Kids These Days

by Drew Perry

  “We’re not losing it.”

  “How would you even know?”

  “I wouldn’t,” I told her. “I wouldn’t have any idea.”

  She walked over to me, kissed me on the top of my head. She left her face there in my hair. She said, “We’re going to be fine, right?”

  “You’re the one who’s always saying so.”

  “Are you OK?”

  “Hell, I’m rich.”

  “We’re going to be good at it,” she said. “I know it.”

  “Me, too,” I said, even though I knew no such thing.

  She straightened up, wiped her eyes again. “Come up in a little while, alright? I missed you today. I don’t know why, but I did.”

  “I’m glad,” I said.

  “You should be.” She kissed me again and walked away. She let herself through the gate at the pool and then out again on the other side, over by the stairwell. I watched her go, and then did what she told me to do. I bided my time. I looked back up at the buildings in our complex—four concrete boxes lined up right on the seawall, three of them five stories tall and ours six, the tallest thing on the beach. Everything else north and south was either houses or two-story deals, red and blue 1960s horseshoe condos with orange roofs. This was still Old Florida, Carolyn and Mid liked to say. Undiscovered. That wasn’t quite it, though—it was more like people had discovered things down here, but weren’t altogether sure what to do with their find. The light came on in our unit. Alice opened the shades at the sliding glass door. It seemed like it couldn’t be her up there, though of course it was. Down on the beach, a county sheriff rode past on a four-wheeler, probably looking for kids drinking beer. A string of pelicans flew just along the first set of breakers. Pelican Palms, I thought, but not Pelican Pines. Alice was right. It started to get dark, and the picture people came back up and rinsed their feet at the spigot by the pool. Once they were gone, I went upstairs, found Alice.

  2

  There were bars across all the storm sewer drainpipes in the roadside ditches. Mid said they were there to keep the alligators out. I was telling Alice about the alligators while we rode north toward Jacksonville.

  “But why would alligators want to be in storm sewers?” she wanted to know.

  “They just do,” I said. “They like it in there.”

  “Why would they like it in there better than where they live?”

  “I think it’s the same as where they live.”

  She changed lanes. “I don’t understand why you think that makes any sense.”

  “When Mid was explaining it, it did.”

  “Well,” she said, “there you go.”

  I had the day off. I’d only asked for the morning, but Mid told me we should hang out in Jacksonville after the appointment, make a day of it. Carolyn gave Alice a list of all the good baby stores. I’d been eight or nine days on the job, and it was as advertised: Mainly what we did was drive out to Island Pizza, make sure they were selling pizzas; ride over to the sunglasses place, see that the sunglasses were lined up and ready to go. The Twice-the-Ices had gotten delayed at the plant in Georgia, weren’t due now for another two weeks. But Mid had lined me up something actual for the next couple of days—he wanted me to go out to a fish camp he had a piece of, have a look at some land they were talking about building rental cabins on. I was supposed to report back, tell him what I thought. “We need an outsider’s perspective,” he said. “You can tell us if it looks like what we already think it looks like.” Alice and I hadn’t touched the thirty thousand. We were afraid to.

  Alice bled a little the Friday before. That was the big news on the homefront. She called the doctor’s office and they wanted to know how much, what color. It didn’t sound like an emergency, they said. Everything was probably still fine. Some women bleed early in pregnancy. They said we were still early. Alice worried. I worried. She’d been all over the Internet, diagnosed herself with every possible malady, found lists of syndromes with long hyphenated names.

  The waiting room at the doctor’s office was a kind of cross between an aquarium and an airport. All we needed was some gentle voice over the intercom announcing flights to Frankfurt and Lisbon, and we could have been in any Terminal C anywhere. The flat-panel TVs in each corner were showing something about flowers blooming in the Serengeti. That eventually switched over to lions hunting zebras at a muddy watering hole, which didn’t seem right, but there wasn’t anybody to talk to about it. There was only an electronic check-in kiosk and a closed frosted glass window on one wall. While Alice beamed us up, I read an entertainment magazine from the year before, read about sitcoms that had already been canceled, movies that had already come and gone. A nurse eventually materialized and called Alice’s name. We went into the back.

