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

by Quinn Cummings

  Which led to the breakfast nook. A previous owner had decided to make his own shelves. These shelves were constructed of some sort of toothpick/Kleenex aggregate, which caused them to sag limply against the wall like a faded Tennessee Williams heroine. After maybe three weeks in the house, I had grown so tired of watching my shelves suffer the vapors I decided something had to be done. I grabbed Consort, who was still trying to figure out why the garage door opened when we used the toaster.

  “I hate the shelves in the breakfast nook,” I grumbled, preparing to launch into how the shelves were the physical embodiment of everything evil.

  “Then get rid of them,” he said matter-of-factly, shaking the toaster.

  I gasped. “I can do that?”

  “Why not? They’re ugly. They aren’t original. You hate them. And it’s your house.”

  I stood a little straighter. It was my house. I was part of the fastest-growing demographic in the United States—single women who were home owners—and I, as a single-woman home owner, was going to make a home-improvement decision!

  “I am going to remove those stupid shelves,” I announced. I then said, “I have no idea how to remove those stupid shelves.”

  Consort introduced me to the crowbar before going back to his own house, where nothing was dead and wall sockets didn’t spontaneously combust. Crowbarring looked simple enough. I was to put the wedge-y end of the crowbar between the crappy shelf and the wall, and gently pry them apart. The crappy shelf would fall to the ground and I would dance with glee and female empowerment. I put the wedge-y bit in and pulled. The wood groaned slightly, but the shelf remained in place. I pulled a little harder and felt something like movement. I yanked, and the shelf came off the wall. Unfortunately, the wall also came off the wall. I fell back against the kitchen table and stared in dismay into a gaping hole. I was looking at outside plaster, which confused me. Wasn’t there supposed to be some sort of wood between the inside wall and the outside wall? And speaking of wood, shouldn’t there be some sort of lumber holding up this corner of the room?

  “There are termites, which eat from the top down. Another kind eats from the bottom up. This house has both. About thirty years’ worth, from the looks of it.” Thus spoke the Exterminator, who had been recommended by the Lawyer who had been put on retainer to talk to the previous Exterminators with an eye toward determining whether the previous Exterminators who had declared the house termite-free had been criminally incompetent or merely criminal. The Lawyer’s Exterminator eventually led to the Contractor. I now had many new friends, nearly all of whom charged by the hour. The Contractor was impressed by how long the house had managed to sustain itself without any actual wood holding up that corner. By the time he’d pulled away enough plaster to find lath in the wall, he had created a hippopotamus-sized hole in my kitchen wall.

  While waiting for the Exterminator to exterminate and the Contractor to contract, Consort put a plastic tarp over the hole. The outer wall had more than a few cracks so when the wind blew the tarp would expand and contract like a giant blue lung. This just added to the sense that the house was alive and anxious for revenge against all the humans who had abused it for seventy years. I plugged a microwave into one of the seven outlets in my bedroom and hid there as much as possible. One night, on a trip to the fridge, I stood by the tarp and could hear termites copulating.

  When I was young, the idea of marriage scared the hell out of me. I just knew that I would be walking back down the aisle, the celebration march playing, my loving groom on my arm, and I’d catch the eye of the date of one of my wedding guests and I’d think, No, wait! You are the man of my dreams, not this well-meaning simp with whom I agreed on a silverware pattern. I’ve made a terrible mistake and it’s going to cost all my dignity and a bucket of money to make this problem go away. So I chose never to get married, opting when the time came for a state I like to call “Living in sin with basic cable.” But, like some mythological tale about the futility of skirting one’s destiny, I escaped my fate as a trapped wife only to find myself married to an incontinent ninety-year-old with open sores and anger-management issues. My house.

  “I thought I was ready for this,” I told the house. “But I was wrong. It’s not you, it’s me. You’re great, but I want to see other houses,” I said tentatively.

  The house, indifferent to my suffering, continued to decay and take me with it.

