How to Party With an Infant (20 page)

“What the hell is going on out there?” she says in a loud whisper.

“Nothing,” he says. “We’re just dancing.”

Oh, his beautiful eyes. Just like Gary’s. Where
i
s he anyway? She has a hard time reprimanding this child—Jake has always repeated her admonishments from the time he was two. “Oh, I not listening? I was bad? I’m sorry.” Damn him.

“But, what kind of dancing? Did you tell everyone to dance this way, or—”

“We’re just dancing. It’s how people dance.” He holds up his arms as if preparing to box, makes a kissy face, and moves his hips.

“Stop that,” she whisper-hisses. “Why is everyone dressed that way?”

“What way?”

“You know what way. Like—” Oh, boy. She tries again: “Why aren’t they dressed the same as they were when they first walked into this house?”

“Because it’s a hood party,” Jake says.

“A what? A what? A what-the-shit-did-you-just-say party?”

He covers his mouth and laughs because she just said
shit,
which is so minor right now. She could say all sorts of things and it wouldn’t matter.

“A hood party,” he says, like it’s no thang. “Like we’re people in the hood having a party. It’s something everyone does now.”

“Oh my God,” she says. “Oh, my flapping God.” She’s not sure what’s worse—that they’re
doing it here or that it’s something everyone does now.
What the big balls is wrong with everyone?

She looks up the stairs, swats Jake to the side, then peeks around the wall. A girl dances, looking over her left shoulder, then her right. Barrett sees Maggie’s son by the flat screen eating a piece of fried chicken.

“Oh, my God!” She presses her back against the wall. She thinks of the mothers talking about her on the SFMC forum or the whole night being filmed by some sleuth kid, the footage going to the school, the news,
Dateline, Primetime,
YouTube!
A disturbing new trend among white, suburban teens. Are parents promoting racism at private schools?
The NCAA would sue them, there would be death threats, the cereal would pull its ad—wait. Is it NCAA? That doesn’t sound right. Isn’t it A something? Oh, fuck it.
Some
organization is going to beat her ass.

Jake’s forehead is gleaming with sweat. He smells a little. She has never noticed that before. He’s starting to smell like a boy.

“It’s fun,” Jake says. “What’s wrong?”

“No,” Barrett says. “I don’t think so. This is not fun. This needs to stop. God, Jake!”

“What?”

“Just. I won’t make a scene. But turn the music down, suggest a game, or a movie, or cake! I bought a cake. Have at it. All you can eat. Please come up and have cake. You guys can do whatever with it. Do shots of cake! I’m cool.”

Her son looks back at the scene with longing, then at her with desperation and hatred, as if his life hinges on the ability to thrust and do the Pissing Dog.

“Find a segue, Jake,” she says. “Make a natural transition into some other activity. You’re smart. You can pull it off. But I’ve got two mothers up there, and if you don’t put a stop to this I’ll come back down here and I won’t be nice about it. I’ll make a scene. You know how I do. And I want everyone’s normal clothes back on.”

“But why?” he asks. “Why is it wrong?
Jay and Cassie are here. They’re black and they’re doing it.”

“They’re rich! Strike that—it’s just wrong! On so many levels.”

“But why?”

Perhaps he really doesn’t know. Perhaps she doesn’t know either.

She remembers when she and her sister wanted to get those big gum balls in the machines at Safeway. They asked a girl their age if they could borrow two quarters. She could write down her address and they’d pay her back, which they would have done. The girls’ mother came out of the store, witnessed the transaction, and completely freaked out.

“Shame on you,” she said. “How could you take advantage of her like that? Shame on you.”

The girl had Down syndrome, but Barrett and her sister didn’t take this into consideration. They just needed two quarters and she was a kid like them and she was there. They would have asked any kid who was there.

These kids in her den—aren’t they still innocent? Do they really know what they’re doing? Or are they imitating what they see on television, the music videos? They aren’t like frat boys, blatantly making fun, but it’s just too hard to explain.

“It’s wrong because I have a feeling it’s wrong,” she says. “That’s why. I’m going with my gut. You’re ridiculing. You’re enforcing bad stereotypes.”

Barrett listens to the music in the background, a new song:
I got hoes, you got hoes. Let’s call the whole thing off.

“We aren’t ridiculing anyone,” Jake says.

