Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life (8 page)

This all would be easier if Consort were equally incompetent, but he’s not. His google-eyed rocks gaze upon mine with scorn. He can cut out paper dolls. He could create a Conestoga mini-wagon that would run on solar power and spark a bidding war between Lilliputian pioneers. In fact, there’s a thick file in Alice’s brain labeled
T
HINGS
D
ADDY
C
AN
D
O THAT
M
OMMY
C
AN’T
. Daddy can drive a stick-shift and Mommy can’t. As my mother says, our people don’t drive a stick-shift for the same reason that we don’t beat our clothing clean against a rock. But the fact remains: Daddy can leap into a stick-shifted car and peel away; Mommy would sit in the driver’s seat and wonder why there was an extra pedal on the floor. Daddy can use all those dangerous-looking carpentry tools he has in the garage. He doesn’t, mind you, but he could. Pointing out that I have a kitchen full of tools I don’t use doesn’t make me cooler. Daddy, like some of the more charismatic boys in Alice’s class, can make a noise using
only his hand and his armpit. Mommy claims she could, but doesn’t choose to—which makes no sense because who wouldn’t want to make noises with their armpits?

Eventually, we will leave the Craft Age (which comes after the Bronze Age, before the Bronzer Age) and will enter the Higher Math Age, at which point I will lose face all over again. The
y
awning sense of incompetence and panic that washes over me when confronted with construction paper, pipe cleaners, and glue is as nothing compared to what I will feel when Alice asks for help with her geometry homework. Proofs, theorems, sines, cosines, algorithms—they all blur together in my head, creating a hellish bouillabaisse that will drown the last of my daughter’s respect for me. Her father, of course, enjoys higher math thoroughly, so this will be a wonderful bonding time for them. They will make calculus jokes and, after a few seconds, I’ll laugh along, nervously and a little too loudly; and because they love me they will take pity on me. One of them will bring out the dusty Conestoga wagon and we’ll all look at it as a wheel falls off. Alice will cover my hand with hers and say something kind before she and her father go off to create cold fusion.

I DON’T KNOW HOW I GOT SO LUCKY, BUT WHEN CONSORT
gets sick, he gets sick discreetly. Possessing a high tolerance for discomfort—a trait that might owe something to living with me—he just plugs away until I find myself shouting, “Would you please just get into bed and insert in the IV!” This is, I should note, a loving shout.

A recent illness was different. It was so brutal he went to bed with only modest badgering on my part. He had aches, a dry hacking cough, chills but no fever, and intermittent dizziness. It was as if his immune system was sampling random pages from the
Physician’s Desk Reference.
Poor Consort, he was genuinely miserable.

The first night he was sick, we decided Consort would sleep in Alice’s room and she would bunk with me. This worked for exactly one night because Alice—though as winning as a stadium filled with Miss Congenialities—has more pointy corners than a starfish. I kept waking up as each of her fifteen elbows found their way into my ribs, spine, and eyes. Add to this her maternally inherited habit of grinding her teeth so forcefully it sounds like a garbage disposal with a spoon stuck in it, and I knew we needed another plan. If Consort was even slightly improved, we’d put her back in her room and I’d take my chances.

The next day, Consort sounded worse and looked almost as bad. His complexion had taken on the shiny, greenish-gray tone
of an oyster. We contacted the doctor and he prescribed antibiotics for him. Consort would be contagious for at least another day and probably coughing all night. The sleep issue raised its head again. Consort could have our bed back, Alice would take her pointiness and her grinding back to her own dominion, and I would sleep on the couch. I didn’t mind. Our couch has marvelous soporific properties, which you wouldn’t think of by looking at it. It’s from the 1950s, huge and sinuously curved. When we first got it, I had it upholstered in a fuzzy, bright green fabric, which looked wonderful as a three-by-two-foot sample. Spread across the couch’s statement-making size, however, it became a background character from a
Sesame Street
arena show. Or a gigantic, gay amoeba. This was just one in a long list of design mistakes I’ve made over the years, but when you sit on it you can hear the soft fabric crooning, “Just put your head down. Just for a second. No one will know…” Two hours later you wake up with a fuzzy-fabric pattern etched on your face.

This night, I settled Alice into bed and arrayed her stuffed animals around her feet in parade formation. Then I settled Consort in, placing his meds in a similar deployment. I grabbed my favorite pillow and a blanket from the linen closet and headed to the living room. I lit a fire in the fireplace and brewed some herb tea. The room looked welcoming and cozy in a nearly professional way. Even the immense homosexual paramecium looked less weird than usual. Had I placed a sweet grandma on the couch, I could have shot an ad for long-distance telephone service. A blonde model would have sold you Midol.