  Every attempt to improve the house opened a new faucet of pain. When I bought the place, the kitchen drawers featured aggressively ugly handles. They had kind of a You find me unattractive? Well, joke’s on you, chump because there are seventeen more of me on this wall alone thing going on. The kitchen had only two shelves of usable storage but enough drawers to serve as a morgue for every Barbie in California. In a fit of post-termite despair, I removed about half the handles only to discover that their width matched no other handle in any known hardware marketplace on earth. When I tried to drill new holes to fit actual handles manufactured here in the three-dimensional universe, I discovered the drawers’ faceplates were made of some kind of pressed talcum powder, which exploded on contact with a drill bit. Of course, I couldn’t put the old handles back because I had thrown them away. I couldn’t put on new handles until I removed all the weird faceplates and it didn’t make sense to do that until I renovated the kitchen, which I couldn’t do because I needed the money I had set aside for kitchen renovation to patch the hippo-sized hole in the unrenovated kitchen without drawer handles, whose owner was pouring herself a rather tall drink.

  Back on the historic tour, each house was a beautiful testament to its current owner’s care and, we all understood, mountains of cash. Whether he was home or not, each house stood as the living embodiment of its owner’s fine design eye, his acute aesthetic sense, and his ability to bill six hundred dollars an hour, thirty-six hours a day. I stood in this magnificent residence and watched the light play across the Persian carpet and bounce off the French silk upholstery. Had this house been a person, she would have been chic, self-confident, and intimidatingly poised, alluding to her recent trip to Lake Como with casually dropped quotes from Blake and Thoreau. My house was a dilapidated soul living behind a bus stop, dressed in a hostess skirt fashioned of plastic grocery bags, railing against the Warren Commission.

  Ultimately, that was what I hated most about my house. It was disorganized. It wasn’t conventionally appealing. It was inclined to hold grudges and then punish the wrong people. No wonder the idea of marriage always gave me the yips. One way or another, I knew I’d end up marrying myself.

  Somehow, realizing how horrible everything had become turned the tide. It went from being “the horrible house” to “my horrible house,” to, finally, “my house.” I began to notice the afternoon light again and discreetly avoided the laundry room. We reached a rapprochement, the house and I. It doesn’t mention my puffy morning eyelids, and I don’t bring up its lack of closet space. This might not be a marriage based on deep passion or unconditional love, but I was starting to laugh at its jokes.

  Having finished the tour, we stepped outside as a group and removed our shoe condoms, leaving them flattened and spent in the basket awaiting the next troop of period-dressed Peeping Toms. I squinted against the bright sunlight and burrowed in my purse for sunglasses. Something behind the hedge caught my eye. A shadow or—I leaned in for a closer look—perhaps a crack? Perhaps a break in the foundation that would lead to the entire front half of the house falling off as neatly as a slice of aged cheddar? Or maybe it was a nest of homicidal yellow jackets, seconds away from bursting open, sending thousands of enraged insects swarming into the house through the hand-carved French doors and setting up shop in the original dumbwaiter? Please, oh please, let it be black mold.

  I leaned in over the heirloom roses (original to the house, from a cutting of a bush reputedly pruned by Anne Boleyn) and peered more closely at the dark spot. No, it was just a shadow. A shadow from the original, solid copper, custom-milled do
wnspout. All was still flawless.

  But, wait. What was that movement under the delicately carved marble foot plate? I leaned in farther and rejoiced at what I saw. Slipping my sunglasses high on my nose, I congratulated myself that at least I didn’t have cockroaches. Thus encouraged, I headed home.

  In Less Than Glowing Terms

  WE CELEBRATE ALICE’S HALF-BIRTHDAY IN THE SAME RESTAURANT every year. We have an attachment to this place because Consort and I had taken Alice there on her six-month birthday. Until that night, she had been a placid and mostly silent accessory in a molded car seat. That very evening, in that very restaurant, she unveiled her shriek for the first time. It sounded like a stadium full of enraged dolphins with the amplifiers cranked up to full volume. For the next year, we didn’t dine in any restaurant as a family. Every year since, we return to that same place to celebrate whatever developmental stage she’s in, and that she doesn’t make that noise anymore.

