Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life (11 page)

We brought in the final five candidates. One by one, they stood in front of the camera, turned in profile, smiled, then turned the other profile. Our cameraman pushed in so close their skin resembled a soft Saharan landscape, flawlessly flat and monochrome across the entire screen. Each girl was perfect in her own way. Each could have been using her eggs to start a new race of humans. The only question was, which variation of perfect did these ad guys want?

The last model left. Within a minute, it was determined that each man at the table had his favorite and would accept no other girl to be the client’s apotheosis. In order to win others to his opinion, he would have the casting director replay the tapes of the other four models, and then he’d start to nitpick.

“Her nostrils aren’t exactly even.”

“I think her eyelashes could be longer.”

“Look at her chin again in profile. It’s a little weak.”

“You see how her hair draws attention to her puffy earlobes?”

Each suit would defend his choice, or slice away at the others. Two hours later, they regretfully told my boss that none of them would work because none of them was quite perfect enough. Outside of this room, each of these men would have written to Penthouse Forum had any of these young beauties even said “Hello” to him, but in this magical world, they held
all the power. These flawless Helens could not only
not
launch a thousand ships, they couldn’t make next month’s rent without unanimous approval. Eventually, the ad agency hired the one girl who hadn’t been available for the callback. Without her physical presence, they had nothing to tear down.

I had forgotten about all this until I was coated in a layer of cheap chardonnay and French V’nilla Crème Frosting. [The missing “A” stands for “Aren’t you glad you don’t know we get our ‘Vanilla’ flavoring from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory?”] I wasn’t the smartest person in the unemployment line, but I wasn’t a masochist, either socially or professionally. If you keep telling me how fat, unattractive, and generally misshapen I am, eventually I’m going to stop returning your calls. Los Angeles was filled with people prepared to sell their beloved grandmother into slavery for a chance to read for a feature. I came to realize that I wasn’t one of those people. The obvious problem with my chosen profession was that I wasn’t physically perfect. The less obvious problem was that I didn’t love acting anymore. I didn’t even like it. I had finally noticed that Acting, the bad boyfriend, wasn’t all that cute himself.

It took me another ten years after I stopped acting to realize that my friend had been right: I was fine. I was attractive enough. When you’re raised in a community where not one person is
anything
enough (rich, thin, young, powerful, beautiful, etc.), it’s strange and liberating to discover that no one outside the entertainment industry thinks about nostril symmetry. Most people have a very realistic expectation of how pretty people should be, and how boring a topic it is to dwell on. Civilians may notice what you look like, but pretty soon they start noticing who you are.

For years, I’ve watched actor friends panic and start to get things tightened and fluffed. What’s distressing is the ridiculously early age at which this panic sets in. An eye-lift at thirty-three doesn’t make you look twenty-three, it makes you look alarmed. Then again, if you’re holding off intimations of the grave at thirty-three, you have every right to be a little nervous. Today, my appearance is my hobby and not my business. Emotionally, this is neutral territory. In the appearance wars, it’s good to be Switzerland. So of course, I gave birth to a little girl with her own set of sartorial impulses, someone who had been hoping for Donatella Versace on the other end of the umbilical cord.

Alice, Consort, and I were now in the restaurant. Either the lighting was better or the roll she was gnawing improved her mood because Alice scrutinized me once more. “The eyeliner isn’t too bad,” she finally announced. “It brings out the green in your eyes.”

I thanked her, wondering as I often do about how my and Consort’s genetic material produced an elementary-school beauty editor.

“But,” she said, patting my hand in a businesslike way, “we have to do something about your hair.”

THE APPOINTMENT HAD BEEN FOR ME. I WAS FOURTEEN
years old and having one of my stubborn sinus infections. The fact that I was averaging four such infections a year meant that within minutes of the first bacterium wandering near my sinus cavity my mother and I could diagnose the infection with confidence. The doctor, however, stubbornly refused to take our word for it and made me come to his office. He could only get paid for stating the obvious if he and I were in the same room. We had the whole process down to a ritualized call-and-response, which took less than a minute:

He would then declare I had a sinus infection and my mother and I would feign surprise. This time, while he was writing out the usual prescription—something the pharmaceutical company should have named after me as a token of its gratitude—my mother asked to talk about another matter. I was sent to wait
outside. Being fourteen, I waffled between a sense of outrage that they were talking about me behind my back and a hope that someone in the waiting room might think I was eighteen. It never occurred to me that my mother and our doctor might be discussing anything besides me.

Looking back, I remember for the next week or so my mother’s fuse was especially short and susceptible to ignition. Generally thick-skinned, she had become abrupt and snappish, but since fourteen is an age not known for its penetrating interest in the motivations of adults, this didn’t affect me one bit. It was two weeks after the sinus appointment when she sat me down for “a talk.” I had no idea what the topic was going to be but I sensed it wasn’t
I finally got you that pony you always wanted
. Her expression was neutral and direct—the expression she saved for rotten things. I racked my brain for whatever I had done wrong and toyed with preemptive sobbing.

