Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday?

by Laura Bennett

  Craftsmanship is like a signature, it doesn’t change and I felt Jeffrey’s garments were not consistent with the work I had seen him do. The other two finalists agreed, and I decided I needed to say something to the producers. If I didn’t, I would regret it forever. I am known for my candor and operating without filters, but in this case I carefully considered the ramifications of speaking up and took the burden completely on myself, leaving Michael and Uli out of the equation. Ironically, “Don’t cause any trouble” had been the last bit of advice Peter gave me before I left for the finale. But this was not about causing trouble; if I was going to lose, it had to be because I simply wasn’t the best. I couldn’t accept going down against illicit work.

  In the end I was satisfied with the course of action the producers decided was most prudent. Ultimately Jeffrey went on to win the show, and I was pleasantly surprised by how relieved I was by garnering runner-up status; now I wouldn’t forever be tied to having been a reality show winner and there would be no pressure to create a full fashion line for the following fall shows. I did feel that Uli was robbed, though; she should rightly have won. If Jeffrey sewed all of his garments himself, then I wish him luck. Otherwise, karma’s a bitch.

  Someone said to me that not winning could be a real advantage. He was right. I have heard that contestants on Survivor get paid $10,000 to participate whether they win or lose. Contestants on Project Runway aren’t paid a dime. As Heidi would say, you’re either in or you’re out—of the money, that is. Either you win $100,000 or you go home with an empty bag. And after all, my dream was to watch the show with my friends and family, which for one brief shining season we did, from beginning to bittersweet end.

  To satisfy my reality television cravings, I have had to start watching Top Chef. I’m not a foodie—I don’t cook and I don’t even necessarily enjoy eating—but I do love hearing the judges speak about the food and listening to the chefs explain their decisions. As it turns out, cooking is just another design solution, using sunchokes and geoduck instead of satin and chiffon. I’m right back where I started, as my family won’t watch with me, but this time I won’t be packing my knives and standing in any audition lines.

  SIX AND THE CITY

  “There’s nothing like a root canal to secure some guilt-free me time.”

  EVERY NOW AND THEN, I’LL HAVE ONE OF THOSE days where I walk my feet off all over New York City, chasing down some fabric, picking up one kid, handing off another, meeting with a producer, going on an interview, having lunch with a friend, and dropping a pair of run-down Manolos at shoe rehab. At the end of that kind of day, I will enter my apartment to find at least five children and often twice as many, various adults, an unstable rabbit, and a tortoise named Frank. When I step off the elevator and into this wall of noise, the phrase “Women and children first” usually ticks across my brain, reminding me that there is a chance of rescue. Maybe this happens because the length of the place looks remarkably like the Titanic, tipped up on one end and spilling its sliding contents into the swirling subarctic waters below. Or it may just be an involuntary mantra that keeps me from jumping ship. Don’t get me wrong, I thrive on being in the center of a chaotic storm—I did grow up in New Orleans, after all.

  People expect our home to look like one of my husband’s projects, which are featured frequently in magazines like Architectural Digest. He has an impeccable eye for simplicity and elegant, understated touches in the spaces he designs. In stark contrast, our loft bears a greater resemblance to the projects. I am always amused by the look of surprise when someone comes to our apartment for the first time. Once they’ve tripped through the obstacle course of scooters and skateboards, backpacks and discarded winter coats around the threshold, they come face-to-face with the one item that defines our space: the sofa.

  This sofa was a big purchase for us. It was a special order from one of the fancy upholsterers that my husband uses for his clients, a rich brown leather with real down cushions for extra comfort. We waited four months for it to arrive. I watched nervously as the deliverymen maneuvered it into the freight elevator. When they finally got it into our apartment, I sniffed the air around it, taking in the distinct smell of new. They set it in place and began to unwrap it. Once revealed, the sofa was perfect, gorgeous, a giant Manolo for my ass.

