Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life (12 page)

“We’re probably going to expel you for this,” the vice principal said, her serious tone at odds with the glee snapping in her eyes. “But first, I want to get your mother in here.”

My mind raced. My mother didn’t need this. My mother was currently at her office, vomiting and trying to work. If my mother showed up at school in her beige wig and her gray skin this nitwit functionary would know she was sick, the secret would be out, and it would be my fault.

I turned to Debra. I worked up some tears. I sniffled, “God, Debra, I’m so sorry. I was just trying to goof around with you. I
knew you had lived through this nightmare and I just…” I sobbed a bit more, for emphasis, “just wanted to make you laugh by roughhousing. It was all just a terrible, thoughtless mistake.”

I wiped my eyes and carried on a bit. Debra, puzzled at this turn of events, patted my hand. The vice principal played with her pen in a way that suggested she wanted a cigarette. Debra turned to the vice principal.

“She just wanted to make me laugh by roughhousing,” she said sweetly. “It was all a terrible, thoughtless mistake.”

Did I say I despised her mindless parroting of what people said to her? I was so very wrong. It was her best quality. The vice principal frowned. She could continue to prosecute me, but it wouldn’t work nearly as well without the victim’s tearful testimony. I smiled at Debra through my tears and hugged her, careful to avoid touching her neck or her hair. She packed up and went off to blindly excel in another class. I smiled slightly differently at the vice principal.

“Is that it?” I asked.

“For the moment,” she said, grudgingly. “Just…”

She stopped. She had gone from nearly getting rid of me to sending me to fifth period with a late pass. She needed to warn me about something.

“Just don’t touch people.”

I picked up my backpack and leaned across the table. “Don’t worry,” I said, calmly. “I don’t plan on getting close to anyone.”

ONE WEEKEND MORNING, I FOUND ALICE IN HER BEDROOM
paging through a children’s book about the body. She said dreamily, “I’d like to see a heart.” Choosing the easy and obvious reply, I pointed at the page where she was reading and said, “There you go.”

She shook her head and sighed, “No.” Then, tracing the aorta with her finger, she added, “In real life.” The voice was soft and dreamy, with a tone she might someday use to describe the captain of the water-polo team. But right now it seemed that Alice had a crush on the cardiovascular system. She then turned to me and said pleadingly, “Can I have a heart? A real human one? To dissect?”

I answered with the classic, “We’ll see,” which is another way to say “I thank God for your ability to be distracted by the modern age.” What I failed to understand was that her need to see a human heart was a need to glance at our collective mortality in a small and measured way. This might be put aside briefly by Polly Pockets, but it certainly wasn’t going to be assuaged unless Ms. Pockets suddenly developed ventricles. Within weeks, I went from, “Medical school is chock-full of human hearts, so work on your multiplication tables” to “Amazon doesn’t have human hearts, sweetie. It seems like they should, and I’d get you one if they did, but they don’t; however, there’s
always medical school so please go work on your multiplication tables.”

One day, after Alice mentioned yet again how nice it would be to find a bloody human heart in her Easter basket, the inner voice that sends me off on idiotic adventures cleared its throat and spoke up. “You know,” it announced, “she’s showing an interest in science, and you’re shutting it down. Either you find her a heart to cut open or you risk her joining a squad of cheerleaders who trade sexual favors with science teachers in exchange for passing grades. Your choice.”

I sat her down and told her the news. Yes, I would get her a real heart. She gasped and interlaced her fingers under her chin in a perfect display of innocent girlish delight, her mind racing toward hacking away at oozing crimson chambers. But, I continued, it couldn’t be a human heart. The federal government frowns on selling organs to civilians. Also, grave robbing. I was prepared to deliver either a pig’s heart or a cow’s heart. As her personal organ shopper, I noted that a pig’s heart was closer in size and configuration to a human heart but I advocated the cow’s heart, which, being larger, allowed for a wider margin of error.

[Having seen Alice attempt to butter a hard roll and section an apple, I knew we needed all the margin we could get.]

I figured I was now out of the woods, effort-wise. I was no longer facing a trip to some dimly lit alley behind the city morgue, exchanging unmarked bills with a loan-laden med student. Instead, I could head to the nearest butcher shop, sing out “One heart, please! And don’t stint on the veins!”, and we’d be set. I couldn’t remember ever seeing a heart at a butcher’s shop,
but what do I know? I’m a vegetarian. I slither through that section of the market covering my eyes in the same way one does when passing certain magazine racks. In either case, we’re talking about body parts dedicated to bring pleasure to someone who isn’t me.

