Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life (2 page)

I LOVE GOING TO THE LOCAL FARMERS’ MARKET; I’M SO
much cooler there. For two hours a week I’m not the Quinn who would live on jelly beans if gum disease and diabetes didn’t exist. I’m not the Quinn who sneers at root vegetables, the Quinn who is frightened by leeks. Walking up and down the rows of stands, I become the Quinn who spontaneously whips up a spinach salad with homemade vinaigrette for lunch, the one who buys vegetables and not only eats them but makes stock from the remnants. I am sober and industrious and thrifty. I am Amish with the option of Velcro. That the farmers’ market Quinn doesn’t actually exist is a small irritant, sand on my psychic spinach.

A while ago, I took Alice to the market. Along with the masses of vegetables and fruits, there were small restaurant booths and vendors selling premade goods. I was holding up a bunch of Swiss chard trying to make myself believe I would actually cook it before it became slime when Alice suddenly breathed, “Ooh, look.” I followed her gaze to where a local Indian restaurant was selling takeout from an ice chest. Since we both appreciate a well-seasoned lentil, we ambled over. The setup was clean. The samples were generous and tasty. Predictably, I bought cooked lentils. And then Alice pointed to a pint-size container of something white.

“Yes! Raita!” she crowed, pleased at seeing her favorite ex
otic side dish. The owner gave her a small taste and she inhaled it. She turned to me, her eyes filling half her face.

“May I please have raita?” she breathed in a voice traditionally used for negotiating items from the Frito-Lay group. I noted the sign that read “Raita: $6.00 a pint.” That seemed more like a fresh-raspberry price, not a food-typically-eaten-by-grad-students-because-it-is-filling-and-cheap price. So I questioned the owner, who gave me a spirited lecture about the cost of creating healthy, locally raised food while also paying workers a living wage. Cowed, I asked if there was a smaller size. But, no, apparently one can only appreciate yogurt with fair-trade things floating in it in pint-sized containers.

I said to Alice, “If I get it…,” and she fist-pumped “Yes!” She assumed this was the “If” that meant
I’m finding a way to give you what you want while still maintaining the illusion that I run the place.
But when I spend six dollars on gelatinous yogurt, it will come with conditions, so I continued, “If I get it, you have to eat it. All of it.” On the off chance I wasn’t flogging the subject sufficiently, I added, “I don’t eat raita, so if I buy it, you are telling me you will eat it. It’s expensive.”

“I will. I will. Thank you,” she chanted, eyes fixed on the ice chest holding the nectar. I handed over six dollars and got my pint of Indian white. The owner warned me that the food was freshly made without preservatives and as such needed to be eaten within two days, which certainly didn’t seem to be a problem, since Alice kept opening the bag and affectionately patting the container of raita as if it were a guinea pig.

She ate the entire pint of lentils that night for dinner, which gave me the narcotic rush of
Look at me, raising a child who enjoys healthy, vegetarian food. I don’t know why people think this
mothering business is so hard. Really, just a little care and attention, and children dance to your bidding
.

I had now set up all the pins. Karma picked up her bowling ball.

The next night we ate dinner out. The following evening, as I pulled the raita from the fridge, its expiration date looming in my thoughts, I asked Alice, “Do you want your raita over lentils and rice?”

“Yeah,” she replied. “I guess.” This wasn’t the same girl who had been liquid yogurt’s head cheerleader less than forty-eight hours earlier. No worries, I told myself. She’ll come around once she gazes upon its pearlescent splendor. I heated the lentils and rice and poured some of the cool raita on the side of the plate, which I placed in front of my daughter. She set upon the rice and lentils like some kind of botanic predator. I waited; the raita remained untouched. In fact, if I had to give a sworn deposition, I would have said the raita was being avoided.

“Didn’t you notice? Raita. On your plate,” I said stupidly, as if the goop leaching into her rice was visible only to me. She moved a raita-dribbled grain of rice onto her fork and between her lips. She looked at me, her lip curled slightly. I barked, “What?” To which she said, “I’d like it if weren’t for the vegetables in it.”

I exhaled slowly through my teeth and said in my dangerously even tone, “It had the same vegetables in it when you couldn’t live without it two days ago. Just. Eat. It.”

