Authors: Ali Wentworth
T
he only thing my younger daughter wanted when she turned seven was a guinea pig. We offered bejeweled Uggs, an iPod, even the financial backing for her mayoral campaign in New York. Anything but a guinea pig. It seemed unfair that we would pay for a bi-level habitat (with organic vegetables and dried-apple hanging toys) for a rodent whose relatives I exterminate monthly by calling Bob’s Pest Control. If I see a rat on the tracks of the uptown 6, I scream like Jack Nicholson just whacked an ax through my door. But a rodent I should name Bubbles, dress in American Girl doll clothes, and cuddle with?
My daughter was determined.
“We have two boisterous dogs who thrive on scent and the massacre of small creatures,” I pleaded.
She wasn’t swayed. “I’ll keep it in my room.”
We hit her with questions, like a press conference after a political scandal.
“Who is going to feed him?”
Without even looking up: “I am. Of course.”
“What happens when we go on vacation?”
She sighed. “My friend Darius has his grandma take his guinea pig, Twerk, when he goes away.”
I could not imagine FedExing our furry family member to my mother in Florida whenever we left town, mostly because I know she would refuse to sign for it. But more important, she’d squash it with the phone book.
When my little girl was even younger, she begged for a chinchilla. She excitedly called my husband to tell him she’d decided on her dream pet and, instead, got an intern, a twenty-year-old who thought breaking news was Britney Spears’s fragrance launch. “I want a chinchilla” (said with a slight toddler lisp), my daughter announced.
“Oh, that’s so great!” said the intern, who was simultaneously perusing a fashion blog. “But you don’t want just one, it takes like two hundred for a coat.”
My daughter is now a vegan.
We finally relented on the guinea pig, but not because we caved on the idea of fulfilling our child’s dream of caring for another living creature and all the responsibility that goes with it—no, we finally said yes because her birthday was fast approaching and we couldn’t come up with a better gift idea.
So she was given a guinea pig. She could choose amongst the millions of adoptable, rescue guinea hogs in the tristate area. She read the pet adoption section of the
New York Post,
spread the word at school, and searched pet rescue sites for hours. One afternoon, while I was reaching for my stash of chocolate chip cookies in the closet, I heard a shriek of “Mommy” that was more urgent than the usual “I need socks.” She had found the guinea pig she wanted. Her. Him. Well, THEM. My daughter couldn’t fall for a tiny little white snowball of a pet; no, she settled on two obese guinea pigs named Archie and Lenny.
“Those are two guinea pigs. We said one!” I pointed out, hands on my hips like a real parent.
“Mommy, they can’t be separated. They are life partners.”
Suddenly my politics were being challenged. She looked at me with her beatific face and ethereal eyes and the next thing I knew I was talking to American Airlines about flying Archie and Lenny from Pittsburgh to New York. Coach.
P
ets are part of childhood. Their lives and deaths define the emotional beings of those adults the pet-owning children will grow up to be. Marilyn Monroe once said, “Dogs never bite me, just humans.” As a mother, I remember all the
Marley and Me
episodes in my own life and want them for my children.
I grew up with myriad pets. Except snakes. We lived in D.C. and knew too many human ones. My older sister, Sissy, managed white mice because my mother wanted something small and contained. At the time, Sissy was reading
Stuart Little
and assumed her precious
Cavia porcellus
would wear Scottish bonnets and drive miniature red sports cars. The two beady-, red-eyed vermin lived in a small plastic container where they relentlessly scratched at the lid, exposing their pink bellies and utter desperation. They were eventually moved to her trash can because they kept procreating at a rapid pace. Female mice can have up to ten litters (about six in each litter) a year, so do that math! The trash cans got bigger as generations of white mice were birthed before our eyes. One day after school we returned to a toppled trash can. We searched for them for hours, and were haunted by their high-pitched squeaking at night. But they were never seen again. I’m pretty sure we moved not because my parents wanted to downsize, but because they were overwhelmed by the infestation and it was the only alternative.
