Kids These Days

by Drew Perry

  “We’re too old for that,” Jane said.

  The lady appraised them. “You may be right,” she said. “Well, we’ve got certificates to the go-carts, too. Do you like the go-carts?”

  “We’ve never been,” Sophie said.

  “Never been? Get one or another of these grown-ups to take you.”

  “We’ll do that,” I said, and the twins lit up.

  “Can we really, Dad?” they asked.

  “We need to discuss it with your mom first,” he said. I saw I might have crossed some boundary.

  “But she’ll say no,” Jane said.

  “Don’t let that boy who got his hand crushed worry you,” the woman said. “They added bars to the sides of the carts. I’ve got a girlfriend who works out there. It’s safer than it used to be.”

  “Who got his hand crushed?” Jane asked, clearly excited.

  “They say to keep your hands inside at all times,” the woman said. “But do people listen?”

  “We should go eat,” said Mid. “Thanks for the tickets.”

  “Tell Vera up there to give these girls two sausages each,” the woman said. “They’re too skinny. They need to eat.”

  We went through the line, and Vera gave the twins extra sausage without anybody having to ask her about it. They were polite, said please and thank you, loaded up their plates with two or three flavors of syrup. We sat down, and it seemed clear Alice had caught Carolyn up on my most recent swing-and-miss. Carolyn wasn’t exactly cool toward me—more pitying than anything. Like I’d received some kind of medium-grim diagnosis. I said, “The girls say they’ve never been to the go-carts. I didn’t even know there were go-carts around here.”

  “There are,” Carolyn said. “But they’re death traps.”

  “No they’re not,” Sophie said. “They’re cool. They’re from like the eighties or something.”

  “Maybe we could take them one night,” I said. “Alice and I could.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Carolyn said.

  “Mom,” they were both saying now, “Please? Can we? Come on.”

  “I said I don’t know,” Carolyn said, her voice harder-edged.

  “Maybe we could talk about it another time,” Alice said, kicking me a little under the table. “Maybe if we planned it. But surely we don’t have to plan it right now, Walter, right?”

  The twins kept after Carolyn, trying out various lines of bargaining—they were older now; we would make sure nothing happened to them. Wasn’t that right, they asked me. Sure it was, I said, regretting the whole thing, feeling the too-lateness of it grow. I’d buy Carolyn a card to apologize. Surely they had a section for this particular indiscretion at the store—next to Baby’s First Halloween, maybe. The raffle woman stood up at the end of the room, sucked on her inhaler, held up a small box. She said, “Let’s do some prizes. What we’ve got first up is a mug that says, WHEN I AM WITH MY FRIENDS, I AM IN HOG HEAVEN. It’s got these adorable pigs on it drinking tea.” She reached into a basket, came out with a yellow ticket, read off the number. A woman at a table near the door stood up, clapped for herself, went to claim her prize. The raffle woman said, “Now how about we do one for the kids?”

  I checked the room: There was Maggie, there were the twins, there was an infant in a car seat two tables over. No question about what was coming. The woman dug into another basket, read out a number from a pink ticket. No winner. Another. Still no winner. She spilled the basket out on the table, squinted at the room, sorted through the pile until she had the one she wanted, and read it out. Jane’s ticket. Jane walked to the front, the room clapping, watching her, so grown up, so pretty, and she got the prize we knew was coming—$25.00 at First Coast Speedways—then made her way back to our table. Carolyn did not look at her, did not look at me. Sophie wanted to see it, and at first Jane wouldn’t let her, exacting revenge for the flip-flop affair, but Mid got Sophie to ask nicely, and then she was showing everybody. It was a home job, just something Xeroxed onto colored paper, but still: She’d won. It was over. There was no way we weren’t going death-trap racing now.