Here’s a fact: When you ask for a cow’s heart at a butcher shop they look at you funny. They look at you funny in the upscale market where the lamb comes in its own tankini and matching flip-flops. They look at you funny in the neighborhood store whose street-facing sign boasts, “Tripe and Head Cheese—Half Off.” They look at you funny in places that specialize in the meats of certain countries known for the paucity of food and the culinary inventiveness they apply to every single part of the animal; cuisines with holiday menus that proudly include earlobe and hoof stew with a side of pan-roasted nose hair. Even
these
butchers looked at me funny after I asked for a cow’s heart. They typically said something that translated as “ew.” It seems not a single culture represented in Los Angeles, a place with more languages than the United Nations, ever looked at a cow’s heart and thought,
Yum! All for me!

What all these butchers did have in common was a belief that I celebrated some religion you hope your new neighbors don’t. A typical conversation went like this:

“Do you have a cow’s heart?”

“A what?”

“A cow’s heart.”

“A cow part? You mean, like a steak?”

“H…eart. Heart. Big muscle, squeezes blood.”

At which point, the butcher would lean over the counter and,
to a person, cautiously inquire, “Is this for your church or something?”

Yes, you caught me. I’m a high priestess in a blood-worshipping cult. You can spot us by our mom haircuts and sensible sedans. Until now, I assumed sheer suburban dreariness rendered me harmless on sight but this didn’t seem to work in the world of meat. I decided if Alice was so eager to see the dark recesses of a mammal’s heart she could damn well see the dark recesses of a butcher shop, so I invited her to join the quest. I figured that dragging a small child on my hunt for raw flesh would surely present a less sinister-looking front than my traveling alone. Wasn’t I just gloriously mistaken.

Imagine you are a butcher. Now imagine a mother and a small child walk up to your counter, the mother prods her daughter slightly, and the little girl pipes up with, “Please, do you have a cow’s heart for sale?” while her mother beams down at her. The mother is either smiling in pride at her daughter’s good manners and articulation, or she is smiling in delightful anticipation of her child’s first blood ritual. Maybe if you explain to them that you don’t sell cow hearts, they will leave. Or maybe the mother will smile more broadly and announce, “What a lucky girl you are, your first blood shall be freshly spilled from a real live butcher!”

Butchers tend to be physically large men. Alice’s and my request caused no fewer than three of them to dart for the back of their shops and refuse to come out.

Finally, one butcher decided we weren’t dangerous as much as really, really strange. He took pity on us and told us the news: we might possibly be able to buy a bunch of cow’s hearts—
which are sold to pet-food companies in volume—but not just one. Even if we did find someone who would sell us a single heart, it would be cut in half—a regulation that had something to do with mad cow disease. Had I been a reasonable person, I would have thought something like,
Hey, after nearly two months of butcher-bothering, I’ll take what I can get. Half a heart is better than blah blah blah…

Luckily, the part of my brain that usually runs things vetoed the smaller, more reasonable voice in my head, and insisted I get a whole cow’s heart or be found wanting in my child’s eyes. I pestered my new butcher buddy further and, after much pleading on my part and pointing to Alice and wailing pitifully, “It’s for the child. It’s for all our future cardiologists!”, he finally slid me a phone number. I was to call a butcher shop located in a traditionally Mexican neighborhood in Los Angeles and I was to ask for Flaco. I was to clarify that I didn’t want Flaquito, but Flaco—Flaquito would be of no help and might possibly turn us all in to the Food and Drug Administration. If I used the name of this butcher as a discreet reference, Flaco might possibly be able to hook me up. I thanked my new friend and promised to eat the paper containing Flaco’s phone number once the transaction was complete.

It took several phone calls to actually connect with Flaco. They kept putting Flaquito on the phone, but I was too paranoid to leave my name and number. Finally, one Saturday morning, I got the elusive Flaco. The conversation went like this:

Apparently, the government was only monitoring phone calls for terrorist activities that week and not interested in major drug trafficking because, so far, no team of machine-gun toting federal agents has broken into my house.

It was late February when Alice first indicated a need for a heart to touch and call her very own. By August her passion remained undimmed. I decided not to tell her about our rendezvous with Flaco until the very morning of the pickup; I suspected that if you’re at ballet class and your daughter suddenly blurts out, “I can’t wait three days until we’re cutting open a real heart!” the other mothers stop offering to share hairpins.

Saturday morning arrived. The air drooped around us in the stale, grimy oven blast that makes Los Angeles natives wonder why anyone moves here. I hustled Alice through Saturday’s breakfast and getting dressed. As I steered her toward the garage she asked, “Ballet class?”

“No.”

“Karate class?”

“No.”

“Gymnastics?”

“No.”

“Horseback riding?”

“No.”

