Ali in Wonderland: And Other Tall Tales (15 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

Coming Home

E
very time I try to get out they pull me back in,” Al Pacino famously declares in
The Godfather
. I never knew a line from a violent movie about the clandestine empire of the Mafia would resonate so much in my own life. Everybody has feelings about their origins. How many times have I heard, “Well, that’s ’cause I’m from the Midwest!” which is supposed to symbolize something, exactly what, I’ve never understood. You’re amiable? Eat corn? What? It’s easy to stereotype every upbringing based on the birthplace: Houston, Georgia, North Korea. . . . But not so easy with Washington, D.C. “You mean you’re from Maryland?” “No, Washington.” “Where in Virginia?” “Actually, Washington.” “IN Washington?” “Yes, my mother gave birth on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial!” It’s different if you work in D.C., it’s a land of political opportunity. But to be born there? Nobody has a reference for that.

I was conceived in the Bahamas, but born in Washington. I often wondered if it were reversed, what kind of life I’d have. Well, conch fritters whenever I want. And skin cancer. The distinction in growing up in the nation’s capital is you are being raised in the heart of all the machinations of government and politics. When I would go trick-or-treating in D.C., it wouldn’t be startling to have Walter Mondale or Al Haig toss Milk Duds and Charleston Chews into my pumpkin bucket. It was always funny to me when I lived in L.A. and kids would ring the bell wearing Nixon masks because I actually got Snickers and Milky Ways from the real one. And we would toilet-paper people’s houses regardless of their stand on
Roe vs. Wade
. Growing up, if a parent was late to watch a soccer game, it wasn’t because the advertising pitch went late or they had trouble closing the shop early; it was because they were deciding whether or not to bomb the Soviet Union. “Sorry I was late for the gymnastics meet, but I had to sign the SALT treaty.” Imagine trying to sell Girl Scout cookies to Oliver North? The majority of my friends’ parents worked in government, and those who didn’t relied on the people who worked in government to hire them. And we didn’t really know the specifics of anybody’s job: her father was a lobbyist, she worked in the State Department—beyond that, we had no idea. I still don’t know what a lobbyist does.

I knew what I wanted to do by the time I was toilet-trained, and it wasn’t working as Shriver’s chief of staff. I was going to be Farrah Fawcett and have pool parties with Kristy McNichol and Mr. T over for tacos. D.C. was so boring. All anyone ever talked about was the headline of the
Washington Post
. And just the political and global news, never the entertainment section. I was at a dinner party for the new assistant secretary of state and nobody there knew
JULIA ROBERTS HAD JUST GOTTEN MARRIED
! Talk about ignorance!

Even when my stepfather was accused of being a spy under the Nixon administration, I took nothing seriously. The FBI had wiretapped our phones, which was daunting and intimidating to my siblings, but I discovered a new recreational pastime, intercepting conversations and yelling “Balls!” into the handset. The tapes now exist somewhere in the Library of Congress. My fifteen minutes.

W
hen I finished college and moved to Los Angeles, I felt like I had finally claimed my life. I was exactly where I wanted to be, doing exactly what I wanted to do, waitressing and auditioning in abandoned warehouses for non-union soft porn. My view was not of the Kennedy Center and the Potomac River, but of palm trees and freeways clogged with assistant costume designers and key grips. I would live out my days in Hollywood and eventually be buried at the Forest Lawn cemetery next to Andy Gibb.

In 2002 I was knocked up and living back in D.C., a mile from where I grew up. Just how the hell did this happen? And I was married to someone who had a Sunday-morning political talk show. I felt like I’d been punk’d by the universe. As a child, my options were limited, but I was a grown woman! I could live in Palm Beach and raise polo ponies if I desired! Or reside in a nonreligious surf cult village in Kahoolawe! I had to scramble psychologically to make my version of D.C. a nonsuicidal endeavor. I called my old shrink for an emergency tune-up. It went to voice mail.