“Then it’s appropriation or something,” she says.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s just bad, okay? I have to get back up there. Find a transition, okay? Redirect. Hell, spin the bottle for all I care. Do Seven Minutes in Heaven.”

“What’s that?”

Barrett walks back up the stairs. “Just stop,” she yell-whispers. Her heart is pounding; it’s gyrating. She takes a deep breath at the top of the stairs and looks back to see if Jake is gone. He’s still standing there, but facing away from her. She can see his profile. He looks stricken and confused, but she continues on despite the strange feeling that she’s abandoning him.

She’s relieved to see Christine and Maggie in the kitchen. Everything is normal. Everything’s okay.

“This looks fantastic,” Christine says.

“I know. I can’t believe you cooked this,” Maggie says. “I never cook.”

“Never,” Christine says.

Well, how nice for you, Barrett thinks. To save money she doesn’t even buy presliced cheese or snack-size anything.
Snack-size
means you are paying someone extra to put less food into a smaller container.

“How were they down there?” Maggie asks.

“Great!” Barrett says. “They’re having some dinner, too. Some . . . chicken, and they’re listening to music, but they’re going to come up soon and have some cake. Sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”

“It’s so hard to plan a party,” Maggie says. “It’s like they don’t want the cake and the song, but you have to have the cake and singing to make it a birthday! Matt just had his thirteenth and they did the same thing—went right downstairs and blared Lil Wayne, Lil’ Kim, Little Richard, God only knows.”

Du dum dum chi. God only knows how often she repeated that joke. Barrett puts some food on her plate, torn over what to do. She supposes she can tell these moms what’s going on, tell them what the kids are really doing downstairs, and not just at her house, she’s sure, but in basements all over San Francisco. It’s crucial these parents know about this activity, yet does it have to be at her house? She needs to sell real estate. She needs to get to know other mothers at Jake’s school.
Most of all she doesn’t want to hurt her son’s social life. He has just been given a portal she isn’t about to block.

“It’s such a hard age. They’re embarrassed by us now!” Christine says. “So you just have to back off.”

“I know,” Barrett says, resolved to aid and abet. She thinks of the girls’ behinds pressed against the boys’ crotches. “It’s a very hard age.”

*  *  *

The fish is excellent, and Barrett believes more needs to be said about this. The fish. How excellent it is. Maggie is well on her way to becoming trashed. She’s trying to hide it, but her eyes are all glassy and googly. Barrett likes her better this way. She always finds herself liking people more if they drink a lot, even though it means they’ll be driving their children home buzzed. It is one of those moral dilemmas she doesn’t really know how to get around.

In the living room she fake-laughs at the things Maggie and Christine find to be funny. Maggie insists her son loves Frank Sinatra. Christine insists her daughter loves foie gras.

“It’s the weirdest thing,” she says, “but she loves it.”

Like they know, Barrett thinks, smugly. Their kids are downstairs pretending they’re in Compton and these chicks are telling me what their kids love. I mean, blow me. She doesn’t know everything either, of course, obviously, yet accepts this as part of life. She won’t be familiar with supersize pieces of her son’s world. How sad, she thinks. How very sad.

“I love this table!” Maggie says. A bit of wine sloshes over the rim of her glass and onto her beige sweater. “Damn it,” she says. “I always do that. I can’t go through one day, not one day, without spilling something or another on my shirt. It’s ridiculous. I’m like a walking wet T-shirt contest. Hello! I’m surprised I don’t get dollar bills from strangers . . .”

Barrett waits patiently. She wonders where Maggie’s going with all of this and if she’ll get out okay.

“. . . Yoo-hoo! Mommy gone wild. Oh, it’s absurd. Ab. Surd.”

Barrett dares to look up. Christine looks worried and eager, as if she’s watching someone do hurdles with a sprained ankle. When Maggie appears to be done, Christine shakes her head. “I know, I know,” she says, but Barrett prefers to let Maggie feel like an idiot and says nothing.

Finally. What she’s been waiting for all night. The sound of children coming up the stairs.

“I’ll get the cake!” she says and jumps up so fast you’d have thought she’d been zapped. She goes to the kitchen to light each candle with a long match. Thirteen candles, thirteen years. Her boy, her love bug. A skateboard on the chocolate cake, resting against a tree. It is really quite lovely, and cake is something you can never outgrow.