She ate another grain of rice, which, possibly, had abutted a grain of rice that had touched the raita, and then she looked at me. “I’m full,” she announced. “You can have the rest.”

“I don’t want the rest. I never wanted the rest. I want you to eat it. I paid good money for that raita…”

“
Good money
.” There’s a phrase. Of course I’d heard it before having a child—had heard it
as
a child—but I don’t believe I’d actually used it until I had a child. Roughly translated, “good money” means: “Money can be spent only once. If I spend it on a music class but you spend said class braiding and re-braiding your hair I start fixating on how the same money could have purchased one of those salon afternoons where they massage my neck before they wash my hair and then offer me a glass of wine while it’s being cut, so allow me the delusion that you are actually gaining something from the money I spend on you…”

“And if you think you are going to be allowed to waste food…”

“Waste,” like “good money,” is a loaded term in my house. A woman with leftover containers dedicated to archiving two tablespoons of uneaten dinner isn’t inclined to view an uneaten pint of six-dollar yogurt as a good thing.

“You are sorely mistaken.” I could have ended there, but I continued, “I expect you to take responsibility for your choices…”

And there it was. When you grow up in a city that venerates eternal adolescence, you are more likely to see a snow leopard than someone who takes responsibility for her own actions. Even if, by the grace of God or irrefutable videotaped evidence, someone admits that yes, they
did
whatever thing they are being accused of, there’s always the “But…”

…I had been taking medication for a neck injury…. You didn’t hear what he said to me first.

…I only requested a therapeutic massage.

Alice might live in Los Angeles, and she might get to know firsthand its endless beaches and American Girl emporium, but my daughter doesn’t get to “Yes, but” her way out of personal responsibility. Today, expensive raita. Ten years from now, her PR people are explaining how that Ecuadorian family of six leapt in front of her car. I was about to find some way of explaining this to her when I caught her expression. The forkful of raita and rice was next to her trembling lips, under her huge liquid eyes; if an artist ever wanted to create the definitive portrayal of what misery looks like on a child’s face, I had the model.

I stood there, frozen. We had reached an impasse, and I had no idea what to do. Clearly she wasn’t going to eat the whole pint, now or ever. If I forced her to eat it, she’d probably develop a complex about dairy products, or grow up to hate everything Indian. I could ruin her relationship with an entire subcontinent. On the other hand, if I gave up and let her leave the table, the lesson she would learn is “appear tragic enough and Mommy folds.” The next thing you know, she’s standing in Saks Fifth Avenue holding up a thousand-dollar handbag and whimpering, “But Mommy, all the other Girl Scouts have it, and you wouldn’t want me to feel
sad
, would you?”

For the sake of any future negotiations, she had to eat some. But how much? Did one bite achieve the holy trinity of not wasting my money, not wasting food, and not wasting a chance to become a moral person? That’s a lot to put on one bite. Maybe she needed to take two. But just then, a little cloud started to form over my heart. Did the fact that I was caving in from “You must eat it all, every single bite, I mean it and I’m not backing down” to “Okay, two bites, two is fine,” make me no better
than a mother at the grocery store offering to buy Ho Hos if her son stops kicking her?

This, in case you’re curious, is why most parenting magazines write articles about the problems of infants and toddlers. Teaching them not to bite can be covered in a 750-word article, because nearly all the behavior of that age, no matter how unsightly, resolves itself and is soon replaced by even less sanitary habits. The quandaries of raising older children can’t even be fully described in 750 words, much less resolved. These are the moments of my life when I not only feel like a well-meaning but bumbling idiot—my default setting—but I actually feel utterly alone. (Do I even need to say that her father was out for the evening?)

I was left with the same question, the one that flattens me every time:
What is enough?
There comes a point in every disciplinary action where things can slip too easily from “These are the consequences of your actions” to “Years from now, your therapy group is going to love this.” Obviously, I am not talking about physical or emotional abuse; I’m talking about two people in a room and maybe one of them has always wondered what makes the clacking sound when you shake nail polish and decides to answer that question once and for all by pouring the nail polish on the bedspread, and now the other one has to decide exactly how much punishment she needs to inflict. (That wasn’t Alice, by the way. That was me. I was six. The noise comes from ball bearings.)

