Doomed

a beat, my dad slipped a checkbook out of his inside jacket pocket and asked, “How much?”

“I don’t understand,” said the undertaker.

“To make the dress fit,” prompted my mom.

The poor naive mortician, he asked, “It’s so lovely. Are you certain you want me to split the seams?”

My mother gasped. My father shook his head in bitter disbelief, saying, “That dress is a work of art, buster. You touch one stitch of it, and we’ll sue you into bankruptcy.”

“What we want,” my mom explained, “is for you to perform a little trimming… a touch of lipo here and there… so that my mother looks her best.”

“The camera,” my dad said, “adds ten pounds.” By this point he was penning a steep six-digit number.

“Cameras?” asked the undertaker.

“Maybe you can also take a little tuck behind her ears…,” said my mom as she demonstrated by pinching the skin at her own temples until her cheeks stretched smooth and taut. “And a little breast augmentation, a lift, maybe some implants so the bodice will hang right.”

“And hair extensions,” my dad added. “We want to see lots of hair on the old gal.”

“Maybe,” my mom suggested, “you could just snip out her kidneys and move them up here a little.” She cupped her hands over her own flawless breasts.

My father signed the check with a flourish. “And we’ve contracted with a tattoo artist.” He tore the draft from his checkbook and waved it beside his face, smirking. “That is, unless you have any objections to Minnie’s getting inked…”

“Oh,” my mom said, snapping her fingers. “And no underthings, not a thong, nothing. I do not want the world watching this funeral live by satellite and seeing panty lines on my beloved, dear, dead mother.”

I thought my mom might cry at this point of the funeral planning, sitting there in the mortician’s office. Instead she turned to me and asked, “Maddy, honey, what’s wrong with your eyes? How did they get so red and swollen?” She took a vial of Xanax out of her bag and offered me one. “Let’s get you some cucumber slices for that puffiness.”

I had, Gentle Tweeter, been weeping nonstop since Halloween. Not that my mother ever noticed.

When I recall my nana’s kiss, I taste cigarette smoke. By comparison my mother’s kisses were flavored with anti-anxiety medications.

In the no-kill cat shelter, she was once more foisting Xanax on me in an effort to make me accept a large Manx with a thick coat of black fur. It didn’t seem to matter to her that the cat had died moments before. My dad lifted its still-warm body out of its littered cage and tried to settle the stiffening corpse into my pudgy arms. “Just take it, Maddy,” he whispered. “On-camera it will read as only being asleep. We don’t have all day….”

As he gently heaved the drooping, dead Manx in my direction and I recoiled a step, I saw something else. In the same cage, hidden by the recently expired black cat, there sat a tiny orange kitten. This was my last chance. In another moment I’d be driven back to the Beverly Wilshire with a rigid feline corpse in my girlish lap. On-camera, with the shelter’s staff as my witnesses, I pointed a chubby index finger at this new orange puff of fur and said, “That one, Daddy!” Making my voice gamine, I piped, “There’s my kitty!” The orange object of my desperate affection opened two green eyes and returned my gaze.

My mother sneaked a quick peek at the index card tacked next to the cage. In a dozen words, it told the tiny kitten’s brief backstory. That afternoon in the no-kill animal shelter, my mom leaned close to my dad and whispered, “Let her have the orange one.” She whispered, “Put back the dead one, and let Maddy have the kitten.”

Still holding the drooping dead Manx, my dad gritted his capped teeth and said, “Camille, it’s still a kitten.” Through a tight smile, he hissed, “That damned thing will live for frigging forever.” He gave the furry corpse a shake, smirking, and said, “With this one, maybe she could call her boyfriend to perform a Lazarus number.”

“If that’s the kitty that our little Maddy has her heart set on…,” my mom said, and she reached into the wire cage and collected the shivering orange puffball, “… then that’s the kitten she should have.” Standing so as to allow the cameras full access to the gesture, turned toward them in a slight cheat, she settled the warm handful into my care. At the same time, in a whispered aside to my dad, she said, “Don’t worry, Antonio.” She motioned for him to lean down and read the index card.

