For today, the issue was the grocery store. The glorious health which Van always enjoyed had taken a hit during her second delivery; her placenta tore and there was a bloody trauma which would have been the death of her in the nineteenth century but was handled with a quick shot of oxytocin in the twenty-first. Still, she had lost a lot of blood; she was consequently anemic and her milk didn’t come in properly, and no matter how much she pumped and breastfed night and day, the baby remained unsatisfied and colicky, struggling wanly to stay on that prescribed growth curve. Kyle hated growth curves—what about the children in Ecuador, anybody worried about their growth curves?—but you couldn’t get around the fact that his infant daughter was hungry and there wasn’t enough milk. Sadly some useless neighbor who had read too much La Leche literature had drilled into Van’s head the dangers of nipple confusion and whatever else an occasional bottle of baby formula held in store for their daughter, and Van was in anguish. But the baby was unhappy and hungry and she wasn’t growing. Finally, in a burst of exhausted tears, Van told Kyle to “just go and get it then!” as if it were his fault.
So there he was, standing in front of a veritable wall of infant formula. Everything in yellow and white—no pink or blue, hypothetical babies are gender neutral—powder and liquid, now there were pouches too, something you could just screw a sterilized nipple onto and stick right into the wee thing’s mouth without worrying about mixing or boiling or dishwasher safe! Those pouches were even vacuum sealed, so presumably there were no bubbles, which might mean no need even to burp the kid. There was literature on all this stuff down at the office that he had never, truthfully, looked at. But the baby needed to eat, and he had to come home with something, and Van was going to have a lot of questions about what he picked. Nothing he chose would be accepted on face value as the right choice; he was going to have to defend himself. Surely half of them had objectionable chemicals. Or cow’s milk. What was infant formula made of, anyway, and why didn’t he even know?
“Kyle?”
The voice was so familiar, it was like the voice inside his head. Or not the voice inside his head. It was the voice that the voice inside his head was always talking to.
He turned around.
She looked incredible, even in oversized sweats. Incredible, but too thin. There were circles under her eyes, and her hair was strangely straggled around her face, like a waif’s; it needed washing. And the color of her skin was off, slightly gray, or maybe just paler than normal. Whatever normal was; the only time he had seen her in the last three years was on television, where she had so much makeup on that she looked like she belonged to an entirely different race of beings. And here she was, wearing oversized sweats, no makeup, it even looked like a couple of pimples were showing up on her left jawline. A worried crease had appeared between her eyes, apparently having settled there with common usage. Still. The color rushed to his face. It couldn’t have been less appropriate, to stand there stuttering like a schoolboy while he was buying formula for his starving infant daughter.
“Alison! Hi. Wow. Hi! I didn’t, I wasn’t, did uh, are you in town?” And now he was laughing, like a lovesick idiot. Some part of him was trying to get control of this but it was taking much too long.
“Yeah, I just kind of dropped everything and came home to see my folks. Wow, I didn’t expect to see anybody I knew at the grocery store.” Her hand flicked to her hair, unconsciously self-conscious, like she knew she looked terrible. “So, like, do you live out here now? I thought you lived in Walnut Hills or something.”
“I, oh, no, Hyde Park, I have a house in Hyde Park. We have a house in Hyde Park.” Horrible, having to admit that we. Even worse to stutter over it. “But my practice is out here and I needed to pick up some things, on my way home.”
“Baby formula?”
“Yes. Oh yeah, we—”
“You had another baby?”
Could this get worse? “Yeah, we did. We did.”
“Congratulations! Two kids, that is crazy.”
“A little bit, yeah.”
“What kind? So, like, what kind?” Her hand creeping to her hair again, pushing it back off her face.
“A girl, we had another girl.”
“That’s fantastic, Kyle. I mean, congratulations. Two girls, that is so, so great.”
“Thank you.” He hated how he sounded. It was a sound he heard constantly in the world he lived in, upper-middle-class suburbanites multiplying and buying homes and congratulating themselves on the wealth and security they accepted as a birthright and then bragged about as an accomplishment. Everyone he had known in high school, yearning for a life of the mind or the heart, half his friends wanted to be musicians or writers or actors or activists and they had all settled so quickly into careers as lawyers and bankers and doctors and now they all had adorable babies and nice big houses in Clifton and Hyde Park and Indian Hills. And there was Alison, too skinny, too restless, unmoored, but at least she was out there still throwing her dreams at the idea of being an actress. “And you! Wow! Things seem to be going so great for you! I mean, you’ve been busy I guess. Becoming a big television star.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Alison tried to laugh, self-deprecating. “Have you seen that show?”
“We don’t have a television set.”
“You don’t have a television set?”
“Van—my wife—thinks TV is bad for the kids.”
“Oh, that’s right, she said that, whenever that was.”
Kyle blushed. That night, at Dennis’s party. He saw Alison remember what had happened, that night, and shrug it off, like she couldn’t afford the memory. Neither of them could, really. The wary grief that sped across her face, through her eyes, the breath of her disappointment, anointed him.