When she mentioned that her abs hurt when she put on her seat belt, I finally realized I had to act, or be prepared to have raised a person who, when grown, calls several friends to complain about how painful it is to detangle her hair.
“Sweetheart,” I said, catching her eye in the rearview mirror, “I am going to ask you something and I need you to be honest. Is the pain worse than it was this morning when you told me that it hurt to tie your shoes?”
[I asked because a friend’s nephew complained about pain in his collarbone for a week and it turned out to be a symptom of leukemia. I can almost live with having let a child with a concussion fall asleep; I’m not sure I could survive being “the mother who ignored the first signs of liver cancer.”]
She thought and said, “No, it’s about the same.”
I followed up with, “And it’s the same pain you had last week, which eventually improved?”
Pleased that I finally wanted to discuss her discomfort in depth, she gave this some time. Finally, she said, “Yes, it’s exactly the same pain.”
“Then,” I said briskly, “it’s time for some bad news.”
She leaned forward, fascinated and a little fearful. There was a small possibility this bad news could lead to an injection. On the other hand, she was the star of the story, and that never grows old.
“I am your mother,” I continued. “Your very existence is fascinating to me. I will listen with interest to the small details of your life longer than anyone else in this world, including Daddy and the pets. Having said all that, I have no interest in hearing about your aching abs any more. Sit-ups make your stomach hurt. They make my stomach hurt. They make everyone’s stomach hurt. This isn’t news. From now on, you are given free rein to complain if something is truly painful. If something is only uncomfortable, or if you have complained about it before, you must do it in an entertaining fashion.”
“What does that mean?” she inquired from the backseat.
“Amuse me. Complain in a way that makes me laugh.”
“I can do that,” Alice said, rising to the challenge.
“Oh, but I’m going to make it harder. You can’t use the same complaint twice. If you want to keep complaining, you’re going to have to find new ways to amuse me every time.”
“Oh.”
There was silence. The radio tried to lure me into buying cost-competitive rims. I mused over whether this mother-daughter conversation would at some future time pay for a therapist to redo her entire house, or merely the kitchen. I considered whether Alice might someday end up in the emergency room dying of a burst appendix because she couldn’t think of a witty and entertaining way to describe four days of stabbing abdominal pain.
She spoke up again.
“Do they make small notebooks? Small enough for me to put in my pocket?”
“I can find you one. Why?” I asked, wondering whether this was a non sequitur.
“If I’m not home, or if I’m feeling okay but I think up a good complaint, I’ll want to keep it for later.”
I hope Alice’s future therapist enjoys the chateau I’ll buy her.
Modern Love
THIS IS HOW WE MATE HERE IN LOS ANGELES:
Day One. Meet at Motorola/Halo 4/Tampax promotional party. Within ninety minutes you have taken naked pictures of each other with your cell phone, which you promptly lose. Get engaged seventeen hours later. Celebrate your togetherness by being interviewed by OK! Magazine and retaining an attorney to sue the online gossip columnist publishing the naked photos.
Day Two. Break up. Send out a publicity release.
Day Two. Get back together. Send out a publicity release.
Day Five. Break up. Send out a copy of Day Two’s publicity release.
Day Six. Get married in Vegas. Honeymoon in Disneyland, which you rent for your exclusive use. Imply to In Touch that you and your new husband used the spinning teacups in ways never intended by the original designers. Refer to each other as your best friend, your soul mate, your ideal lover, and the finest actor you know. Compliment him in print for his performance in Crash. Apologize in print for confusing him with Ryan Phillipe, whom you dated but no longer speak to.
Day Eight. Buy three ocicats. Name them Lola, Tallulah, and River, which, you tell Us Weekly, is what you will also name your three Chinese daughters, whose adoption paperwork you just started. Create a production company together. Call it ELF, short for Eternal Love Films. Buy seven books to make into movies, all of which will star the two of you.
Day Twenty-six. Tell Parade that marriage is hard work but that you and your husband are prepared to ride out the rough spots. Muse aloud about writing a book about the secrets to a long and happy marriage. When asked where your husband is, think a moment and then say “Arizona? No, the other A state…Alabama. I think he said something about getting barbecue. Or he’s touring with his band. He’s in a band, right?”
Day Twenty-eight. The National Enquirer prints pictures of you in a compromising position with your car detailer. People reports that your husband’s new costar—a sixteen-year-old Korean-Austrian model—is flashing an engagement ring from your husband. Remove yourself from the city to lick your wounds. Realize that when you are outside of the city licking your wounds no one is looking at you. Come back to Los Angeles and alert the paparazzi that you plan to lick your wounds in solitude in the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf at the corner of Robertson and Beverly.
Day Thirty. 10:00 a.m. “We are saddened to announce that we have decided to formally separate. We remain committed to each other and we ask that you please respect our privacy and the safety of our cats at this time.”
Day Thirty. 10:05 a.m. Alert soon-to-be ex-husband by text message that you are divorcing him.
Day Thirty. 10:30 a.m. Send anonymous e-mail to gossip blogger who posted naked pictures, clarifying that soon-to-be ex-husband has a new strain of herpes and needs a body double for any movie requiring a shot of his naked butt.