I found as an adult I was grappling with more than being at dinner parties where diplomats screamed over me about NATO probing and world market slips. I was now living in the town where, at my age, my mother had been the toast
de la ville
. And I don’t mean because she had a powerful job as White House social secretary, although that was a significant perch, but because she was so revered and adored. And still is. When I started to immerse myself in Washington society, I was continually met with the same comment: “You are the spitting image of your mother!” Which would, undoubtedly, lead to millions of questions about how she was and what she was up to. Everyone knew her. And they were all her age. The people I had sung “Edelweiss” to in my nightgown as a child were now my dinner partners. This took a long time for me to wrap my head around. Some of these women were on committees and boards with my mother, and now they wanted to have lunch with me? I had to start calling them Lucy and not Mrs. Lawrence? And they were divulging intimate secrets to me? I didn’t want to know what kind of geriatric sex the people who used to bounce me on their knee were having!

I made a private pact that I would be true to myself; I would dress, speak, and dance without inhibition. Somewhere between Martha Mitchell and Hanoi Jane. My acerbic and irreverent behavior liberated me from my mother’s legacy. I discovered one evening, when I was seated next to Alan Greenspan (and I barely knew how to balance a checkbook), that anyone with a copious Wikipedia entry actually prefers to discuss anything but their vocation at social events. In fact, Mr. Greenspan loves jazz and really appreciates a good dirty joke. People in D.C. get exhausted from the pedantic inside-the-Beltway talk and want to know what a thruple is (a relationship consisting of three people) and what doing it “old school” means.

I was recently at the White House to emcee an event with First Lady Michelle Obama. When she came to the podium, she said, “I was just upstairs with the president, and he asked me who was emceeing my event. I said, Ali Wentworth, and Barack said, ‘Really? She’s very funny, but isn’t she a little . . . inappropriate?’ ”

Well, there you go, I thought. I’m sure Reagan never called my mother inappropriate. And in my world that’s a real compliment.

Chapter Twenty-Two

A Big Bowl of Baby

W
hen we started planning our eldest daughter’s baptism, I envisioned a quick service, a blessing on the forehead followed by a brunch with eggs Florentine, mimosas, and silver vases of pink peonies. Baptisms, to me, were about holding up a baby, dressed like a Victorian doll, for photographs, and tables of Tiffany rattles and monogrammed hairbrushes. Not so for the Greeks.

My father-in-law presided over the service at the Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral in D.C. All the Greeks (not quite the sixteen million) and WASPs (all twelve) were in attendance, both sides with very different expectations: the Greeks excited for the religious and cultural celebration, and the WASPs anxiously trying to remember if they were ever confirmed so they could claim their sip of the Communion wine. I didn’t have any expectations of my own; I knew my father-in-law was the go-to guy for sacraments. Our large cast of familial characters had not been in the same room since the wedding, and I was relieved not to be the focus again.

There was no doubt that George was beloved and worshipped on my side of the family. The thought bubble over my mother’s head the day of our wedding read, “How the hell did this happen?” He was so smart, sophisticated, handsome, and accomplished—I myself asked, “How the hell did this happen?” Well, sometimes these things can’t be explained. As Woody Allen once said, “Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind. Everything really valuable has to enter you through a different opening.” Not that any of my orifices are exemplary or better than others’. Sometimes I think if George and I were both drowning in a lake, my mother would, without hesitation, jump in and save him. Then he would remind her that I was still in the water, and they would collectively call someone for help.

As to what George’s family thought of me? I had just six months earlier given birth to their first grandchild, which pretty much afforded me demigod status. Yes, my husband was a Rhodes Scholar, but could he incubate human life?

