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

by Quinn Cummings

  “Yes,” he said, gently lifting Alice’s lips to show me her choppers. “They’re straight. They are also tightly packed. When these teeth fall out, there will be no room for the next teeth. They will come in up here,” and he motioned to her gums, “and here,” pointing to her cheekbones, “and maybe a few here,” he said, indicating her forehead. Alice flapped away his hands, which were interfering with her television viewing. I plunged into despair. My dental shame was coming home to roost. My troublesome DNA slipped away from the time-out corner and did a dance of triumph in the middle of the room.

  You don’t just get braces for your child. You earn braces for your child by virtue of numerous appointments for plaster cast making, mold forming, and credit checking. By the time Alice and I arrived for the official presentation of the gear, I was humming “Pomp and Circumstance.” We were brought into a small room with a model of Alice’s jaw already wearing the apparatus. Alice, alert to any opportunity for self-improvement, agitated to put lipstick on her plaster doppelganger. This time, I was offered water by the hygienist. It came in a tiny cup with the cast of High School Musical grinning out at me in their perfect, gleaming teeth.

  The appliance was presented. Alice was to wear a palate stretcher for eighteen months, which, over time, would create enough room for her adult teeth to grow in. I wouldn’t have to attack her open mouth with a key every night, but we would have to haul across town every three weeks for a tune-up. This would comprise a ten-minute appointment with a forty-five-minute commute on either side. Years from now Alice will ask, “Mommy, what did you do about global warming?” and I’ll be able to tell her, “I contributed.”

  This expansion process was referred to as Stage One. Math was never my gift but calling something Stage One implies there will be other, equally expensive and time-consuming stages to follow. My dental insurance caps orthodontic payments at fifteen hundred dollars, which we reached when Alice touched her first Highlights magazine. I toyed with not doing Stage One and just letting the Stage Two chips fall where they may, but by then Alice would be chewing with her eyelids and elbows. Holding the plaster model of her teeth in one hand, I signed the contracts with the other. The term “indentured” kept popping into my head.

  For everyone involved, the palate stretcher represented new levels of commitment—financial, emotional, and logistical—and within weeks it became abundantly clear this was not the best time to bring new levels of responsibility into our lives. I was distracted and overbooked by life in general and Alice had reached a developmental stage that was driving me out of my mind. To her credit, at least she was giving me something new to find maddening. This wasn’t the limit-testing of an earlier time, or the spike of sassiness that recurred every ten months or so. When the palate stretcher arrived, Alice was more than willing to work within the system, as long as the system rewarded her periodically with visits to Web sites that featured pictures of kittens. She was just vague. There was no request so small that I didn’t need to spell out every single detail, and no part that was self-evident to Alice. If, six months before, I would have said:

  “Please make your bed before we leave.”

  I was now saying:

  “Please go into your room, where you sleep. Not our bedroom, where you sometimes sleep, but the room where your bed is. Please remove all stuffed animals from your bed. Please remove the cat from your bed. Do not dress the cat in your clothing. Put the cat on the ground. Stand up again. Flatten the sheet on the bottom, to remove wrinkles. Take the top sheet, the one that is in a pile at the bottom of the bed, and pull it up to your pillow, and flatten the sheet against the bed. If there is a lump under the sheets, press it. If it’s soft, it’s your stuffed animal; remove it. If it squeaks, it’s your cat; remove it; put it on the ground and do not dress it in your clothes. If the lump is neither a stuffed animal nor the cat, flatten it out. Now, you will notice another pile at the bottom of the bed. This is your quilt. Please pull it up and straighten it. Straighten means the quilt is on the top of the bed. If it’s covering half the bed and puddling on the ground, that isn’t straightening the quilt, that is giving your mother the headache she gets behind her eye. Having straightened the quilt, please take all the stuffed animals and place them on your bed. Finally, you will notice a third pile at the foot of your bed. It is a nest of socks that need putting away. They needed putting away three weeks ago when I first mentioned them. They desired to be put away two weeks ago when we had a discussion very much like this one. Last week, they were practically begging to be put away. Either you match them and put them away, or I cut them into tiny squares, soak them in kerosene, and use them as fireplace starters. I will give you no new socks, and you will develop smelly feet and that’s all anyone will remember of you from grade school.”