Day Thirty. 11:00 a.m. Get served with papers from soon-to-be ex-husband because he is suing you for support and alimony for the ocicats, whom he renamed Adolph, Gotti, and Darth.
Sharp Left Turn
WHEN YOU LIVE IN LOS ANGELES, YOU KNOW TWO THINGS about your friends: (1) They have written a script and (2) they’d like you to read this script and give them constructive criticism.
You can avoid the phone calls, you can move several times and arrange to spend a few months in a medically induced coma, but when you wake up they’ll be in your hospital room, smiling shyly and offering up a sheaf of battered pages. The title will be something soul-sucking like Lenin and Marilyn: A Rock Opera.
I have been known to read these scripts. I have been known to have tea with the writer afterward and to give notes, for all the good that does. The one lesson I’ve learned is that a writer asking for comments on his script really, down deep, only wants one comment:
“It’s perfection!”
Or, maybe: “Don’t change a thing!”
Or else: “I am retiring three vowels from my vocabulary, in honor of what you have achieved in this script!”
The writer is less enchanted when I take a long sip of my tea, and then another, and then I ask him if he wants a scone, and then I go to the bathroom and then I come back. Then I take another long sip of my tea, and then I check my voice mail. Eventually, having exhausted all available delay tactics, I inform the writer, “You have second-act issues.”
To oversimplify, most movie scripts go like this: in Act One you introduce the people and present the problem; in Act Two you flesh out the problem; in Act Three you fix the problem, or don’t—depending on whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy. But many newer writers continue to add ornate emotional side trips and allegorical detours well into the second act when we should be zooming down the main plot highway. A new script will find us at the cusp of the climactic gun battle when it occurs to the writer, “Wouldn’t it just rock if it turns out our hero was a hemophiliac? And he gets a pap
er cut during this big battle and he starts bleeding like crazy and his driver—wait, ooh! His driver who used to be his girlfriend but had plastic surgery and a sex change so he doesn’t recognize her and came back for revenge for leaving her in jail but has fallen in love with him again—anyway, that character, whatever he or she is, has to take him to the hospital for a transfusion, where the driver suffers kidney failure, and then I can write all that stuff in about how I feel about socialized medicine…”
That is a second-act issue. If you are a highly talented and seasoned writer, you can thumb your nose at the whole structure business and drop in new plot twists anytime you like, but the scripts I read are not usually written by seasoned professionals. I mean, come on, I’m reading them. As for advancing your screenwriting career, giving your script to me is only one step more helpful than giving it to your toaster. These scripts are being written by hopeful amateurs. They are motivated by the endless possibilities of the blank page and their own fertile imaginations. I try to explain that the best stories, the ones that touch an audience for years to come, tend to have one shared characteristic: they are remarkably simple. Create a problem, flesh out the problem, and then solve the problem. If the first story you’re creating makes you think of another story, then write a second story, separate from the first. Keep it simple.
Of course, what I don’t tell these people is that I have a genetic second-act handicap. There’s no narrative so straightforward that I cannot find a digression or a rant to lead me astray. Whenever I open my mouth that Microsoft paperclip leaps up with a bubble spelling out, “I see you are about to relate an anecdote. Would you like some pointless asides?” I always think No! A thousand times no! but within seconds I am fleshing out a story about picking up dry cleaning by tracing the lineage of the Bourbon family in Spain, which becomes a musing on crudités, which somehow steers me to the requirements for membership to the Junior League. I’d worry that my listener is confused, but they’ve usually slipped out of the room by then.
I am now going to tell a story about my prom night. Fully aware of my own second-act problems, I will indicate all such digressions with brackets.
I attended the prom with my friend Justin, because I asked him. I don’t know why I cared about prom. I had no interest in the traditional teenage rituals. I was marking time in school until I could stop this hideous charade of being like people my age and go back to work. I cared because John Hughes and Seventeen magazine told me prom mattered in ways I couldn’t begin to appreciate until I had actually been to prom.
Prom, it seemed, was kind of like Europe.
[No straight man I know cared even one-tenth as much about prom as the girls did, except for how they hoped to have sex afterward. Some of my gay friends had the potential to care about prom on an aesthetic level, but they knew they weren’t getting their own special version of the dance in the fabulously decorated gym with the cutest guy in school. So they either went with a female friend or stayed home and watched MTV feeling lonely but also oddly hopeful for their college years.]
Justin could have taken one of the several girls who each labored under the delusion she was his girlfriend.
[They were all named Kimberly. They all aspired to one day appear in a ZZ Top video.]
Owing to some combination of mutual affection and the fact that I asked him five months before the actual dance, Justin and I went together. The prom was at a hotel down by the beach, in Marina Del Rey.
[Marina Del Rey was incorporated in 1965. Its last architectural detail was added about five years later. Marina Del Rey is all about faux-wood paneling and big square apartment buildings looming over small round pools, which long to be embellished with swinging Swedish stewardesses. I defy you to drive through Marina Del Rey and not start humming the theme to Three’s Company.]