A
ny event involving family is all about coordination and hydration. The morning of the baptism was spent on the phone repeating the address of the church, the time of the service, and what I was wearing. And then I would hang up. My daughter Elliott was in a particularly feisty mood. I think she knew all the cooing over her was not going to lead to a Wiggles concert. And stuffing her into my grandmother’s musty white christening dress left her sweaty and even more irritable. Plus, I was holding her like a football as I tried to shimmy into a skirt I wore before pregnancy. The fact that it was ripping at the seams and I looked like a sausage didn’t deter me. After Elliott was born, I lost all sense of body image, meaning I was in denial and assumed it looked the same as it did when I was in college. To this day, I wouldn’t know I had cellulite, age spots, and gray hair if my kids didn’t point them out daily.

So here it was a year after the wedding, and we were all back in a Greek Orthodox cathedral with the Greeks on the right side and non-Greeks on the left. Elliott was fidgeting in my arms, dressed like something you’d see on a float at the Puerto Rican Day parade. The two of us struggled to keep the silk bonnet on her head; she would pull it off and I would scotch-tape it back on.

At the beginning of the baptism, I was instructed to lay the baby down on a white towel and disrobe her. “Can she keep her bloomers on?” No. “Can I wrap her in a blanket?” No. So I stripped my little girl down to her nakedness, and she screamed like someone had bitten off her foot. I’d never seen her turn purple.

Elliott was then anointed with holy oil. It was rubbed all over her skin like she was a Greek chicken. All she needed was a lemon shoved up her butt and a sprig of rosemary. Babies are supposed to enjoy massage, but I think Elliott knew she was being prepped for something. Like dinner. She wasn’t going to get a bottle or her jingly caterpillar until she renounced Satan. I was told that because babies don’t have the word capacity to renounce Satan, the godparents do it for them. The way her bloodcurdling screams echoed through the church, it was clear that the Devil seemed to have a tight grip.

My father-in-law held his grandchild in his arms and lovingly blessed her. Then he abruptly submerged her in a copper bowl full of water. When I say submerged, I don’t mean a sprinkling of holy water on her forehead or a splash of water on her legs; I mean down in the diving bell at the bottom of the sea. When her purple face popped up, eyes closed, mouth open, and the piercing scream came, I thought she would take her tiny hand and slap the whole row of us. Then she was pushed back into the bowl again—not twice, but thrice. All I kept thinking was, “She’ll remember this, and when she’s a hormonal teenager she will shoot me point-blank in my sleep.”

I looked out at the congregation. My in-laws and various Greek relatives and friends were gleefully smiling and snapping photos like we were in Disney World, happy times! Click click click.

Then I looked over at my mother. She was pale, and you would have thought by her expression she was watching the Khmer Rouge bite the heads off kittens. My sisters had their faces in their hands, and my brother was about to cry. The room was watching two different movies—
It’s a Wonderful Life
and
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
.

When the service was over and my baby was buttoned back into her christening dress, the whole congregation made their way over to our house for the party. And these two families melted together in hugs and cheers and toasts over a big buffet. Elliott was passed out in her stroller like a barmaid on New Year’s Day, her bonnet tossed to the floor. People were sitting on the floor, on steps, outside, holding plates of meringue cake and flutes of bubbly. Everybody mixing, laughing, wondering what to do with the white-chocolate-covered almonds . . . (the Greeks give them out at every occasion). They may have all taken different roads, but everyone ended up in the same celebratory place in Elliott’s honor. And to this day, when Elliott sees a pot of boiling water she locks herself in the coat closet.

