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

by Quinn Cummings

  I was also wide awake. Since the last time they had gone out of town, I had forgotten how to sleep without someone trying to steal my pillow. The bed felt less like open space to be claimed by me than empty space I wasn’t capable of filling up. This is what life would be like without them, I thought, which made me get up and head into Alice’s room. I curled up in her bed, her stuffed animals weighing down my feet. The cat jumped on the bed and wedged herself into the small of my back and immediately began agitating for me to move. Something hard pressed into my cheek from under the pillow. I pulled it out and flipped on the bedside light; it was the good soap box. I placed it back under the pillow, its soft aroma mingled with my daughter’s unmistakable pillow perfume, and fell soundly asleep.

  Through the Great Room, Past the Gym

  THIS HOUSE, THE HOUSE IN WHICH WE LIVE, IS NOT LARGE. There is enough room for all the living things—two adults, the one child, the dog, and the cat—but it was built during a time when people were shorter, had less stuff, and were pretty excited by a roof not made of hay.

  When I bought this house, I was the only one living in it. I am not very large. The house is not very large. This worked. At its best, when the house wasn’t collapsing or leaking, I appreciated how it was scaled down for me, like my own domestic Disneyland. When you’re five foot three, twenty-foot ceilings just remind you that you’re paying for square footage only the flies are enjoying. Then Consort moved in and the house contracted slightly. He was off-scale to the house and it punished him by creating extra corners at just about shin height for him to discover. We were starting to think maybe we needed to find a larger place, one that didn’t resent him personally, when Alice arrived and the house went back to being the right size. She was so very small, and I wanted to be no more than a few feet from her at any time, so the house, obligingly, made itself into a cozy nest. I was never more than an arm’s reach from a cloth diaper or a fresh change of clothing for either of us.

  About this time, we went to visit a business associate of Consort’s at his mini estate in a fashionable neighborhood. His wife, a ferociously educated and meticulously groomed woman, gave me the tour of the house, which she had helped design. I was dazzled by the size of it, easily ten times the area of our house, but I was puzzled when she gestured down one long hallway and said, “That’s the girls’ wing.” I peered down the elegantly appointed tunnel toward where I guessed her eight-year-old twin daughters’ rooms were and asked, “And your bedroom is where again?”

  She laughed an educated and groomed laugh and pointed the other way. “Through the great room, past the gym.” I glanced down at my tiny daughter, asleep in her stroller, and couldn’t imagine designing a house that would put me that far away from her. Must be an older-kid thing, I figured.

  As it turned out, the kids weren’t the only ones in that family with distant beds. The husband had a whole second family in another country. The divorce was as sordid as the house had been icily pristine, spare and spacious and perfectly designed to keep every member of the family a stranger to each other.

  As Alice grew we kept planning to move, but every time we’d start thinking about it, housing prices would climb to a new and more ludicrous plateau. Around the time Alice turned two, I overheard what someone paid for a bungalow down the block and realized with a jolt that we could no longer afford to move into our own house. The fact remained, there was something sane about the house we had now: the size of it; the environmental footprint; the monthly nut. We stopped talking about the move and started talking about the renovation.

  However, talking about renovating is not actually renovating; we have yet to get around to the renovation. At first, the renovation didn’t start because Consort is a perfectionist and I get bored easily. He would bring home seventy-eight different tiles so we could pick out the ideal kitchen backsplash, and after the third tile I would use my trick of sleeping with my eyes open. Then the renovation didn’t happen because we had to choose between the perfect kitchen or keeping Alice in extracurricular activities. If she didn’t have extracurricular activities, Alice would never get tired, and there is no backsplash in the world that makes up for a child who is not tired and will not go to bed and wants to watch The Daily Show with you.

  We lived in a small house. We continue to live in a small house. Alice does not live on the other side of the great room because there isn’t one room in this house that could be defined in size or quality as being “great.” If my child calls for me in the night, she doesn’t need to use the phone. We are, for better or worse, a family that knows one another. When a family lives in as close proximity as we do, the first thing to go is privacy. How can I keep forgetting to lock the door when I enter the bathroom? More intriguing, perhaps, is what kind of powerful pheromones do I emit when I enter the bathroom, and why must every living creature be drawn to them? I walk in and shut the door. After the perfect amount of time to get myself into an embarrassing state, the door bursts open and Daughter strolls in.

  “Hi!” she announces, cheerily.

  “What did I say about knocking before coming into the bathroom?”

  Alice tries to remember, and decides whatever I said was superfluous, so she answers with, “I want Mexican food for dinner.”

  “Well, this isn’t a restaurant, you always want Mexican food for dinner, and it’s nine thirty in the morning. Did we really need to discuss this now?”

  We stare at each other. Then she remembers something vital to her health.

  “I cut my leg. I need a Band-Aid.”

  “Where?”

  “In the medicine cabinet.”

  “No. Where did you cut your leg?”

  Alice cannot find said injury to her leg.

  “No, wait. It’s on my hand.”

  “Alice, please go find your father and talk to him and leave me alone.”

  She leaves. After a beat, there is a knock. “Person in here!” I bark.