  That was twelve years and a few babies ago. The poor thing still sits there, a shred of its former self. The luxurious leather, so soft it was almost suedelike, didn’t hold up well to vomit or leaking sippy cups. Within a year, the seat cushions were cracked and torn and I had to make fabric covers for them. When holes began to appear on the arms and backrest, we resorted to the ultimate white-trash fix-all, duct tape. When we were having guests over and trying to make the place look nice, my husband would apply a fresh coat of tape.

  Any attempt I have made to have nice furniture has failed miserably in the face of my whirlwind of boys. The pair of Barcelona chairs I dreamt of owning since I studied Mies van der Rohe in architecture school sits deteriorating, buttons gone and foam chunks oozing from the once beautifully tufted leather cushions. In a feat that impressed even me, my kids managed to destroy the matching table, somehow getting the seventy-five-pound piece of glass off its graceful chrome base and smashing it. The Jacobsen swan chairs with their smooth swivel action and hand-upholstered wool seats are now so encrusted with indeterminate substances that the color has turned from a warm red to a unnamable shade of grunge. My tall, slender Mackintosh ladderback chair has been knocked over so many times that the grid is no longer orthogonal. The seventeenth-century fruitwood bombe chest that my husband inherited from his mother now has gouges all over the wood where multiple wheeled objects have repeatedly slammed into it.

  It’s not just the furniture that has been marked by the destructiveness of my minions. Our once-pristine white walls now have a wainscoting of scribbles at child-height; the blank canvas is just too much for budding artists to resist. Nonremovable stickers of a special industrial grade pepper the windows. Behind every door is a crater where the knob slammed into the sheetrock during a game of chase.

  About six years ago, I reluctantly cried uncle and turned the apartment over to the kids. Kitchen appliances are buried beneath notices of field trips past and present, and artwork I can’t be caught throwing away. Every television sits in a nest of the tangled miles of cords and controllers it takes to power the various video game systems. Several swings and a punching bag now hang from the ceiling. Overflowing baskets of sporting equipment and bins of headless action figures inhabit every corner. A life-size coffin, perfectly acceptable at Halloween but a bit macabre any other time of the year, serves as a coffee table because we have no place to store it.

  Sometime in the future, when my children have homes of their own to destroy, I will have a beautifully furnished apartment. It will be as fabulous as the interiors my husband designs for his clients, with all of the classic twentieth-century furniture I covet. But for now, IKEA is all my kids deserve.

  Because the existing furniture is one notch short of disposable, and there is nothing of value left to break, our loft is the perfect place to have big parties. There’s our annual Halloween bash. The “Viva Las Vegas” party is admittedly a cliché but still always a favorite, especially when there are at least twenty little kids running around dressed like Elvis. “Party Like a Rock Star” headlined forty kids in faux-hawks with inflatable guitars crammed on a stage lip-synching Led Zeppelin. “If You’re Indicted You’re Invited” saw an amazing array of favorite criminals, from O. J. Simpson to Jean Harris. Vincent “the Chin” Gigante showed up in his robe, on Heidi Fleiss’s arm. One of my personal favorites combined the themes of all the other parties into one name—Michael Jackson. People came as any version of MJ from the little black boy belting “ABC” to the child-molesting plastic-surgery victim dangling a baby off a hotel balcony.

  As much fun as this apartment is, it also has its drawbacks. It’s an open-plan loft, so we basically live in one big
room. There are two bedrooms, one large and one small. The large one is filled with bunk beds that are not specifically assigned. First come, first served—if you want to sleep on the bottom, then go to bed first. The smaller bedroom harbors Peter, the baby, and me, but not always in that order.

  Because the bedrooms leave little space for activities other than sleeping, everything else—with the exception of bathroom things—happens out in the open, and often we are in a state of Too Much Information.

  Finding space around here can prove challenging. I wind up hiding in that fallback safe haven, the bathroom. What’s not to love about a room designed for one that has a locking door? And who can possibly argue with the reply “Not now, I’m on the toilet”? If things get too overwhelming, I just schedule myself a dentist appointment. There is nothing like a root canal to secure some guilt-free me time. One medicated hour in the chair with no disturbances can be pure bliss, and as a special bonus, I get to leave with a Vicodin prescription.