I crafted a little nest with the blanket and pillow and tucked myself in. Lulabelle loped into the room, came to an abrupt stop, and stared. I don’t know what she had been planning but
clearly my being there spoiled it. I patted the blanket. She considered her options and sprung up. I scratched her head as I read. Somewhere in the house, Consort coughed in his sleep and Alice stuck her pointy corners into dreamed adversaries. From the outside it probably didn’t look like nirvana but it was as close to peace as my family got. That should have been my first clue.

One moment I was scratching between Lu’s ears, the next I was removing her nails and teeth from deep in my hand. Lulabelle was gazing directly at me but seeing nothing. Her eyes were solid black marbles. She sank her nails into my hand again and gurgled in delight. This wretched little beast was obviously possessed. I was harboring a psycho cat-zombie, desperate for the life-regenerating properties of human flesh. What could possibly be making our calm, friendly cat so damned weird?

And then I remembered. Catnip!

A month earlier, I’d been invited to a school fund-raiser for a friend’s kid. Try as I might, I cannot think of a way to attend these things without spending money on unnecessary stuff. Typically I avoid them like Consort’s illness, but if I blew off my friend’s fund-raiser I could never guilt her into coming to ours. That’s how it works. So there I was, standing in a bustling auditorium trying to decide which I needed less: a free-trade baby rattle or hemp oven mitts. Then I noticed a small collection of cat toys in a basket. Tuning out the poncho-clad mom explaining how these were made by indigenous Peruvian villagers—people who must have been slightly baffled by the concept of “making toys for food to play with”—I grabbed the smallest object on the table.

“And this…?” I asked, holding up a small plastic bag
of something I could only hope was legal in the state of California.

“Organic catnip,” she said, pleased I had noticed. “Grown by a prison outreach program. They also raise beets and make fruitcake.”

I was unclear of the connection unless it was Things Most People Don’t Eat, but I didn’t care. For less than ten dollars, I could catch my friend’s eye as I slid out the door, waving the unbleached-paper bag indicating I had bought something, and feel no guilt over ambushing her with a fundraising Tupperware catalog later in the year.

When I got home that night, Lulabelle was sleeping on our bed, a black dot of contentment. She wanted nothing more in this world than to continue in a state of perfect bliss. So, naturally, I woke her. I shook out one of the rather suspicious-looking buds and put it in front of her without any expectation of enthusiasm on her part. I had tempted her with catnip toys before, but Lulabelle’s attitude had always been, “Wake me when it’s thrashing and screaming in fear.” The woman who sold it to me swore that its freshness, its lack of pesticides, and its general good karma from having been grown by the formerly oppressed gave it extra moxie.

Lulabelle flicked an ear, extended one paw, and patted the flower around. She stood up and batted it around a little more vigorously. Then she jumped straight into the air, pounced on the bud, flung it skyward, leapt after it, and turning in space, flopped on top of it like a drunken acrobat. I was delighted. For once, I had given a gift where the recipient didn’t ask for the receipt. In fact, she was getting a little too pleased with her present. Somewhere between the frantic biting of the bud—followed
immediately by attacking my knees—and a series of frenetic wind sprints accompanied by weird guttural shrieks, I decided Lulabelle had enough personality as it was. She didn’t need a psychotropic jump-start.

I hid the bag in the office. I was washing dishes an hour later when the cat flew into the kitchen, leapt at my shoulder howling in pure delight, then ran off toward the bedrooms. Something told me she might be driving under the influence again. I checked the office. Lulabelle had pushed open the door, located the bag on its high shelf, torn it open with her claws and teeth, and eaten a few more buds. Summoning my inner drug trafficker, I packaged the bag inside another bag and placed it first in a hanging basket over the kitchen sink and then inside a high cupboard. Both times, within an hour, another bud had been scored and I had a nine-pound, cranked-up Hell’s Angel terrorizing my home.

I scanned the house trying to think of a single drawer or cabinet that even the most determined addict couldn’t tease open. The linen closet! The doors of the linen closet have been painted so many times over the past eighty years that the accumulated paint has added another quarter-inch or so to each panel. Once they are closed, it takes a very specific
Lift, Twist, Pull
maneuver to open them without injury—a move that had taken me six months to perfect. If Lulabelle figured this out, my concern would not be how to keep her away from the catnip but how we were going to afford college for both the kid
and
the cat. I toyed with the idea of just throwing the bag of murderous fun in the trash, but rejected that on two grounds: one, I don’t throw perfectly good
anything
away and two, the vague sense of guilt that I’d be taking away the only pure joy the cat has in which we can
all participate. I’m sure she felt equally, exquisitely alive when snapping a bird’s neck or screaming at the neighbor’s pugs, but I don’t see the rest of the family participating in either activity.