  “I know,” Consort answers through the door, somewhat perplexed. “Alice said you wanted to talk to me?”

  “No, I want you to talk to her. I want you and me to have some romance left in our relationship, so can I please have some time to myself?”

  “Of course. Of course.”

  Out in the hallway, I can hear Consort retreat and Alice approach.

  “What did Mommy want?”

  “She wants some alone time, honey. Let’s take the dog for a walk.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  I could have told him that. Alice, athletic as she is, is growing up in Los Angeles and views her feet as something to be adorned, not used. The dog, having heard the word “walk,” comes prancing excitedly to join Consort and Alice in the hallway. The dog needs his nails trimmed, so now, along with the sounds of my family negotiating a walk, are the sounds of a touring company of 42nd Street rehearsing a big number right outside the bathroom door.

  “Put on some shoes, sweetie, and we’ll go out for a nice walk.”

  Alice sighs and, sensing the inevitability of being forced to use her feet, tries to make the whole experience at least visually pleasant. “Can I wear my new shoes?”

  Simultaneously, from two different sides of the door, Consort says, “Sure, whatever.” And I shout, “Not the new shoes!”

  Alice stands closer to the door and negotiates.

  “Pleeease?”

  “No.”

  “PLEEEEEEEEEEEASE!?!?!?!”

  “Absolutely not. Those are your new dress shoes.”

  The door slams open again. Alice and dog enter as one. The dog places his head on my knee and looks up adoringly. Consort stands just beyond the threshold, looking apologetic. The cat slips through the open door and starts batting around a disposable razor.

  Alice begins pleading, “I want to wear my new shoes!”

  Seeing no hope of ever being alone, I offer a compromise. “How about cowboy boots?”

  “Fine,” Alice snorts, after a sulking beat.

  Consort tr
ies to hustle everyone out, but Alice stands her ground.

  “Now what?” I demand.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” she explains. “You all have to leave.”

  When you live in a small house with a child, you can’t get away from the child as easily as big-house owners can. There is no gift-wrapping suite or maid’s yoga-room where I can banish my offspring should I feel so inclined. There is only her room, and eventually I will have to go in there, if for no other reason than half my winter clothing is stored in her closet. In a small house, the kid is always around. For the most part, this pleases me. I rather enjoy looking at and talking to my kid. Still, I lose all composure when it comes to being the governess of good habits. I blame this on proportion.

  In a large house, the bed of a child, lavishly unmade, might represent less than 1 percent of the entire domestic acreage. In our house, if Alice throws off the blankets just right, I will be stepping over them on the way to and from the garage. Dishes left on the kitchen table comprise less of a big home’s overall visual composition than the hand towels in the downstairs guest’s second bathroom. In the more modestly sized home like ours, you can see the dishes on the table from almost any point in the house, just as you can see the Eiffel Tower from almost any point in Paris. In the small house, every design choice takes up a larger proportion of the visual space. That’s what I mean by “proportion.” Were we to move into Hearst Castle, wet towels on a bathroom floor wouldn’t even register on my housekeeping radar. In our house, a wet towel either needs to be picked up immediately or risks being designated as sculpture by a city inspector.

  Another aspect of snug living means none of us will ever say, “Gosh, how long have you had that unconscious habit?” We know exactly how long you’ve had it. We even remember how good life was before you had it.

  Consort hums a single line of a song, over and over. He doesn’t hum the whole song because that would give it closure. He doesn’t sing it, which might draw his attention to the fact that he’s doing it and cause him to stop. No, he gets some unimaginable subconscious joy humming the same line over and over. Forever. Or until I start to claw at my skull.

  He’ll be in the office, cleaning out e-mail. I am in the living room, mere feet away, reading a book. He is humming the first line to “Can the Circle Be Unbroken,” an upbeat little number about someone burying his mother.

  CONSORT (Humming): I was standing by the window…

  Consort breathes. I wait. He clears out another e-mail.

  CONSORT (Humming) I was standing by the window…

  QUINN: Honey?

  CONSORT: Hmm?

  QUINN: Humming.

  CONSORT: Oh, sorry.

  Consort breathes, clears his throat.

  Reads another e-mail, deletes it.

  CONSORT (Humming): I was standing by the window…

  Forty-five minutes and ninety standing-by-the-windows later, I finally sing at the top of my lungs “ON ONE COLD AND CLOUDY DAY!!!!” Consort jumps about six inches off his seat.

  CONSORT: What the hell was that?

  QUINN: The second line of “Can the Circle Be Unbroken.” You kept singing the first line.

  CONSORT: I did? I don’t think I even know that song.

  QUINN: I can assure you, you know one line.

  CONSORT: Sorry, I didn’t notice.

  Consort turns back to the e-mail. I open my book. A blissful moment of silence occurs. I read my book’s first line for the seventieth time.

