venereal-warted gangbangers, nothing could make my parents happier.
Acting as if breakfast were sacrosanct family time, my dad was such a hypocrite. Open on the table beside his place was the usual stack of orphan dossiers, among them a photo of two flinty eyes that stared out from a glossy head shot. These stone-colored eyes, they seemed to despise every silly luxury they could see in this sumptuous hotel setting. For the length of a gasp, the trill of my schoolgirl giggling fell silent as my own eyes were held spellbound by the craggy features and churlish expression of that particular Slavic foundling. Entranced was I by that coarse thuggish sneer.
At last my mom broke the silence by saying, “Hang up, young lady.”
Turning on her, I attacked with, “Jesus says you’re the one who’s fat.”
“Hang up now,” said my dad.
And I told them, “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger.” Into the phone, I said, “JC? I need to call you back later.” I said, “My imperious, all-powerful dad is being a big booger; you know how that goes.” As my coup de grace, I told the phone, “And you’re right about my mom’s belly.” With exquisite Ctrl+Alt+Deliberateness, I switched off my phone and placed it next to my empty breakfast plate. For the record, Gentle Tweeter, at that repast I’d been served nothing more than a halved grapefruit, a sliver of dry toast, and a meager poached egg. A quail egg, mind you. Such death-camp rations had hardly gilded my mood. Affecting my best Elinor Glyn attitude, I thrust my face at my father and announced, “As you seem so determined to make me suffer…” Here I closed my eyes in the style of a true heroine. “… I’d rather you just lashed out and struck me!” As other preteens might long for a large allowance or shiny hair or friends, I wanted my parents to strike me. A punch with a closed fist or a slap with an open hand, I dreamed of it. Whether the blow came from my mom or dad, those pacifist, idealist, nonviolent do- gooders, it didn’t matter. Across my cheek or into my stomach, I yearned for the impact because I knew that nothing else would shift the parent/child balance of power as effectively. If I could goad them into slugging me just once, forever afterward I could cite that incident and use the memory to win any argument.
Ah, to be Helen Burns, Jane Eyre’s childhood cohort who was stood before the students of Lowood School and roundly pulverized by Mr. Brocklehurst. Or to be Heath-cliff and have a large stone bounced against my tender head by young master Hindley. Such public abuse was my fondest desire.
Eyes closed, face serenely presented, I eagerly awaited the painful blow. I heard my mother stir her coffee, the tiny song of the spoon ringing within her china cup. I heard the rasp of my father scraping butter on his toast. Finally, my mom said, “Antonio, don’t let’s prolong this…. Go ahead; smack your daughter.”
“Camille,” my father’s voice said, “do
I continued to lean forward, eyes closed, offering my face as a target.
“Your mother’s right, Maddy,” said my dad. “But we’re not going to start beating the crap out of you until you’re at least eighteen.”
In my mind, dear CanuckAIDSemily, I wore a blindfold and dangled a smoking Gauloise from between my lips. I prayed to be pummeled like a girlish punching bag.
My mom said, “We wanted to help you process the grief you must feel about your grandparents.”
“We have a present for you, dear,” my dad’s voice said.
I opened my eyes, and there was Mr. Wiggles. A fluttering, jolly golden fish hovered in my water glass. His protuberant eyes swiveled to ogle me. His gulping little hatch of a mouth gaped open and shut, gulped open and shut. My hard-bitten facade crumbled at the sight of the paddling, gasping little sun-colored sprite suspended in the unconsumed water of my meal. In a word, I was delighted. The name Mr. Wiggles came instantly to mind, and in that moment I was joyous, a hand-clapping, happy child wreathed by my smiling family. Then, tragically, I was not.
In the next moment, Mr. Wiggles foundered. He keeled over and floated belly-up in the glass. My parents and I stared in shocked Ctrl+Alt+Disbelief.