  Constant proximity to my family is not a problem for now, but may become one in the very near future. I fear man smell the way some people fear snakes or spiders, and because I have five boys, my fears are not unfounded. An older boy named Oskar lives in our building; when he was going through puberty, I could literally smell him move past our floor in the elevator. My thirteen-year-old hasn’t yet fallen headlong into the fetid depths of puberty, but one stroll down the seventh-grade hallway gives me a hint of what I am in for, and it doesn’t smell pretty. It is the putrid hormonal byproduct of boys turning into men.

  “Why do you all smell so bad?” I asked Peik after I was safely outside the building and once again able to breathe through my nose.

  “You mean this?” He struck a superhero pose. “I busted in there, and with one flex the smell of man bounced off the walls.”

  “Put your man smell away already,” I said, trying not to laugh at him.

  In an attempt to ward off the inevitable, I have tried to stock up on odor-blocking body products, the way John Birch Society members fill their basements with canned food, but in my heart I know there isn’t enough Old Spice High Endurance Long Lasting Stop Smelling Up My Damn House Deodorant Stick in the world. And really, what is more disgusting, the stench of newly minted manhood, or the stench of newly minted manhood with a side order of “Mountain Fresh”?

  I’ve done the math. Assuming man smell lasts for only two years—and I trust it is temporary, because my husband doesn’t stink—by the time all five of my boys have passed through the noisome years of puberty and I can take a deep breath in my own home, the year will be 2023.

  Mini-men aren’t the only thing with an off smell in this loft. Our apartment could double as a petting zoo. I have successfully denied the kids anything large that would really require care, like a dog or a cat, but the small animals keep making their way into our household. We have a goldfish named Bubble Bath who swims in a vase on the kitchen counter, completely ignored by whichever child asserted that he would “prove I can take care of a dog” by receiving the fish. It was a short stroll to the hamster request. Ours is an insomniac who spends his nights running on a wheel that squeaks, and his days attempting to chew his way out of his ten-gallon glass aquarium home. I have applied countless rounds of WD-40 to that little circus ride, but the urine-induced rust just doesn’t seem to respond and the nightly squeaking continues. He is not a friendly creature—none of my five boys dares to handle him.

  If Hamster is unfriendly, our rabbit can only be described as downright vicious. Princess started out as a “class rabbit,” which makes her sound more appealing than she is. She came home for Christmas vacation one year and never left. Small wonder the teacher never put in a call of concern regarding Princess’s whereabouts. Again, I have no idea what child conspired against me to get another mouth into the house, but none of them seem particularly interested in taking the kind of loving ownership necessary to overcome Princess’s issues. I was not there for her formative years, so I don’t know the root of her problems, but she has so much anger and is so aggressive that the killer rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a Muppet in comparison. Princess roams free because we are afraid to come in direct physical contact with her. She has a cage where food, water, and a litter box are provided for her, but she enters only at her own discretion. Once while I was working on my computer, intent on my keyboard and semi-oblivious to my surroundings, I sensed something moving off to my left.

  “Mmmm, Cocoa Puffs,” Peik said.

  We’re out of Cocoa Puffs, I thought as I continued to click away on an assignment. And then it hit me. I turned in slow motion from my desk to see my son’s mouth closed, jaw moving.

  “NOOOOOO!” I yelled as I snapped out of my trance. But it was too late. Realizing what he had eaten, Peik started spitting and running through the house screaming. I suspect that child is off breakfast cereal for life.

  My favorite pet is Frank, short for Frankentortoise, a five-year-old red-footed tortoise who, like Princess but for entirely favorable reasons, has free rein of the apartment and a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” potty policy. Don’t ask me where he does it, because I can’t tell you. Though the children have offered his poop to guests, luckily none has ever eaten tortoise turds. Frank recognizes people; he especially loves Zoila, who is always happy to give him a handful of the real Cocoa Puffs that Peik now refuses to eat.

