Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life

by Quinn Cummings

  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.

  Ye Olde Los Angeles

  A FRIEND OFFERED HER MAGNIFICENT HOME TO BE INCLUDED in her neighborhood historical society’s fund-raising tour. This is the kind of casually glamorous thing that happens to this friend all the time, and she invited me to join her while she checked out the other houses on the tour. Notice I said her neighborhood historical society. My neighborhood doesn’t have a historical society. The closest we’ve come to civic beautification is an 800 number for abandoned shopping carts. Sometimes, one of these carts bears the insignia from a supermarket no longer in business, which, I guess, might qualify it as historical. Anyway, my friend told me to get to her place at 2:30 p.m., when her tour-giving shift ended. I arrived a few minutes early and marched across her spacious front yard past a three-piece Dixieland band and tables laden with punch and cookies. Visitors in period dress milled and chatted, sipped punch, and nibbled cookies. I approached the front door where a historically clad docent said cheerily, “Welcome to the Magnolia House, please put on the booties before entering. The next tour begins in four minutes.” She pointed to a basket of what appeared to be huge, fuzzy condoms in a festive blue.

  “Actually,” I whispered to her, feeling somehow like I was trying to cut in line, “I’m a friend of the owner.”

  Her heavily lashed eyes widened, but ever so slightly. She asked my name and disappeared into the house. As I waited I watched the people around me slip terrycloth galoshes over their shoes to protect the vintage flooring inside. Another historically clad woman came onto the porch, and at that moment I realized I was the only person on the property not wearing a picture hat and an ankle-length skirt. I tried to strike a historically appropriate pose. It was the least I could do to keep in the spirit of things. The first docent reappeared and nodded my way. “Mrs. G—knows you are here and will be right out,” she explained, in a buttery tone. “In the meanwhile, I am going to have to start the next tour. You probably know all about the house, so please be patient with me.” The other guests looked over at me respectfully as someone who was allowed into the house without paying. As I slipped on my Muppet overshoes, I had the brief and mostly alien sensation of being the coolest person in a thirty-foot radius.

  The docent took a square of paper from her historically accurate bag, unfolded it, and began reading. Magnolia House, she announced, was large. Magnolia House had been made using a kind of wood that you hardly see on the West Coast anymore (which, of course, might be related to having been all chopped down to make big houses like Magnolia House). You may have noticed that Magnolia House’s front yard has the largest tree in the neighborhood, which, it was said, had been used by the local Native American tribes as a meeting place. We all turned and looked at the tree. The docent then mentioned that a guest on an earlier tour told her it wasn’t a native tree so it couldn’t have been a Native American meeting place. We all stared at the tree for a second longer, admiring its no-longer-a-meeting-place-but-still-very-attractive qualities. Then we turned back toward Magnolia House. The docent noted that Magnolia House had been exquisitely restored by the owner. At this point, the docent smiled at me. Apparently, my friend’s unflagging ability to find authentic leaded-glass inserts somehow left a residual glow upon me. I tried to look modest but worthy.

  Now it was time to go inside. Everyone tightened their fuzzy shoe-condoms and the front door opened. My friend—having spent the required time giving the tour and keeping people from touching her toothpaste—came flying through it. She had transferred her tour obligations to another docent so we could now walk around the neighborhood and check out the other houses.

  Half a block later, we approached the next house on the tour and were given the brief external prelude, which involved John Barrymore having owned the house until he lost it in a divorce. Nearly every house on the tour had a history with one of the better divorce lawyers in Ye Olde Los Angeles. English country houses have the Reformation; Los Angeles houses have the Deposition. We walked inside and while everyone else said, “Oooh,” I very softly said, “Oh,” and instinctively wrapped my arms around my torso. It hadn’t occurred to me until just that moment that all of these houses would be filled with such very nice things. I don’t do well with very nice things. I am not a bull in a china shop; I am a bull terrier in a china shop, capable of doing far more damage with my small, lively frame than one might think. Hearing the docent tell us about the one-of-a-
kind bibelots sitting on the mockingly fragile side table, the mate of which was in the Royal Museum of Flimsy Things in Stuttgart, didn’t help. While trying to make myself smaller, I hit the eighteenth-century Irish breakfront with my elbow. The original glass shivered slightly, the inlay appeared to loosen a touch. Because I didn’t want to turn this lovely afternoon into another public lesson about why Quinn can’t have nice things, I slithered away from the group and parked myself in a corner behind a solid-looking couch. I stood very straight. I kept my arms at my sides. I tried not to move my head. My historically appropriate character would have been Bridget, the frightened immigrant maid.