And at that, a photographer representing Cat Fancy magazine stepped forward, said, “Smile!” and we were, all of us, blinded by the flash.

DECEMBER 21, 10:44 A.M. PST Mother of the Year

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Gentle Tweeter,

I never imagined it would be too awfully difficult to be a good mother. That’s why my own mother seemed like such a disappointment. Really, what onerous efforts did successful motherhood require? One had only to accumulate a sufficient deposit of fresh spermatozoa within one’s womb, and then await the release of a viable egg. From what I could suss out, the whole process seemed more or less automated. The actual birthing involved staffing a sterile, tiled room with an entire documentary film crew, all the grips and gaffers and sound engineers, the cameramen and assistant directors and makeup artists. I’ve seen the result: My mother blissed out on an intravenous Demerol drip, spread-eagled on a kind of vinyl dais with special leg rests. A stylist is powdering down the shine on her meticulously waxed pubis, and—voila—the ooze-colored bulb of my newborn noggin pops out. Chapter one: I am born. This miraculous celluloid moment is absolutely revolting. My lovely mother winces a single grimace, but otherwise her dazzling smile remains intact as my slime-slickened miniature self comes corkscrewing out of her steaming innards. Swiftly am I followed into the world by an equally not-attractive afterbirth. Even then, no doubt I was hoping the attendant physician would give me a good wallop. A real public thrashing. Only a child raised in such complete love and privilege could crave a savage beating as fervently as I did.

Usually my mother played a copy of the video whenever people gathered for my birthday. “We got it in a single take,” she’d always say. “Madison was a lot skinnier back then—thank God!” And she’d always get a rollicking laugh at my expense. Such flank attacks are why I so longed for my parents to honestly sock me in the kisser. My blackened eye would trumpet what small torments I daily endured.

You, Gentle Tweeter, you no doubt saw the stills from the birthing film that People magazine published. My heartless Swiss school chums certainly saw them, and until the day I died I was to regularly find these photographs—a me the size of regurgitated food, the red of a ripe tomato smeared with cheesy pap and squirming at the end of a ropy umbilical cord—these were stealthily affixed to the back of my sweater with adhesive tape, or they were published in place of my annual portrait in the school yearbook.

Once I was born, I could see for myself that motherhood required no special skills. My general impression was that various glands come to the fore, and you’re rendered essentially a puppet or a slave to the timing of bodily secretions—colostrum, piddle, doo-doo. You’re always consuming or voiding some vital gunk.

It’s this full comprehension of motherhood that prompted me to give my kitten, Tigerstripe, a better upbringing than I had endured. I vowed to show my own mother how this job should properly be done. “Put some clothes on, you people!” I’d admonish my naked parents on the beaches of Nice or Nancy or Newark. “Do you want my kitty to grow up to be a pervert?” I’d locate their pungent stash of hashish and flush it down the toilet, saying, “You might not care about the safety of your child, but I do care about mine!”

Granted, as a distraction from religion, the cat worked perfectly. I no longer returned Jesus’ calls during dinner. Instead, I carried Tigerstripe everywhere in the crook of my elbow, lecturing in a stage whisper, always within earshot of my folks, “My mommy and daddy might be drug-hungry sex zombies, but I’ll never allow them to hurt you.” For their part, my parents were simply glad that Jesus and I had broken up. Thus, they acquiesced as I carried my Tigerstripe with me at all times, in Taipei and Turin and Topeka. He slept curled beside me in my various beds in Kabul and Cairo and Cape Town. At the breakfast table in Banff or Bern, I said, “We don’t like nonfat, fair-trade tofu sausage, and we request that you no longer serve it to us.” In Copenhagen, I announced, “We would like another chocolate eclair, or we refuse to attend the opening of La