“When we went to the doctor last time,” she began, fixing her eyes on me, “I had him check out my throat, because my glands had been swollen for a while. He sent me to another doctor, who did a biopsy.” My heart flopped against my rib cage. She continued, “It turns out that I have lymphoma.”

My mother kept talking while I drifted in and out. Rarely in my life had I felt more acutely alive. I swear I could feel my hair growing. I could see her lips move and hear every single world she spoke, I just couldn’t make the words add up to anything. I heard “chemotherapy” and felt her fingers tap my wrist to draw my attention; I had been staring off into space. This brought me back to, “We’re not going to tell anyone I have cancer. Everyone will treat me like I’m going to die and I’m not going to die. So it’s better that no one knows.” I nodded. I could not see how
people wouldn’t know, but maybe she was giving me good news. Maybe this particular cancer was so inconsequential that you could have it and keep it to yourself and a few specially chosen loved ones. Maybe this lymphoma thing was like a tattoo on your butt.

Then she said, “I’m not going to die and leave you alone” and I thought,
Crap, I would be alone, wouldn’t I?
Papa had died five years earlier and both my parents were only children. But that didn’t matter, because lymphoma wasn’t that big a deal and we weren’t going to tell anyone and she wasn’t going to die. She repeated what I hadn’t absorbed the first time around. She needed six months of chemotherapy. She would do it on the way to the office in the morning. It would be no big deal. It would begin the next day.

My mother went to hug me, but I shook my head. I was too aware of my own skin and heart and life right now. I really couldn’t stand the thought of feeling another living thing. Human contact would have been overwhelming.

Years before, when she had applied for her current job, “Must have my own bathroom” certainly wasn’t on my mother’s wish list; but, as luck would have it, the only office available when she started happened to have its own private bathroom. This wasn’t the executive bathroom. It wasn’t even a nice bathroom—the sink was a mural of rust stains and using the toilet required balancing oneself on a stack of toner cartridges—but by the second day of chemotherapy my mother was very grateful for its proximity.

Never a large person, my mother lost nearly twenty pounds
in three weeks. By the second week, her hair was starting to fall out. By the fourth week, she was almost hairless. Within a month, I had a fragile, vomiting, bald mother. The hair loss extended to her eyebrows and eyelashes, giving her the effect of having been partially erased. During this entire time not one single coworker asked after her health. I like to think this was owing to discretion on their part, but it’s more likely because fourteen-year-olds aren’t the only humans incapable of seeing anyone but themselves.

When her hair started to go, my mother and I spent a Saturday visiting every single wig store in Los Angeles County. There seemed to be three colors of wig: a light-absorbing black, a coppery red Lucille Ball would have rejected as too garish, and beige. Regardless of color, every wig tended to be cut into a shape resembling an old lady’s swim cap and had the effect of informing everyone in a visible radius that you were wearing artificial hair. After the last store on our roster, we got back into the car and I looked over at my mother. In her youth, she had been a runway model and even after she stepped off her last catwalk, she continued to possess the style and grace of someone who expected to move through life looking good. Now, nothing fit her stressed frame; no color flattered her ashen skin. She was living in someone else’s body, wearing someone else’s clothes. Her expression staring out over the steering wheel was one I had never seen before on her in my life. She looked beaten. The temperature in the parked car was, conservatively, six hundred degrees. The combination of this sudden sauna-like heat and her exhaustion from the chemotherapy and futile wig-shopping caused my mother to look nearly dead. Frightened, I tried to lift her spirits.

“That last one wasn’t as bad as some of the others,” I piped, but my voice died away as I watched her face crumple, her head lean against the steering wheel. She sobbed in terror while I sat there, sweating, breathing hard, and shredding the list of American Cancer Society–approved wig shops between my trembling fingers.

A few days later, I began having weekly conversations with my half-brother—the grown son of my father’s first marriage. He was a good guy, kindhearted and funny, but I could count on two hands the number of times we’d been in each other’s company. My mother wasn’t having me call him in Boston so I could reconnect with my snow-shoveling, Celtics-following, letter-R-dropping roots. Without ever being told so specifically, I understood he’d take me in if she didn’t survive. That didn’t seem so ludicrous anymore. We would make small talk and I would think about what it would be like to live in Boston, to ask my brother where my mittens were, to have to say to people, “He’s my brother. I don’t have any other family.”

I kept my promise to my mother. I told no one she was sick. One night, a nurse came to the house to take an extensive medical history for a university study. It seemed my mother’s lymphoma was quite rare. Hours later, the nurse told my mother, “I’ll hand this in but I have to tell you, there’s no good reason why you got sick.” The nurse may have been mystified, but the sheer statistical oddness of my mother’s condition confirmed what had already been running through my head. My father, a healthy man, had dropped dead of a heart attack at a relatively young age. My mother had developed a rare cancer seemingly out of the blue. Random bad things were going to happen to the people I loved and needed. I decided not to care about anyone new.