I read all the parenting books, some twice. I know the best parent is a consistent, loving, authoritative presence. You tell each child, every day, in large ways and small, “These are the things that matter to me and will eventually matter to you.
Please behave in this fashion.” And you understand that as the parent you have to keep advocating for the expected behavior all the time. We always say “please” and “thank you.” We always make our bed in the morning. We never use Mommy’s toothbrush to get the cat looking her best. But children, wily and alert little devils that they are, spend many years looking for loopholes, and life keeps conspiring to create them. Over the years, they learn that certain rules are only in effect around their grandmothers but can be ignored at other times. They learn that after Daddy has driven for an hour on the freeway and only gone two-tenths of a mile, he doesn’t care what you do, as long as you do it quietly. They learn that for one week a month Mommy has a much more stringent definition of the phrase “back talk” and a much lower tolerance for it. What I want to be is a strong, resolute figure leading my daughter through the primeval forest of childhood, hacking out a clear, bright path of expectations for her. What I usually end up being is a person swatting at bugs, squinting at the sun and saying nervously, “Wait. I know I have the map here somewhere.”

In the end, Alice choked down three bites, one for each character trait I was trying to impress upon her. Also, she had to pay me for the raita she urged me to buy but now didn’t want. Her loathing of the stuff was so profound she didn’t even look miffed at the loss of hard-earned capital. We lived through another mothering moment with only the odd psychic abrasion and some cucumber floating in a cup of soured milk as a reminder.

The dog wouldn’t eat it either.

I CANNOT SAY THAT BEING A CHILD ACTOR WAS DETRIMENTAL
to me, but I could have done without being a
former
child actor. To be a child is a temporary condition. To be a former child actor is a permanent state. Former child actors aren’t people. They’re memories from your childhood, little people who lived in the television in the den. It would be as if I asked you to consider the feelings of an EASY-BAKE Oven.

Former child actors are frequently exposed to idiotic questions. They are required to respond graciously when people ask them things they wouldn’t have the nerve to ask their brother-in-law after drinking a six-pack. Do you have any money left or did your parents spend it all? Was (actor with whom I worked) an ass? and Did acting ruin your life?

I try to be polite. I tell people that my parents spent every cent I made on cheap wine and aboveground swimming pools, and what a comfort it is to discuss this with them, a complete stranger. I tell them that (Actor with whom I worked) was a lovely person, but he was an adult and I was a child so, outside of acting, our interests didn’t exactly coincide. I couldn’t legally meet him at a nightclub and he wasn’t too excited about hanging out with me while I read the Little House on the Prairie books, ate Wheat Thins, and drank Tom Collins mixer. As to the
did-acting-ruin-your-life
question—the answer is no. Actually, I liked acting and acting suited my personality quite well,
which says nothing good about my character. I remember once getting very upset with my mother for using something funny I had said without giving me credit. I barged into the adults’ conversation and said through gritted teeth, “That was my line, you know.” I was six years old; I wasn’t even acting yet.

The maddening part about being a former child actor is that I’m not
always
a former child actor. If I look good and I’m not perspiring copiously or in the middle of saying something inappropriate, no one recognizes me. I’m just another civilian with a fresh manicure. As luck would have it, I’m rarely composed and I’m usually disheveled. If Rupert the dog has made a break for it and I’m running down the street in my pajamas screaming, “Come BACK here you (verb form of expletive) (noun expletive) hellhound or I swear to (verb form of expletive) (deity) I’m going to beat you into a PASTE!” and I stop to gasp and sweat and pull bees out of my feet, someone getting out of a car will look at me, smile, and say, “I’m sorry, but weren’t you—?” I blot my brow and try to be gracious because that person hasn’t done anything wrong in wanting to confirm that I was, and still am, Quinn Cummings, and it doesn’t hurt me to be polite—most of the time.

