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“Or else what?”
“Or else I’m blaming you.”
“Auntie Holly! Auntie Holly!” My niece Savannah comes squealing around the corner and jumps onto my lap. “Save me! AAAAHHH!!! Don’t let them get MEEEEEE!!!” Two boys I don’t know and one of the twins—Harrison, I think—are close on her tail, brandishing neon plastic weapons of some sort.
“Stop right there,” I demand. “What are those?”
“Thuper Thoakers!” Harrison growls.
“What?”
“Super Soakers,” George explains. “They’re water guns.”
“Oh, don’t even think it…” I tell them as I try to pry Savannah’s sticky fingers from around my neck.
“She said we were worm barf,” one of the boys explains matter-of-factly. “And now she must die.”
With that, they all open fire. Savannah takes off shrieking, but we’re already soaked.
“Fuck,” George says as she stands up to shake herself off. “I think it’s lemonade.”
I try to use the hose to wash off, but there’s no water.
“We turned it off this time,” Olivia, my sister-in-law, explains as she dashes by with a tray of hamburgers. “They kept spraying into the house last time.”
“Great.” As I go inside to wash up, I can’t help but notice that Cole and Olivia’s house might benefit from a spray or two. The decor, courtesy of their three small kids and two large dogs, is suburban eclectic: broken plastic toys in primary colors, couch-pillow forts, Elmo paraphernalia as far as the eye can see and fur-covered wall-to-wall carpeting, which thanks to a little foresight on Olivia’s part, is roughly the same shade as the dogs. At four-year-old hand level, black splotches of what might once have been grape juice provide a lovely focal point for the room.
When I finally make my way outside again, George is talking to my parents. Well, just my mother really, because my dad doesn’t talk so much. He just sort of stands there next to my mom thinking about other things. Or maybe he’s just standing there not thinking anything. It’s impossible to tell.
“George just mentioned you took the week off?” Mom says while trying to untangle the chains from the three pairs of glasses dangling around her neck. “Do anything fun?”
I glare at George. “Nope.”
“That’s too bad. Did you have any cake, dear?”
“Yes.”
“And did you see the kids?” she asks, looking past me toward the sandbox where Madison is hitting another little girl in the face with a plastic shovel.
“What kids?”
“Well, we’re going to go on over and say hi to the birthday girl. C’mon, Larry.” She makes a beeline for the sandbox and my dad shuffles off behind her.
We lie around in the sun for a while drinking beer, waiting for the entertainment to arrive. Alas, my furry purple hunk of burning love is a no-show, or maybe this particular group of kids has just seen enough of Barney for one summer, and so we are left with an adolescent acne-scarred magician. The kids, of course, are more interested in trying to steal his wallet than any of the handkerchief tricks he’s performing.
George, who’s been scanning the scene of frenzied, foaming six-year-olds and their wasted Stepford parents with as much interest as she can muster, turns to me languidly and slurs, “I don’t think I want kids.”
“Oh, come on—don’t base your maternal future on one six-year-old’s party.”
She waves me off. “I just don’t think I’m the breeding type. It’s too much responsibility, raising a kid.”
The thought of remaining childless by choice seems odd to me. “But what will you leave behind? It’s our duty as human beings to make sure our genetic material continues its evolutionary march toward perfection.”
“Big deal. There are plenty of others willing to carry that torch.”
“I suppose.”
“And you could choose to be single too,” she adds. “Imagine the freedom. To actually try to stay single forever.”
“That’s warped.”
“Think about it, Holly—it sure would take the pressure off. Men do it all the time. And it’s not like either of us will have to deal with any backlash from our parents or anything like that….”
George’s mothers, while perhaps overly involved in their daughter’s life, would never dream of pressuring her into couplehood or marriage. The possibility that a woman’s happiness or self-esteem might be dependent on anyone with a penis was simply beyond their sphere of comprehension. And my parents are more like spectators in my world, instead of active participants. They’re pretty old (I was a fortieth birthday surprise package for my mom) and besides, their urge for grandkids has already been filled eight times over by my brothers. So my mother isn’t all that interested in my social life, while my dad is so obsessed with model trains that he’s hardly come up from the basement since he retired and probably wouldn’t notice if I brought Marilyn Manson home for dinner.