My brother John was partial to the basset hound. When he was twelve he was allowed to choose any breed of dog he wanted and the symbol of Hush Puppy, the premier footwear of the decade, was the winner. Aside from the dwarfism, ear mites, spine injuries, and yeast infections, Josephine was the perfect dog. We could hang from her pendant ears without incident and her forlorn eyes always ensured much petting and attention. Josephine was slovenly; her belly brushed across the marble floor when she walked from room to room. And her barking resembled the sound track to any 1970s prison-break film. When Josephine was a couple of years old, she took a dark turn toward canine juvenile delinquency. She decided that Kibbles ’n Bits was not going to cut it anymore and began hanging outside our local Safeway for a bigger score. Josie would enter the store like any housewife doing errands, bypass produce and the sale on instant soup, and make a beeline for the meat department. There, she would sniff out a choice cut of New York strip steak (or, occasionally, a pork loin), bite down, and carry the package back out the door and into the parking lot, where she would consume it delicately and unrushed. She was known as the smash-and-grab pooch. And if that were not enough, after her feast she would be so bloated and fatigued that she would stagger onto Massachusetts Avenue, one of the busiest and most congested streets in D.C., and curl up for an afternoon
snooze. Traffic would halt, people would exit their cars blustering, and if anyone tried to move her by pulling her tail or gently kicking her belly, she would growl and send the terrorized person back into their Acura. These jaunts became as frequent as the D.C. police’s arrest threats. Sadly, the day came when Josephine was forced by the city of Washington, D.C., to move outside the district borders. We were told she was moved to a free-range felon farm. Mutts behind Bars. Somewhere sweet Josie is some dingo’s bitch.
When I was twelve and my older siblings were sent to boarding school (another free-range felon farm), it was finally my turn to choose a pet. I took the task very seriously and methodically scoured the public library for pet encyclopedias and almanacs that I would drag many blocks home. My kids don’t know how lucky they are to have Google. I would lie in my bed with a flashlight and try to imagine myself with an Irish setter, a French bulldog, or a spider monkey. I finally chose a dachshund. And have been an avid dackel lover ever since. I share this adoration with other famous dachshund owners—John F. Kennedy, Picasso, Andy Warhol, Jack Ruby, Abraham Lincoln, the Olsen twins, and David Hasselhoff. But don’t hold that against the breed.
For many young girls their first love is a horse, but mine was a little black-and-brown sausage named Max. Freud would say a penis substitute; Woody Allen would
say, “For you I’d think a Great Dane!” I slept on the floor next to Max’s dog bed before he was housebroken, dressed him in my old Cabbage Patch doll clothes, and shared mac and cheese with him out of the same bowl. Aside from my husband, Max was my only kindred spirit and confidante. Until Chester, Gilbert, Charlie, and Daisy. And all the dachshunds that followed him.
I
didn’t mean to rescue Gilbert. I was at the East Los Angeles pound searching for a friend’s lost dog and there he was. Gilbert was skeletal, wrapped in one of those quilted blankets used for moving, and shaking uncontrollably. One of the volunteers held him as he trembled, peering out from behind the cloth with Norma Desmond eyes. I never walk away from an adoptable dachshund. Or any form of gingerbread. Those are just my rules. So Gilbert joined me in the Hollywood Hills. Like any new relationship, it took some time for us to ease into cohabitation. I found that, like a few men I had dated, Gilbert had the nasty habit of peeing around the sofas and chairs in some kind of alpha ownership ritual. Something I could never train him, or any other dachshund, out of. But eventually we existed in a harmonious, symbiotic union. The phone would ring and he would yap incessantly.
The phone would ring in a movie I was watching and he would yap incessantly. Gilbert was a burrower and slept under my down comforter deep in the bowels of my bed, where he would curl himself up like a Cinnabon until morning. My own cashmere water bottle. Until he started licking his own ass; then he was back to the dog bed.