  And I could feel all of everything boiling up at the table: Whatever it was that crackled between Carolyn and Mid was there, plus the fault lines running below the rest of Mid’s known empire. Also the BOJ, the monitor, the ever-improving version of what Alice and I circled every day. And now this new thing, something concrete, which was nice, which helped—we had the certain coming demise of one or both of the twins at the hands of the internal combustion engine, which would be my fault and mine alone—and you could see that every piece of that was getting ready to come into full and mighty bloom right there at the XMAS IN J.U.L.Y. Pancake Supper and Benefit Raffle, but Delton saved us all. She martyred herself. She came in the door trailing the famous boyfriend, and he was wearing swim shorts and a plain white T-shirt, and she was wearing a little sundress, orange and strapless, something that made her look twenty-nine and her own age all at once. It looked like she’d put her makeup on with a push broom, but that wasn’t what mattered so much. What mattered was the inside of her left forearm, where she was sporting a white gauze bandage about the size of Jane’s Speedways envelope. Carolyn and Mid were both out of their chairs before she could sit down, asking if she was hurt, if she was alright. No, she was saying, she wasn’t hurt. She was fine. Fine. Maggie made sculptures out of the mortar her pancakes had become. Jane and Sophie looked at Delton. All of us looked at Delton. “It’s a tattoo,” she said.

  Carolyn said, “Is it that big?”

  “No,” Nic said. “They just like to put on extra-big bandages over at Little Charlie’s. They’re really careful.”

  “How big is it?” Mid asked, sitting back down.

  “You know, like the size of a playing card,” Nic said. He pulled the neck of his shirt over, showed us a palm tree on his collarbone. “About like that,” he said.

  “Oh,” Mid said. “OK. Terrific.”

  “What’s it of?” I said, and Alice sunk her nails into my arm. I couldn’t help it.

  “It’s a letter,” Delton said. “A character. It’s the Japanese symbol for tiger.”

  “Cool,” Sophie said.

  “Yeah,” Jane said.

  Mid said, “I don’t get it.”

  “There isn’t anything to get, Dad. That’s the whole thing. It’s more about being in tune with life.”

  Carolyn said, “What did you just say?”

  “Did you teach her to talk like that?” Mid asked Nic.

  “No, sir.”

  Mid looked him over. “What do you do with your time, anyway?” he asked.

  “I’m in school, sir. At Flagler.”

  “You’re in college?” Alice said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Wow,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” said Alice. “It’s good. It’s good to be in college.”

  Delton said, “I don’t get what the big deal is with that. Everybody always thinks it’s such a big deal.”

  “Who’s everybody?” Nic asked.

  “All my friends.”

  “What’s your major?” I asked Nic.

  “Education,” he said. “I’m getting my Deaf Ed certification. I’m going to be a teacher.”

  It was an impossible answer. This was not the answer of a reprobate child who’d just gotten your daughter tattooed. I watched Mid. He took a bite of his food. He took another bite. He said, “Whose idea was this?”

  “My major?” Nic said.

  “The tattoo,” Carolyn said, “is I think what he means.”

  “Mine,” said Delton.

  “Why didn’t you ask us first?” she said.

  “Because you would have said no.”

  Carolyn turned to Mid. “And this is what happens when you buy a child a Camaro,” she said.

  “I’ll be finished with my degree next year,” said Nic. “I’m graduating early. I’ll be able to get a pretty sweet job.”

  Mid s
et his fork down, lined it up with his napkin. “Why do you keep talking to me like you two are getting married?” he asked him.

  “I don’t, sir.”

  “What makes you think I care in any way about what job you’ll have next year?”

  “Dad,” Delton said.

  “And what’ll happen in five years when you decide this was a completely dumbass move?” he asked her.

  “Hey,” Nic said.

  “No offense,” said Mid.

  “I’m on the Dean’s list,” Nic said.

  “Let me talk to my daughter for a minute,” Mid said. “Then you can give me your résumé.”