“…although, since I am so truly fabulous it would be a crime…no, a sin—a sin of omission!—to deprive the world of my offspring. Hey, I know! Maybe I could just be an egg donor instead!”
George always gets a little cocky and grrl-powerish when she’s drunk, and the Perlman-MacNeill family values come flooding through, unrestrained by her usual mild-mannered self-deprecation.
“Sounds great,” I tell her.
“They pay you, like, a couple thousand bucks a shot for that, you know. And it would be a real mitzvah, helping an infertile couple get pregnant….”
The thought of George in stirrups with some mad gynecologist harvesting her eggs was a little far-fetched. “This from somebody who’s afraid of tampons.”
“Yeah, but I still use them,” she giggles, propping herself up on a plump elbow. “I’m sorry, but if you really think about it, the idea is just totally gross. Admit it!”
After debating internal vs. external feminine hygiene products for a good twenty minutes, I’m ready to go bug my brother for a job. By the time I make my way over to the patio, Cole is a bit drunk and bleary-eyed himself, and his face is smudged and sweaty from standing over their old barbecue all afternoon.
“Aw, come on, Holly. You don’t want to work with me. You’re a writer, not a drill-press operator…aw, shit…would ya look at that? Mackenzie! Mackenzie!”
Three little girls turn their heads.
“But Cole—”
“Mackenzie go inside if you have to go potty! Sorry Holly, what did you say? Goddamit, like the dogs don’t do enough damage to the grass….” Fluffy glances over at him from his spot in the shade and growls. Cole shakes his head and tosses him a hot dog that has been charred beyond recognition.
“Look, the truth is my job is totally dead-end, anyway. I’ve got to make better money so that I can save up and then take a year off to write a book.” Not a bad plan. I’d come up with it during a Roseanne rerun—one of the episodes after the Connors win the lottery and we find out that Roseanne the writer had been imagining the windfall all along (a dreadful ending to a perfectly good sitcom, but inspirational for my purposes nonetheless). Since I couldn’t count on winning the lottery, I needed to find a way to make good money fast.
“I don’t know…”
“Please! I need you to get me in.”
“Olivia! Olivia, goddammit! Skyler’s playing with dog poop again!”
“Come on, Cole—you’re union. You make tons of cash and you get amazing benefits.”
“Yeah, compared to you, maybe, but I have all this to pay for.” He makes a vast sweeping gesture with his spatula, indicating the yellowing sliver of lawn and modest house owned, for all intents and purposes, by the bank. “You don’t want to work on the line, Holly. And you’d suck at it, anyway.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Yes, you would. It would kill you. Shit. It’s killing me. You think this is what I wanted to do with my economics degree?”
Before I can respond, the back of my mom’s red helmet of hair blocks my field of vision. “Cole, your brother wants another cheeseburger,” she says, holding out a paper plate.
“Mike, you lazy bastard!” Cole yells. “Come and get it yourself! You’re ten feet away! Ma, he’s ten feet away…”
Mike, who’d been dozing in a lawnchair for three hours, flips him the bird, inspiring a hard punch from his wife, Lindsey.
Cole shakes his head and puts another burger on the plate for my mom to bring him.
“That’s his fourth one,” Cole says. “No wonder he looks more pregnant than Lindsey.”
My three older brothers are nothing if not virile. Cole has three, Mike’s waiting on his fourth (as if the twins weren’t enough), and Bradley, who lives in Detroit, has two, but his wife Bonnie is also pregnant.
“Cole, you’re not listening to me.”
“Why should I? It’s a stupid idea.”
“Hey—I think it’s a great idea!” Mike pipes in from behind.
“Shut up, Mike. No one’s talking to you.”
I’ve learned the hard way not to expect any genuine support from Mike. (My brothers really are a bunch of jerks—until the age of thirteen, I honestly believed my mother was planning to sell me to the circus when I was born, but that my father had discovered her plan at the last possible moment and intervened, saving me from a life of shoveling elephant shit.) Cole’s the only one of them who takes any responsibility for the endless teasing and torturing they subjected me to while growing up, and I’m pretty sure that’s because Olivia talked some sense into him over the years (she’s like the older sister I never had). Mike and Bradley still snap my bra strap, and sometimes even practice wrestling moves on me when my parents leave the room.
