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

by Quinn Cummings

  “I don’t want the rest. I never wanted the rest. I want you to eat it. I paid good money for that raita…”

  “Good money.” There’s a phrase. Of course I’d heard it before having a child—had heard it as a child—but I don’t believe I’d actually used it until I had a child. Roughly translated, “good money” means: “Money can be spent only once. If I spend it on a music class but you spend said class braiding and re-braiding your hair I start fixating on how the same money could have purchased one of those salon afternoons where they massage my neck before they wash my hair and then offer me a glass of wine while it’s being cut, so allow me the delusion that you are actually gaining something from the money I spend on you…”

  “And if you think you are going to be allowed to waste food…”

  “Waste,” like “good money,” is a loaded term in my house. A woman with leftover containers dedicated to archiving two tablespoons of uneaten dinner isn’t inclined to view an uneaten pint of six-dollar yogurt as a good thing.

  “You are sorely mistaken.” I could have ended there, but I continued, “I expect you to take responsibility for your choices…”

  And there it was. When you grow up in a city that venerates eternal adolescence, you are more likely to see a snow leopard than someone who takes responsibility for her own actions. Even if, by the grace of God or irrefutable videotaped evidence, someone admits that yes, they did whatever thing they are being accused of, there’s always the “But…”

  …I had been taking medication for a neck injury…. You didn’t hear what he said to me first.

  …I only requested a therapeutic massage.

  Alice might live in Los Angeles, and she might get to know firsthand its endless beaches and American Girl emporium, but my daughter doesn’t get to “Yes, but” her way out of personal responsibility. Today, expensive raita. Ten years from now, her PR people are explaining how that Ecuadorian family of six leapt in front of her car. I was about to find some way of explaining this to her when I caught her expression. The forkful of raita and rice was next to her trembling lips, under her huge liquid eyes; if an artist ever wanted to create the definitive portrayal of what misery looks like on a child’s face, I had the model.

  I stood there, frozen. We had reached an impasse, and I had no idea what to do. Clearly she wasn’t going to eat the whole pint, now or ever. If I forced her to eat it, she’d probably develop a complex about dairy products, or grow up to hate everything Indian. I could ruin her relationship with an entire subcontinent. On the other hand, if I gave up and let her leave the table, the lesson she would learn is “appear tragic enough and Mommy folds.” The next thing you know, she’s standing in Saks Fifth Avenue holding up a thousand-dollar handbag and whimpering, “But Mommy, all the other Girl Scouts have it, and you wouldn’t want me to feel sad, would you?”

  For the sake of any future negotiations, she had to eat some. But how much? Did one bite achieve the holy trinity of not wasting my money, not wasting food, and not wasting a chance to become a moral person? That’s a lot to put on one bite. Maybe she needed to take two. But just then, a little cloud started to form over my heart. Did the fact that I was caving in from “You must eat it all, every single bite, I mean it and I’m not backing down” to “Okay, two bites, two is fine,” make me no better than a mother at the grocery store offering to buy Ho Hos if her son stops kicking her?

  This, in case you’re curious, is why most parenting magazines write articles about the problems of infants and toddlers. Teaching them not to bite can be covered in a 750-word article, because nearly all the behavior of that age, no matter how unsightly, resolves itself and is soon replaced by even less sanitary habits. The quandaries of raising older children can’t even be fully described in 750 words, much less resolved. These are the moments of my life when I not only feel like a well-meaning but bumbling idiot—my default setting—but I actually feel utterly alone. (Do I even need to say that her father was out for the evening?)

  I was left with the same question, the one that flattens me every time: What is enough? There comes a point in every disciplinary action where things can slip too easily from “These are the consequences of your actions” to “Years from now, your therapy group is going to love this.” Obviously, I am not talking about physical or emotional abuse; I’m talking about two people in a room and maybe one of them has always wondered what makes the clacking sound when you shake nail polish and decides to answer that question once and for all by pouring the nail polish on the bedspread, and now the other one has to decide exactly how much punishment she needs to inflict. (That wasn’t Alice, by the way. That was me. I was six. The noise comes from ball bearings.)

