How to Party With an Infant (18 page)

Barrett’s son, Jake, flips the channel—he always flips it right when she’s starting to get into the groove of a show.

“Just pick something,” she says, eager to relax while she has one kid down, but Jake’s cell phone rings and he tosses the remote to the other side of the couch. His ring tone is a jazzy riff that makes her panicky. It’s so strange—Jake’s phone is ringing and yet both she and Gary, the only people who call him, are in the room. This has been happening all week, but still, she can’t get used to the sound, to the way Jake will jump a little, feeling his pants pocket, then looking at the
screen, casually, as if it were something common. It’s been happening ever since his commercial aired a few weeks ago.

She supposes it’s a good thing—she has always wanted him to have more friends, yet at the same time he was perfectly fine without them. Active, funny, charming. She never really noticed his lack of friends except those times when a crew of boisterous boys would pass them on Chestnut; she’d feign the need to duck into a shop, pulling him in after her, but when she did this she felt guilty because it forced her to admit he needed protection, or that there was something wrong with him in comparison to those other boys. But ever since his cell has been ringing “off the hook” and he was starting to say things like “I’m going over to Hat’s house” (Hat? Hat!), she wishes he were the old, friendless Jake, because that Jake seemed to work harder.

“What’s up?” he says into his phone. “Nothing much. Yeah, I know who you are.”

Barrett scans her son slumped on the sofa, then tries to get Gary’s attention, but he has gotten hold of the remote and is watching, openmouthed, a show about battleships. She bets he doesn’t even notice the changes in their son. He’s as observant as a carton of eggs. When he finally looks over at her, she gestures to Jake, but Gary looks behind Jake to the back door.

“What?” he says.

“Never mind!” she yells, furious his mind isn’t tuned to the same station.

“Um, I guess so,” Jake says. His legs are spread so wide on the couch! He never used to take up that much room. He puts his hand over the crotch of his jeans and pinches at himself like he’s trying to pluck a grape.

She sighs loudly, and both boys look at her and give her peevish little smiles. They’re trying to
lull
her, because she has complicated moods and desires and they both know that talking to her only makes it worse.
If they only knew that these crooked little grins made it doubly worse.

Jake ends his call. She makes herself wait five seconds before speaking. That’s another thing about her husband and son. They can talk on the phone and when they hang up they’ll just sit there like nothing happened. You’re supposed to talk about what you talked about on the phone! It’s like they’re from the Paleolithic period.

“Who was that?” she asks. Cool tone. Nonviolent posture. Eyes on the television, the ships marching across stormy seas.

“This girl from homeroom,” Jake says.

“What did she want?” Barrett asks.

“Dad, change it back to what I was watching, please.”

Poor Dad, Barrett thinks. He’s so transfixed you’d think he was watching porn or football. He never gets to choose, but when you have no opinion or knowledge of program schedules, you have no authority, so that’s his problem. Gary changes it back to the singer’s fabulous life. She displays the contents of her refrigerator. “I’m obsessed with Coke Zero,” she says.

“You guess so about what?” Barrett says.

“What?”

“You said, ‘I guess so,’ on the phone. You guess so about what?”

“Jeez. Listen much?”

“Well?”

“She was asking if she could come to my birthday party.”

“To Waterworld with you and Tyler?”

“No, remember I said I wanted to have something at the house now, like at night.”

“That’s fine,” Barrett says, even though she had her mind set on the water park. She loves water slides and amusement park food, and enjoys seeing her son with Tyler, a boy with hair as red as a rooster’s wattle, because he, too, is cool yet solitary, the kind of kid who’ll grow up to be a drummer.

“What,
exactly, is this party going to be like?” Barrett asks. “I need to know what to buy, what to expect. Should I invite the parents?”

“No!” Jake yells. “Just, like, I want to ask a lot of people. And we’ll just hang out. I’ve never really had a big birthday.”

“Your second one was huge!” She remembers the balloon man they hired. He twisted the balloons into a jet pack Jake could wear. She couldn’t fathom it on him now. It would be so small—like a growth.

“That doesn’t count,” Jake says.

The pop star walks into her bedroom and points at various things from her childhood, which was what, a month ago? From watching this show Barrett has learned that no one reads and everyone loves the movie
Scarface
.