“Camille?” my dad asked. “By any chance did you get the waters mixed up?” He reached across the breakfast table and lifted the glass with dead Mr. Wiggles. Putting the rim to his lips, he carefully sipped around the expired fish. “It’s just as I thought.”
My mom asked, “Did Maddy get your GHB?”
“No,” he said. “I’m afraid her new goldfish did.”
My former-pothead, former-junkie, former–speed freak parents, they’d accidentally overdosed my fish by presenting him to me in a glass full of GHB. Meaning: liquid Ecstasy. Meaning: gamma-hydroxybutyric acid. Unfazed, my dad kept drinking even as my pet’s tiny golden corpse bumped and bobbed against his lips. He pinched it out with two fingers and passed the tiny victim to the Somali maid. “To the commode,” he intoned solemnly, “and henceforth to return to the great circle of life.”
Even as I reached for my phone to speed-dial Jesus and relate the details of this latest atrocity, my mom pushed the basket of pastries within my reach and sighed. “So much for Mr. Fish… What say we go out today, Maddy, and adopt you a pretty little baby kitten?”
DECEMBER 21, 10:40 A.M. PST
My True Love Rescued from the Jaws of Death
Gentle Tweeter,
My parents never adopted anything without issuing a minimum of ten million press releases. Tigerstripe was no exception. A documentary film crew shadowed us to a no-kill cat shelter in East Los Angeles, where my father and I weighed the merits of the various abandoned strays. My mother led the phalanx of cameras to a wizened tabby, alone in its wire-mesh cell. Examining the index card on which was printed the animal’s curriculum vitae, she said, “Ooooh, Madison, this one has leukemia! Its prognosis is death within four months. That sounds perfect!”
Topmost among the criteria my parents sought in any dependent relationship was impermanence. They wanted homes, employees, businesses, and adopted Third World orphans of which they could divest themselves at a moment’s notice. Nothing offers better public relations fodder than something you can rescue and love intensively for a month and then be filmed burying at a lavish funeral.
When I declined the dying tabby, my dad steered me toward an aged calico tom. The shelter staff estimated it had approximately six weeks left to live. “Diabetes,” my dad said, nodding solemnly. “Let that be a lesson to you, young lady, for the next time you want another sugary snack.”
The documentary cameras followed us from one doomed kitty to the next. From cats with infectious peritonitis to those with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Some struggled with the effort to lift their dying heads as I scratched behind their feverish ears. This seemed less like a cat shelter than a feline hospice. Confronted by kitties suffering from intestinal tumors and terminal pyometra, I felt awful. It’s true, they all wanted love and a home, but I didn’t want any of them. I wanted something that would live to love me back.
A Siamese lay on disposable paper training pads, too weak to control its bladder. A Persian cried plaintively and blinked gummy, cataract-clouded eyes at me. When my dad saw the long list of medications it required day in and day out, his face brightened into a smile. “This guy can’t last for long, Maddy!” With one hand, he coaxed me toward the cat’s smelly cage, and he said, “You can name him ‘Cat Stevens’ and give him the biggest memorial service any cat ever had!”
My mom mugged for the cameras and added, “Children absolutely adore holding little funerals for their pets… creating a little cemetery and filling every grave! It teaches them awareness for subsoil bacterial life- forms!”
If my mother possessed respect for any life-forms, her own mother wasn’t among them. When my nana died of a stroke on Halloween night, from an errant blood clot generated by her cancer, my mom flew in from Cannes the next day carrying the infamous aquamarine evening gown encrusted with sequins and seed pearls. “Haute couture,” she’d said, entering the office of the backwoods mortuary, the dress sealed in a clear plastic garment bag and draped across her arm. The upstate undertaker was dazzled: Sitting on the opposite side of his desk were Antonio and Camille Spencer. Fawning, he acknowledged that the dress was gorgeous, but then he explained patiently that it was a size four and Nana Minnie’s cancer-riddled corpse was a size ten. Without missing
