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

by Quinn Cummings

  Consort went back in the house, got a flashlight, and determined that the monster cat was, in fact, a monster raccoon. It trundled over to the biggest tree in the yard and scampered up with surprising grace—Consort later described it as being like watching Chris Farley rock climb. Tracking the raccoon in the beam of his flashlight, he discovered no fewer than four more raccoons up in the tree, all of Samsonite heft, lounging about on various limbs, staring down with a menacing indifference. For reasons that I’m sure made sense when normal people would have been sleeping, Consort decided to shoo them away. He made a whistling noise; they continued to stare. He shouted like a cattle driver; they blinked. He poked at the tree with a rake; they yawned and opened another bag of Funyuns. Eventually, Consort determined that waving the bamboo rake back and forth like a giant fan made a noise they found displeasing; or else their pity for him was cutting into their appetite. Either way, they tumbled down to the high stucco wall next to the tree and ambled off into the night.

  I was fascinated. Tree raccoons! I guess it made sense that raccoons would be up in trees—at least until they saved enough for the down payment on a condo—but I had never actually considered finding raccoons in my trees. I made Consort swear that if he ever spotted tree raccoons again he’d wake me, even if I swung at him with my patented fist-of-sleep while he tried. Consort, confused that someone in the house was even more excited about tree raccoons than the dog, agreed warily.

  The very next night, as I was gearing down for bed, I went to the back door to let in the cat. Typically, Lulabelle is ambiguous about her return to domesticity, at least until last call, at which point she comes flying toward the door as if Cerberus, Hades’s gatekeeper, were breathing down her neck. Then she freezes inches from the threshold and spends a few minutes dithering about whether she really wants to come in or not. I remind her that Indoors = Kitty Stars by shaking her bowl. She shoots me a filthy look for thinking she can be bought that easily and saunters into the laundry room. Then, in one powerful leap, she finds the bowl on the dryer and attacks her supper. It’s all wondrously predictable. On this night, however, I called for Her Grace several times without getting an answer. I looked out into the shadows of the yard but saw no football-sized fur missile careening toward the door. Instead, in the glow from the porch light, I caught a glimpse of two eyes shining down from the tree.

  I squinted. Raccoon or cat? Whatever it was, it was stealthy and coy. I stepped a little farther out into the yard, but the dark shape didn’t emerge clearly as either a cat or a raccoon. If it was a raccoon, I wanted to see it. If it was my cat, I wanted to shout at it, however impotently, to come inside. I returned to the house, found a small flashlight, and walked back toward the tree, standing directly underneath it. Whatever it was, its body was hidden behind a branch. I took a step sideways; still hidden. Another step sideways; still hidden. Another step sideways and my foot hooked under the wooden Adirondack lounge chair, one of only two objects in the entire backyard. The momentum of catching my foot caused me to arc sideways over the chaise, the leg of the footrest now helixed with my leg. I landed on the ground, and a second later the heavy teak frame landed on top of me. A half-second later the flashlight hit me as well, right on the face.

  I lay on the ground, staring at the night sky, or what I could see of it through the top half of the tangled chaise that was pinning my head to the ground. Through the slats, I saw the animal look down at me. It was, I was disappointed to note, Lulabelle. She appeared to be thoroughly disgusted and embarrassed for me in equal measure. Sighing, I righted the chaise and carefully folded up my pant leg to avoid bleeding on yet another piece of clothing. As I’d done many times before, I mentally calculated my tetanus-shot status and was happy to note I was unlikely to develop lockjaw. Then I went inside to tell Consort he had my permission to date after I was gone.

  The Good Soap

  IMAGINE YOU ARE IN MY HOUSE SOME EARLY EVENING. DINNER has been eaten. Consort is indulging in his favorite leisure sport: squinting at something on the computer screen, tapping a few keys, swearing, and squinting again. Alice is at the kitchen table indulging in her favorite leisure sport: not doing her homework. This is the half-hour of doodling and humming that has to occur before fifteen minutes of homework is accomplished. Somewhere, quietly, the cat is hacking up a hairball and the dog is shedding. I walk into my bathroom, at which point our domestic peace is disturbed by a pained and insistent shriek that reverberates from every wall in the house.

