I think I took the job as a sadistic decision-making tooclass="underline" do I want a child, really, and if so do I want one badly enough to leave Kyle if he won’t go along with the process? Kyle is low-key and has expressed no desire to drive to a medical plaza and ejaculate in a cup.
But the longer I’m on Whisker-Bop!, the less I seem to worry about whether or not to have a child, because the young “actors” I work with are horrible. My costume includes a set of felt rodent teeth that are on my facial mask around my chin, and I often wish these teeth were real so I could gnaw the golden ponytail off my young costar Missy. She calls me Ratty, though I am obviously a mouse.
Like many lesser mammals, Missy can detect fear. She reminds me a lot of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, asking questions that insist she already knows more than she should.
“When you have a daughter, you won’t make her do homework when she already has sooooooo many lines to memorize, will you Ratty?”
After our initial meeting (she asked me if I had any children and I said “Not yet”), Missy’s favorite game is asking questions about my hypothetical future child that relate to Missy’s own life.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. She then runs over to her mother yelling about how Ratty said it’s unfair to make her do homework on set, and her stage-tyrant parent shoots me a laser-glare.
I’m haunted by how physically perfect Missy is, her clear skin and her sonic white teeth. She just landed a detergent commercial, and because I want to punish myself I will not be able to resist switching to that brand. I am a zombie-slave under Missy’s control, I often think. I don’t have a child and I probably will never have a child: I hate this but trying any harder to have one seems like it would make the reality sink in even more. It is far easier to just do the bratty things Missy asks me to do, buy her endorsed products, and act like this agonizing relationship somehow brings me closer to motherhood.
The show’s writers have sensed the obsessive link between Missy and me. At first I was free: a free mouse. But as the episodes progressed and the show got renewed for a second season, it was decided that Missy would adopt me so I would no longer “have to sleep in the cold, cold fields. Brrrrr!” That was Missy’s line, then the two of us had a song and dance number called “I’ve Found My Live-In Friend.”
The other children, two boys who are a bit sweeter than Missy but already vain at age seven, sometimes hear Missy call me Sneezy and try to use this name as well. I snap at them, “I’m not one of the seven dwarves.”
“But Missy calls you…” they protest. And I just stare at them vacantly, as if to say, “Don’t you get it? I’m Missy’s grown-up zombie-slave.”
Sometimes Kyle watches the show, even though I beg him not to. “Oh right,” he says, “like you wouldn’t watch me if I was singing on television in a dancing mouse costume?”
There are moments on the show when I can actually be seen glaring at Missy, killing her slowly with my gigantic fake eyes. Like the scene last week when she was explaining how stealing is bad: it is wrong to borrow things from mommy’s purse and daddy’s wallet, even if one plans on returning them. At the time, I was enraged at how purely incredible Missy smelled—like flowers but softer, without the alcohol of perfume. Her smell makes me want to kiss her satin head.
Of course the home audience doesn’t notice my disdain. But Kyle sees all.
“Man,” laughed Kyle. “Look at your posture. You want to teach that kid a lesson.”
But I do not. I want her reborn. I want her mine, without any knowledge of show business, bleached teeth, or interview skills.
Missy isn’t very kind or gentle. At work it’s common for her to greet me by jamming her tiny fingers between my ribs and insisting she shouldn’t feed her rat any more this week because I’m getting fatter. Something about Missy takes me back to high school, even though she is only six years old. Perhaps I project her popularity: she will no doubt be popular. This automatically makes her better than me, who was not even popular for a day.
Today she and I are doing a song called “Leave It Alone (If It’s Under the Sink).” The dancing is strenuous, especially in the suit, where I have no sensation as to what my true range of motion is. I accidentally bounce my giant mouse midriff against her when we’re doing a series of twirls.
“CUT!” Missy loves to yell this. The director and the producers have repeatedly told her that whether or not taping should halt is not her decision, but to no avail. “Fatty Ratty bumped into me!”
I give a few humble apologies through my mask, which makes a large, distorted echo inside and allows me to hear the way I might sound to others if I had learned to speak although deaf.
“Take your mask off when you talk,” Missy yells, “I can’t understand you.”
She says this despite knowing that I cannot take my mask off unassisted. It is a very heavy mask with ceramic veneer on the upper face. Similar to a spacesuit, it screws on so that it will stay firmly in place throughout rigorous musical routines.
I put my arms up and shrug in a type of “oh well” expression. Like an abusive lover, Missy can sense when she’s pushed me to the breaking point and needs to reel me back in.
“Silly mousie,” she says, and then hugs me a little. I pat her tiny back with my oversized mouse paw.
“Draino? Oh noooooooo…” I place my paw to my forehead and spin around several times in front of a blue screen. Animated, I will appear to be swirled down an oversized sink pipe. Everything is oversized on Whisker Bop! except for the children. For some reason, this makes them seem infinitely smarter.
Kyle has brought me lunch, which is our excuse to go have sex in my dressing room. I’m embarrassed that we do this near the set of a children’s show, but we kind of love it and cannot pinpoint why. It’s not like it even feels naughty, just creepy and a little bit pathetic.
Today though, there are kids running through the hallway, shrieking their shrieks and banging on doors with their limbs as they pass. Though Kyle feels good, I can’t help but have the children’s screams redirect my thoughts to the why of sex, the primal reason he and I have been programmed and physically engineered to engage in this behavior. There is more to life I tell the part of my brain that wants so badly to know which one of us, if not both, is the reproductively defective one. I suppose if I found out that it was him and not me, this same part of my brain would then ask: what is the real point of having sex with Kyle?
I try to reign in my thoughts. Children are not the only reason for sex, I remind myself. They are just one reason. A very loud reason that feels entitled to run around all over the backstage area yelling and laughing at things that aren’t funny.
But in this one moment it suddenly becomes way too much that we aren’t trying to make a child. I love Kyle; at least I love a lot of him. There is enough to love there to be passed on. I want to distill us both down into seven little pounds that will grow as needed, both him and me but also someone who’s free of us, free to ignore the ways that we’re crazy and not valid. It seems like a baby would save us, not our relationship but literally us: half of us both could have a new chance.