How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane (29 page)

The child does not put the doll down for the rest of the day. She goes to sleep, holding it tightly, like a motherless rhesus monkey.

When she is finally asleep, I sneak back into her room to inspect the toy; so help me if I find one mite or spider on it, I will walk straight to that woman's house, set fire to the doll's hair, and lob it through her bedroom window.

I gently pry the doll from my daughter's arm. It's heavier and more substantial than I'd imagined—and I take it into the bathroom, where I give it a wipe-down
with a wet washcloth. The pen mark comes right off the foot, the toes of which are very detailed, it turns out. Giving it a once-over, I verify that all the parts are in working order. The arms and legs rotate as they should, and I manage to work the shut eye open, though it still blinks a little slowly, like maybe she's winking because she thinks she pulled a fast one on me.

I take the doll into the living room, where I go to work on her hair, brushing carefully from the bottom and working up so as not to pull out too many strands. Looking closely at her face, I realize I hadn't noticed before the little space between her teeth, or the tiny gold hoop earrings encircling her little earlobes.

The hair is now untangled, but I keep brushing until it is glossy and smooth to the touch. It's so soft—now I'm just stroking her hair, marveling at how nice it feels against my hand.

My husband walks past and looks at me funny. “Get a room,” he says and then laughs loudly at his own joke as he goes to the fridge for a snack. “Good one,” I think but don't say. (If I gave him every laugh he deserved, he'd be unbearable.)

I pull the doll close to my face and lay my cheek on it. She smells of nylon and toy plastic. It's a sickeningly sweet, industrial smell, and it opens the curtains wide on my own childhood memories and of countless toys I've loved and coveted from afar.

I understand this doll. I like this doll. I want this doll. I—

“MAMA?”

I turn to see my daughter looking at me, sleepy betrayal on her face.

“WHY DID YOU TAKE MY AMERICAN DOLL, MAMA?”

“I—I was just cleaning her for you.” I say, not very convincingly. I hand over the doll—though not easily—and send the child back to bed. She walks sleepily upstairs, accidentally bonking its freshly brushed head on the banister. I make a note to take it to the American Girl salon one afternoon while the kid is at school. Maybe I'll even grab myself a seven-dollar coffee at the café while the doll gets her hair styled to the tune of forty dollars. Because sometimes we turn into our mothers. And sometimes we turn into our daughters.

nineteen

THE FIRST BABY

T
he child was in deep mourning for the Chicago Cubs.

After a four-year stint in Chicago we moved back to Los Angeles, and the kid was torn with grief. I'd wake up at two o clock in the morning to find her standing next to our bed, cradling a giant foam finger and sobbing, “I MISS THE CUBBIEEZ!” At four years old, I figured, she wasn't pining for Chicago's losingest professional baseball team so much as she was grieving the personal loss of their concessions stand. But that didn't make her grief any less real, because it doesn't matter how old you are, the heart wants what the heart wants, i.e., Wrigley Field hot dogs and bags of cotton candy the size of a grown man's head.

In lieu of picking up our lives and moving all the way back to Chicago just for the ballpark snacks, we considered
the next most obvious solution: we would get a dog. Because if I've learned one thing in life, it's that nothing soothes change and upheaval like a shitload more upheaval and change.

We decided to let the kid choose from a group of preapproved-by-me dogs. I'd clicked through a nice array of candidates posted on the local Humane Society's website; one of the featured dogs was a small black mutt that looked like what you might end up with if you were to peel the face off a human boy and staple it onto the body of a Pomeranian. Of course I put Dogboy on the short list and then headed over to the shelter to interview him and a few other possibilities.

Once there I narrowed it down to three contenders: an apparently stoned shih tzu, an incontinent Maltese, and Dogboy (who wasn't quite so weird-looking in person, much to my disappointment), which is when the husband brought the kid in to make her selection.

The kid picked Dogboy.

Dogboy turned out to be a good dog (boy), especially after he got past his credit-card-and-couch-eating phase. He was attentive, sweet tempered, and well behaved. But good as he was, Dogboy was at a huge disadvantage coming into our family. He didn't know it, but he had some very big paw prints to fill.

It was 1994. I'd been in L.A. for just over a year and had lived through riots, fires, and a robbery/shooting in my front
yard, all of which left me feeling that the city was one long amusement-park ride with a bad record of safety violations.

It was three o'clock in the morning, and I was awake, watching a bad reality show, at a time when “bad reality show” had not yet proved redundant.

My roommate was in France for the winter, and so when the floor began to roll and the cupboards began to vibrate and the vacuum cleaner leaped out of the pantry, there was no one to witness the sight of me leaping naked into my bedroom doorway where, just as the thought “so this is where it all ends” crossed my synapses, my ovaries commanded EVACUATE! and I spontaneously started my period and proceeded to bleed all over the rolling floor.

I didn't die in the Northridge earthquake. I lived to see the next day, and after some cleaning up of broken dishes and stained carpets, I had one of those epiphanies you have when you make it to other side of a near-death experience, and it had clarified two things for me: (1) if/when the world was going to end, I didn't want to be alone; and (2) Los Angeles is no place to be sleeping in the nude.

I toyed briefly with the idea of having a baby,
^*
but as my romantic/fertilization prospects were less than ideal (i.e., I was half-dating a guy whose idea of foreplay was a forty-five-minute conversation about how much his foot resembled William Shatner), I settled on the next best thing. I would get a dog.

I'd never had a dog before—the closest I'd ever gotten was when I was a kid and my dad would fling open the front door and yell “SCREW YOU!” at the neighbor's German shepherd as it frolicked in our yard, gleefully covering it with lawn bombs.

When I ran the idea up the flagpoles of my friends, I was surprised at how many of them disapproved. They showered me with such warnings as:

Their arguments notwithstanding, I refused to be dissuaded.

I visited shelters, scoured local ads, and petted my way through dog adoption events. In a moment of alcohol-induced spirituality, I determined that the winning applicant would be the first dog who responded to one of the five following names: Sparky, Lucky, Eddie, Sam, and Donut (I was secretly praying, of course, for a Donut).