  “Who fondled my good soap?”

  I don’t know which is more pathetic: that my life has become so small that I’ve grown jealous and protective of a bar of soap or that no one else in the house takes my soap seriously. I certainly give it the respect it deserves. It lives in a little paper bag inside a little cardboard box, which has absorbed some of the soap’s fragrance and gives off the intoxicating scent of roses, geraniums, and leisure time, perceptible even to a woman whose nose might as well be constructed out of cement.

  If Consort and Alice are to be out of the house for several hours, I will go to its sacred hiding place and liberate the good soap. Holding it lovingly in my hands, I will take it to the bathtub, place it carefully in a slotted soap holder, and then I will draw a bath. While soaking in this bath, I will read a book. This book won’t always be about the British royal family, but it will frequently be about the British royal family. When I am not adrift in the calming sea of British royal history or turning the increasingly damp pages thereof, I will lather up a healthy dose of my good soap. Much later, when I am relaxed, wrinkled, scrubbed, and scented, I will emerge from the tub. I will carefully dry off the good soap in a clean washcloth, slide it into its paper sleeping bag, and tuck it into its little box. I might even pat it fondly before I hide it away again. Let no one think I take my good soap for granted.

  Alice was with me when I purchased the good soap. It was a glorious pink, the color of the cheeks of healthy babies and wealthy spinsters. I held it to Alice’s nose and she scowled. “You know I don’t like roses,” she said.

  I smiled silkily and murmured, “Good, because it’s not for you. It’s mine. My soap. For me. Not for Daddy. Not for you. Not for trimming a beard or becoming a life raft for My Little Pony. It’s just for me.”

  “I don’t want it anyway,” she sniffed.

  “And you can’t have it,” I shot back.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Fine,” I said.

  Having settled that the soap was (a) not hers and (b) mine, I bought it. I took it home and placed it in a drawer in the bathroom. An hour or so later, I came in to wash my hands. My new soap was sitting in the bottom of the sink, wet and sudsy. I yelled, “AL-ICE!” and waited for her, while watching several drops of expensive soapy goo slither down the drain. Alice wandered in. I pointed sharply into the sink.

  “My good soap is in the sink. Why is my new soap in the sink?” I sputtered, carefully picking it up and blotting it dry. Alice stared off into space, thinking. She thought the entire time it took me to search for and locate the engraved paper sleeve behind the small trash pail under the towel rack. It was crumpled but recoverable.

  “I needed to wash my hands,” she finally answered.

  I breathed in, I breathed out. I tried for a reasonable tone. “Remember,” I said in a conspicuously well-modulated voice, “how this was my soap and not yours? Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. Please don’t use it.” I slipped the soap, now carefully dried, back into its sleeve and into its perfect little box, which I found in the tub, filled with Barbie shoes.

  She thought for a second longer and hit upon a flaw in my reasoning. “You’re the one who always says I have to use soap!” she said triumphantly. I felt the blood drain from my head all the way down to the earth’s core the way it does during certain mother-daughter conversations.

  “Yes, I do demand you use soap. But there was soap here,” I said in a slightly strangled tone, pointing to the large and cheap bar of white waxy crap
sitting dry and unloved on the sink ledge. “And here,” I said, pointing to the bottle of fluorescent-green liquid with Dora the Explorer and her simian friend splashed on the front (because when I think clean I naturally think monkey—an animal known for flinging its own poop).

  She tilted her head toward the other forms of soap and considered them a moment. “Oh,” she finally said. “I didn’t see those.”

  Because that’s my child’s vision, her world-view. The thing directly in front of her cannot be seen. It is completely invisible unless pointed out by a parent with a raised voice. But the thing that is deep in a drawer behind the backup Q-Tips and a manicure kit is agonizingly apparent. I held up the good soap and spoke slowly in my lowest register.

  “This is my good soap. Don’t use it.”