  CONSORT (Humming): The moment I wake up, before I put on my makeup…

  Of course, our little Alice is test-driving her own unconscious habits, which I won’t go into here because on her they’re adorable and I think she inherited most of them from me anyway. Still, I think she’s pleased to note how virtually all of them make her mother fly from the immediate area and hide in the bathroom, where, as we know, no sanctuary can be found. Sometimes I hide in the garage and dream of a day when I can shout imperiously, “Alice, you go to the lesser playroom and you, Consort, stay in the music salon, and I don’t want to see either of you until 6:30 tonight, when we’ll meet in the light green dining room.” But the reality is that I’d go looking for them within an hour; the magazine-reading room would be too lonely without them.

  Consort, Alice, and I were curled up on the couch watching a documentary about meerkats. We watched them dart down into their underground dens, curl up with their family members, and groom each other with loving care and surgical precision. The narrator told us how meerkats, after days spent in the hostile desert, thrived in the closeness of the den.

  I looked down. I was absentmindedly braiding Alice’s hair as Lu slept in her lap. Somehow the cat continued sleeping as my daughter snapped Scrunchies on her tail. Alice’s feet were propped on Consort’s leg. Rupert, not allowed on the couch, was attempting a flanking invasion of Consort’s lap with a move best described as “oozing upwards.” Every member of the family was within inches of one another. I considered getting some pretzels but realized there weren’t enough pretzels to bring back and share, nor was there a hidden place in the kitchen where I could jam a handful of food in my mouth. Instead, I leaned back against Consort and watched these exotic mammals gather strength and comfort from one another against the harsh world outside.

  Al Dente

  WHEN I WAS PREGNANT WITH ALICE, MY WISHES WERE SIMPLE. A boy would be fine. A girl would be fine. He or she should be a happy little person who didn’t have my immune system or my coloring. A girl arrived and fairly quickly it was established that, unlike her mother, she did have a hope in hell of tanning. This was good. Within a year it was determined that, again unlike her mother, her immune system didn’t take every cold germ as a personal challenge to spawn lung disease. Again, good. Having done so well on the first two wishes, I leaned close over my new child and whispered, “Sweetheart, now try to get Daddy’s teeth.”

  I was born with Wal-Mart-sized choppers in a bodega-sized mouth. This led to all sorts of excitement as my adult teeth erupted in places not traditionally thought of as chewing areas. For the sake of future eating, I was rigged with a palate stretcher, a plastic-and-metal apparatus that extended across the roof of my mouth up behind my snaggly teeth. In the very top, in the dark recesses of my palate, there was a lock—a lock that needed to be turned a quarter turn every night, using a key of dollhouse proportions. One of my earliest memories is of my mother hovering over me, flashlight tucked in the crook of her neck, peering and poking into my gaping maw. “DO! NOT! MOVE!” she commanded. “DO. NOT. SWALLOW.”

  There’s really no card that conveys, “Thank you for widening my head, Mom.”

  You’d think something that medieval would be adequate to the task of straightening my teeth, but all it did was create enough room for the adult teeth to find their way into my mouth. It didn’t make them any smarter. My teeth slid down sideways. My teeth leaned against one another like drunken frat boys. A couple of teeth, showing an embarrassing lack of initiative, came halfway down and stopped. I spent the next six years in one tooth-improving gizmo after another.

  Because I was acting at the time, they couldn’t just give me Big Iron and be done with it. Instead, they kept putting me into Half-Assed Plastic, which was one-quarter as effective and took three times as long—sort of like near beer. The logic was that metal braces were obvious and unattractive, while plastic braces were unnoticeable. I’ll grant you, braces made of metal are noticeable but at least the human eye registers there is something on the teeth. With plastic braces, my teeth were simply out of focus, and what you saw of them had a shade of yellow that suggested I was the only sixth grader starting her day with three cups of coffee, a glass of red wine, and a Camel. Eventually, sometime before I was old enough to rent a car, the last retainer was lost, the last payment was made, and I was declared to be orthodontically sound.

  Considering that my mother’s teeth came in straight, as did my father’s, it seems especially unfair that my parents had
to go through such effort. Whichever ancestor foisted these dental genes upon me had the good sense to die before blame could be assigned. Now it was my turn and as each of Alice’s teeth came in, I’d look at it and think, Not sprouting from her nose. This is good. Because that’s what I’m all about: realistic expectations. Alice tanned, she didn’t have a runny nose eight months every year, and her teeth were approximately where they should be. Maybe my more troublesome genetic material had been given a generational time-out.

  When Alice was four, the dentist took her first X-rays, cleaned a little, poked around for a few minutes, and motioned me over. We stood by the dental chair while my daughter sat paralyzed with pleasure at the Toy Story video on the plasma screen above her head.

  “Do you have dental insurance?” he asked.

  “Yes?” I said hesitantly, hoping this was some sort of poll.

  “Because Alice is going to need braces,” he said.

  I felt that was a little abrupt. If you are consigning me to years of monthly dental appointments and having to buy generic cheese it seems to me I should at least be taken into a private room and offered a box of Kleenex, a glass of water, and a package of flavored floss. When my future earnings are being pillaged, I don’t want to hear Tim Allen’s voice.

  “But,” I spluttered, “they’re so nice and straight! These are good teeth!” I was about to explain how she couldn’t possibly have my teeth because she could tan when he stopped me.