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

by Quinn Cummings

  “Glad I could entertain them,” I said to myself. “Wasn’t that humiliating for me. And she’s still going to buy ill-fitting pants.”

  “Yes, but I was right,” Lady Helpful said airily. “And my being right felt good. And since I live in your head, your external mortification means nothing to me. Now, put your striped shirt and jeans back on, lace up your Converse low riders, and buy me a cup of tea or I’m going to tell the woman we saw by the three-way mirror that the blouse she was trying on makes her look like she has tertiary syphilis.”

  I wanted to ask this voice where she was when H.R. Pufnstuf was stalking in the wings, but I decided I’d had enough of her for one day.

  Carson Has Two Mommies

  ALICE AND I WERE DRIVING SOMEWHERE. WE HAD JUST LEFT karate class and the last time I had looked in the rearview mirror she was trying to loosen the knot on her day-glo obi. My mind drifted. Did I just think we had string cheese at home or did we actually have string cheese? Was Alice going to demand string cheese once we got home? Should I get string cheese at the nearest store? Was string cheese reason enough to battle Gelson’s parking lot on a Saturday afternoon—a cruel tarmac where mothers armed with Expeditions and BlackBerries play chicken with each other while popping The Princess Diaries into the backseat DVD player?

  Alice announced, “Carson has two mommies.”

  Carson was a cherub-faced, redheaded boy in karate class. Being six, Alice rarely noticed any adult attached to any of her peers unless the adult was offering up Cheetos or a kitten. Today, however, both of Carson’s adoring and attentive mothers were en dojo, one cheering him from the sidelines while the other nursed his infant brother behind the trophy rack. Either activity might have been what caught Alice’s attention, prompting her to count parents and consider their gender. I waited to see if she’d add anything, but she didn’t. She was waiting for me.

  “Yes,” I finally said in a voice that wanted to be flat but came out cautious. “Carson has two mommies.” I had hoped my tone would finish the conversation but I had just played the overture.

  “How?” she shot back.

  I briefly flirted with “They found him in a cabbage patch at an Indigo Girls concert,” but decided my daughter was ready for a few basic facts of life in the big city. First, however, I needed to issue a stern warning—a binding nondisclosure clause, as Consort would say—so my kid wouldn’t start giving PowerPoint lectures to her peers whose parents were hoping for a few more months of innocence. I caught her eye in the rearview mirror.

  “I will explain how they did it,” I said in my best parental voice. “But if I find out you’ve been passing this information along to your friends, the consequences will be horrible. Do you hear me?” She nodded her head quickly and tried not to squeal.

  Without preamble, I explained: (1) egg, (2) sperm, and (3) fetus. There is something to be said for introducing the birds and the bees from the perspective of two women trying to create a child. With two mommies, you don’t have to go into the specifics of how sperm actually gets from the generous male friend to the lesbian with the egg. As far as Alice knew, FedEx might be involved. Having covered a fairly loaded subject quickly, accurately, and vaguely, I let out a sigh.

  After a moment, Alice said, “So that’s how all families with two mommies get babies?”

  And I said, “Yes…mostly.”

  “What do you mean, mostly? What other ways are there?”

  Couldn’t shut my mouth could I? Couldn’t just leave it at “yes” and go back to ruminating about string cheese? Of course not. Because a fussy part of my brain thinks things like, You can’t just give her half the information. Not all babies in lesbian families arrive through an ice chest and a turkey baster. If you only tell your child part of the facts she will be underinformed. Or worse, misinformed. If you don’t tell her the whole story, she’ll end up getting her artificial-insemination facts from the gutter.

  So I did what any modern parent would do. “Oh, look! A Chihuahua!”

  But she stayed on message. I slumped. “Keeping in mind this isn’t to be discussed outside this family?” I stalled.

  “I know. Just you and Daddy.”

  Frankly, I didn’t see Consort carving out special time for this conversation either. I mentally scanned her inventory of friends.

  “All right, Ivy has two mommies. But one of Ivy’s mommies was married to a man before she fell in love with Ivy’s other mom. So Ivy has a dad, not just a…”

  I froze. I couldn’t think of a child-friendly version of the phrase “sperm donor.” Luckily, Alice was already on to another thing.