Corsaged and groomed, we headed toward the hotel where the prom was being held and promptly got lost. We both forgot to bring an invitation, and every hotel in the area could be described as “the large grayish-beige building with lots of windows, sort of overlooking the marina, with a sign advertising the all-you-can-drink Sunday brunch.”
[All hotels, apartment buildings, and condominiums anywhere near the beach in Los Angeles have names with the word “Vista,” “Mar,” or “Pacifica” in them. This is so the guests know they are entitled to a view of the Pacific Ocean even if their actual view is of the air-conditioning unit at the Vista Mar Pacifica Hotel next door. It also lets people know they are staying in a city that used to belong to Mexico.]
Just as we spotted the right hotel, a car lurched in front of us and stopped suddenly in the middle of the lane. Justin swerved to avoid hitting it and we slammed into a tree. We were doing thirty miles an hour. Neither of us was wearing a seat belt, but because I wasn’t occupied with the immediate challenge of avoiding a collision, I had the extra millisecond to duck.
[We were in Justin’s father’s car. It was a Cadillac—the style and vintage where the bench seat not only had enough room for me to duck but, had I chosen, enough room to make a cassoulet.]
The car stopped moving. I sat up a few seconds later. The trunk of the tree we’d hit was about two feet from the windshield. The front third of our car was embracing the tree in such a way that both headlights now faced each other. The car we avoided hitting was still sitting frozen in the wrong lane, its owner staring at us blankly. I got out of the car and wobbled over on my high heels. Snapping into sudden wakefulness, the driver put his car into gear and raced off down the road away from me. I was now quite certain this jerk was seriously drunk. I was also quite certain he was the evil toad who just ruined my evening so I raced down the street after him yelling, “STOP!” like maybe he had just accidentally sped away and my squeaky-voiced rage would bring him to his senses. Between my heels, my hairdo, and my dress, I wasn’t anyone’s idea of a serious threat.
[Oh, the dress. Remember, this was the early 1980s. I longed for a hot-pink strapless taffeta number with a poofy skirt. My mother, showing an Olympian restraint, never said, “Quinn, at your height and weight, you’ll resemble a toilet-paper cozy.” She merely suggested simpler lines and classic colors. I sneered. But one lucky day, while browsing through an antiques store, she found the dress. It was from the first decades of the twentieth century, lacy, ankle-length, and narrow, a poem of simple lines and classic colors. It fit me perfectly. It was also filthy. It cost forty-five dollars to buy and another ninety to be laundered by someone who could be trusted with antique lace. It came back a warm creamy white. It was distinctive and elegant, and for the weeks leading up to prom I kept going into my closet—where it lay in a special linen bag—just to gaze at it. It was elegant and flattering but it was not the ideal outfit for a quarter-mile dash after a drunk in a speeding car.]
The drunk screeched around a corner, and I stomped back toward Justin’s car. A few people were now milling around. Someone said he called the police and got the license plate on the other car. This very kind stranger gave me his phone number and told me to have the insurance company contact him if there was any problem.
[Days later, I called the phone number, to thank him.
“Pentagon,” the voice answered.
“Wrong number,” I apologized and hung up. I dialed again.
“Pentagon.”
In a dubious voice, I asked for John D—. I was immediately connected to another office.
“General D—’s office.”
It turned out that our Good Samaritan was a brigadier general in charge of all overseas communications for the U.S. Army. Whatever my feelings about the military-industrial complex might have been, this was a seriously cool witness to have on our side.]
I returned to the car and plopped back in the passenger seat. Considering my options, I decided to have a good mad-cry. Justin, who had been leaning against the steering wheel, turned to face me and said, “I’m sorry Quinn, are you okay?”
The streetlights on the lesser avenues of Marina Del Rey provide
just enough light to see when one’s date appears to be bleeding from several gashes in the middle of his face. Justin turned his head toward me, causing his blood to splatter in a wide arc across the front of my dress. In order to keep the proper tone, I responded to him in an upbeat voice while staring at his earlobe.
“Oh,” I said waving a hand airily, “I’m fine. Fine.”
He passed a hand over his face and looked wonderingly at his palm.
“Did I cut myself?” he asked.
I glanced at his face for an instant and went back to staring at his earlobe.
“Oh. You have a…little cut,” I said brightly. “We should probably get you to a doctor. You know, just for the heck of it.”
[I’m going to brag here. I’m kind of fabulous in an emergency situation. The same energy level that, in day-to-day situations, makes people want to hit me over the head with a pipe flattens out to normal when I get an adrenaline blast to the brain. Also, when someone as moody and pessimistic as I am finds herself in a crisis, I become almost jovial. Look, I think, the worst thing—which I kept predicting would happen—has happened! Worriers like me enjoy having our suspicions confirmed.]
Justin leaned his head against my shoulder. The kind witness stuck his head in the window and told us the ambulance was on its way.
Justin said, “What happened?”
I said, “We hit a tree.”
Justin said, “My dad’s going to kill me.”
I said, “I doubt it. It wasn’t your fault.”
Justin said, “I’m not going to be pretty anymore.”
I said, dryly, “Even now, you’re still prettier than I am.”
Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life Page 15