But old habits die hard, and Cole feigns intrigue. “So tell me, bro—why should I get her a job?”
“Well, she has skinny fingers, so she might be useful for fixing the machinery…”
“True. Go on…”
I can see exactly where this is going. “Shut up, Mike! Cole, don’t listen to him,” I beg.
“…and she wouldn’t be a distraction to the other guys, that’s for sure.”
“She wouldn’t? Why not? Because I was kinda thinking she would…”
“Naw…no boobage!”
Cole stifles a laugh and elbows me playfully in the ribs, while Mike endures two more punches from Lindsey.
“Fuck off. Both of you.” I grab another beer and make my way back to George.
“What was that about?”
When I tell her, she laughs. “Great idea, Norma Rae. So this is what you’ve come up with after a week on the couch?”
“Could it be any worse than what I’m doing now?”
“Uhhh, yeah.”
“At least I wouldn’t be broke.”
“Please. You would not last a single day working on an assembly line,” she says between bites of an empty hot dog bun. Apparently, she’s decided that fat is indeed worse than carbs. “Your brain would revolt.”
“I’ll adapt. I’ll write my book in my mind while I work,” I inform her. (I’d thought it all through very carefully.) “The blue-collar experience will also contribute to my growth as an artist. And what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, you know.”
“Maybe, but it also hurts a hell of a lot.” She shakes her head and starts in on another bun.
“G, I am so sick and tired of being broke. And I’m tired of saving up for months to buy a proper pair of black boots.”
I’ll admit that it took me quite a while to realize that just because I had a real job didn’t mean I could actually be Cosmo Girl and go out and buy all the pretty things I saw in In Style magazine. It required more than three years of scrimping and saving for me to pay down the unholy credit-card debt accrued during my first six months at the Bugle—something George will never let me live down. Despite that initial lapse in judgment, however, I remain a proud member of the Spend-a-Lot-on-Your-Bag-and-Shoes school of fashion. A true classic never goes out of style, and expensive accessories have the power to redeem the rest of a lackluster wardrobe.
“Well, no one said they had to be Jimmy Choos,” she says coolly.
They were my one splurge this year; an investment certain to yield years of pointy-toed pleasure.
“Yeah? Well, I’m even more sick of having to shop online. I can’t believe I live in a city that doesn’t even have a Prada store….”
“As if you’d be able to shop there, anyway! You can’t even afford the Saks outlet!”
“Maybe not, but I bet just knowing a Prada’s around is a damn good feeling.”
“If you want to move to New York, just do it already, Holly! You’ve been talking about it for years. But if you decide to stay, then we can probably both agree it doesn’t really matter if Buffalo has a Prada store or not because unless their spectator pumps come in a steel-toe version, I highly doubt they’d pass the safety codes at the factory. And if they did, it would spoil your plan to save up enough money to take a year off, anyway!”
She’s right. I am afraid. Afraid of New York—where real writers live, where rent exceeds my current annual income, where people toss last season’s Jimmy Choos out with the trash. Why did it all have to be so damn hard? Why couldn’t I just be one of those lucky people who has everything she wants, from guys to Gucci and back again? I quietly eat the icing off my third slice of birthday cake.
“This party sucks,” I conclude.
“No available men.”
We survey the scene. Aside from my brothers, my dad and a few other bored-looking fathers, the magician appears to be the only unattached postpubescent male.
As if she could tell what I was thinking, George shoots a dark look my way. “I think he might be a bit young for you.”
“Maybe, but I bet he has a few tricks up his sleeve….”
“Cute. Very cute. At least you can still joke about it.”
“I don’t want to be a sad singleton,” I sigh.
“Better a sad singleton than a happy breeder.”
“Enough with the Camille Paglia. Tomorrow you’ll be begging Professor Bales for a booty call.”
“Yeah? Well the day after tomorrow you’ll be back at work.”
“Oh, that was cruel.” I clutch at my heart. “So, so cruel.”