  “So Zack’s mom got sperm?”

  “Which Zack?”

  “The one who eats his hair.”

  “Always wears shorts?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, his mom adopted him.”

  The subject was dropped as abruptly as it came up. Alice grabbed a book and I switched on the radio, confident I was in the clear. The clear, however, was short-lived because Alice’s consciousness had been raised and over the next few days it dawned on her: my friends all got here somehow. Because we live in Los Angeles in the bloom of the twenty-first century, the pathways to life are rarely straightforward.

  “Adam doesn’t look like his parents.”

  “Yes, Adam was born in Tajikistan and his mom and dad went there and got him.”

  “Where is that?”

  (Silence)

  “Um, Eastern Europe.”

  [Stupid 1970s educational system, worrying about our self-esteem but completely doing away with geography. Alice never asks me questions about how I feel about myself.]

  “Was his sister born there?”

  “No, his sister was born in Peru.”

  “Were Emily and her brother born in Tajik…Tasik…that place?”

  “Emily’s fathers found a very nice lady who would give them an egg and use their sperm to make a baby. And then, two years later, another baby.”

  [Actually, I believed there was a second lady who gave them an egg, on top of the uterus lady, but when my brain bubbled up to clarify this detail for my daughter, I slapped it silly and forced it to shut up.]

  “Merrit told me she grew in her aunt’s uterus.”

  “WHAT DID I SAY ABOUT MENTIONING THIS AT SCHOOL?”

  “I didn’t! She tells everyone that. All the time.”

  A casual call to her mother the next day confirmed that yes, Merrit had been the product of her mother’s egg and her father’s sperm but owing to medical complications had come to term by way of her aunt. I also confirmed that Merrit found this tidbit so fascinating that—no matter how much her mother might beg her otherwise—she led with it, conversationally.

  I can only hope Alice honored her nondisclosure agreement on the playground, but the variables continued to fascinate her. We were at the library a week later when she spied a mother and child in line; she whispered at a volume heard all the way to the books-on-tape-and-homeless-guys area, “Mommy, look! That Chinese lady adopted her baby from China!”

  Under the guise of searching for something in my purse, I hissed in her ear, “Or maybe that’s her biological child.” This puzzled her, so I whispered a short, discreet, yet scientifically accurate version of the more conventional route to parenthood. By that point, we were in the checkout line. This might not have been the ideal venue for starting the basic birds and the bees canon, but the woman ahead of us was disputing a ten-cent late fee, so we had plenty of time.

  Alice thought about this new method of procreation for a few moments, then shook her head. This was way too easy. Where were the surrogate uterus, the multiple sires, the court system? In the modern age, a child in a big city knows fewer and fewer parents who just got knocked up. What used to take a bottle of Chianti and the back of a VW bus now involves a team of fertility specialists, a second mortgage, and/or the goodwill of the Chinese government. Alice, a child who appreciates a lively pageant as much as the next kid, clearly preferre
d twenty-first-century breeding.

  A few weeks passed and my daughter stopped discussing the ways human families are created. I assumed we were out from under the awkward question spotlight. In fact, I was feeling quite pleased with myself. I had covered a large and ungainly topic calmly and thoroughly yet without once resorting to terms commonly found in Penthouse Forum. Let other parents fret over how to navigate this perilous journey with their children. I had it nailed.

  One night a month or so later, while driving home from the beach, a small voice issued from the darkness of the backseat: “What happens when we die?”

  At that moment I experienced a glorious epiphany. A sudden realization, like a blinding flash of white light, hit me from above. I now understood that all of the major life conversations between my daughter and me were going to happen in a left-hand turn lane.