  Height and weight. Blood pressure. Go behind this door, pee in a cup. Then the nurse put us in an examination room: table, stirrups, plastic model of a uterus on a low bookshelf. Everything was fancy and shined up. If there were multiple plastic uterus models available, this was surely the deluxe edition. The gown they had for Alice was a little better made than some of the clothes I had on. There was even a pitcher of ice water and two glasses on a little stand by the door. The glasses had the clinic’s logo etched into the side. “You do get your money’s worth here,” I said.

  “It’s like a spa,” Alice said. “I like it.”

  Two or three more nurses came in and did two or three more things to Alice before they walked us down the hall to the ultrasound room. The tech in there got her up on the table, rubbed her down with the jelly, held the magic wand up to her belly, and without much warning at all, there it was—the windshield-wipered image up on the screen, black-and-white, grainy, a channel you couldn’t quite tune in. Still, it was pretty clear it was a human baby in there, pretty clear, even, which end was head and which was tail. Our child. On the damn television set at North Florida Fertility. That plus the underwater mouth-sound of the heartbeat. Alice reached for my hand. She was crying. I was, too. It wasn’t possible not to.

  I’d always cried at significant moments, at public ceremonies. I cried when they played the national anthem before graduations and ballgames. I cried when other people got married, even in the movies. I cried at long-distance telephone carrier commercials, back when there were long-distance telephone carriers. And now I was crying because there was another life up there in that picture, and that was more than I could process, more than I figured anybody could process, really, when or if they tried to work it through. And I knew something in me was meant to be rearranging itself, that I should be undergoing some profound reassessment of the way I saw the world—but instead I was off and gone on my own ride, through the tunnel and into the dark. I was thinking about middle-of-the-night feedings, about chicken pox, about boys sitting in the driveway, laying on the horn, waiting for my child to emerge from the house. It was like those first few seconds after a car wreck, right after you first come to, and you’re thinking, Wait. We can still undo this. We can figure something out. Alice said, “Isn’t it unbelievable?” I was not lying when I said it was.

  But I did not suddenly feel like a father. I did not have some vestigial urge to run out and stab a gazelle in the throat and drag it back to our hut for dinner. Instead, I felt what I’d been feeling all along, since we’d started talking about it, started trying: That I was powerfully, deeply alone. That the rest of the world, the world of ultrasound technicians and locksmiths and mortgage bankers still writing mortgages and center fielders holding their babies in their arms during post-game interviews—all those people knew exactly how to do this, did not flinch in the onrushing face of certain peril. They’d simply come wired with something I hadn’t. They knew they were supposed to have children, did it without batting an eye. It was what came next. You survived your twenties, you found someone who felt like she could live under the same ceilings you did without needing to kill you, and you had a kid. You had another. Everyone did it. Everyone.

  “W
ould you like to know the sex?” the tech asked. She kept clicking things, measuring lines on the screen.

  I looked at Alice. “Sure,” I said. My voice seemed too loud for the room.

  “We can—”

  “No,” said Alice, interrupting me. “No. We want to be surprised.”

  I said, “We do?”

  “I like that,” the tech said. “I wanted to be surprised, too, you know? But my husband said it was driving him crazy.”

  “It’s driving us crazy,” Alice said. She looked dead ahead at the screen. “We’re just going to try to keep it a secret anyway.”

  The tech smiled at us. “Y’all are sweet,” she said.

  Another nurse came in to help Alice get cleaned up, and she took us back to the exam room, told Alice she could get dressed. I felt cut open, run over. It seemed like I couldn’t hear so well. Alice asked me questions, and I answered her. Somehow we landed in the doctor’s office. DR. VARDEN, it said on his door, underneath a suite of little multicolored plastic mailbox flags that sent some secret signal to somebody, depending on which one was flipped out. We sat together on a leather sofa. Dr. Varden wasn’t in there.

