“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.
After the knock Barrett waits a second, then opens the door with a spent yet friendly smile on her face so that she looks as though she’s been very busy, yet is happy to be interrupted.
“Hi! Come in!” she says to Christine and her daughter.
“Hi, I’m Christine,” Christine says, looking around her living room.
“I’m Barrett,” she says, though they’ve met before and see each other practically every day. “I think we may have met before.”
“This is my daughter. Luella say hello.”
“Hello,” she says, flashing a smile. Literally. It’s a flash, then it’s gone.
Luella? Barrett thinks. Why, of course. The girl has a handsome face, made prettier by the fact that Barrett has to stop and think if she’s pretty or not. The large nose is the hang-up, but in a way it ameliorates the face because you think, Wow, even with the nose she’s pretty. She also has round, heavy breasts that would surely make any teen pre-ejaculate if he got ahold of ’em.
“Pretty name,” Barrett says.
“I just wanted to make sure there were parents here,” Christine says.
“I told you there would be,” Luella says.
“Well, you said that about the last party, and your friend ended up going to the hospital.”
“What?” Barrett says.
Luella rolls her eyes. “She would have had to go to the hospital with or without parents there. She couldn’t find her inhaler, and the contractor was there to drive her. It worked out fine.”
Barrett gives Luella a secret wink. “Everyone’s downstairs,” she says.
“I’ll text when it’s over,” Luella says, then sulks away.
“Would you like something to nibble on?” Barrett asks Christine, horrified at the words that just left her mouth, but Christine doesn’t appear to have heard. She’s watching her daughter with intensity. Barrett knows the look. There’s nothing more pleasing than watching your children when they don’t know you’re watching them.
“Would you like a glass of wine?” Barrett asks.
Christine’s face lights up. “Sure!” she says, spoken like a true mom.
Barrett brings out the wine, pouring it beforehand because it’s Bogle, her weekday wine. She brings the bruschetta, too, and can tell that Christine’s happy to see both. After they get settled on the couch, they sit in silence for a bit too long.
“I love your house,” Christine says, but Barrett’s sure she’s lying.
Another silence is saved by the bell.
“They just keep coming,” Barrett says, pretending to be weary. She walks to the door and opens it to a mother, Maggie, and her son, who doesn’t seem at all embarrassed to be accompanied by her.
“Hi,” Maggie says. “I just wanted to thank you for having the party. I’m Matt’s mom, Maggie.”
“Maggie?” Christine says from the other room.
“Christine?”
Maggie peeks through the door, and both women issue that customary little greet-scream. Barrett can’t imagine men doing this. Pat? Andy? Ahhhh!
Both Barrett and Matt watch them hug while giving one another awkward glances. She feels like she’s on a blind date and tries to think of things to say. “So, Matt, Maggie tells me you like math and Kings of Leon.”
“Okay, Mom,” he says. “See you later.”
“They’re downstairs,” Barrett says to Matt, noticing that a black comb is lodged into his dark curls. He walks away, and she almost calls after him: “Wait, there’s a comb stuck in your hair,” hoping to save him from embarrassment, but she assumes he knows this and that it must be a fashion statement, though she isn’t sure what’s being stated: “I have so much hair I can stick a comb in it.” Or: “I’m so busy, I’ll get to my hair when I’m good and ready.” Or, simply, “Look at me. There’s a comb in my hair. A comb!”
She’s left fake-smiling at these women who are facing one another and speaking in hushed, aghast tones. Barrett forms the tip of the triangle, not really sure what she’s doing here. She feels psychotic, clearly not part of the conversation, but it’s too late now. She has to commit. It’s like being in a store, two shoppers flipping through the rack toward one another. Who is going to move? Who is going to take her hand off the clothes and go around? Not Barrett. She never moves. It’s her thing.
“God, you look so good!” Maggie says. “Did you get divorced?” she asks in an exaggeratedly sardonic, drag queen sort of way.
“No, no. I’ve been doing Pilates. It’s such a good workout—”
“I love Pilates,” Barrett says, committing.
“You know who did get a divorce though? Sheila Schatz. Isn’t that crazy? She looks fantastic though.”
“Like how?”
“I don’t know. She just looks thin and . . . she’s just got that divorced body.”
“So do you!”
“Really?”
“Yes! I haven’t seen you forever. What have you been doing?”
“Same old. What have you been up to?”
“Oh, the yushe. Superbusy. Really busy.”
Barrett takes a step back, then another, until her steps take her to the sofa. She goes around.
She takes her glass of wine from the table, gripping it ferociously, and takes a deep sip. More kids stream into the house and she waves them in like a parking attendant. “Downstairs,” she says. “Have a blast.” She feels duped that these two know each other. Now they’re talking about a friend who is moving to San Rafael.
“I told her to go see Little Children,” Maggie says. “Going to that community pool—it’s just like the one in the movie. Totally creepy.”
“Great movie,” Barrett says. “And book.”
Both women turn to face her, and Barrett feels like she’s in high school once again. She’d do anything to fit in, to have these girls like her, but in high school, unlike in
motherhood, she never had to work so hard. Usually the blond hair worked as an E-Z Pass.
“I didn’t know it was a book,” Maggie says. “Oh, my God, we’re reading the worst book in my book club. I mean it’s not bad, but it’s so serious and I can’t get into it.”
“We’re reading Baby on the Brain,” Christine says. “It’s about this high-powered marketing director and she gets pregnant, but still tries to juggle everything? And her friends are all single, so she still tries to go out and keep up with that lifestyle, but then her parents die and . . . Never mind.” Christine flutters her hands. “I don’t want to ruin anything.”
Barrett finishes the sentence in her head. Then her parents die and the protagonist discovers what really matters. Or: Then her parents die and she realizes she needs to think of others instead of just herself. Or: She realizes her single friends are all whores who’ll end up alone and children are the best. She loves little Arabellabellalulu after all. Mele would just puke.
“I should read that,” Barrett says, using her admonished voice because that’s how you speak if you want to appear engaged just as cool teenage girls speak with that nasal, closemouthed, bored-to-death drawl in order to properly merge with their kind.
“Would you like a glass?” She lifts her glass to Maggie.
“I’d love one. Are you kidding?”
Both women laugh—ha, ha, ha, we drink, we gossip, we’re cool, hip moms!—and Barrett goes to the kitchen like a servant. The kitchen is around the corner, so she can still hear the women. “Red or white?” Barrett asks.
“White, please,” Maggie says. “Jake just started at Sterne, right?”
“No, no. He’s been there since fifth.” He had to take a test and undergo an interview, and waiting for the results was like waiting for the lines to appear on a pregnancy test after your fifth in vitro. She doesn’t like that she can’t see their facial expressions.
“Oh,” Maggie says. “I’m not sure what he looks like.”
“He’s in that webisode thing,” Christine says.
“That’s right!” Maggie says. “He’s a star.”
How to Party with an Infant Page 14