We had owned a small cottage in East Hampton, Long Island, for many years as a refuge from the humidity and tempers of Manhattan. Gilbert would bark at the surf like its monstrous hands were flowing up to seize him and swallow him back into the sea. And he would chase deer because somewhere in his tiny DNA he believed he was bred to slaughter lions. I don’t think he thought through how he would transfer his carnage home; he struggles to lift a sparerib.
We sold that house and years later rented a house in Amagansett, which was about twenty miles east. It was more desolate and quieter and what I imagined the Hamptons were like in the 1950s. I would have eaten melon topless with Pollock and sketched the dunes with de Kooning whilst Coltrane played his sax and Kerouac rolled joints. But it was the twenty-first century, so I drove my kids to craft camp, argued with the neighbor about spilled garbage, and ate gluten-free blueberry muffins. My husband ceremoniously took Gilbert for a daily constitutional on the beach. One afternoon it was near dusk and overcast. As the front door opened, I faintly heard, “I lost Gilbert!”
“How could you LOSE Gilbert?” I said, panicked.
“I think I saw him walk into the surf,” was his imbecilic answer.
Dogs are not suicidal and Gilbert was not some despondent Geraldine Page character who lost the will to live and walked dramatically into the waves. He was lost. Or found a better family with panoramic views and a tennis court. I painted signs and stapled them to every tree and post in a mile radius. I called animal control and the mayor. The mayor never returned my call. And for three days and two nights we waited for a sign, a whimper, a tepid scratch at the door. I couldn’t sleep, imagining Gilbert, face to the storm, struggling to brave the elements.
On day three, we got a call from animal control. They had found a dachshund in the town of East Hampton. To be more specific, on the roof of the town hall in East Hampton. My husband reluctantly drove over, knowing that, given his age and minuscule legs, our ten-year-old, white-whiskered banger couldn’t have trekked twenty-three miles.
We were wrong. Gilbert had lost half his body weight and was covered in burrs. Yes, he was lost, but being the determined little German that he was, he had marched miles to the only turf he knew, a place where we had lived for many summers before. We will never know how he ended up on the roof of the town hall, but
then, who built Stonehenge and where is Jimmy Hoffa buried?
A
nd so the next generation of pet fostering commenced. Archie and Lenny, the aforementioned guinea pigs, arrived at JFK Airport in a crate that had a small sticker slapped on one side that read
FRAGILE
. In honor of the two furry newcomers, I baked two red velvet cakes in the shape of guinea pigs and frosted them in their specific brown and white colors. And then we hacked into them with a knife and ate their innards.
Archie and Lenny took over our daughters’ bathroom like an episode of “Hoarders: Rodents” where their poop (which looked like brown Good & Plenty candies) dusted the white ceramic tiles. They ate better than the majority of Americans and smelled like an indoor, heated petting zoo. But they were our pets! And as much as my husband wanted to flush them down the toilet or “set them free” (guinea pigs are the only man-made animal that doesn’t exist in the wild), we chose them to finish our circle of family. They completed us!
And someday Archie and Lenny will escape from their cage and find freedom through our radiator vent or procreate (Lenny might be female, we don’t know), giving birth to hundreds of guinea pigs who will take over the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But no matter
what the final outcome (and I’m talking to our babysitter when I say it won’t be a dish involving barbecued peanut sauce), our daughter will delight in their company. And one day, she will have a daughter who will beg her for a pygmy goat or a hedgehog. And as much as my daughter won’t want to clean the newspaper from beneath the bearded dragon or feed live mice to the albino boa constrictor, she will remember her relationship with Archie and Lenny and she too will indulge her daughter’s request.
*
H
alfway through the film
The Help
, I was so hysterical my husband had to carry me out of the theater like I was having some sort of seizure. I could hear him whisper, “Bad shrimp,” to the ushers. We were having a date night (or because of my husband’s schedule, we call it date afternoon) and decided to see a movie. I was expecting much more of a romp. And there
was
a knee-slapping moment; poop in a pie always delivers. I mean, who hasn’t done that? But it was the “You is good, you is smart, you is important” line that sent me into sniveling convulsions and prompted our early exit. After a few hours of clinging to my husband’s neck and finishing my box of Milk Duds, I tried to surmise why.