  I stalled. I coughed. And as I did, I remembered that when Alice had been a mere infant, I had waffled long and hard on the whole Santa thing. It’s terribly sweet to watch them put out cookies and write notes of innocent desire, but the more you play up the myth, the more likely you are to find a slightly older child pondering practical considerations such as, “How could he possibly visit every house in one night?” and “I never did get a reasonable answer as to how he gets into houses without chimneys” and “Why didn’t the security alarm go off?” At some point the child figures out she was lied to and, even if it was in a loving and well-meaning way, it’s a lie from parent to child. I couldn’t get comfortable with that. Enough people in this world are going to lie to her; I want her to know her parents are one place where she gets the truth. On the other hand, denying Santa from the get-go just seemed churlish.

  So, when Alice was a little over a year old, I had an inspiration. She had noticed Santa in a book for the first time and inquired about this bearded man in the strange track suit.

  I began, “That is Santa Claus. It is said that he lives at the North Pole.”

  Did you catch that? With a simple addition of three words—“it is said”—I could live with myself. Alice had the entire story and could choose to believe it or not. I was neither espousing nor denying the existence of Santa, I was merely passing along some interesting information I’d heard. Were there a court case involving old Sinter Klaus, I could not be called to testify, as my information was, at best, hearsay.

  I also kept the holiday focus off the big guy. If Alice’s childhood could be thought of as a sitcom, Santa had a very small cameo. He wasn’t the wacky neighbor, popping in weekly with his catch phrase, his crazy hairdo, and the second-act complication. No, he was more like the affable bar owner who has a couple of good lines each season. At Christmas, he never gave her the big present and I never used him as a form of behavior modification. Of course, this limited my discipline arsenal somewhat, but it also assured me I’d never see Alice make finger quotations around the word “Santa” as in: “If Santa has a problem with my unmade bed, maybe Santa should just talk to me himself.”

  Turns out, the heavy-artillery topics of birth and death aren’t that far removed from the whole Santa thing. I waffled between what I knew, what I wanted her to know, my instinct to tell her the truth, my cellular-level impulse to keep her away from unpleasant truths, and an unrelated but pressing need to complete a left turn in busy traffic.

  I stopped coughing and started talking. I told her that while no one knows what happens after you die, I believed we left our bodies when they were worn out but that our souls continued.

  “Where?” she interrupted.

  “Um, somewhere.”

  “Tajikistan?”

  “Probably not.”

  But somewhere. Then, to keep the afterlife relevant to her, I threw in my belief that when you die you get all your old pets back. Having been called upon to describe the unknowable with less than a minute’s warning, I sat back in my seat, spent but satisfied. I had earned another maternal merit badge today, of this I was certain.

  “You said, you believe that’s what happens,” said the prosecuting attorney in the backseat. “Don’t you know?”

  “As I said,” I repeated, slightly deflated that no one but me seemed impressed by my handiwork, but still driven to not lie to my kid, “no one knows. People believe. Some believe very deeply, but we don’t have scientific evidence of what happens after death. In order to prove it, we’d have to have what is known as empirical evidence…”

  Suddenly, anguished wails drowned out my lecture on scientific method.

  “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE AND YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN AFTER I DIE AND I’M GOING TO BE ALONE!”

  Didn’t I handle that well? For those keeping score at home: Telling the nearly whole truth about reproduction worked. Not expressly lying about Santa was maybe a bit devious but it allowed me to sleep at night. Allowing room for reasonable doubt about the afterlife forced me to pull over on the Pacific Coast Highway and comfort my hysterical child for half an hour.

  While birth took a little over a month to stop being front and center in her mind-share inventory, death took half a year. And this meditation did not follow a measured pace. We’d be going through our lives, enjoying the simple pleasures of a day in the park, a slice of pizza, or the second act of The Nutcracker, when out of the blue Alice’s face would crumble and she’d moan, “We’re all going to die, and we don’t know what happens. I’m so alone!” I speak from experience when I say that very few eighty-dollar ticket holders appreciate a sobbing six-year-old existentialist and her tongue-tied mother during the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

  Tentatively, I began to ask other mothers for insight, and I soon learned that every child went through his or her wrestling match with mortality. From wanting to disinter long-dead hamsters, to inquiring of elderly relatives when they planned to breathe their last, to insisting on sleeping with Baby Jesus from the crèche, every child I knew went through a death fixation of some sort. And all of them got over it.