  We also have a very large, very noisy cage of tiny finches in the front of the loft. Despite their distance from the bedrooms, I can hear them in the wee hours chirping in harmony to Hamster’s machinations at the very first hint of daylight. I am surprised they have the intelligence to do so, because we started with a pair, and those fecund little birdstards have multiplied into what is undoubtedly the most inbred, genetically mutant tribe since the Kennedys. By rough count at least forty birds have been created in the past twelve years. Currently there are twelve, which seems to be one too many because one of them is pecked at by his friends so often that his neck is slowly becoming devoid of feathers—he looks like a sad little man, flying slowly behind the flock as they swoop from one end of the ten-foot-long antique bird cage to the other in synchronized flight. They might eventually kill him. This is what happens when you live in one room with too many inhabitants. We could put him in his own cage, but he would then likely die of loneliness. It’s Manhattan survival in miniature.

  A FRIEND OF MINE ONCE TOLD ME THAT HER MOTHER HAD SCOLDED her for “overscheduling” her two children. Here’s the thing about having children in Manhattan: there is no such thing as overscheduling, and anyone who calls you out on it is jealous because their town doesn’t offer the variety of afterschool lessons and experiences our town does. If New York City is Disneyland for adults, then it is freaking Epcot Center, Disney World, and Space Mountain for kids. There is no end to the things a child can learn and experience here. Filmmaking? Kendo? Basketweaving? Rock climbing? Sculpture? Oboe? Interpretive dance? We have it all.

  My kids don’t have too many extracurricular things going on, because lessons tend to be expensive and add total chaos to my schedule, but I do make sure each child has a unique activity that corresponds to his talents. Peik has his music, Truman has fencing, Pierson has male modeling, and Larson has art.

  One afternoon, Larson was working on a paint-a-tie-for-your-dad kit I had picked up for him at Jack’s 99 Cents. Because Larson is surrounded by some of the most amazing art and architecture in the world, he has developed a great deal of personal style and artistic ability. He was distracted from the project, though, by a favorite SpongeBob episode on the television, so he didn’t do his best work. He didn’t seem to think Peter would mind, though, and presented the result to him just as we were headed out to the Tribeca Ball, a benefit for the New York Academy of Art. Peter stripped off his ancient Hermès tie and put Larson’s on, much to our son’s delight. A few hours later, at dinner, the grande dame of art herself, Eileen Guggenheim, leaned over to Peter from a table away.


  “What artist painted your tie?” she said, barely touching a finger to it.

  “An outsider who goes by the name of Larson,” Peter said in all seriousness, though there was a glint in his eye.

  “Ah,” she replied, leaning back to her own table, but only after giving him a knowing look, one that said she had heard of this new artist, and he was going to be a big success.

  AT A COCKTAIL PARTY NOT LONG AGO, I STARTED CHATTING UP ANOTHER guest. She was a typical New York Upper East Side socialite, attractive, sleekly dressed, perfectly coiffed hair, in her mid-forties, with just a tad too much Botox as evidenced by her huge, motionless forehead. We ran through the customary small talk about where we live in the city and what we do; I told her about my ridiculous living conditions, which led to comparing notes on children. I went on a bit about my six, their various activities, and basically how challenging it is to keep the kids all alive, which is clearly the main objective of any parent.

  “Yes,” she said, “I know how hard it is to keep your little ones out of harm’s way. Why, just this past month I almost lost my baby, Lily.” She paused to take an exaggerated breath.

  “Go on,” I encouraged, moved by this terrible admission and at the same time dying to know all.

  “Well, it was just heartbreaking to have to spend Christmas in the intensive care ward when all the other darlings were at home, waiting for Santa.”

  “You poor thing.” I opened my eyes wider in what I hoped looked like an invitation to say more.