  “Maybe Walter and I should go outside,” Alice said, standing up. Maggie started singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” complete with hand motions.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “We’ll just be outside,” she told Carolyn, who wasn’t listening. “If you need anything.”

  “Olivia,” Carolyn said. “What is this all about?”

  “Delton,” said Delton.

  Alice took my arm, said, “Let’s go.” The twins looked like they’d never seen anything so excellent. I saw Delton reach for Nic’s hand under the table.

  “I’m coming,” I said, not moving.

  “Walter. Right now.”

  “It’s a tiger?” Carolyn asked.

  “It’s the symbol for tiger,” Delton said.

  “Wait till you see it,” Nic said. “Dude did a killer job.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” Mid said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And stop calling me sir. You’re driving me fucking crazy.”

  “Dad,” Sophie said, right away.

  “This is a special circumstance, sweetie,” Mid said, and that was the last of it I got to hear. Alice pulled me away, hustled me past the raffle lady and out into the parking lot.

  “What were you doing?” she said.

  “What?”

  “You were just staring. You looked like a mental patient.”

  “I was watching,” I said.

  “You were staring.” The evening had gone very still. The sky was pinking over. Alice said, “She’s not wearing sleeves.”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “She didn’t even try to hide it. Carolyn will kill her.”

  “You think?”

  “Maybe not. It’s not like she got arrested.”

  I tried to hold her hand a while, but it was too hot, and she let go. “We won’t let Montezuma get one,” I said. “A tattoo.”

  “That’s a boy’s name. He was a man.”

  “I think it was a volcano.”

  “It was a man, too,” she said.

  “It could work both ways. Boy or girl.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “We’ll just tell her,” I said. “It can be a rule. We’ll say, ‘Monty, no tattoos.’ ”

  “Monty. That’s cute.” She put a hand to her belly. A cat stopped out in the open, started bathing itself. “I think they had that rule, though,” she said. “I think they had the rule and it didn’t make any difference.”

  “We could still try,” I said.

  “I guess.”

  I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For earlier. For everything.”

  She traced a circle in the sand with her shoe. “What was that with the go-carts?”

  “I made a mistake.”

  “Now we have to take them.”

  I said, “Surely it’s safe, right?”

  “Not safer than not taking them.”

  Something spooked the cat, and it ran for the treeline. “The police showed up today,” I told her. “Out at the cabins.”

  “What did they want?”

  “To talk to Mid. They talked to him, and then they left.”

  “About what?”

  “About the store. They want to do some hidden-camera thing.”

  Part of her was still back inside, I could tell, watching the traveling circus of Delton being fifteen. And part of her was probably still back at the condo, too, watching the monitor watch Monty’s room. She said, “Was that all?”

  “That’s all he told me.”

  “I’m pretty sure this is just getting worse and worse,” she said. “That’s what Carolyn thinks.”

  “Worse in what way?”

  “In no way. In all the ways.” She rubbed at the side of her neck. “I don’t like this,” she said.

  “I don’t like it, either,” I told her. “I want you to know that.”

  She reached for my hand again, and this time she held on. Maybe, for that brief moment there in the parking lot, we were the team Alice wanted us to be. I hoped we were. I was, for once, trying for it.

  It did not rain the night we took the twins to First Coast Speedways. A storm came in over the flat, almost got to us, but then backed up and stayed put inland, off behind the Intracoastal and the interstate. You could see the lightning strobing the clouds, but you couldn’t hear the thunder. Safe distance, we decided. And they confirmed that at the Speedways gate: A guy with his arm in a sling nodded out over the parking lot, back toward the storm, said, “We’re fine now, but if that thing gets any closer—if we hear it, we have to shut down for thirty minutes, no exceptions. We’ll blow the siren. You’ll know. You gotta leave when that happens. Just make sure somebody stamps your tickets for a rain check.”

  “Are you the person who got his hand crushed in the go-carts?” Sophie asked.