  This secure perch provided me the unexpected benefit of observing several different tours. The house, it seems, had been in dreadful shape. The present owner had spent much time and, it was understood, wheelbarrows full of thousand-dollar bills to bring the home back to its prime. No continent save Antarctica had been unmolested in pursuit of exactly the right details, which were endless. The tone the docents took was the same tone documentary filmmakers take when covering the Civil War: be of good cheer during the battles, for we all know how this turns out. Also, as with certain Civil War buffs, their passions weren’t always my passions. When the fifth tour was encouraged to note the original push-button light switches and marvel at how these were only the third push-button light switches to be installed in the city of Los Angeles, my mind started to meander.

  I am a terrible shopper for anything of consequence. I’m instinctively drawn toward objects that excite a sense of pity in more reasonable consumers. If the thing to be bought is clean and attractive, my first thought is Everyone is going to want that and I steer my quest toward something odd and unsettling, preferably leaking a sticky fluid or bulging ominously at the seams. The dark side of being “of help” is that once you take on the big projects, the big projects sense your soft-heartedness and reward you with some of the most abusive and bizarre behavior ever seen outside the Prussian Journal of Abnormal Psychology.

  Which explains my house.

  I never actually wanted to buy a house. I hate owning things and what is a house but a really big stinking thing with countless smaller things piled inside? All through my twenties, I enjoyed the obligation-free lifestyle of renting, especially the part where when something goes wrong your greatest concern is locating Ivan the maintenance guy before Ivan locates his daily Big Gulp laced with Sterno. The way I understood it, when something went wrong with a house you actually owned you were not encouraged to run into the front yard, find the nearest publicly inebriated geezer, and insist it was his job to snake your drains.

  Both my mother and my accountant grew adamant that handing vast amounts of my meager income to the government was a mortal sin. Not to mention the whole rent versus equity-building argument—a baroque opera my accountant could sing in all its parts. And did. Every quarter. Finally, I was told in no uncertain terms to buy a house. I tried avoiding the inevitable by hating every single house I saw, which wasn’t hard. The only good thing I could say about house shopping was that it made dating less depressing.

  There were a few options open to me at the time, nearly all of which were unbearable: I could buy a condominium of such anonymity that had I walked into the wrong unit I could have lived there for a week before asking myself, “When did I buy pickled beets?” Or I could buy a real, honest-to-God house with a yard and everything, but it would have been so far away from the actual city that I would visit it only on weekends, spending the remaining five nights a week in my Swedish pied-à-terre parked behind a diner on Sunset. Or, finally, I could buy a house in need of repair in a neighborhood known for a lively mixture of the artsy and the gangtsy. As long as I wasn’t absolutely tied to the idea of viable plumbing or a neighbor without a meth lab, I too could pursue the American dream within the city’s borders.

  The house had been described by the real estate agent as “charming,” which I came to understand meant, “You want glass in those windows? Well, la dee dah. Ain’t you the Queen of France!” The present owners had self-funded an independent feature that would never find a projector much less a paying audience so they were desperate to sell the house. I walked into the living room, flinched at the stained carpet, winced at the painted-over beams, cowered under the popcorn ceiling, and covered my eyes from the glare of the Home Depot track lighting. The whole effect was that of a back-alley dentist. Yet once we opened the shades (and set them aside as they fell off their hinges), the light streaming in was copious and beautiful.

  When the bathroom was last renovated, back in the seventies, the owners must have gotten a killer deal on black tile, black fixtures, and black “wet-look” paint. Frustrated when they couldn’t paint the original pink floor tiles, they tried bleaching them instead. This created the appearance of a grimy Big Stick perpetually melting on the bathroom floor. There was a shabbily made soffit suspended over the bathroom sink with a fluorescent fixture humming from within. The soffit was large, curved, and painted high-gloss black. It was as if Death were looming over your shoulder, monitoring your hair loss.

