I'm Glad About You (24 page)

According to Maggie’s infantile logic, she hated the baby because it was a girl. In spite of all Van’s convictions to the contrary, it wasn’t a boy that she had been carrying after all, it was another girl, and while everyone knows that girls are just as good as boys, occasionally they’re really not. Through his years of daily servitude at Pediatrics West, Kyle had come to understand the unspoken pattern of gender preference in the subtle behavioral lexicon of new families. A firstborn who is a girl is good! Not quite as thrilling as a firstborn who is a boy, but not so far off. If the firstborn is a boy, that’s fantastic, and then a second boy? Unbelievable good fortune. A firstborn girl with a second-born boy is also unbelievable good fortune. A second-born girl is good, if the firstborn is a boy. Two girls? A subtle breath of disappointment enters the discussion. Are you going to have a third, and try for that boy? The fact is your odds don’t go up, the more girls you have. The highest chance you will ever have of having a boy is 50 percent. If you’ve popped out two girls already, then the chances are actually better that you’ll pop a third. Statistics are just statistics, but they’re statistics for a reason.

Kyle knew that Van had wanted a boy, and why not? Little boys really did love their mothers with an unadulterated wonder. He had seen it often enough in the examining rooms at PW; the way the young mothers and their little boys looked at each other was truly enough to break your heart. The opposite scenario was also assumed to hold true. Two girls and a gorgeous wife should have meant nothing but uninterrupted adoration for Kyle Wallace. It didn’t quite work out that way. When faced with the complete catastrophe of living with three females who really had nothing at all to say to him, he folded his own truths into whatever corner of his brain might hold them. It is possible that they festered there.

For today, the issue was the grocery store. The glorious health which Van always enjoyed had taken a hit during her second delivery; her placenta tore and there was a bloody trauma which would have been the death of her in the nineteenth century but was handled with a quick shot of oxytocin in the twenty-first. Still, she had lost a lot of blood; she was consequently anemic and her milk didn’t come in properly, and no matter how much she pumped and breastfed night and day, the baby remained unsatisfied and colicky, struggling wanly to stay on that prescribed growth curve. Kyle hated growth curves—
what about the children in Ecuador, anybody worried about their growth curves?
—but you couldn’t get around the fact that his infant daughter was hungry and there wasn’t enough milk. Sadly some useless neighbor who had read too much La Leche literature had drilled into Van’s head the dangers of nipple confusion and whatever else an occasional bottle of baby formula held in store for their daughter, and Van was in anguish. But the baby was unhappy and hungry and she wasn’t growing. Finally, in a burst of exhausted tears, Van told Kyle to “just go and get it then!” as if it were his fault.

So there he was, standing in front of a veritable wall of infant formula. Everything in yellow and white—
no pink or blue, hypothetical babies are gender neutral
—powder and liquid, now there were pouches too, something you could just screw a sterilized nipple onto and stick right into the wee thing’s mouth without worrying about mixing or boiling or dishwasher safe! Those pouches were even vacuum sealed, so presumably there were no bubbles, which might mean no need even to burp the kid. There was literature on all this stuff down at the office that he had never, truthfully, looked at. But the baby needed to eat, and he had to come home with something, and Van was going to have a lot of questions about what he picked. Nothing he chose would be accepted on face value as the right choice; he was going to have to defend himself. Surely half of them had objectionable chemicals. Or cow’s milk. What was infant formula made of, anyway, and why didn’t he even know?

“Kyle?”

The voice was so familiar, it was like the voice inside his head. Or not the voice inside his head. It was the voice that the voice inside his head was always talking to.

He turned around.

She looked incredible, even in oversized sweats. Incredible, but too thin. There were circles under her eyes, and her hair was strangely straggled around her face, like a waif’s; it needed washing. And the color of her skin was off, slightly gray, or maybe just paler than normal. Whatever normal was; the only time he had seen her in the last three years was on television, where she had so much makeup on that she looked like she belonged to an entirely different race of beings. And here she was, wearing oversized sweats, no makeup, it even looked like a couple of pimples were showing up on her left jawline. A worried crease had appeared between her eyes, apparently having settled there with common usage. Still. The color rushed to his face. It couldn’t have been less appropriate, to stand there stuttering like a schoolboy while he was buying formula for his starving infant daughter.

“Alison! Hi. Wow. Hi! I didn’t, I wasn’t, did uh, are you in town?” And now he was laughing, like a lovesick idiot. Some part of him was trying to get control of this but it was taking much too long.

“Yeah, I just kind of dropped everything and came home to see my folks. Wow, I didn’t expect to see anybody I knew at the
grocery
store.” Her hand flicked to her hair, unconsciously self-conscious, like she knew she looked terrible. “So, like, do you live out here now? I thought you lived in Walnut Hills or something.”

“I, oh, no, Hyde Park, I have a house in Hyde Park. We have a house in Hyde Park.” Horrible, having to admit that
we
. Even worse to stutter over it. “But my practice is out here and I needed to pick up some things, on my way home.”

“Baby formula?”

“Yes. Oh yeah, we—”

“You had another baby?”

Could this get worse?
“Yeah, we did. We did.”

“Congratulations! Two kids, that is crazy.”

“A little bit, yeah.”

“What kind? So, like, what kind?” Her hand creeping to her hair again, pushing it back off her face.

“A girl, we had another girl.”

“That’s fantastic, Kyle. I mean, congratulations. Two girls, that is so, so great.”

