this dispute, we would need to actually trap one of these buggers and that was not working out as we’d hoped. Whatever it was in there, I had come to expect a note requesting more breadsticks and a wine list.

We upgraded to the sticky traps, which seemed like a good idea until a wall-denizen actually got stuck on one. I was in bed reading myself to sleep when I suddenly heard a jujitsu tournament in the kitchen. The sound appeared to be originating from under the sink and was accompanied by squeaks of terror. This was going to be unsightly. I toyed with buying an airline ticket to the Cayman Islands and starting a new life, but chose instead to foist this on my life partner.

I found him in the garage being masculine with a chop saw and encouraged him to come into the kitchen and do something we might laugh about in thirty years. The rodent was dispatched in as swift and humane a fashion as Consort could muster. A trash bag was involved. And a shovel. We concluded that glue traps, while saving us from having to stare at rodent innards, are terribly cruel to the animal. So we moved up to the traditional snap traps of the Looney Tunes/Acme variety. These were purchased, anointed with cheese smothered in peanut butter, and hidden in places where neither the child nor the dog would discover the awesome strength of spring-loaded steel.

For a few days nothing happened. We thought maybe we had caught the lone invader in the sticky trap. The new traps remained unsprung. I was no longer hearing the symphony of gnawing in the walls. Maybe there had just been the one.

SNAP! SNAP! SNAP!

All illusions were dispelled.

In the morning, we discovered that all three traps were licked clean of food, without so much as a whisker trapped under the murderous bar.

Consort noted, “That’s one incredibly smart mouse.”

I thought,
That would be because it’s a rat
, but I held my tongue. Consort’s Achilles’ heel seemed to be the idea of sharing a house with a rat, however temporarily. As long as I pretended we were hosting the Albert Einstein of mice, Consort wouldn’t sleep in his car.

The next night, we set the traps with extra-tempting, extra-aromatic peanut butter and went to bed. Consort and I were reading when I heard something from the laundry room.

I whispered, “Do you hear that?”

Consort listened for a second.

“I don’t hear anything,” he said and went back to his magazine.

I waited a second and heard it again.

Footsteps. Heavy footsteps.

The swish of a hairless tail.

“Ugh, it’s in the back room,” I shrieked, but softly. I don’t know why I kept my voice down. I certainly wasn’t concerned that my words might make the rat self-conscious.

Consort sat up and said in his best humor-the-woman-I-love tone, “It’s not in the back room.”

I hissed, “Just go look. Please. I’ll wait here.”

[Readers, please note my behavior here: I heard noises and hid in the bedroom, I called Consort in rather than take care of a trapped mouse, and now I’d sent him into the laundry room because I thought I heard something. All I needed was a frilly apron and a prize-winning cake recipe using Miracle Whip and I could make the cover of the April 1955 edition of
Ladies’ Home Journal.
]

Consort sighed noisily and shuffled toward the back room, muttering the whole way.

“‘Read those
New Yorkers
,’ she says. ‘Please get them out of the house,’ she says. So, I finally sit down to get through some of them and what does she do? She has me hunting for imaginary…OH. MY. GOD!”

The next few minutes were a frightening series of grunts, rapid footsteps, and things being overturned. I stood at the kitchen doorway, too alarmed to come closer. I heard the back door open and close. Consort staggered out of the laundry room, sweating. He looked at me in disbelief.

“It threw a bottle of bleach at me.”

“Is it still back there?”

Consort nodded and said, “I tried to herd it out the back door, but it went behind the dryer and now I can’t see it.”

Consort and I stepped hesitantly into the laundry room. Everything but the washer and the dryer had been upended. I stood guard with a broom while Consort gingerly slid the dryer away from the wall. There was no rat. There was, however, a hole about the diameter of a quarter, under the dryer’s exhaust vent. We looked at each other.

“Could it have gone through there?”

Consort shook his head. “You didn’t see how big this thing was. It was wearing my shoes. There is no way it got through that hole.”

But apparently it could, and did, go through the hole. The exterminator we called the next day took no small delight in telling us that rats can basically make themselves flat enough to pass through a soda straw and that our old house was laden with rat-friendly highways and shortcuts. I pictured a verminous version of Chutes and Ladders. Wherever we set a trap, our houseguests would simply find another route. Our rats had traffic options Los Angeles commuters could only fantasize about. Also, they can breed up to five times a year and produce up to fourteen pups per litter. We were, in a word, screwed.