  I read all the parenting books, some twice. I know the best parent is a consistent, loving, authoritative presence. You tell each child, every day, in large ways and small, “These are the things that matter to me and will eventually matter to you. Please behave in this fashion.” And you understand that as the parent you have to keep advocating for the expected behavior all the time. We always say “please” and “thank you.” We always make our bed in the morning. We never use Mommy’s toothbrush to get the cat looking her best. But children, wily and alert little devils that they are, spend many years looking for loopholes, and life keeps conspiring to create them. Over the years, they learn that certain rules are only in effect around their grandmothers but can be ignored at other times. They learn that after Daddy has driven for an hour on the freeway and only gone two-tenths of a mile, he doesn’t care what you do, as long as you do it quietly. They learn that for one week a month Mommy has a much more stringent definition of the phrase “back talk” and a much lower tolerance for it. What I want to be is a strong, resolute figure leading my daughter through the primeval forest of childhood, hacking out a clear, bright path of expectations for her. What I usually end up being is a person swatting at bugs, squinting at the sun and saying nervously, “Wait. I know I have the map here somewhere.”

  In the end, Alice choked down three bites, one for each character trait I was trying to impress upon her. Also, she had to pay me for the raita she urged me to buy but now didn’t want. Her loathing of the stuff was so profound she didn’t even look miffed at the loss of hard-earned capital. We lived through another mothering moment with only the odd psychic abrasion and some cucumber floating in a cup of soured milk as a reminder.

  The dog wouldn’t eat it either.

  Like Nature Intended

  I CANNOT SAY THAT BEING A CHILD ACTOR WAS DETRIMENTAL to me, but I could have done without being a former child actor. To be a child is a temporary condition. To be a former child actor is a permanent state. Former child actors aren’t people. They’re memories from your childhood, little people who lived in the television in the den. It would be as if I asked you to consider the feelings of an EASY-BAKE Oven.

  Former child actors are frequently exposed to idiotic questions. They are required to respond graciously when people ask them things they wouldn’t have the nerve to ask their brother-in-law after drinking a six-pack. Do you have any money left or did your parents spend it all? Was (actor with whom I worked) an ass? and Did acting ruin your life?

  I try to be polite. I tell people that my parents spent every cent I made on cheap wine and aboveground swimming pools, and what a comfort it is to discuss this with them, a complete stranger. I tell them that (Actor with whom I worked) was a lovely person, but he was an adult and I was a child so, outside of acting, our interests didn’t exactly coincide. I couldn’t legally meet him at a nightclub and he wasn’t too excited about hanging out with me while I read the Little House on the Prairie books, ate Wheat Thins, and drank Tom Collins mixer. As to the did-acting-ruin-your-life question—the answer is no. Actually, I liked acting and acting suited my personality quite well, which says nothing good about my character. I remember once getting very upset with my mother for using something funny I had said without giving me credit. I barged into the adults’ conversatio
n and said through gritted teeth, “That was my line, you know.” I was six years old; I wasn’t even acting yet.

  The maddening part about being a former child actor is that I’m not always a former child actor. If I look good and I’m not perspiring copiously or in the middle of saying something inappropriate, no one recognizes me. I’m just another civilian with a fresh manicure. As luck would have it, I’m rarely composed and I’m usually disheveled. If Rupert the dog has made a break for it and I’m running down the street in my pajamas screaming, “Come BACK here you (verb form of expletive) (noun expletive) hellhound or I swear to (verb form of expletive) (deity) I’m going to beat you into a PASTE!” and I stop to gasp and sweat and pull bees out of my feet, someone getting out of a car will look at me, smile, and say, “I’m sorry, but weren’t you—?” I blot my brow and try to be gracious because that person hasn’t done anything wrong in wanting to confirm that I was, and still am, Quinn Cummings, and it doesn’t hurt me to be polite—most of the time.