“Thank you.” He hated how he sounded. It was a sound he heard constantly in the world he lived in, upper-middle-class suburbanites multiplying and buying homes and congratulating themselves on the wealth and security they accepted as a birthright and then bragged about as an accomplishment. Everyone he had known in high school, yearning for a life of the mind or the heart, half his friends wanted to be musicians or writers or actors or activists and they had all settled so quickly into careers as lawyers and bankers and doctors and now they all had adorable babies and nice big houses in Clifton and Hyde Park and Indian Hills. And there was Alison, too skinny, too restless, unmoored, but at least she was out there still throwing her dreams at the idea of being an actress. “And you! Wow! Things seem to be going so great for you! I mean, you’ve been busy I guess. Becoming a big television star.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Alison tried to laugh, self-deprecating. “Have you seen that show?”

“We don’t have a television set.”

“You don’t have a television set?”

“Van—my wife—thinks TV is bad for the kids.”

“Oh, that’s right, she said that, whenever that was.”

Kyle blushed. That night, at Dennis’s party. He saw Alison remember what had happened, that night, and shrug it off, like she couldn’t afford the memory. Neither of them could, really. The wary grief that sped across her face, through her eyes, the breath of her disappointment, anointed him.

“It’s just while they’re little,” he reassured her. “She worries about all the colors, and the light patterns, there are so many studies about what they do to kids’ brains.”

“No studies about what that bullshit does to adult brains?” Alison asked. She was looking off now. “Well, it’s great to see you, you look really good, Kyle,” she said. The polite whisper hovered behind the good-bye; what was the point of even talking? Life quite frankly had forbidden them to speak. Another step past and she would be gone.

“How long are you in town for?” he blurted. She hovered for a moment, dragged backward by the hook of the question.

“I’m not sure,” she acknowledged. There was something there, some kind of exhaustion, wariness, something she couldn’t say. Of course he had no right to ask her anything.

“Well, if you’re here for a while, you should come over,” he informed her.

“Come
over
?”

“Why not?”

“Why
not
?”

He laughed, finally, at that. “Are you just going to repeat everything I say?” he asked.

“Am I going to repeat everything you say? I don’t know, maybe I will,” she shrugged.

“I have a pretty full plate at the office this week, but I’m usually out of there by seven. You could come over for dinner some night.”

“
Dinner
?” She actually grinned at that one, awakened by the absurdity of all this into the moment, and he finally could see her again, wry, complicated, quick to amuse.
She’s in there
, he thought. “I don’t know, Kyle, your wife just had a baby,” she reminded him. “It’s probably not the best time to just have people over for dinner.”

“She’ll love it,” he assured her. “She’s stuck in that house with two babies all day and the only chance she has to talk to anybody at all is when they show up on our doorstep.” His invitation was sure-footed, buoyant with the ring of a truth he was inventing on the spot.

“Maybe you should ask her,” Alison suggested, with enough of a raised eyebrow to acknowledge that there was a reality between them more authentic than this polite conversation might suggest.

“She’ll be thrilled.”
Is he insane?
Alison thought, but Kyle kept pushing through. “She’s always wanted to get to know you. God knows she’s heard enough about you.”

I bet.
“I’m sure you have better things to talk about than me.”

“You’re a big television star! We don’t watch it, but everyone else does. My father is addicted.”

“Your
father
?” Kyle had tossed that one off casually but Alison inwardly cringed. Mr. Wallace had always had a soft spot for her, and she remembered fondly his steadiness of character and his concern about whether or not you were making the kind of decisions you can live with. She really didn’t want to hear that he had been watching her fall in and out of bed with the losers who were constantly traipsing through the universe on nighttime television. “Seriously, don’t tell me that your father is watching that junk, the very thought makes me want to crawl under a rock.”

“He watches it religiously. My mother hates it but he seems to love it.”

“Terrific.”

“Right?” There was something different here, a lightness which she hadn’t felt with him for years. Well, she’d barely
seen
him for years, only that once, but before that too everything had been so brokenhearted and operatic. This seemed almost normal. He was actually
laughing
at her discomfort, not in a mean way, more like an old friend who is just happy to tease you. It was distinctly weird.

“I’m so glad that you think it’s amusing, Kyle, but it makes me kind of uncomfortable to think of your dad watching me on television.”

“After what I’ve watched you do on television, I don’t believe anything makes you uncomfortable.”

“I thought you didn’t have a television!”

“We don’t! But sometimes I just—see ads for it.” That was clearly a lie, but why? Did he secretly sneak off and watch nighttime soaps with his father? The new male bonding. That seemed unlikely.

“You watch it online,” she guessed. “In between patients, you dial it up on Hulu.”

“As if there was a minute to do anything between patients. Other than argue with insurance carriers. No no no, I’ve just seen ads.” No question, he was lying. But then he grinned at her. What did it matter, they were finally talking to each other like actual human beings. Hanging out with Kyle hadn’t gone this well for—well,
ever
, maybe. There was no worry that this might all suddenly erupt into a huge awful fight which would end up with them
almost
having sex.

“Really, how long are you in town for?”

“I’m not sure.”

“But you’re at your mom’s?”

“Yeah, I’m at my mom’s.”

“I’ll give you a call there.”

“Okay, sure.”

And so he finally walked away from her, approaching the line of cash registers at the front of the store with his baby formula under his arm, the rules of suburban America respected and complete. It was just what it was, two people parting with the past left like a bland linoleum floor between them. The absurd clarity of the fluorescent lights left no shadows around him to haunt her imagination.

fourteen