  To which Alice would hear:

  “Put socks on the cat.”

  Until her brain came back online, we weren’t good candidates for new, pricy, fragile, expensive, tiny, costly, custom-made dental objects. But if we waited until she could actually hear me, her palate-stretcher case would be sitting next to her estrogen-replacement pills. Every now and then, I’d think, Forget the sweet and temporarily absent-minded child, I’ll just be responsible for those expensive doohickeys that look exactly as if the orthodontist plays with paper clips while he’s on the phone, but there were two problems with that approach:

  One, I’m supposed to be teaching Alice personal responsibility and accountability and all that stuff that takes far more energy than just doing their work for them.

  Two, I can’t handle constant, low-level responsibility any better than Alice can. At least she’s going to grow out of it.

  I’m great in a crisis and epically bad at maintenance. My feeling is that if I do something boring and virtuous, I should be rewarded by not having to do it again for many months. Doing your taxes, as grisly as it is, fits perfectly into my model. It’s horrible, it takes over your life for a few days, and then it’s gone again until next year. [If you are the sort of person who just thought, But Quinn, if you did a little bit of your tax preparation every month of the year, you wouldn’t have to live on chocolate-covered espresso beans for five days in April, then fine. You come over and take responsibility for the palate stretcher.]

  I can keep track of more details than NORAD. Alice’s shoe size? Got it. Presents for the godsons for Christmas? In a bag behind the extra ironing-board cover in the laundry room. The cat gets the eye drops, the dog gets the ear drops. Don’t walk outside at night in spring without making a lot of noise ahead of time unless you’ve always wondered what a skunk looks like up close and startled. Without prompting, I can sing “My Sharona” from start to finish. For fun—and because I was afraid people might think I was too hip—I do crossword puzzles, which means that every month or so I learn three new names of rivers in Belize. I know all of the names of Alice’s stuffed animals, which is no small statement because their names change an average of once every eight days. I also know the names of all of Alice’s classmates who, because we live in Los Angeles, are frequently named after rivers in Belize. At last count, the moist computer in my skull has over three thousand small programs up and running. There is simply no room left to take on two objects that weigh less than a butterfly and cost more than my first car.

  I could try asking Consort to be the keeper of the dental gear, but his day is pretty full trying to find any one of his many pairs of eyeglasses. Consort has reading glasses, driving glasses, driving glasses that allow him to read maps, reading glasses that allow him to drive short distances, sports glasses, glasses that are scratched and worn but still good enough for cleaning the garage, and glasses that keep him from falling down while walking the dog but aren’t clear enough to let him see what he is picking up in the plastic bag. A man driven to flailing despair because he can’t find his picking-out-paint-chip glasses doesn’t want to hear about a palate stretcher.

  In the end, the kid and I were in this together, and I am both p
leased and shocked to note it didn’t go as badly as I might have predicted. She’d leave her night gear someplace bizarre, but I’d find it while trying to locate my keys. I’d start the lecture after finding her palate stretcher in the drying rack by the kitchen sink, and she’d point out that, in fact, I was holding my night guard, which keeps me from grinding my orthodontically straightened teeth into a fine powder. We have discovered a nice bakery near the orthodontist’s office where, post-stretching, we get sustenance for the long journey home. I think we might actually make it through this adventure.

  And someday, when my mental decline is complete and Alice has put me someplace soft, warm, and—if she’s feeling generous—accredited, I will live for her visits. And I’ll use my last bits of sentience to demand that she smile.