Chapter Twenty-Three

I Don’t Get Vacation

I
hate family resorts. I’m happier in my own bed with a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios watching the Travel Channel. It’s not vacation if I can’t sleep most of the time, hear the cacophony of car horns, and walk around naked without the entire building across from us laughing. Resort vacation is the same stress of everyday life, just in a nicer setting. And surrounded by the same people. We leave New York to get away from New Yorkers only to be trapped among New Yorkers, in fewer clothes. And who told the Germans in the room next to us it was okay to blare Japanese technopop at 4:00 a.m.? And the three-hundred-pound sunburned guy wearing a thong to keep buying us drinks called Sex on the Beach? As Lenny Bruce once said, “Miami is where neon goes to die.” And the weather isn’t always so reliable; I’ve spent five days on an island in the Turks and Caicos watching every episode of
My Wife and Kids
during a monsoon. After you’ve been to all the spots hailed by Expedia, they start to blend together. Did we dance to that steel band and eat grilled snapper in Antigua? Barbados? Or was that a fortieth birthday in Teaneck? We took the cruise from Puerto Vallarta? Or was it Greenland? The glass-bottomed boat, the dirty-talking parrot, the bottle of colored sand—I look at the photos and barely remember any of it. And as much as I hate resorts, I just keep going to them. I keep thinking the next resort will change my opinion. In a soufflé recipe one must gently fold in the egg whites; that’s how I view my history of resort vacations, a softly blended pile of fluff. I didn’t relish vacations as a child (sun poisoning), and it hasn’t gotten better as an adult. My honeymoon was beyond perfect, but we didn’t need to be in St. Barth’s; we would have been happy locked in a kennel cage in our garage.

E
very summer my husband and I take our two young daughters to Greece. We think it’s important for them to be immersed in their religion and culture and to understand that many women have dark mustaches. We eat foods with tentacles and basically bathe in feta. Each day is a new adventure exploring beaches and their tavernas. You can have a four-star meal in your bathing suits there, and I will choose linguine with lobster over a Dora the Explorer popsicle from the parking-lot truck any day. We get very lax and follow painted cardboard signs and arrows with the word
thalassa
(the sea) nailed to cypress trees. One day last summer we found ourselves on a lovely crescent-shaped beach, sun beaming down, ocean the color of Ralph Fiennes’s eyes . . . Oh, and packed with frolicking gay men. I took my four-year-old’s hand—she was dressed in a red strawberry bikini and pigtails and holding a Kermit the Frog pail and shovel—as we took an ocean stroll. As we made our way through the cluster of perfect physiques with too much oil, she clocked a Filipino man dry-humping a peroxide-blond German with a My Little Pony tattoo and a cowboy hat. “Mommy, what are they doing?” Hmmm . . . excellent question. First of all, there’s nothing wrong with what they were doing—I believe in gay marriage, gay rights, everything gay—but any two creatures, be it straight, gay, or amphibian, twisting tongues and flexing their buttocks shouldn’t be on public display without a cover charge. “He’s tickling him,” I said, swiftly moving on. She was too young for full disclosure: I was too old for full disclosure. And so my afternoon was not filled with the usual drooling naps, sandy cups of lemonade, and search for twinkle shells. When I wasn’t building a private cabana out of our towels and T-shirts, I was answering questions like, “Who’s Ricky Martin?” and “What’s transgendering?”

Recently we took the girls to the Bahamas for spring vacation—the week when children have no school and grown-ups do their jobs from BlackBerries, pretending they saw Scooter’s cannonball into the pool and oohing over the sea-glass ashtray Suzy made at the kids’ club. And let me add one thing about resort kids’ clubs: just how thoroughly do they vet potential counselors? One New Year’s Eve we left our daughter at a kids’ club and were somewhat concerned, as the counselor had very red eyes and was “off.” When we came back, she was passed out on the floor. Good thing the DVD of
Annie
automatically replayed. We have a friend whose little boy was expelled from a kids’ club in Mexico; I was always afraid to ask, Just how does a toddler get expelled from a kids’ club? Apparently it involved paintbrushes, turpentine, and peeing off the balcony.