So, starting that very day, Steve the Rat Guy would appear once or twice a week and remove three or four little casualties from his arsenal of industrial-strength traps. I liked Steve. He was punctual, he was efficient, and while he wasn’t cheap he made up for it by his professional demeanor. He would enter the house. He would go to the traps. There would be a few minutes of quiet and then he would leave with a few small, opaque black bags, tied together and hanging across his chest. At another period of my life I might have been inclined to put this behavior into the category of “odd” as opposed to “soothing,” but those little bags meant my vermin problem could remain a wonderfully abstract concept. I no longer had to contemplate how something that spread the Black Death and killed one-third of Europe’s population was now frolicking in our walls.

One week, Steve the Rat Guy sent in his place Mike the Rat-Guy-in-Training. Mike the Rat-Guy-in-Training operated under the assumption that if people were paying you to do a job, they
wanted to hear all about it. He went to check a trap and hollered back, “Nice big fat one!” He went to the next trap, poked his head into the living room where I sat, and asked, “You didn’t happen to find a rat with only two legs around here, did you?” In the laundry room, he reached under the washer, pulled out a trap, and peered at it thoughtfully. Holding the trap out to me he said questioningly, “It’s either a really big mouse or a baby rat. What do you think?” Choosing not to play Guess the Vermin with a pro, I fled to the bedroom with then-baby Alice. A few minutes later there was a knock at the door. Mike was apologetic. It seems that while he was up in the crawl space over Alice’s room he accidentally kicked something that fell down the hatch opening and into her closet. He cleaned up most of it and, he added proudly, at least we now knew where the other half of that rat went. Steve returned the following week, his understated bandoleer of doom a welcome sight.

At about the time we decided to list Steve the Rat Guy as a dependent for tax purposes, I got a call from a friend who lived around the corner. Her family’s housing situation had changed abruptly and they were desperately looking for a new place to live. Finding rental housing with a dog was complicated; finding it with a dog, a cat, and proximity to her daughter’s school was nearly impossible. The only house they found was on a major thoroughfare, pretty much assuring a quick and nasty demise for their tough, beloved little street cat. She had a request.

I walked into the office where Consort was scowling at a spreadsheet and mumbling incantations. I announced, in what I hoped was a
whee!-aren’t-we-spontaneous-people!
kind of way, “Long story short, we’re getting a cat.”

Yanked from a place where things made logical sense back into the world where I forced him to live, Consort absorbed this new information. “If I ask for the longer story, is there any way I could talk you out of this?”

I kissed him sweetly and said, “No.”

Lulabelle arrived the next morning. Her owner, my about-to-move friend, was smiling in relief and sniffling in sadness. Lulabelle was scowling. We let her out of the cat carrier and into the living room where she paused just long enough to whap our then-dog Polly on the nose, then flew twice around the room in search of an exit. She fled into the bedroom and darted under the dresser where she sulked for two days. When she finally did leave her sanctuary, it was to scamper out the back door and return to her old house where, minutes later, I found her curled up on the front porch waiting to be let in. For the next few weeks, her to-do list read:

After about three weeks, I went to the back door to invite Lulabelle inside as I had done every night since she’d arrived. I had no realistic hope she would be out there. I was about to get my coat to make the trip around the corner when I noticed a sharp glittery light out in the darkness of the yard. It was the il
lumination from the laundry room window reflecting back from Lulabelle’s yellow eyes.

She was lying on the ground. Something about half her length was trapped under her paws struggling desperately to get away. Lulabelle glanced down for a second, put her paw firmly on its head, and glanced up at me as if to say, “Is this urgent? I’m a little booked up right now.”

I shut the door delicately and waited. If this kept up, maybe we could create a system: a sock on the doorknob meant she was in the middle of preparing dinner and expected a little privacy. A half-hour later, I opened the door and the whiskered angel of death slithered in, feeling especially good about life. She sauntered to our bedroom, jumped on the Bench of Random Objects, curled up between a stapler and a Christmas wreath, and slept the sleep of the just until well into the next morning.

In the years since then, we came to learn that not only is Lulabelle an excellent ratter and mouser, she is a superlative birder, a more than competent squirreler, and probably a talented destroyer of untended Chihuahuas. Anything weighing less than five pounds with the poor luck to rest on the ground even briefly is a potential entree. Out of some feline sense of honor, Lulabelle usually tithes tails, wings, and heads to me, her landlord of record. I measure the advent of spring not with the first crocus but the first bird skull. I long to explain to Lu that we only wanted the ugly and verminous eaten, but that would have been like asking Godzilla to stomp only Tokyo’s less popular neighborhoods. I attached a little bell to her collar but the body count didn’t seem to diminish. The only noticeable effect was that for scores of small creatures in the vicinity of our yard, their last thought was:
Say, what’s the odd ring—