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 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.”