At the height of the dot-com frenzy, I took a job in San Francisco. After several weeks of dead ends, I left Los Angeles without having a place to live in San Francisco. I figured I’d get there, stay in a hotel for a few days, find a sublet, and move in. That seemed like the kind of whimsical thing people I knew did all the time, and it always worked out fabulously for them. I had forgotten that whimsy, like paisley, is incredibly unflattering on me. There was, quite literally, no housing to be had in the entire city.

I gave up quickly on finding a whole apartment, then on finding a room in a house, then a spare bedroom in an apart
ment. I was down to begging strangers to let me drop an air mattress in a hallway and contemplating the more picturesque Dumpsters near South Park when a Los Angeles friend called with an offer. His cousin and her girlfriend were going to Europe and needed someone to watch their apartment and take care of their cat for two weeks. I went to meet the women. The apartment was a cozy, rundown sort of place, covered in cat hair and located directly behind San Francisco General Hospital, thus assuring me a constant wail of sirens. Then again, it wasn’t the backseat of my car, and it bought me two more weeks to try to find a proper sublet. My responsibilities as temporary tenant were simple: bring in the mail; answer the phone as needed; give the cat her IV drip.

I’m sorry, what?

The women had tried for several years to have a child. When it became apparent this wasn’t going to happen, the cat became their beloved offspring. Unfortunately, the cat was now very old; every major organ system was fading like a Hawaiian sunset. Her eyes were cloudy, her hearing was shot, and her kidneys were failing by the minute so unless she was rehydrated and fed twenty dollars’ worth of medication twice every day, she would die.

You know, like nature intended.

I received a swooningly vivid demonstration of how to pick up the cat (which, while really sweet, resembled something you’d collect on a Swiffer), pinch up the skin on her neck, and plunge in the needle. She let out a weak but truculent mew. I let out a half-choked whimper. Next, I was taught how to pulverize her heart pill, mix it with water, put it into a syringe, and jam it down her throat.

For the next two weeks, I awoke at five every morning and, before I went to the gym, stumbled around the apartment trying to find Linty the cat. Sometimes, I would grab under the bed only to snatch up a dust bunny or a limp sock. Eventually I would locate her slumped form somewhere in the apartment, and she would emit this little moan, which said plainly, “Crap. Still alive.”

Every morning and every night, I would insert the IV line and wait for the bag of fluid to empty into her. Every morning and every night I would watch her minimal life force come back as the fluid rehydrated her. Every morning and every night I would remember that she hated her heart pills and that I should have given them to her first, when she was still walking toward the light. Every morning, I would leave for the gym with paper towels worn around my arms like blood-specked dropcloths, absorbing the vivid reminders of exactly how much she hated heart pills.

It is a testimony to the housing situation in San Francisco that I still considered myself lucky.

During this time, I had found a longer-term temporary housing situation (the housemate of a high-school friend’s ex-girlfriend had been popped for shoplifting for the third time. He jumped bail. His room was free. Whee!) so when Linty’s moms returned, I moved out that afternoon. As I was packing, one of the women invited me back the following night for her birthday party. I didn’t really know anyone in town besides the stock-optioned teenagers I was working with, and I was still thankful they had taken me in, so I gladly accepted.

When I arrived the next evening, the apartment was full of women. I smiled politely, slid through to the kitchen, got myself
a drink. As I was coming back into the living room, the girlfriend of the birthday girl grabbed me by the wrist and tugged me toward the birthday girl, who was standing by the fireplace. Assuming she wanted me to wish her girlfriend a happy birthday, I went along without hesitation. Why wouldn’t I? They were middle-aged lesbians in San Francisco. The worst thing that should have happened to me was being forced to try lentil and hummus pâté.

Once I was standing between the hostesses, the birthday girl called out, “Excuse me? Everyone? Be quiet!”

The rest of the women in the room quieted down and stared expectantly at their beaming hostesses, and at me sandwiched between them. My stomach sank.

“I’m sure you all remember
The Goodbye Girl
…”

No, I’m thinking frantically, she’s not going to do this.

“The little know-it-all on
Family
, you remember that show?”

The women started conferring. Some remembered it, some needed their memories refreshed, some had no idea what she was talking about. All of them, however, were staring at us with great interest. My expression was probably similar to the time I stuck my foot in my rollerblade and discovered half of a fat lizard my cat had secreted in there for some later meal.