  At the height of the dot-com frenzy, I took a job in San Francisco. After several weeks of dead ends, I left Los Angeles without having a place to live in San Francisco. I figured I’d get there, stay in a hotel for a few days, find a sublet, and move in. That seemed like the kind of whimsical thing people I knew did all the time, and it always worked out fabulously for them. I had forgotten that whimsy, like paisley, is incredibly unflattering on me. There was, quite literally, no housing to be had in the entire city.

  I gave up quickly on finding a whole apartment, then on finding a room in a house, then a spare bedroom in an apartment. I was down to begging strangers to let me drop an air mattress in a hallway and contemplating the more picturesque Dumpsters near South Park when a Los Angeles friend called with an offer. His cousin and her girlfriend were going to Europe and needed someone to watch their apartment and take care of their cat for two weeks. I went to meet the women. The apartment was a cozy, rundown sort of place, covered in cat hair and located directly behind San Francisco General Hospital, thus assuring me a constant wail of sirens. Then again, it wasn’t the backseat of my car, and it bought me two more weeks to try to find a proper sublet. My responsibilities as temporary tenant were simple: bring in the mail; answer the phone as needed; give the cat her IV drip.

  I’m sorry, what?

  The women had tried for several years to have a child. When it became apparent this wasn’t going to happen, the cat became their beloved offspring. Unfortunately, the cat was now very old; every major organ system was fading like a Hawaiian sunset. Her eyes were cloudy, her hearing was shot, and her kidneys were failing by the minute so unless she was rehydrated and fed twenty dollars’ worth of medication twice every day, she would die.

  You know, like nature intended.

  I received a swooningly vivid demonstration of how to pick up the cat (which, while really sweet, resembled something you’d collect on a Swiffer), pinch up the skin on her neck, and plunge in the needle. She let out a weak but truculent mew. I let out a half-choked whimper. Next, I was taught how to pulverize her heart pill, mix it with water, put it into a syringe, and jam it down her throat.

  For the next two weeks, I awoke at five every morning and, before I went to the gym, stumbled around the apartment trying to find Linty the cat. Sometimes, I would grab under the bed only to snatch up a dust bunny or a limp sock. Eventually I would locate her slumped form somewhere in the apartment, and she would emit this little moan, which said plainly, “Crap. Still alive.”

  Every morning and every night, I would insert the IV line and wait for the bag of fluid to empty into her. Every morning and every night I would watch her minimal life force come back as the fluid rehydrated her. Every morning and every night I would remember that she hated her heart pills and that I should have given them to her first, when she was still walking toward the light. Every morning, I would leave for the gym with paper towels worn around my arms like blood-specked dropcloths, absorbing the vivid reminders of exactly how much she hated heart pills.

  It is a testimony to the housing situation in San Francisco that I still considered myself lucky.

  During this time, I had found a longer-term temporary housing situation (the housemate of a high-school friend’s ex-girlfriend had been popped for shoplifting for the third time. He jumped bail. His room was free. Whee!) so when Linty’s moms returned, I moved out that afternoon. As I was packing, one of the women invited me back the following night for her birthday party. I didn’t really know anyone in town besides the stock-optioned teenagers I was working with, and I was still thankful they had taken me in, so I gladly accepted.

  When I arrived the next evening, the apartment was full of women. I smiled politely, slid through to the kitchen, got myself a drink. As I was coming back into the living room, the girlfriend of the birthday girl grabbed me by the wrist and tugged me toward the birthday girl, who was standing by the fireplace. Assuming she wanted me to wish her girlfriend a happy birthday, I went along without hesitation. Why wouldn’t I? They were middle-aged lesbians in San Francisco. The worst thing that should have happened to me was being forced to try lentil and hummus pâté.

  Once I was standing between the hostesses, the birthday girl called out, “Excuse me? Everyone? Be quiet!”