  Dog Days

  I WAS DRIVING ALICE TO SCHOOL WHEN I NOTICED A BROWN dog trotting down the sidewalk. The dog—even from a distance, an obviously sociable mutt—nosed a woman walking past and attempted to play with her dog, a taupe poodle in a plaid coat. With minimal effort, the woman and her poodle ignored the brown interloper who, sensing a cold shoulder, proceeded to sit back on her haunches and have a good scratch. This entire scene played out in a leafy residential neighborhood that borders a commercial boulevard near Alice’s school. I glanced up and down the street but could see no one calling out for a wayward pet. The dog had no collar and her paws were filthy. She finished her ear scratch, gave the sidewalk a quick surveillance, and loped off toward the busy avenue. My stomach sank.

  From the back seat, Alice said, “I don’t think that dog has a person.”

  “I think you’re right,” I said.

  I pulled over to the curb and got out. Realistically, if the dog was lost, it would be in a mild panic and wouldn’t let me get anywhere near it. I was afraid it might bolt directly into the busy avenue and the outcome would be horrible.

  I said softly, “Hey, sweetie, you lost?” I beckoned with I-know-the-good-scratching-places fingers.

  The dog grinned widely. She dropped down on dog elbows and crawled, soldier style, to me. She rolled on her back and licked my toes. Ten minutes later, Alice and I drove up to school with a pungent-footed guest licking my ear from the passenger seat. Alice gathered her school stuff and opened the back door.

  “I think we should call her Macy,” she pronounced.

  “I think we should call her Temporary,” I countered. Our dog at the time, Polly, was quite literally a cranky bitch of a certain age who viewed any attempt to interact with her as a gross invasion of privacy. We were going to remain a one-dog family.

  That afternoon, I took Temporary Macy to our local animal hospital. She had no identifying chip. I checked the neighborhood where we found her. There were no “missing dog” signs taped to the telephone poles so I put up a dozen “found dog” signs and checked her into a nearby kennel. I boarded her for a week, visiting every day for pats and a walk, but no one responded to my signs. This was not entirely surprising as Temporary Macy was a mix of a couple of breeds frequently bred for urban protection or fighting; if they don’t show promise, they’re thrown away like old munitions. Actually, my affectionate ward was lucky, as many of her not-aggressive siblings are tormented to make them more vicious or, failing that, used for bait.

  When I would visit her at the kennel, Temporary Macy would greet me with the kind of adoration reserved for those who have taken a bullet for the Pope. The kennel workers grew so fond of her they let her sleep under their feet while they worked the desk. It was abundantly clear she was domesticated, warmly social, and in crying need of a home. After a week passed, I decided to find her one. I knew it was time because finding her a home was the right thing to do and also because her kennel bill was beginning to wander up into weekend-escape-at-the-Ritz-Carlton territory.

  I have never written a personal ad, but I cannot imagine making any greater effort to present someone in a more favorable light. I used phrases like “good listener,” “attractive,” “easy to please,” and “mellow.” I didn’t mention how she likes long walks on the beach, picnics in front of a roaring fire, and exotic out-of-the-way restaurants, nor did I take off ten pounds or puff up her academic credentials, but I think I hit every other cliché of the genre. I did say she was “submissive” and “easy to control,” which I suspect are familiar to readers of a different type of personal ad.

  Within a few days, I had the good fortune to find her a home with friends of ours. Their son Dennis was slightly timid when it came to canine companionship but they felt such a mellow dog would be a natural introduction. The parents had never owned dogs before but Temporary Macy was so cheerful and easygoing, how hard could it be?

  I wasn’t promising them something just to get the dog off my hands. She was an eight-month-old sweetheart who seemed to need very little in the way of exercise beyond a walk a day. She was housebroken, quiet, and lived to sleep with her head on your feet. I didn’t quite understand how a dog with at least two breeds in her that are known for energy and endurance was such a couch potato, but who was I to question the way of the dog? They named her Ursula, for her bear-like qualities. I considered the matter closed.

  Three days later, I got the first phone call.

  “Quinn,” my friend began hesitantly. “Ursula ate a potato chip and now she’s coughing.”

  “She might have scratched her throat. She’s a tough puppy. She’ll be better by tomorrow,” I said reassuringly.