So I crammed the bag into the linen closet and promptly forgot about it. The catnip, indifferent to my wish that it would just go away, continued to emit its mysterious vapors deeply into the blankets into which it had been tucked. Now, one of these blankets was covering my body, on top of which was the cat, flopping around like a freshly caught swordfish and living in a paradise only she could see. Every time I went to touch her, to remove her from the head shop that was my blanket, she would bite me. I had two options: to lie very still and wait for the catnip to wear off or to lie very still and wait for the feline assassin to grow bored. Usually, I stay pretty still when I’m sleeping; that night I’m sure I gave every appearance of being guest of honor at my own wake.

The next morning, Lulabelle sprung up from the couch, stretching and yawning. She looked pleased with herself, alert and energized. Having spent the same night reminding myself not to move, I was less than refreshed. My eyes were tiny raisins shoved into dough. My facial skin hung on me like a poncho. I decided that no matter what symptoms Consort exhibited during the day, sleeping in my own bed was still better than having a deranged cat use my foot as a speed bag.

But then Consort coughed. He coughed all day, a rasping and stubborn hack that laughed at all the over-the-counter treatments and at least one prescribed medication. The high-octane cough syrup might have prevented him from operating heavy machinery but it didn’t prevent him from coughing. By the time we went to bed, I was resigned to the fact I’d be on the couch again if I had
any hope of sleeping at all. Returning to the linen closet, I realized that even though I knew stowing the catnip there had been a bad idea, I hadn’t moved it, thus guaranteeing a wide selection of drug-infused bedding. I carefully chose the blanket farthest from the bag o’ buds for my next night’s sleep.

Stupid woman. As far as Lulabelle was concerned, I was a mountain of warm mammal flesh wrapped in a carapace of catnip. Tonight, along with the ninja attacks, she added a high-pitched gargling sound. It was exactly the noise she made when a squirrel had the audacity to be seen frolicking outside the kitchen window, and now, it seemed, I was in the same category. I slept the fitful sleep of prey.

The next morning, the alarm clock went off like a home invasion. I staggered into the bathroom where a ninety-year-old woman startled me from the mirror. The cat purred and leaned against my leg. I hadn’t told Consort about the blanket business. He was feeling bad enough. Besides, I suspect he wouldn’t have believed me. When Loodles wasn’t under the spell of demon nip, she was almost ludicrously affectionate. Consort’s response would have been “Lulabelle? The one getting to third base with your ankles? Noooo…” My addicted abuser presented a pretty face to the world. Lifetime would make a movie of my torment.

Consort was officially diagnosed with bronchitis, which meant a new course of antibiotics and at least two more days before I could safely share a bed with him. I shivered. The cat smiled.

After our third night on the couch, the cat began stalking me through the house. She was the lioness and I was the gnu with the gammy leg. My sleep-deprived brain was desperate for a
night without ambush; my legs were desperate for a night without puncture. Getting my blankets that night, gazing into the shadows of the linen closet at the catnip bag, it came to me in a flash: I might not get a full night’s sleep, but it would be leagues better than what I was getting now.

I lay down on the couch and unfolded the blanket. The cat grabbed the blanket with twenty lethal claws and started to bite furiously. From my pocket, I produced the bag of catnip and opened it. Her head snapped up from her biting. She froze. I removed a bud, wafted it in front of her nose a couple of times. Her eyes glazed over in ecstasy. I threw the bud across the room. Lulabelle sprang from the couch, landing on the catnip bud in one pounce. She spent several happy minutes grinding the bud into psychedelic granules. Then she raced a few laps around the house. Having taken this time to slither into the bed I had made, I lay on the couch, unmolested. Just as I was drifting off, nine pounds of hallucinating predator landed on my back with a thud. I took another bud from the bag tucked into my blanket and flung it across the room. Again, she raced off for the kill, leaving my extremities unmauled.

The same ability that had allowed me, when Alice was an infant, to walk into another room, locate the pacifier, replug the child, and go back to bed without waking up now allowed me to play catnip fetch without leaving a REM cycle.

Consort coughed, although less drastically. Alice thrashed and ground her teeth. Lulabelle dreamt she was Joan of Arc driving the Bolsheviks out of Neptune. And I achieved a flawed but ultimately acceptable night’s sleep.

By the next night, Consort was very nearly well. I could safely move off the couch and back into my own bed. I folded
my psychedelic blanket one last time and noticed the cat sound asleep on her back, her front paws covering her eyes. I wasn’t so far away from my youthful and indulgent past that I didn’t recognize a brutal hangover when I saw it. Replace the gnawed-clean catnip bud with an empty flask and a neck full of plastic beads and Lu would have looked perfectly at home slumped in a doorway in the French Quarter. I reached between her paws and gently tried to remove the last remaining bud. Without opening her eyes, without even waking up, she bit me. I tiptoed into the other room, recovered the rest of the stash, and placed it gently next to her sleeping form, an offering to a much loved and easily angered god.