  The rest of the women in the room quieted down and stared expectantly at their beaming hostesses, and at me sandwiched between them. My stomach sank.

  “I’m sure you all remember The Goodbye Girl…”

  No, I’m thinking frantically, she’s not going to do this.

  “The little know-it-all on Family, you remember that show?”

  The women started conferring. Some remembered it, some needed their memories refreshed, some had no idea what she was talking about. All of them, however, were staring at us with great interest. My expression was probably similar to the time I stuck my foot in my rollerblade and discovered half of a fat lizard my cat had secreted in there for some later meal.

  “Anyway, here’s our friend, the little child star, Quinn Cummings!”

  She hugged me, and then stepped back a bit so that her friends could fully appreciate my former child star aura. My first thought was: If this is what they did to their friends, what did they do to mere acquaintances? Ritualized flaying?

  One woman brayed, “So, who did you work with who was lesbian? Is (the name of an actress) a dyke?”

  The women chorused, “Yes! Who’s gay?”

  I was near paralysis in horror and anger at this behavior. Still, I managed to come up with a nearly Victorian “I’m sure I wouldn’t know who is gay or lesbian. It wouldn’t occur to me to ask.” [Lies, lies, lies. I know all sorts of things about all sorts of people. Some are out. Some are not. Some live discreet lives as homosexuals or bisexuals. Some are off-the-charts sluts. But if you think I was going to out someone for the satisfaction of these nattering harpies, you are painfully mistaken.]

  Once everyone figured out that the former child star wasn’t going to do some adorable tricks, the interest in me faded a bit. I took this opportunity to slither out of the room and make a break for the front door. Sure, it was rude not to say good-bye to the hosts, but they started it.

  I got to my new apartment and went back to unpacking when a horrible thought occurred to me. I checked the bags. I checked my car. I checked my bags again. Oh, hell, I had left my good winter coat at the Cat House. I had to go back for the coat, but if I saw those two women again, I was going to say something awful, something I might regret. Actually, I wouldn’t regret it at all, and I’d probably play what I said back again and again in my head and giggle, but I wanted to believe I was a better person than that. I tried to tap into my inner San Franciscan, a mellow forgiving individual who could listen to the Grateful Dead without wanting to slam her hand in a door.

  An hour later I was back at their house. They only lived ten minutes away from my new place; the other fifty minutes had been spent trying to find a parking space, which did absolutely nothing to
foster a “live and forgive” attitude in my heart. I ran up to the apartment, now empty except for the hostesses and, I assume, Linty the cat. I found my coat, brushed off the larger pyramids of cat fur, and inhaled deeply to begin my prepared speech. I then coughed out a Hindenburg of hair, and tried again.

  “Look, I don’t want to make a big deal about this, but you two did something that made me…”

  I thought about the words I wanted to use: “blindingly irritated”? “teeth-gnashingly irked”?

  I went with: “kind of uncomfortable.”

  They stared blankly at me so I continued. “It was very nice of you to invite me to your party, but when you brought me up in the front of the room like that, and introduced me as a former child star, I felt like the evening’s entertainment.”

  I waited for some expression of embarrassment to cross their faces. They waited patiently, expecting me to come to the point where they had committed a faux pas. I tried again.

  “That part of my life was nearly two decades ago, and when it’s the first thing someone finds worth mentioning about me, I start to feel as if I have done nothing else of any consequence in my life.”

  An exquisite pause occurred, where we all wondered if anyone was going to leap in and protest that I had done lots of worthwhile things after puberty. No one did.

  The birthday girl protested, “But everyone wanted to hear about Hollywood.”

  Her girlfriend lay a protective hand on her shoulder.

  “Honey, let Quinn vent.”

  LET.

  QUINN.

  VENT?

  Venting is something you do when traffic is really bad and you come home and yell at your spouse for fifteen minutes about how you want to live in a city with two thousand people and where you can walk to work.

  Venting is something you do at a bar after everyone has watched the presidential debates.