  Two days later: “She seems to be happy and very active, but she’s still coughing.”

  “She might have gotten kennel cough,” I said, slightly less confidently. “If it doesn’t clear up by tomorrow, take her to see the vet.”

  The next day she was drooling bile, coughing, and unable to stand. They raced her to the vet to learn that their new family member had something like pneumonia, only nastier. The next week for them was a blur of multiple medications crammed down Ursula’s throat by plastic syringe, mopping pools of bile from the floor, and explaining to Dennis that if the dog fell down and didn’t get back up, to come find Mommy and Daddy right away. Imagine Lassie meets ER, with a little Exorcist thrown in for texture.

  And who was responsible for this blameless family going through such an awful experience? That would be me. I spent a lot of time on the phone saying things like, “I am so sorry…I just didn’t know…You have to get up to medicate how often? Oh, God. I am so sorry.”

  A week passed, and then two. Slowly, Ursula got better. My friend was able to throw away the syringes. Ursula improved. She became healthy. She went beyond healthy into radiant, then energetic, then positively robust. We discovered a new layer to Ursula. What we had taken to be a mellow disposition was, in retrospect, the first symptoms of a life-threatening illness.

  Healthy Ursula had enough energy to pull a Humvee full of cinderblocks up Pikes Peak. Healthy Ursula thought the proper way to greet people was to jump on them, knock them down, and stand on their sternum. Healthy Ursula ate shoes. Also doors. Healthy Ursula was a pet I never would have placed with a family looking for their first dog.

  A month passed, and then another. I would hear stories from Ursula’s family and they weren’t great. These kind people had neither the time nor experience to be consistent and firm owners, which is the only way you can train an exuberant and willful puppy. She was getting stronger. The family was weakening. Unless Ursula could help out with mortgage payments, something had to give.

  Saturday morning, I got a call. My friend was in tears.

  “We just can’t do it,” she wailed. “She’s the sweetest girl in the world, but I’m down to one pair of work shoes. She just won’t stop and she won’t listen. Would you please take her back?”

  I looked around at Polly, my sullen elderly dog, at Lulabelle, my aggressively dog-loathing cat, and my child who doesn’t especially like being licked or knocked over.

  “Sure,” I said with something that sounded almost like enthusiasm.

  My job as Urs
ula’s rescuer had just entered its you-rescue-it, you-own-it phase. Without proper and consistent training, Ursula would be bounced from house to house, getting weirder and wilder with each stay. She could end up in a shelter. In Los Angeles County, twenty-four hours after an “owner turn-in,” a dog of her breed is destroyed. The only way I was going to save her sweet bouncy hide was by becoming the toughest alpha bitch in this area code.

  Luckily, this comes naturally to me, which is odd because I have a cellular loathing of conflict and a hair-trigger reflex to be helpful—two characteristics rarely associated with strong leaders. As I understand it, Napoleon seldom offered to water people’s plants when they were out of town. Still, if being obstinate means saving a life, I can put my niceness in storage with the winter gloves and old tax returns and get down to business. Which is why, on an overcast and colorless Monday afternoon, I walked through their front yard, past the Ursula-sized holes dug into the lawn, past the macerated garden gnome and the odd designer-shoe carcass to play full-throttle, one-on-one, who’s-your-bitch with Ursula. The front door opened and Ursula, having seen me through the window, leapt in joyful greeting, aiming straight for my collarbone. I took her leash quickly, snapped it sharply, and barked, “SIT!”

  The nose muzzle on her training leash did its job. Ursula froze for an instant, blinked in confusion, then rose back up on her hind legs and attempted to lead me in a waltz.

  “SIT!” This time even sharper and meaner.

  Again, she froze. I pressed her backside down. She sat.

  I sang out merrily, “Good sit!” My voice had shifted from a sadistic Marine drill instructor to Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. Hearing a sweet tone, Ursula made for my shoulders again.

  “SIT!” I pressed her backside down. She sat.