The quote addresses the three integral parts of being someone worthwhile: someone good, someone smart, and someone important. (Note to my daughters: there is no “you is hot.”) The fact that it’s grammatically incorrect underscores the poignancy, as it is spoken in the film by a black maid in the 1960s who is trying to impart wisdom and warmth to a little girl she has cared for who never received love from her own mother. The maid expresses the only love provided in the child’s life.
The quote has struck such a chord with many people, not just me, because it triggers that want and need in all of us. And by making it a mantra and repeating it on a loop, some will eventually believe it. Of course, if you’re the chairman of JP Morgan or Heidi Klum, you won’t need to do this.
But why does it touch me so intensely? Maybe we all yearn to hear those lines whispered to us. Am I the little girl? Or more important, am I the little girl STILL?
I was the youngest of three children and then the middle child of half siblings. I’ve had a mother and two stepmothers, a father and two stepfathers. So yes, the fact that I became an actress is self-explanatory if not glaringly predictable. I need love, validation, and global attention. I don’t fault my parents, but our childhood does inform who we will be (no matter how much therapy we have). Honey Boo Boo anyone?
Perhaps if someone had repeatedly assured me, “You
is good, you is smart, you is important,” my life would be different. I might not be on Zoloft. Or binge-eat Skinny Cow caramel and pretzel ice-cream bars at 3
A.M.
What if I really believed from early on that I was good, smart, and important? I’m not saying I’d be a Supreme Court justice, but I might have tried harder to pass algebra (I only did because my teacher was arrested for sexual misconduct, so I got a pass). You is important means you have worth, weight, character, and merit. It means you matter. Tell that to Michael, the sophomore at Harvard who ditched me behind the Widener Library in 1983 holding my bra and his half-empty Heineken.
I’ve always been more at ease telling jokes than commanding attention for my sage opinions on North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missiles and how they’ve broken the armistice agreement. Even today, I find public speaking to be a herculean task; it would probably be easier for me to strip. (Nobody wants me to; believe me, I’ve asked.) The feeling of being important just never resonated with me. I confess, I was the kid who leaped around the living room shirtless with a pillow shoved down a pair of black tights while I pretended to be Baryshnikov. I still wear costumes on Halloween. Of course I pretend it’s at the insistence of my kids. I once dressed up as Sunny von Bulow with a blond wig and pajamas stuffed with pills. My children were four and six years old. They thought I was just dressed up as me. I’m
not sure if these are examples of a person who feels she is good, smart, and important.
Had Idi Amin and Pol Pot received nurturing whispers like “you is good” as toddlers, might hundreds of lives have been saved? Pol Pot was the eighth of nine kids and failed all his exams in 1953. This is not someone who felt good, smart, or important. At least the little blonde in
The Help
had a fighting chance, thanks to Aibileen. If not for her, she might have become Squeaky Fromme. I’m not saying that if every psychopath or homicidal maniac was the beneficiary of good mother messages they would all be saints; Jeffrey Dahmer would have still chewed Aibileen’s arm off, but a few of the Fascist dictators might have been dulcified.
I
would love to write a sequel about Aibileen and the little blond girl in the form of an action film starring Whoopi Goldberg and Dakota Fanning. The little blond girl grows up corrupt and unloved and, as a teenager, gets into trouble with the mob, drug dealers, and the Kardashians. Consequently, she is being hunted, with a large bounty on her head. At this point, Aibileen has retired (after forty years of servitude, the family gives her a monogrammed tote bag) and moves to a remote island off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago. The little blond girl has nowhere to flee—the house in Scarsdale is too
obvious and the ski condo is being rented. So the little blond girl escapes to the islands and hides in Aibileen’s hutch. (Little blond girl wears Calypso macramé bikinis for the entire third act; Aibileen still wears her starched maid’s outfit.) The thugs catch wind of the little blond girl’s whereabouts (courtesy of a weak, coked-out friend played by Steve Buscemi) and track her to the island. In the last scene of the film, Aibileen and the little blond girl crawl behind the dunes with assault rifles and an Uzi, obliterating the bad guys as Aibileen screams at the little blond girl, “You is good, you is smart, you is important.” Why couldn’t that have happened to me!