  I don’t know what I’d expected. Maybe I hadn’t thought far enough ahead to remember to expect anything. I kept looking at Alice’s stomach, checking for some kind of change, and then back up at the hundred or so framed snapshots of happy families all over Varden’s walls: Kids and parents skiing, kids and parents on horseback, kids and parents whitewater rafting. We were going to need a better camera. We were going to need to go horseback riding next to whitewater rapids.

  Dr. Varden arrived looking healthy, looking fit, wearing scrubs that were somewhere between pink and purple. He had a picture on his desk of his own family—three boys like nesting-doll versions of Varden, and his calendar-pretty wife, all of them standing in a field wearing tan shirts, tan pants. They were the most deeply content scout troop in history. He sat down, beamed, rifled through a folder. “Well,” he said, “you two are doing absolutely great. You just really are.” His teeth were so white you wanted to tell somebody about it. He pulled a clear ruler from a drawer, measured something on a large printout of one of the ultrasound pictures. He mouthed some numbers to himself. “All clear,” he said. “Sound the bell. Everything’s just right.” He winked at us. On purpose. He held up the ultrasound. “You take a pretty picture,” he said.

  “Thank you,” said Alice.

  Varden said, “So let’s talk about this bleeding.”

  Alice said, “Is everything OK?”

  “In this?” He put the picture back in the folder, patted the cover. “From what we can see, yes and yes. Mister Computer spit out a nice set of numbers. No real risk factors except for your age. Good heart. Good stomach. Past that we can’t tell much else yet, but those look good. Only real marker is the bleeding.”

  “Marker?” Alice said.

  “Warning sign. Little tiny. But still. Just the one day, the bleeding?” He went back through the chart, found his page. “This says Friday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Brown?’ he said. “Not red?”

  “Yes.”

  “Brown is good,” Varden said. “To be expected, even. Or maybe not, but not so surprising.” He talked and moved like he was sped up, like his clock wound differently than ours did. “If it happens again, or if we see anything bright red, that’ll get our attention, but I certainly don’t think we need to do anything right now.”

  “What would we do?” Alice said.

  “Rest. Small procedures. But we’re not there, OK?”

  “OK.”

  “You’re a champ,” he said. “Blood pressure. Heartbeat. I love it. You and the baby both. Just great.” He leaned over the desk to look at her. “You look fantastic, by the way. I’m not just saying that. You really do. For your age—” He held his hands out, a magician’s apology. “And I don’t mean one thing by that. Not one thing. All I’m saying is that a pregnancy in your thirties is different from one in your twenties. That’s all. And you? You look like you’re in your twenties.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re more than welcome. How’s the nausea?”

  “Better,” she said. “A little bit.”

  “That ought to keep improving, too. I bet it does, but we’ll get somebody to call you next week to check in. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds good,” she said.

  “And how about Dad? Questions from Dad? We doing OK?”

  Dad was just trying to stay upright. “We’re doing OK,” I said.

  “The thing here says you’re from Carolina. Anywhere near Myrtle Beach?”

  “That’s South Carolina,” I said.

  “Right.” He drank out of a glass of ice water using two hands, like it was a sippy cup. He stood up. It was clear the appointment was over. He was a man with things to do next. “Misty will take care of you up front,” he said, “unless there’s something else you good folks need.” He looked at Alice one more time. “You’ll be getting big before you know it,” he said. “And you’ll look great then, too.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Mom, Dad, if you think of anything, anything, that you want to ask, call the office anytime. We have nurses on the help line twenty-four hours, seven days. Anything you think of, just call.” He pulled a desk drawer open, got out a magnet shaped like an egg. “Number’s right on there,” he said, handing it to Alice. “You two pop that up on your fridge.” The phone number ended in B-A-B-Y, spelled out in pink and blue ribbons. Alice put the magnet in her purse. “So,” he said, shaking my hand, then Alice’s. “We’ll see you in a month, OK?”