  On this most recent half-birthday, I met Consort and Alice at the restaurant. Consort and I treat parenting as a relay race, with Alice as the baton. Alice and I go to Place A where I leave her for a music lesson, then I go to Place B, with Consort arriving at Place A fifty-five minutes later to pick her up. We then meet at Place C where he hands Alice to me and I hand him his dry cleaning. Then she and I go to Place D, and he goes wherever he goes when I’m not making him meet us places. That day, he’d picked her up at her friend’s house on the way home from work. This meant that for once I had a chance to actually make an attempt to improve my appearance. You wouldn’t believe how much extra personal time you can find if you aren’t detangling little-girl hair and vetoing outfits that include shorts and party shoes.

  I rolled up to the restaurant just as they were arriving. Alice raced to fling herself upon me but came up short about a foot away. She leaned back, squinted at me, frowned, and pointed an accusing finger at my face. “There’s something wrong with your eyes,” she said worriedly. “They’re all dark and shadowy.”

  “That’s eyeliner, sweetie,” I said briskly. “If Mommy were better organized, you’d see it more often.”

  Consort said loyally, “I think Mom looks very pretty.”

  But my kid wasn’t up to blindly toeing the party line. She persisted, “Why would you want to make your eyes look so tiny and tired? It’s just weird.”

  I said, “Because I was under the impression that it improved my appearance. Thank heavens you were here to clarify that I was completely mistaken.”

  “You should ask Araminta’s mother where she gets her makeup. She’s really pretty.”

  I had heard about Araminta’s mother. As always, I restrained myself from noting that I, too, might be really pretty if my ass fat were injected into my face three times a year.

  I have never been conventionally attractive. I know this for several reasons. First, I know this because my vision is nearly perfect and mirrors exist. I also know this because I live in Los Angeles, where the prettiest people from every town in the world converge to find work as actors. Some of them learn how to act. Others find long and lucrative careers on daytime soaps. The rest teach yoga. Many eventually meet other nearly flawless people and they breed together, creating a new generation of the super-attractive, quite a few of whom were in school with me. Had there been no mirrors and no soap offspring, I still would have known I wasn’t traditionally beautiful because the entertainment industry kept telling me so. From the age of fourteen onward, I was reading for the part of the wacky sidekick. You know her as Rhoda Morgenstern, Ethel Mertz, or Jane Hathaway. We exist to pop our heads through doorways and say things like, “Not with my towel, you don’t!” and to help the female lead hide the Russian mail-order bride she inadvertently ordered online from her fiancé’s parents.

  After a few years of being professionally unattractive, I would begin to open scripts with the timidity of someone opening a can of soda that had been rolling around in the trunk. Few things in life are certain, but I was reasonably sure that my character was going to be described in less than glowing terms:

  Dumpy. Plain. Homely. Unsightly. Frizzy. Clumsy.

  I don’t think any part I was reading for was ever described as repugnant or scrofulous—which might have pleased me for no better reason than imagining some writer paging through a thesaurus—but any other way of saying, “But she has a great sense of humor,” they said.

  I actually got one of these parts. My first scene found me, Wacky Friend, whining to the lead, Pretty Girl, about how I didn’t want to go to the beach with her because she looked so much better than I did. I even had an emotional little monologue about how I was a tragic flat-chested thing and she was this vixen, this goddess, this paragon of female comeliness. There was one big problem: one of us was flat-chested, and it wasn’t me. Yes, she was far prettier than I was and the thick glasses they glued to my nose weren’t going to help any, but she was a tiny slip of a thing with the build of the ballerina she had been. We did the first rehearsal reading, and I noticed a worried glance shoot between the director and writer. Illogically, I hoped they would cut the whole speech of self-abasement and allow me to merely be unattractive without making me talk about it for half a page. I got the script revisions. My speech was now about how I didn’t want to go to the beach with her because she was the perfect weight and I was only five pounds lighter than the Statue of Liberty.