So, we were in the Bahamas, and suddenly our younger daughter, Harper, came down with strep throat, with (based on an unpredictable magnet thermometer you press on the forehead) a 109-degree fever. We raced to the local island clinic in a rusty golf cart. It was a bubble gum pink building with broken windows surrounded by burned grass. The hospital consisted of a rickety chair, a roll of medical tape, and an illustrated guide to chlamydia. All three very helpful. The next few days I lay in a dark hotel room with just the rattling sound of the ceiling fan and crashing waves, holding my daughter’s hand as she sweated and cried to get back to New York. In her feverish delirium she sounded like Martin Sheen in
Apocalypse Now
. Poor thing had to look out on an ocean she couldn’t play in, smell fruit concoctions she couldn’t digest, and swig penicillin that ended up in my hair. I can only hope it was penicillin; it was a thick white paste in an old bottle that pirates used to drink from in days of old. And worst of all, there was no SpongeBob SquarePants on the island. The yellow piece of cheese, or whatever he is, has gotten us through some very tough times. My eight-year-old had her hair bead-braided, which made her look like a Florida State student on spring break. But that’s what you get when you leave your husband in charge in the tropics.

I split my time between bike riding with Elliott and pinning down a screaming and writhing Typhoid Mary as I poured liquid Tylenol down her neck. There would be an hour at two in the morning when I would roll over and spoon my husband. It was the moment that would reassure us that we loved each other and that this was all part of our journey together. Beyond that, our vacation interactions extended no further than hissed exchanges: “You go back to the room and get sunscreen, I’ve been up three times!” and “If you knew the grouper tartare was going to be disgusting, then why did you order it?”

Word got around the hotel that we had a feverish child, and suddenly I had moms in lime green Roberta Freymann kaftans approaching me in the restaurant. Coming to my rescue. “Listen, I have powdered Amoxicillin, Tylenol, Motrin, Pepto-Bismol, a Z pack, Benadryl, Neosporin, and Ritalin if you need it.” I realized this is how vacation is with children. These women were generous, friendly, and prepared; they knew they had a fifty-fifty chance of getting a tan and reading the new Judith Krantz novel or sitting under an umbrella with a toddler hidden beneath towels, coughing up phlegm. And the more children you have, the more you up your odds. No matter how fast my golf cart went, I would never outrun the curse of the family vacation.

A
s I lay next to my moaning, feverish baby girl, I started remembering vacations we took when I was a child. Was there a lot of sickness? Did my mother have to go below deck and hold someone’s hair back as they retched over the toilet? You never remember those moments when you’re a kid. You remember long, boring car trips when you wanted to smash the window and roll out of the car that was packed with siblings, canines, and 7-Eleven detritus. Even my mother had moments where she had to descend to the filthy level of family vacation. When I was thirteen, we drove in a blizzard through Idaho, and my mother, in horror, realized there was nowhere but a tundra to relieve herself. There would be no aloe soap or Frette hand towels, just snowy brush and coyote skulls. My mother marched out about a hundred feet, pulled up her ankle-length black mink coat, and became one with a saguaro cactus. The rest of us held it in for the next six hours.

Then there were the beach vacations where I sat on a towel in the ferocious sun, wondering why people travel so far only to sweat and burn. And my older sister was always developing rashes or getting stung by some undersea monster. We all were endlessly covered in bites from sand flies, mosquitoes, and mites. And I knew if I had ever gotten a foot into the ocean, it would have been swiftly dismembered by a killer shark, so I never took the risk. Is my sharkophobia getting redundant?

Nothing was as awful as ski vacations, though. I honestly would have preferred a third-degree sunburn in Mexico. What was to like? Mummified in snowsuits with itchy long winter underwear, extra socks, hats, gloves, scarves, all to slide on two wooden sticks down a hill. What was particularly unnerving was not my inability to exit off the chairlift without falling, but being sent to ski school for most of the day. How did a week off from school spent in another school qualify as vacation? The parents were swigging red wine and gorging on cheese fondue as they waved at the suffering toddlers sliding down the icy mountain, snow-plowing so deeply their knees snapped. My mother believed all the torture would be worth it if she gave me a pack of Wrigley’s fruit gum. It did help with my frostbitten lips, but a Band-Aid for my cold abandonment? She would pull me to ski school, repeating affirmations like, “Just put your mind to it” and “Nothing is impossible.” By the way, Mom, “Whoever said nothing is impossible never tried nailing Jell-O to a tree.”