  The kitchen “suite” was made up of a couple of small, separate rooms, including the original kitchen and an adjacent space that was once an outdoor porch. The other rooms had a mysterious, aggressively vacant quality. There was a room that the Realtor, an undiagnosed psychotic with a puckish sense of humor, referred to as the “third bedroom.” It was an exact duplicate of the room on Ellis Island where they held people with weeping eye infections. There was also a curious little four by six enclosure with five electrical outlets and a built-in, fold-up ironing board longer than the room itself. Electrical outlets were a kind of leitmotif in the house. There was no room without at least five. One small room had ten. They served as a nice counterpoint to the four phone lines into the house, all of which spawned outlets in each room. I assumed this allowed a previous occupant to call four friends at once and brag about how many outlets he had.

  The whole house was a big, throbbing “NO,” with a heaping helping of “Why is there a working toilet in the bedroom closet?” thrown in for emphasis. And yet, there was that afternoon light in the living room, warm and pervasive without being insistent. Unconsciously, I noted where the Christmas tree would go. At first nearly inaudible, then louder, then drowning out the real estate agent’s blather about lot size was a voice in my head saying, We can fix this.

  I know this voice. It’s the same voice that encouraged me to adopt a cat who despised me and was later diagnosed with something called “feline rage.” It’s the same voice that caused me to take a job with a woman whom I had been warned was as crazy as a shit-house rat, with the added caveat that if I valued my mental health, I’d grab my purse, race to my car, and change my phone number. It’s the same voice that picked everyone I dated from seventeen to twenty-seven. This voice sings in a three-part harmony of generosity (“I should fix this”), hubris (“I will fix this”), and teeth-gnashing naïveté (“I can fix this”). It tells me everyone else has failed at fixing something so now it’s my job. I will spend time and money finding the cat the perfect scratching post even though she showed a preference for my corneas; I shall offer up my self-esteem as brittle Parmesan against the human cheese grater for whom I work; I shall live on Twizzlers and Diet Cokes while my boyfriend writes his romantic comedy about mutant robots; I will walk into home ownership with my eyes wide open, knowing I will spend vast sums of time and money trying to elevate this home from “charming” to habitable.

  Back on the historical tour, the docents had a seemingly endless array of happy-accident anecdotes:

  The owners thought the original Tiffany sconces had been sold, but they happened to find them in a box in the servants’ quarters behind the shoe closet.

  The chandelier the owner impulsively purchased at a Vatican tag sale twenty years ago perfectly matched the window treatment in the formal foyer.

  They removed the paneling in the library to have it re-carved by celibat
e Neapolitan woodworkers and found a vault stuffed with money and the deed to another, even more historic, home in Paris.

  My renovation surprises were less serendipitous:

  Do you know you have a cat skeleton under there?

  The plumber was standing in the back doorway, the dust and cobwebs from the crawl space forming a kind of gray mantilla. I internally replayed what he said several times, trying to find some way I could have misunderstood it. I played it safe and went with repeating the noun and not the other noun.

  “Cat?”

  He mulled my question while totaling up the bill. “Maybe a skunk, but probably a cat. It’s just bones,” he said hastily, mistaking my look of general horror with a fear of putrefaction. “I’m just telling you so you can tell the electrician.”

  “Why will I be telling the electrician?” I asked with perfect enunciation.

  The plumber frowned. “Because,” he said slowly, “he might want to know before he puts his hand on it?”

  “I’m sorry, that was unclear,” I said, terribly calmly. “Why will I be calling the electrician?”

  “Because,” he said cheerfully, as he continued adding up my now very long bill, “next to the dead cat, there’s some wire down there which is kind of smoldering. I’d get someone in today.”

  A week later, I was sitting in the kitchen glaring at the breakfast-nook shelves. The smoldering electrical wire had turned out to be a harbinger of massive and systemic electrical failure, possibly due to the multiple extra outlets illegally installed in each room. The cost to fix this was gruesome and had the added aggravation of improving the overall appearance of the house not one whit. After all the old wires were removed and new, nonsmoldering ones installed in their place, my house would look exactly the same, minus the burning-wire smell, which hadn’t bothered me at all. The worst thing that might have happened was that the house would have burnt down, which was starting to sound like a good idea. All I could think was: Please God, just let me improve one single thing in this stupid house that someone can actually see.