  Knowing you exist as the aesthetic Goofus to another person’s Gallant does eventually wear upon your self-esteem. Every once in a while, I would find something left of my spine and proclaim, “That’s it! I’m not reading for another part where the character enters every room scarfing a bag of Oreos and predicts she’ll die alone and be eaten by her cats.” But after a few months of arctic silence, it would dawn on me; there were no other roles for me. They weren’t looking for twenty-year-olds to play the crusading defense attorney, the impatient but secretly kind neurosurgeon, or the police detective with a haunted past. They were looking for the hot girl or the pity date. More maddening, I wasn’t even getting the pity date roles. This had something to do with my refusing to have a wardrobe of unflattering pants and Scrunchies to wear to such interviews and partially because—and I mean this with all kindness and generosity—I was reading against some seriously ill-favored individuals. However bad I was going to look after putting on an orange shirt with ruffles, they were already there. I couldn’t pity them too much, though, because being professionally plain had bought them very nice houses in the less-fashionable canyons.

  For a while, I comforted myself that I fell only slightly outside Hot Girl. In my mind, I lived adjacent to Hot Girl, in Cute Girl. Cute, it seemed to me, was attainable. Cute was a wide and forgiving land, which allowed a girl entry with nothing more than a winning smile, decent cleavage, and brushed hair. I was cute, I comforted myself, and there just wasn’t a place for cute. Then one day I read for a pilot where I actually read for the lead. It was different because they would actually have the merely cute read for the lead. This was possible because they had created a variation of the wacky friend: the wacky hot friend who makes up for being really hot by being really slutty, and possibly French. Having provided sufficient stroke fuel in the second lead, they could audition actresses of mere cuteness to star. It was all very exciting.

  I read acceptably well. They laughed in the right places. I felt I had done all I could do and hoped that my lip gloss brought me within striking distance of “I’d do her.” Later that day, I got a call from my agent. She started off by sighing. Instinctively, I grabbed the bottle of wine and a large glass.

  “Well,” she began, “they loved you.”

  “They loved you,” in Los Angeles means, “You didn’t set their couch on fire.”

  “But,” she said, and stopped.

  I poured.

  “But they need someone attractive for the role.”

  Because I am the same person who keeps sticking her tongue on the canker sore, to see if it’s still incredibly pai
nful, I sought clarification.

  “That’s what they said? ‘Attractive’? They didn’t say, ‘More attractive’?”

  “No, they said ‘attractive.’”

  Had they said they were going for “more attractive,” I could have consoled myself with the delusion that it was a matter of degrees between me and Hot Girl. But saying they were going with “attractive” only led to the nasty question, “And that makes me…?”

  “Anyway,” the agent continued, eager to get on to making other calls and destroying other people’s hopes. “They just put out an offer to Valerie Bertinelli.”

  Methodically, I refilled the wineglass to the rim.

  “So,” I said thoughtfully, “I can safely assume I am less attractive than Valerie Bertinelli.”

  “Great. We’re on the same page,” my agent said in relief. “Gotta go. Love you. Mean it. Bye.”

  Valerie Bertinelli is, on all accounts, a charming woman. Her hair is marvelously thick and bouncy. Her smile is adorable. I believe she has dimples. But until that moment, had you asked, I would have sworn to you that she and I both dwelt in the land of Cute, both equally blessed in that department. Now I was finding out I had set up my camp in the no-man’s-land between Cute Girl, Ugly Friend, and Thing that Demands Payment in Order to Walk over Its Bridge.

  I drank wine and ate buttercream frosting from a can. An hour later, tipsy and slightly sticky, I called my most patient male friend. He made the mistake of answering.