TO BE A PEDIATRICIAN who doesn’t like babies was to know oneself to be absurd. Kyle watched his new daughter yawn and stretch and mewl in her mother’s arms and wondered if this is what sociopaths felt like. Dissociated, repulsed, a bit annoyed with the expectations from others as well as himself that he should have warm feelings for something so patently distasteful.
Van of course was oblivious. She sat in the corner of their beautifully decorated Victorian living room and cooed at the blob in her arms with a picturesque maternal splendor. It would have been an even prettier picture if their first daughter, the photogenic Maggie, had been sitting at her feet playing with her dollies. But Maggie had somewhat predictably hated the baby on sight. When she wasn’t screaming for her mother’s attention she was hiding under a bed somewhere, sulking. Kyle occasionally went looking for her, hoping that she might sense his own appalling aversion to the new baby, and that this might actually turn into some sort of unspoken bond between them. But Maggie was strong-willed, and Kyle was not the parent she wanted. His few attempts to lure the child over to his side were met with such screaming resistance that Van was forced to intervene, pointing out with acidic grace that she “had enough on her hands” without Kyle making things worse.
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.