One morning I pleaded for a potty break but was told disrobing would take too much time; I would miss the beginning of my ski school class. My mother consequently had the embarrassing pleasure of watching steam surround me like a manhole in downtown New York as I was pulled up the T-bar, peeing all the way. Sissy performed the same act, and we were made to finish the class in soaked parkas and melted egos. It was on this same trip that a man (desperately in need of anger management) determined that my sister had intercepted his snow-bunny wife’s path and proceeded to beat her repeatedly with a ski pole. My sister was bruised and terrified, but fortunately, no bones were broken. It created quite a stir under the pines of Sugarbush. My brother set out like a hired assassin to find the offender, flying over moguls and swishing around trees, only to witness the abuser screeching out of the lodge parking in his Mercedes. The next year my brother’s friend broke his leg doing a flying eagle (stoned) over a jump. I was delighted to stay cooped up with Caleb at the lodge and play checkers. He was very cute—long hair, brown eyes, James Taylor during the
Sweet Baby James
era—and I got to eat chili and stare at his face instead of becoming an ice sculpture of a despondent child.

Ultimately ski school paid off; as a teenager I was skilled enough to bomb down the mountain, and as an adult adept enough to ski the double diamonds and get whistled at by University of Arizona guys on the chairlift.

A year ago I found myself on the parent side of the ski school battle. I stuffed my children into snowsuits and sent them, weeping, to ski school as I skulked around the lodge in fur boots, with hot cocoa and my iPad. What? I gave them gum!

W
hen I was thirteen, we spent Christmas break in Cuernavaca, Mexico. My brother was nineteen, my sister eighteen, my little sister seven. The first few days were festive, filled with guacamole, day trips to ancient Mexican temples, and the purchasing of many colorful embroidered Mexican blouses. And then, all at once, we were struck down with Montezuma’s revenge—a condition that had us fighting for the bathroom as our intestines rebelled more forcefully than the Mexican Revolution.

My mother decided to kill four birds with one stone. She lined us up facedown on her bed with our pants down at our ankles. One by one, she inserted a glycerin suppository up our bums like she was putting nickels in a slot machine. I’d hear “OW, Mom!” going down the line until she got to me. I guess you could call it premeditated insurrection, but there was no getting the medicine in my fanny. You know when you touch a sea urchin, and it instantly puckers closed? My anus was Batman’s car. By the fourth try the suppository had disintegrated; there were only two foil-wrapped bullets left, and one was earmarked for my little sister. My mother, in full no-antidiarrhea-capsule-will-get-the-better-of-me mode, unwrapped the capsule and pushed it in like she was Dirty Harry loading a gun.

All went smoothly with my younger sister, and then my stomach cramped. The butter bullet flew out of my body across the room and hit the middle of a painting depicting a toucan in a sombrero. I’m sure if I rehearsed it, it would have been an excellent party trick, especially in Tijuana, but shocking and extraordinary as it was, I wasn’t sure how the room would react. “Well, that was your one shot, and now it’s gone,” said my mother. As if it were my fault I had a sassy ass. My recovery took longer than the others’, but from that day on I knew I was gifted. You should see me in childbirth.

F
lash forward three decades, back to the Bahamas. By the end of the week and a bottle of (no doubt expired) antibiotic potion, my daughter had recovered. We headed to Atlantis, a place for children to shoot down urine-flooded water slides and parents to consider ending their lives. One afternoon ten buses of Herbalife employees arrived, and as I ran to avoid them, I slipped on a soggy diaper. If I hadn’t had the strength, or had been ten years older, I would have been trampled by the hordes of people gearing up for their third crème brulée frappuccino before hitting the slide again. My husband continued being smacked by the sides of the ginormous Aztec pyramid slide, occasionally surfacing like a wet monkey. I spent the time out front searching for a vacant taxi.