“Anyway, here’s our friend, the little child star, Quinn Cummings!”

She hugged me, and then stepped back a bit so that her friends could fully appreciate my former child star aura. My first thought was: If this is what they did to their friends, what did they do to mere acquaintances? Ritualized flaying?

One woman brayed, “So, who did you work with who was lesbian? Is (the name of an actress) a dyke?”

The women chorused, “Yes! Who’s gay?”

I was near paralysis in horror and anger at this behavior. Still, I managed to come up with a nearly Victorian “I’m
sure
I wouldn’t know who is gay or lesbian. It wouldn’t
occur
to me to ask.” [Lies, lies, lies. I know all
sorts
of things about all
sorts
of people. Some are out. Some are not. Some live discreet lives as homosexuals or bisexuals. Some are off-the-charts sluts. But if you think I was going to out someone for the satisfaction of these nattering harpies, you are painfully mistaken.]

Once everyone figured out that the former child star wasn’t going to do some adorable tricks, the interest in me faded a bit. I took this opportunity to slither out of the room and make a break for the front door. Sure, it was rude not to say good-bye to the hosts, but
they started it
.

I got to my new apartment and went back to unpacking when a horrible thought occurred to me. I checked the bags. I checked my car. I checked my bags again. Oh, hell, I had left my good winter coat at the Cat House. I had to go back for the coat, but if I saw those two women again, I was going to say something awful, something I might regret. Actually, I wouldn’t regret it at all, and I’d probably play what I said back again and again in my head and giggle, but I wanted to believe I was a better person than that. I tried to tap into my inner San Franciscan, a mellow forgiving individual who could listen to the Grateful Dead without wanting to slam her hand in a door.

An hour later I was back at their house. They only lived ten minutes away from my new place; the other fifty minutes had been spent trying to find a parking space, which did absolutely
nothing to foster a “live and forgive” attitude in my heart. I ran up to the apartment, now empty except for the hostesses and, I assume, Linty the cat. I found my coat, brushed off the larger pyramids of cat fur, and inhaled deeply to begin my prepared speech. I then coughed out a Hindenburg of hair, and tried again.

“Look, I don’t want to make a big deal about this, but you two did something that made me…”

I thought about the words I wanted to use: “blindingly irritated”? “teeth-gnashingly irked”?

I went with: “kind of uncomfortable.”

They stared blankly at me so I continued. “It was very nice of you to invite me to your party, but when you brought me up in the front of the room like that, and introduced me as a former child star, I felt like the evening’s entertainment.”

I waited for some expression of embarrassment to cross their faces. They waited patiently, expecting me to come to the point where they had committed a faux pas. I tried again.

“That part of my life was nearly two decades ago, and when it’s the first thing someone finds worth mentioning about me, I start to feel as if I have done nothing else of any consequence in my life.”

An exquisite pause occurred, where we all wondered if anyone was going to leap in and protest that I had done lots of worthwhile things after puberty. No one did.

The birthday girl protested, “But everyone wanted to hear about Hollywood.”

Her girlfriend lay a protective hand on her shoulder.

“Honey, let Quinn vent.”

LET.

QUINN.

VENT?

Venting
is something you do when traffic is really bad and you come home and yell at your spouse for fifteen minutes about how you want to live in a city with two thousand people and where you can walk to work.

Venting
is something you do at a bar after everyone has watched the presidential debates.

Venting
is when the person doing the venting is being slightly irrational and the person being vented at is blameless.

Two hours before, these people wanted me to tap out my age with my hoof for a roomful of strangers, and I was
venting
?

Neither of these women, who between them had five master’s degrees, thought the situation merited an “I’m sorry.” I didn’t even get an “I’m sorry you feel that way,” which wouldn’t technically qualify as an apology anyway.

I gripped my coat and said icily, “Guess my
venting
is done.” I spun on my heel and headed for the door. In my path was the dispirited balding lump of fur that was my former patient. I leaned over and scratched her head. She purred. I yanked the door open and headed down the street toward my car, marinating in the pleasure of being of no interest to anyone at all.