Of course, with my daughters, I have overcompensated. I panic if my children DON’T crawl into bed with me in the middle of the night. In fact, I’ll tiptoe into their room at 3
A.M.
, nudge them awake, and drag their sleepy selves down the hallway and into my bed. I tell them every day that “You is good, you is smart, you is important.” And they tell me I’m not using correct grammar.
My husband and I were in Positano, Italy, savoring linguine
alle vongole
and each other when even the topless sunbathing on rocks and speedboats to Capri couldn’t keep us from flying home three days early because we missed our kids. Of course when we threw our bags down and tearfully embraced them, they burst into tears because that meant the pretty babysitter had to leave.
My elder daughter had intense separation anxiety as a toddler. She would cling to my leg like a koala on a eucalyptus tree every morning at kindergarten drop-off. The teacher would plead with me to disengage and exit the classroom, but I couldn’t and secretly kept her tiny fingers fastened on me. I would eventually leave (after telling my daughter I had an office right above her in the school building and had to go to work) and sit in my car and bawl. I guess I could have homeschooled her, but then today she’d only know how to bake a decent chocolate chip cookie and have watched all the episodes of
Will & Grace
. She wouldn’t know math or have learned a sport. Although, based on most of reality TV now, you probably don’t need much more than that to make way above minimum wage.
Let me be clear, I don’t overpraise my daughters. I don’t tell them they’re geniuses or try to get them an audition for
Toddlers & Tiaras
. My daughters don’t have tennis trophies and horseback-riding ribbons pinned all over their walls. As a parent, I don’t need their success to be a reflection of me; that’s a low bar. I tell them when they’re mediocre or their paper on the Greek deity Artemis was “meh.” I praise when it is truly warranted. When I witness them demonstrating random acts of kindness or creating a stellar Sponge Bob out of clay, I can’t hide my excitement.
I also try not to emphasize their physical appearance.
They are beautiful girls, definitely more breathtaking than all the other children in the United States and most of Canada. But I don’t want them to be fixated on looks. They have their father’s brain and my legs and if it were the other way around, they’d be screwed.
A
bout six months ago, I got my first “I hate you.” I bet Aibileen never got one. My daughter was being impudent and as punishment I canceled a sleepover (which is easy for me because I didn’t want her to leave anyway). She was so outraged she practically ripped up the wood floor with her fingernails. I said sternly, “Go to your room right now, young lady!” I felt like I was delivering a line from a TV Land sitcom. She stormed down the hallway slapping walls and pounding her Converse sneakers into the carpeting. Thankfully the apartment below is vacant or I would have gotten an eviction notice from the super.
And then I heard it, echoing down the hall: a deafening, “I hate you, Ali Wentworth!”
I willed myself not to cry. Instead, I stampeded down the hallway with such intensity, I barely missed trampling our dachshund Daisy. I kicked the door in like Jackie Chan in a Jackie Chan movie. (I assume; I’ve never seen one.)
“It’s I hate you, MOM!” I yelled at her.
She stopped thrashing around and said, “What?”
“Don’t say, ‘I hate you, Ali Wentworth’—it’s ‘I hate you, MOM!’ Please don’t sully the brand!”
I lay on the sofa deep breathing after ruthlessly searching for a wine opener. And even though I knew I would endure many more years of door slamming, name-calling, and worse, in that moment I knew I had done one thing right. My daughter would not have that kind of fire if she didn’t feel good, smart, and important. Well, maybe a little too important. And minutes later, she apologized in such a mature and thoughtful way. She told me she hated being at odds with me and was sorry she’d let her anger get the better of her.
She curled up against me on the couch. And as I stroked her hair and kissed her forehead I whispered, “I can’t wait until we’re on a desolate island and I teach you how to use a gun to assassinate bad guys.”
She looked up at me with her wide eyes and whispered back, “Mom, are you drunk?”