  “Naw. I fell down that step the other night.” He motioned with the sling arm. “Came out of the booth funny, missed the step, tried to catch myself, fouled my elbow.”

  “Oh,” Sophie said, clearly disappointed.

  “Do keep your hands inside the buggies at all times, though, OK?”

  “What’s a buggy?” Jane asked.

  “Fancy word for go-cart,” he said.

  The twins were tall enough and old enough to ride the kiddie carts by themselves, so of course that’s what they wanted to do. Alice and I stood in line with them, made sure they got in OK, and then picked our way up into the bleachers to watch them take laps around a track shaped like a pear. The lights were almost bright enough. There were shadows out at the far ends. Alice said, “Maybe you should have ridden with them the first time.”

  “They’ll do great,” I said. “They don’t want me down there.”

  “If we kill one of them, Carolyn will never forgive me.”

  “She might. Give her time.”

  “Don’t even joke about that.”

  It was just a tattoo, was where Mid had finally landed. He’d rather she not have done it, but et cetera. And Alice was nearly on board with that, or the idea of it, but when we’d been down on the benches or out walking our evening half-mile, she’d been saying, too, that it wasn’t the tattoo at all, that it was the sum total of the body of work in question. That Carolyn would have been fine if it’d been the tattoo and nothing else. I know, I’d been saying, but still. Not still, she’d said. Imagine you were on the other end of that. I’m on the end of some of it, I said. She said: It’s hardly the same.

  First Coast Speedways featured two tracks. There was the track the girls were on, a flat concrete track, and also one for the older kids and adults, which had banked wooden turns, more turns, bigger carts. The carts on the wood sounded like air conditioners being rolled across Lincoln Logs. Our carts sounded like bees. On the big track, if you wrecked, you were on your own to get yourself pointed in the right direction again. On ours, a guy would come out, lift the front or back end off the ground, spin you around and send you off again. He wore a helmet and shinguards. Any time anybody wrecked, Alice flinched. I did, too.

  “The doctor’s office called today,” Alice said. She had her hand up over her eyes visor-style, watching the girls come around. “They wanted to know if we were enrolled in any parenting classes.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “And we’re not.”


  “I know that.”

  “We’re supposed to be, they said. I think there’s a law.”

  “What’ll they do, take the kid away?”

  Sophie came around the bottom end of the pear. From where we were sitting, her helmet looked four sizes too big. Jane drove by a few seconds behind her, took the corner more cautiously. We waved. They never saw us.

  “They have them at the hospital down here,” she said. “We can take the classes here even if we deliver in Jacksonville. So we won’t have to drive so much.”

  “Great. Sign me up.”

  “I did. We start next week.”

  “Isn’t that a little soon?”

  “They said we could do it early if we wanted to. There are two sets of classes. Birthing and Parenting. I signed us up for Birthing first.”

  “That seems like the right order.”

  Two boys smashed into each other down in front of us, shouting and laughing. The shinguard guy ran out, straightened the carts, and the boys took off again. Alice said, “We only have to take three of them.”

  The foil on the windows. Now classes. I said, “How many are there?”

  “They meet weekly.”

  “Weekly?”

  “I think that’s pretty normal. And it could be good for us.”

  “We’ll go,” I said. “It’s fine.”

  There was a light stanchion out in the middle of the track to signal how much time there was left in each race—green to yellow to red. In the last minute the red light blinked, then held steady, which meant you were supposed to bring your cart back to the start/finish line. A girl who looked a few years older than Delton wandered out onto the track once all the cars had stopped and handed a boy driving the #31 a cheap-looking checkered flag. I had no idea how they kept track of who won—after the first couple of laps it all seemed scrambled to me. Maybe they just chose a kid out of thin air. The #31 boy stood up in his cart, waved his flag, and his parents, sitting a few rows down from us, cheered more than was necessary. “Now that’s the way to want it, Gerald Junior!” his dad yelled.