Yes, it’s possible we needed to cut back on her schedule. “Actually,” I said, in the breathless tone of the emcee announcing
who was to be first runner-up and who was now Miss Universe, “We’re going to pick up your cow’s heart!”

The scream of delight was gratifying. We both flew into the car. Of course, that was the last time we traveled faster than a walk for the next hour. To get to the neighborhood where our hookup was to occur we needed to take the freeway. It was Saturday morning, not even 9:00 a.m. yet, but the freeway was packed solid. Being a native, I decided it was people trying to get to another freeway, which would take them to the beach, mercifully in the opposite direction. This logic worked only until we passed that juncture and the traffic grew worse.

Okay, I thought grimly, there was an accident somewhere up ahead so, I turned on the AM news-radio station. Nothing. If there was an accident up ahead, it was one of those super-secret, invisible black-ops accidents that aren’t reported. I sank a little farther into my seat and entered into the driver’s version of hibernation; my breathing slowed, my metabolism dropped, I prepared to be out of commission until spring when I would emerge from the freeway hungry and irritable. But being in traffic wasn’t all that bad. The car wasn’t uncomfortable and the kid was reading.

Suddenly, either I entered menopause or the temperature in the car went up by thirty degrees. I put my hand over the vent. The air blasting out had gone from soothingly cool to hellishly hot. My car had recently entered its dementia years and had taken to periodically forgetting how to air-condition. Our trustworthy and supremely competent mechanic had pronounced the situations “weird,” “too expensive to fix,” “possibly not fixable,” and “a big pain in the ass.” While we tried to figure out the best way to repair it without compromising Alice’s college
plans, he suggested I switch off the air-conditioning whenever it got mulish. I felt virtuous in a smaller carbon-footprint way. I could simply roll down the windows and let the breeze do its work.

However, a breeze requires two things: air and movement. Air we had, smelly and dust-infused as it was. But with the car going no more than four miles an hour in fifty-yard spurts, the interior quickly took on the comfort profile of a convection oven. Alice was a resilient passenger focused on her book, but after a few minutes she mournfully informed me, “I’m really warm.”

I reached back and patted her sweaty knee with my soaking-wet hand. “I know, baby,” I said, trying to toggle the air-conditioning back into self-awareness. “Just read and try to ignore it.”

Maybe not the dumbest statement I have ever uttered, but not far from the top. First of all, it had to be over a hundred degrees in the car and only a desert tortoise could have been blasé about the heat. Second, encouraging her to keep reading only guaranteed that it was going to stop being a morning about the cardiovascular system and start being a morning about the digestive system. Within a few minutes, when she said, “I’m going to stop reading now. I think I’m feeling a little motion sickness,” my own stomach sank. Alice has such a fear of vomiting that by the time she finally admits it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that she’s feeling a bit nauseated, anyone else would be screaming, “BUCKET!” I drove with one hand and waved what little fresh air I could generate toward her face while mentally scanning the car for anything we could use as a receptacle. I remembered a plastic bag in the trunk, which, had we been
moving at all, would have been impossible, but lucky us, we were again at a complete stop.

I raced out, grabbed the bag, and got back in the car. With a dart of joy, I saw the next exit was ours. “Breathe through your mouth and think about Pomeranian puppies,” I caroled in hysterical delight, “because we’re almost there!”

With a deft vehicular sideways lunge across three lanes of snarled traffic, we were liberated. The sudden movement of the car caused the inner-car temperature to jump down to a bracing ninety-five degrees. The air-conditioning sputtered back to life. Alice went from chalk-white to sort of a dusky green. I chose to view all these things as good news.

The butcher’s shop was a few minutes from the off-ramp on a sweltering boulevard mostly dedicated to stores selling handmade tortillas, illegal immigration cards, and Lotto tickets. We parked around the back and sidled in. The store was shabby but clean, which pleased me for no especially good reason; did hacking an organ to pieces in one’s backyard become more wholesome if the dealer’s nails were scrubbed?

The man behind the counter said, “Can I help you?” As I said, “I’m looking for Flaco and not Flaquito,” Alice interrupted with, “Do you have a trash can?” in a somewhat desperate and clenched tone.

Puzzled at her intensity, he pointed her to the standing trash can at the end of the counter, to which she ran. She opened the swinging lid and vomited copiously. We are not a pat-my-head-while-I-puke people. We are more a you-must-have-something-better-to-do-than-touch-me-right-now people, so I left her to her work. I turned to the counterman and smiled as brightly as I could while feeling sweat pool in my waistband and my bra. He
said, softly, “I’m Flaco?” His mouth said that. His eyes said, “What bet did I lose to get the two of you?”