  Alice nodded. I felt nodding wasn’t enough. I pressed on.

  “I’m not kidding. If you use my soap, you will have to pay for another out of your allowance.”

  She slumped her shoulders and sighed again. “O-kay,” she said finally and shuffled back toward her room. I tucked the good soap back into the farthest depths of the bathroom cabinet, confident we had communicated and ever hopeful that, at some point in her childhood, we’d get through an entire conversation without one of us sighing.

  Two days later, I went to take a shower. There in the shower caddy was my good soap, a steady drip from the showerhead gradually boring a hole through it. The soap was at least 20 percent smaller than it had been the last time I saw it. This caused me the odd sensation of feeling my own blood pressure without the little balloon-y thing. Consort had been the last person to take a shower, and Consort views any water left in our thousand-gallon hot water heater as a damning testimony to his not having tried hard enough. I followed the scent—my scent—of roses and geraniums into our bedroom where a half-dressed man was deciding on a tie. He picked up one tie with a greenish-brown pattern, held it to his neck, and asked, “What do you think? This one? Or…”—he held up another tie with an identical greenish-brown pattern—“this one?”

  “The first one,” I said confidently, knowing he’d spend another ten minutes on the decision before selecting a yet-unseen third tie with a greenish-brown pattern. “But,” I continued, “that’s not why I came in. You used my good soap.”

  He looked puzzled. “I did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why did I do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He thought and I waited, because I don’t have hobbies.

  “Oh, I know,” he said with some relief. “It was because I couldn’t find any other soap in the bathroom.”

  Scientists will be excited to learn this affliction is genetic. I gently blotted what was left of my soap and tucked it into its bag and back into its box. Then I stood in the bathroom and tried to think like the two of them. It was predator and prey and I was going to win this round. I couldn’t leave the soap anywhere in the bathroom because it seemed that leaving it anywhere near running water was the same as saying, “Could you two please make some rose-and-geranium-scented drain paste?” I had a flash of inspiration. My lingerie drawer! It would stay hidden and dry while also scenting my unmentionables. Oh, that’s good, that’s the kind of thing French women do. For months to come, I would give off an olfactory note from the underwire, which would hint oh so subtly at my feminine wiles.

  I fairly skipped into the bedroom, opened the drawer, and was flummoxed by the sight of Alice’s socks. Then I remembered: her antique dresser was showing its age and her sock drawer had recently taken to flying off its runners and attacking the fingers of any small girl trying to find tights. So until Consort fixed the runner we were sharing a drawer. My feminine wiles would be bunking with Shrek anklets. Alice would come looking for themed footwear but she’d leave with an expensive bath toy. No good. I looked around the bedroom. The closet? Oh, nice. I could hide the soap in one of my dress pumps, which don’t get worn unless someone is getting married or buried. Everyone I knew seemed healthy but also fearful of long-term commitments. These shoes weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

  I hacked my way toward the back of the closet and looked where my dress pumps usually lived, next to my I’ll get back to riding when I have free time and discretionary income, which probably means after Alice gets through graduate school paddock boots and my I don’t care how much my feet bleed, I paid full retail for these and I will wear them again evening heels. The dress pumps weren’t there. A quick-yet-thorough tearing apart of the house found them nestling in the loving bed of a marabou stole in Alice’s dress-up box. It seemed the shoes only got worn for marrying, burying, or a practical-yet-witty counterpoint to a gypsy costume.

  Brushing aside a Ranger Rick magazine and a cutaway Great Pyramid made from shirt cardboard and gold-painted Pez, I sat on the couch and thought. Even a first-year psychology student would have suspected there was a larger problem here than soap. The problem was the total lack of boundaries I had created for myself. Without my noticing it, my daughter and my life partner had invaded every private place in my life and then peed in the corners. I did a thorough inventory to determine the degree of infestation.

  My purse carried a pair of Consort’s glasses, two Polly Pocket dolls, Consort’s backup cell phone, a book of Mad Libs, and a Barbie cowboy hat. It also carried my wallet, which contained ten redemption tickets won at a Chuck E. Cheese three years ago, but no cash. My car contained a combustion engine, several air bags, a bunch of knobs and dials, and the answer to the question: I wonder how many books about princesses and/or cats were published last year?