  The good news was that my ham-handed approach hadn’t broken my child. The humbling news was that being honest with her probably hadn’t changed anything either. The children of the devoutly religious people I spoke to struggled with the shadow of death as did the children of atheists. I could have told Alice that when our bodies stop working the angel Fred Astaire shows up with a gigantic bag of candy corn and escorts us to the Barbie Valhalla in the clouds, and we still would have gone through this.

  It dazzles and humbles me that I am supposed to give advice on such big topics. I still don’t understand how string cheese peels. Because I love Alice so very much I try to forget that I’m an idiot. I try to give her words to live by. I want her to make every effort to live with courage, confidence, an awareness of other people, and an abiding humility in her own powerlessness. That’s what I want to tell her. What comes out, as we buckle in for the ride home, is that life is like a left-hand turn in busy traffic. If you’re careful and lucky, you’ll do okay.

  Poetry in Motion

  SOMETIMES WHEN CONSORT AND I ARE FEELING AFFECTIONATE, we debate which of us will die first. Being as I am female and he is male, I’m quite certain he is going to die first. Actuarial tables and a visit to any retirement home would support my theory. Sometimes I find an actual actuarial table online. I print it out and wave it in front of him, basking in my rightness. He will die first. I will cry and cry and cry and then I’ll get his side of the bed.

  Whenever he is informed of his mortal inevitability, Consort always shakes his head and says, “Yes Quinn, if you were a normal female you’d outlive me. But you’re you.”

  Then, to drive his point home, he brings up some violent and unlikely injury I have suffered. He will mention the time I was riding a horse and dismounted so I could lead us safely across a stream and proceeded to walk the horse across my foot, breaking my toe. Or the time I was running up a flight of stairs to a fencing lesson and I stumbled and landed on my own foil, removing a chunk of shin bone in the process. Or the time I dev
eloped blood poisoning from a spider bite. Or the time I got pneumonia and coughed so hard that I broke a rib. It’s a poignant fact of my life that whenever I visit the ER, I provide a nice change of pace for the medical staff beyond the usual stabbings, heart attacks, and the drunks with the d.t.’s.

  What’s hard for people treating these injuries to imagine is that I’m always as surprised as they are. I’ll be walking along, it’s a lovely day to be dropping off library books, and a second later I’m removing a chunk of tequila-soaked glass from my forehead. This is the basis of Consort’s argument. It’s not that I lead a life devoted to extreme sports and high-risk behavior. It’s that my very cells call out to the sharp, the flammable, the suddenly preciptious, and the easily riled. When Consort confronts me with such anecdotes, I parry with a waved hand and an airy “Things like that don’t happen to me anymore. I’ll outlive you and then I’ll crack my neck in whatever room I want and you’ll just have to listen to it in the afterlife and suffer.” Then I crack my neck. End of discussion.

  Recently, I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of our dog acting up. Generally, Rupert is a quiet, mellow dog, but his ruckus was urgent enough to rouse me from a sound sleep. Assuming he needed to go out, I staggered to the back door only to be confronted with Consort coming back in from the yard, the dog at his side. They both looked pleased with themselves. I muttered, “Is he okay?”

  “Oh, yeah, he’s fine,” Consort answered, breezily. “It was tree raccoons.”

  It’s a testimony to my ability to leave a warm bed, walk the length of a house, and make small talk without actually waking up that I nodded in agreement and went back to sleep. The next day, I called him at work.

  “I’m sorry, tree raccoons?”

  Yes, tree raccoons. The night before, sometime after 2:30, Rupert had grown suddenly very excited about the subject of out. He had to be out now. Out is the new black. Out! Out! Consort, being annoyingly nocturnal, was still at his desk working. He was about to let Rupert out when he realized the sudden excitement might be over a skunk, a skunk who might not relish a new canine friend lunging forth to play sniff-my-butt. Consort locked the dog in the house—which caused the barking mayhem that woke me up—and headed outside to shoo away whatever it was spooking the dog. He saw no skunk, but he did see a cat waddling around the far corner of the yard. It was a huge cat. A very huge cat of indeterminate origin.