“How many kids are you thinking?”

“I don’t know. Fifty?”

“Fifty! Do you know fifty kids?”

“Yes,” Jake says, and Barrett senses that this is strange for him to admit.

She wants to ask where these kids were before the commercial aired, but feels this would be cruel. Jake is aware of the connection. It’s the reaction to sudden fame that serves as the true test of character, and so far he’s doing very well.

She doesn’t really get the appeal of the whole thing. About six months ago a cereal company called for video submissions from kids ages ten through thirteen doing whatever they do on an average day. Jake sent in clips of himself skateboarding at Golden Gate Park, riding his bike in the Presidio, and playing in the water at Crissy Field. For some reason it won. They probably liked the whole San Francisco thing: the Haight, the bridge, a kid in the city eating Jumbo O’s on the Muni. Now Jake and Stubs, their feral corgi, can be seen running out of the ocean. Jake can be seen walking down Union, reaching into a box of Jumbo O’s, tossing some in the air, then catching them
in his mouth as his friends laugh and pat his back. She doesn’t like this supposed “reality” ad. Who are these friends? And who is that fake mom pouring the cereal for him? Like a twelve-year-old can’t do that for himself.

“I want one of those cool parties,” Jake says.

“No way, mister!” Barrett yells.

“Honey,” Gary says. “Why are you yelling?”

“Because! We’re not going to be one of those families who do those sweet parties!” Gary’s expression is blank and dumb. “It’s this trend,” she explains. “There was this show years back about kids who throw extravagant birthday parties. They’ll come in on the back of an elephant, they’ll wear designer clothes, they’ll belly-dance in front of their peers, and then at the end they get a car, and not like a Corolla. They get a Mercedes or a BMW. One girl got a sports car and an SUV. Two cars! It’s just insane. The parents should be neutered.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Jake says.

“We will feed you, educate you, love you,” she says, “but it’s not our job to hire Kanye West to come to your birthday party, nor am I required to buy you an SUV.”

“I wouldn’t want Kanye anyway. And I don’t want anything all crazy. Maybe we can get some KFC and we’ll just hang out downstairs and listen to music and stuff. Maybe dance. Twenty people tops.”

Dance! Barrett’s heart melts, along with her hesitancy and skepticism. She trusts Jake, after all, and she wants him to have fun on his birthday, to dance with friends. Perhaps Jumbo O’s has created a tiny portal into which kids can glide. His charisma, his style and agility, his humor have always been present, but now they can erupt for all to see.

“We should get KFC,” Gary says. “I haven’t had that for so long.”

Barrett glares at her husband, who is taking off his socks and throwing them toward the hallway. Then he stands, holds up his leg behind him, and farts. Both Barrett and Jake laugh.

*  *  *

Today’s the day of Jake’s
party, but Gary has to go to a funeral and he has taken Tara with him since the family requested children be there. His colleague’s baby has died. The family was expecting it, but still. How do you wake up? How do you go on? Barrett can’t think about it. She really can’t—can’t wrap her head around the child’s death, can’t come near to imagining what they must be feeling. You can’t possibly know other people’s pain no matter how hard you try to cram your feet into their shoes. You end up grieving for your own self and their loss becomes an object lesson. This makes her sad.

She looks out of her living room window, waiting for the kids to come. They live on a narrow street and, she’s happy that no one’s parked on the Mount Davidson side of the road. Maybe parents will park and come in, stay for a glass of wine, perhaps some bruschetta, salad, or salmon. She prepared for the possibility of guests. She has some dessert, too—lava cakes from Trader Joe’s that she put in white ramekins to make it look like she made them herself. Then she remembers the birthday cake and feels stupid.

A car pulls up. She spies a boy in the passenger side, a younger girl in back, and a handsome father behind the wheel. Please come in, she thinks. She loves handsome fathers—it isn’t that she flirts with them or anything, but they tend to give moments of her day (the playground, for instance, with Tara, or soccer games with Jake) a pleasant charge. She’s way more into her kids when an attractive man is watching, and the feigned enthusiasm always turns into genuine enthusiasm, and so cute dads are good parenting aids, though in this town most of the dads are practically geriatric, or superuptight bores who probably bought their tools at Restoration Hardware. The guy out there, however, looks like he could change a tire. Unfortunately the boy gets out of the car without him.