She turns the lights low so the candles burn brightly and walks toward the dining room table. She launches into the birthday song, realizing she’s in a fairly low register and it sounds like she’s moaning, but the kids join in, their voices surprisingly soft so the whole moment feels like a séance, a plea to some ghost, an elegy to childhood and times you once fiercely knew. She watches Jake through the candlelight, his sweet face, his awkward stature with its latent hunkiness. He looks exactly the same as he did when he was four years old, shyly watching his friends singing to him, watching his mother moving toward him with a lump of pride in her throat. Exactly the same look. But not the same, of course. Not exactly. Not at all.

She stands in front of him. She doesn’t need to bend down anymore. Jake blows out the candles.

Everyone claps. The boys whoop, and then she hears that sound she loves. The door opening. Gary and Tara finally coming home.

“Gary!” she says, a tremor in her voice.

*  *  *

Later that night, after everyone has gone, Gary tells her about the funeral for the baby whose name was Thomas. Every time his name was spoken during the service Tara yelled, “Thomas? Thomas! Thomas the Train!”

“I said, ‘Shhh.’ I said, ‘No, not the train. He’s a boy. A boy.’ Then Tara said, ‘Thomas the boy,’ but kept yelling his name.”

“That’s horrible,” Barrett says.

Tara walks to Gary, who is sitting cross-legged on the floor, waiting for the assigned book. Tara hands him her choice, then plops down onto his lap. Instead of cleaning up, Barrett sits beside them and listens to the story about the green sheep. She wants to tell Gary about tonight, but doesn’t know how. It could be a funny story. It could be worrisome, horrific. It could be nothing. It is nothing compared to the funeral.

“Here is the moon sheep. And here is the star sheep,” Gary reads. “But where is the green sheep? Where IS that green sheep?”

“Where is Thomas?” Tara asks.

The question brings tears to Barrett’s eyes, and she and Gary exchange glances. What do they say? When do you start telling your children the truth?

“Oh, sweetie,” she says. “Thomas had to go.”

Tara looks at Barrett with her mouth open. “Oh, he had to go?”

“He had to go,” she says.

“He’s okay,” Gary says.

“Yes, sweetie,” she says. “He’s okay. He’ll be okay.”

There are a lot of women who look like Dora at San Francisco playgrounds because . . .

A hood party is racist because . . .

Thomas is dead because . . .

Her boy is growing up. He will become . . .

She can’t fill in the blanks.

Tara turns the page, and there’s their answer. The mystery is solved.

“Turn the page quietly,” Gary says. “Let’s take a peep. Here is our green sheep, fast asleep.”

*  *  *

Barrett and Mele push their daughters on the swings, both secretly wishing there was a swing button they could press. Ellie leans back in her bucket seat, splayed as though on a zip line. She looks up, in love with the show in the sky.

“Did the moms ever find out about the party?” Mele asks.

“God, no,” Barrett says.

Mele thinks about the toons, the princesses that make Ellie so happy. Who cares if she’s playing with plastic toys and reading books that aren’t about biracial eagles with two proud fathers? Who cares! There’s a show up there in the sky!

She tells Barrett she’s thinking about chicken wings, corn on the cob, maybe some play on hot dogs.

“
Haute
dogs,” she says.

“Haute
dawgs,
” Barrett says.

“Maybe some kind of coleslaw.”

“With cartoons in it so the kids will eat it.”

“Dora Slaw,” Mele says.

“And don’t forget the cake.”

Mele wonders: funny, sad, light, heavy. What approach do you take? Do I dare do chicken? Do I dare eat a peach? Thomas, birth, death, children. Birthday parties, times you once fiercely knew.

“Why did Tara go to the funeral?” Mele asks.

“The parents wanted children there. They wanted a lot of life there.”

She wonders when Ellie will stop being entranced by a crowd singing “Happy Birthday”
to her. When the awe of oneself begins to diminish, when you don’t think celebrating your existence is justified.

Mele will create a recipe for an irresistible cake that makes even teenagers line up like toddlers, giving in to their childish selves. She’ll create a bulimic’s fantasy, an anorexic’s nightmare, a stoner’s wet dream. The cake demands loud singing and seconds. A campfire s’mores ice-cream cake.