  With Alice, the boundaries are just so very blurry, which makes sense in a biological way. I remember hearing about a study that explained how fetal cells from a mammal’s offspring could drift around within the mother’s bloodstream for the rest of her life. This only confirmed what I suspected: I will never be totally alone again. The first dwelling Alice ever experienced was me. When she was no larger than a baseball, she made me drive twenty miles for freshly made tortillas. We’ve been hashing out who owns what ever since.

  She eats off my plate. I lick my thumb and clean her cheek while she howls. I don’t wear bangs because Alice can’t stand bangs and I can’t stand hearing about how she can’t stand bangs. She wears bright colors because she’s the closest I’ll ever get to turquoise. Asking her to view the soap as not ours but mine was as bizarre to her as insisting the soap wasn’t subject to the laws of gravity. We’d eventually get to soap autonomy, but only after years of behavior modification. In the meantime, I took to stowing the good soap in my purse, which meant Alice only found it when rummaging for a mint or a pencil or her blue leotard.

  One night, very late, my eyes snapped open and my head sprang from the pillow. Silhouetted in the bedroom door was Alice. Having arrived well into the first act of this particular episode, I struggled to fill in the details. It was night. Alice must have said, “Mommy?” My maternal alert system would have sprung into action, which puts me in a totally wakeful state without actually switching on my higher brain functions.

  “What is it?” I asked, trying to remember her name. “A nightmare?”

  “The blanket came off,” she said, shaking her head, “and I couldn’t sleep.”

  Ah, there’s the brain coming online. I could feel it whirring away in there, getting up to speed, spitting out such questions as, And it seemed easier to walk all the way down the hallway than pull up the blanket at your ankles…? and When it’s seventy degrees in the house, how much did you need that blanket, anyway?

  But what she was really saying was, “I have a powerful need to rejoin my pack.”

  Our communal cells vibrated happily at one another. I wiggled over a bit and patted the pillow. Even in the near darkness, Alice saw the invitation and leapt nimbly into bed. Within a minute, she was asleep. I knew she was asleep because she started expanding.

  Alice offered her usual “Thank you” for being allowed into our bed; she lengthened her a
rms and legs by up to a yard in each direction. Interestingly enough, this new length was mostly comprised of elbows and knees.

  Consort, on the other side, had a more subtle approach. When we first moved in together, I offered him whichever side of the bed he wanted, and he chose. He swears he has never reconsidered his decision, but each night, once asleep, he longs for my side of the bed and he will achieve it, one patient inch at a time. Given eight hours, Consort will claim the entire bed to himself, leaving me a sliver of territory down by the footboard, at which point Lulabelle will leap nimbly onto the bed and start inflating to the size and density of a keg of beer. Between Consort, the kid, and the cat, I was a modest nation with no natural borders staving off constant sorties from aggressive superpowers. I had become Poland.

  The annual father-daughter trip to play in the snow brought a welcome respite from this relentless personal invasion. I stood in the doorway, waving good-bye lovingly and, it must be admitted, more than a bit enthusiastically. Three days! Three glorious days where I didn’t have to model good habits for anyone. I could eat carbohydrates for every meal. I’d eat pie with ice cream and watch daytime television and have a bath with the good soap whenever I felt like it. In fact, I’d have a bath right away. I brought out my new book about the Hanoverians.

  The bath was lovely. So was the brunch of pecan pie, the afternoon snack of pecan pie, and the early dinner of pecan pie and house-renovation shows on TLC—my version of dinner theater. Consort called. He and Alice had arrived at snow and were happy. I was happy and I was happy that they were happy. But since I had developed what I diagnosed as a “crust headache,” I went to bed early. I sprawled with glorious abandon. I tested out Consort’s side of the bed. I stretched across the bed. I tried lying on the diagonal. No one got in my way. Even the cat was sleeping elsewhere tonight. I was free.