“Jake,” she calls. “A buddy is here.”

“Don’t call him a buddy!” he says, running to the door, his jeans making a swishing racket.

“Those are the biggest jeans I’ve ever seen!” she says. “And they’re so stiff, and all bunched up by your shoes. Good God, when did you get those shoes! They’re so white they’re practically blinding me.”

“I went shopping with Dad.”

“Obviously.”

“He got the same jeans.”

“Oh, I believe it.”

His buddy walks in, and Barrett stops herself from hugging him and asking about his hobbies. “Hello!” she says.

“Hi,” he says.

“Come on!” Jake says and runs toward the stairs.

She’s once again left alone and wishes Tara were here so she’d at least look like she had something to do. She straightens the living room, puts the
New Yorker
she found in the park on top of the
Us Weekly
.

She hears a car outside and runs to the window, spying a minivan with a
MY CHILD IS AN HONORS STUDENT
sticker and a license plate that says,
MOM4BOYS
. The minivan drives away, thank God. Whenever she sees those awful accoutrements she wants to stick to her car something equally offensive, like
MY CHILD ISN’T OBESE
or
I AM FERTILE
.

The door opens. In comes the new friend, a boy with sunken eyes, dark long lashes, and cheekbones like pomegranates. He has a concave trunk and clownish feet.

“Hello!” she says. “Are you the honors student?”

It takes him a moment, and then: “That’s my brother,” he says. “But his whole class got that sticker.”

He’s also wearing baggy jeans, along with a huge sweatshirt, which is covering up a gold chain necklace.

“Nice bling,” she says, trying to be down.

He flushes as if she caught him masturbating. “It’s okay,” she says, then points him to the stairs.

Three girls, all with braids in their hair like they’d been in Jamaica or at Burning Man, are next to arrive. Barrett is on her knees on the couch, watching them walk up to the door; then she turns around and sits facing forward and flips through
The New Yorker,
but then thinks this looks too staged.

She gets up and opens the door.

“Hi, girls,” she says.

“Hi,” they all sing. They smile at her like she’s dying, cursed with some old-lady affliction. One of them carries an expensive handbag, and Barrett wants to tell her that she shouldn’t even care about labels until she’s twenty-four.

“The boys are downstairs.” She points to the stairwell.

“Thank you!” one says, and then they giggle like that TV pop star, tittering at jack nothing, just filling dead air with dead laughter. She feels like it’s too late for these kids, the girls especially, like they’ve crossed a line and can’t come back. She thinks about that dreadful
My Super Sweet 16
show, the last episode she saw, the birthday girl and her posse preparing for the party.

“We’re pretty and popular and wear nice clothes and people sort of look up to us,” girl one explained.

“So, like, this party could seriously affect our reputations,” girl two said.

Then the camera cut to a nonfriend, a brunette whose eyes kept darting from side to side, and she said, “Kaya’s, like, relic-collecting rich. Like, I heard she has Napoleon’s bathtub.”

It’s too late for them to be fully human. Their fates are sealed. They’ll be giggly and mean now, fake and dumb later, then as mothers they’ll arm their kids with pukey cute gear and give them pompous British names. Fuck, she’s in a bad mood.

Barrett was a popular girl, she supposes, but popularity was completely different when she was in school. She recalls her blond hair soaring while she danced (all fists and forearms) and drinking wine coolers. That’s what made you popular back then. Big hair and Bartles & Jaymes. Now it’s all about handbags and hashtags and phones, for crissakes! Kids these days are so messed up.

She tiptoes to the top of the stairs and hears a hoot of laughter and then a girl say, “Sick! What are you? Like six?”

She walks back to the couch and watches another car pull up, then reverse. A woman is behind the wheel and she’s parking. A parent is going to come in! There aren’t any brag-hag bumper stickers on her car either. Barrett walks to the mirror by the front door and widens her eyes and turns her head to the right. Then she walks into the kitchen so that when the mother knocks Barrett won’t be right there. She’s pretty sure the mother parking is Christine, one of those “cool” moms, who isn’t cool at all but bills herself that way and is part of the little cool-mom clique that Barrett despises and desperately wants to be a part of, more to avoid being grouped with the dork moms than anything else.