  “A month,” she said.

  “Wonderful.” He walked—almost ran, he was moving so quickly—to the door, showed us into the hall. He waved when we rounded the corner. We waved back. And we must have paid at the desk, must have walked ourselves out into the blazing parking lot, must have found our car—I just don’t remember it. I know I got the AC running. I know we watched a very pregnant woman walk up the front steps to the clinic. Alice opened up the little envelope they gave us, shuffled through the ultrasound pictures. There was a CD, too. She said, “So I guess we’re having a baby.”

  I said, “It looks like we are.”

  The AC wasn’t doing much other than pushing out hot air. “That was a lot,” she said.

  “Dr. Varden?”

  “He wasn’t like that last time. He wasn’t as—He just wasn’t quite like that.” There was a drainage ditch off to the side of the parking lot. I checked for alligators. The blacktop shimmered in the heat. Alice said, “Are you alright?”

  I said, “Are you?”

  She put the photos back in their sleeve. She said, “It all just seems impossible. It’s like I can’t entirely believe it.”

  “Right,” I said. “It is like that.”

  “Did you see the way he drank the water?”

  “With both hands?”

  “I’ve never seen an adult do that,” she said.

  “I don’t think I have, either.”

  Alice said she was hungry, so we got out Carolyn’s directions, figured out where the mall was from where we were. I found the interstate. Alice held the pictures in her lap, looked out the window, didn’t say much. I did not ask her what she was thinking. Back in the office, Varden was probably doing push-ups in between patients. Jumping Jacks. Flossing. Traffic on the highway was slow, but moving. I still couldn’t get used to how flat the land was everywhere you looked.

  One of the things she’d told me was that it wasn’t just that she wanted a baby, but that she wanted a family—she wanted me, specifically, to be a father, as much as she wanted to be a mother. She wanted us to have a child. I’d tried talking to friends about this back home, coded conversations out by the grill, tired parents who repeated the party line: It was hard as hell, but it was the best thing that had ever happened to them. They all said that, like they’d gone to some day camp to lea
rn the right words: The best thing that ever happened to us. It was hard, though, to know if any of that was true, or if, instead, once you had somebody living full-time in the guest room, everything else was scoured so clean you couldn’t remember what your life had been before.

  “Salad Tong?” Alice said. “No way. That’s not even in the game.” When we played the game, it seemed like a game, and I liked that—it felt less like we were headed for a screaming infant in our laps, and more like this was all some puzzle in an in-flight magazine.

  “Salad Tong,” I said. “Salad Tong and Salad Shooter.” We were sitting in the food court, looking out on a long riverwalk, finishing our lunch. There was a guy outside doing airbrushed portraits on T-shirts. Inside, there were carts where you could buy perfumes, wigs, hats with the logo of your choice stitched in while you waited. The mall went on forever, like a mall of a mall. I had a vague sense of being frightened by it. I had a definite sense of being frightened by everything else.

  “But which one would be the boy?” she said.

  “Salad Shooter, of course,” I said.

  “Why of course?”

  “You can’t call a girl Shooter.”

  “Don’t be a jackass,” she said. “Go get us smoothies, OK? Bring me a strawberry.”

  I stood in line at New World Smoothie. All the flavors were named for explorers—the Ponce de Lemon, the Vasco de Gamagranate. They didn’t have plain strawberry. They didn’t have plain anything. I ordered Melon Magellan for myself, got an Eric the Red for Alice. EXCITING BERRY BLEND, it said on the menu board. She was on the phone when I got back to the table. I tried to explain about the flavors, but she waved me off. “Carolyn,” she said. “Slow down.”

  I could hear Carolyn on the other end, but couldn’t make out what she was saying. A group of kids came through wearing those shoes with wheels. One of them hit a chair a couple of tables over, went down. It looked like he was thinking about crying, but he held it together, got himself up, rubbed his knee, rolled back over to his friends. Alice said, “How is he in jail?”