During all this time, of course, I was in high school. I attended an especially well-regarded private school, one of those places that get fifty worthy applicants for every available spot. I still have no idea why I was there. I am not being modest; my academic record up to this point had been a paean to the life of the underachiever, and my mother was in no position to endow a small opera house should they accept me. The harsh reality was that I didn’t even want to be there. I wanted to be acting. But my mother had this charmingly retro idea that she was raising a person, not an actress. I was told I would be going to school like other people my age. So there I was, observing my classmates with the emotional remove of a cultural anthropologist.

In my mind, my peers were an exasperating mixture of worldly and naïve. Owing to their parents’ choices, my schoolmates had a deep understanding of California divorce and custodial laws, the exact make and model of the German sports car they were expecting on their sixteenth birthdays, and the most creative off-label uses for certain prescription drugs. But when it came to actual world events—which is to say anything that didn’t specifically improve their chances of breaking into the Ivy League—they were as sheltered as nuns. Their job was to do well in school and get accepted into the kind of college that would make their extremely successful parents forget they had taken seven years to graduate from State.

One particular classmate—I’ll call her Debra—produced in me the sensation of chewing on tinfoil while listening to an extended club mix of nails on a chalkboard. And that was in my best of moods. Debra came with a list of disagreeable personality traits, and topping the list was the fact that she was the
least intellectually curious person I had ever met. Of course, this also meant she had a near-perfect aptitude for excelling at high school. The teachers would speak and her brain would tranquilly and unquestioningly record every single fact, flagging each data point to spit back verbatim at such future time of the teachers’ choosing. When asked her opinions on a more general topic, Debra would reprise the teacher’s most recent lecture, right down to the “Ums” and the “I means,” to which the teacher would beam back in pure pedagogical joy. Her mastery of the high school academic game only confirmed my suspicions that a properly socialized African gray parrot could make it to Brown.

One day during my mother’s third month of chemo, when her hair was completely gone and her skin was the color of a saltine, I was sitting in the cafeteria eating lunch when Debra came flying through the door, sobbing uncontrollably. A few classmates, alert to the pleasures of drama by proxy, ran to her side. Debra remained frozen in the doorway, wailing. Finally, she managed to force out a few words.

“I…got…an…eighty-…
nine
!”

The sobs began anew. It took a few minutes, but everyone in a three-mile radius of the cafeteria finally got the full story. Our class had taken an English test. For the first time in Debra’s life, she had scored less than a ninety. While the rest of us were eating lunch, she had been begging the teacher for the extra point to protect her sterling average. She had even offered to do another report for extra credit—she just wanted
one
point—but the teacher was resolute. Debra’s academic record now included a B-plus, and it was going to stay that way until her dying day.

Freshly outraged, she blubbered, “Why do the worst things
always happen to me? I am so unlucky. This is the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone.”

I finished chewing my apple. Debra’s thick, waist-length hair flipped from side to side as she bemoaned her awful fate. Even through her tears, her face was round and smooth and vibrant with health. I felt a sudden pressing need not to hear her voice anymore. I got up to leave and was forced to sidle around her and her support coven still clustered near the doorway. Seeing a new person next to her, and assuming I was there to provide more comfort, she turned to me and moaned, “Oh, Quinn, you don’t know how easy you have it.”

“Quinn, why did you choke Debra?”

The vice principal had a year-long relationship with me, and it was nearly all bad. She liked the sensitive kids. If you were a girl who wrote bad poetry or cut yourself, or a boy who felt your best in grandmother’s long-line girdle, she couldn’t find enough ways to love you. She’d eat lunch in her office with you. She’d hold your cigarettes during school hours. She’d help stage your intervention. She just adored the big loud messes who then pulled it together and got into a reputable second-tier college and became active, generous alumni. She didn’t like students who were also actors. She told me the first time we met that she had voted against my attending the school. Oddly enough, the fact that
I
had also voted against my attending her school didn’t bond us, nor did my observing out loud that she liked actors well enough when these actors were parents and they were writing big checks for the scholarship fund. By the time I answered her question, “What is your problem with authority figures?”
by saying “I have no problem with authority figures when I have some respect for the person wielding the authority,” she was counting the minutes until I screwed up big time. Having a star student come streaking into her office claiming I tried to kill her, with five eyewitnesses corroborating that they thought they saw
something…
This was a gift from heaven. She leaned back in her chair and squinted at me.

After a long moment, I replied sullenly, “It was a mistake.”

Which, truly, it was. We were too close in the doorway for me to do what I wanted to do, which was to pull her stupid healthy hair so hard that it separated from her stupid healthy scalp and stopped mocking me. So I went for her neck, thinking that if her lungs didn’t have any air, she’d at least stop whining.

Debra, pointing to nonexistent marks on her neck, wailed, “She could have killed me!”

I thought,
No. I have small hands and my position provided very little leverage. Had I wanted you dead, I would have doctored your Yoplait with antifreeze and wiped off the fingerprints.
The mere fact that such an answer had come so easily to me meant it probably wasn’t going to strengthen my case.